The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1864

June issue of the Spiritist Review was ready and partially printed when we got the letter below from Father Barricand to which we had promptly replied as seen.

“Dear Sir,

Mr. Allan Kardec has asked me to acknowledge receiving that letter that you sent him and to tell you that it was unnecessary to request its insertion in the Spiritist Review. It would have been enough to have sent him a motivated rectification to have him considered it outright as a duty of impartiality. The June issue was already in printing at the time your letter was received hence it will come in the next issue.

Yours sincerely, etc.”

“Lyon, May 19^th, 1864

Dear Sir,

I have just read in the May issue of the Spiritist Review an article about my course that is so much masked and fantasized that I see myself in a position to respond in order to destroy the unfavorable impression that that article may have left on your readers with respect to me and my teachings. The article is entitled: Public courses of Spiritism in Lyon. Such a designation has never been given to any of my programs and if anyone has attended my course in hopes of receiving lessons of Spiritism, as you insinuate, after being seduced by an attractive and deceiving title it was in reality because they were not careful enough to read what our flyers say.

You tell your readers that the journal La Vérité takes on several of our assertions and that the paper takes care of refuting us, something that you add they will do wonderfully well just by considering the way they began. But you do not show those statements. It is true that our contradictor says that one does not need to be versed in theology to use a pen and that they are not afraid of pursue us with the sole weapons of reason and Spiritism given faith in; that the paradoxical thesis that we sustain cannot be discussed; that we should not be drawn to accompany Spiritism in the cemetery, but that we must not hasten to ring the funeral knell; that, on his own account, he is able to nurse by himself, and without much trouble, that little child called Truth; ... that the blood of the future flows warmer than ever in the veins of the Spiritist, and that he has the intimate confidence that one day we shall be given the definitive tone of the most magnificent TE DEUM.

Mr. Allan Kardec is perfectly entitled to imagine that such assertions refute ours, ensuring his readers that by judging from the beginning the director of La Vérité will perform wonderfully well in his self-imposed task of refuting us. We hardly believe, however, that beyond the Spiritist school people will share the same opinion and we would even suspect that if the Director of the Spiritist Review found adequate to reproduce textually the article in which our antagonist accepts the struggle many of them would hesitate to consider that article as a starting point that promises a wonderful refutation against our lessons of Spiritism.

You may perhaps ask: doesn’t the La Vérité reproduces faithfully part of your argumentation? No, Sir, that summary is a burlesque parody. Everything there is false: our language, our ideas and our reasoning. Such arrogant expressions: I have the courage to prove to you… emphatic report, ambitions figures, everything is a comedy. Mr. Allan Kardec’s pocket is well fed and it is just fair that he helps his followers… these things have been part of our lessons and Mr. Director of the La Vérité could have spared the trouble of having attributed them to us if he had understood and wanted to understand the true study of the issue that we dealt with before him.

What was that about, in fact? To explain to our auditorium the actual situation of Spiritism in Lyon in 1862 and 1863. Now, in order to avoid basing our data on anything that could be denied by any Spiritist and instead of talking about your trips and assess your wealth we limited ourselves to evaluate your brochure entitled Spiritist Trip in 1862 and your article in the Spiritist Review, January 1864 in which you report to your readers the situation of Spiritism in 1863.

Considering the remarkable difference of tone and language in those two documents we thought appropriate to say, not as La Vérité says that Spiritism is dead and agonizing, but that it suffers at least in Lyon a moment of stagnation if it has not yet initiated a period of decadence. To support such a conclusion we remind you of the confessions given by the Director of La Vérité since while Mr. Allan Kardec affirms that in 1862 one could count and without exaggeration between 25 and 30 thousand Spiritists in Lyon, Mr. Edoux has no problem in recognizing that their number today does not reach ten thousands. What word can be used to define such a reduction other than decadence?

It seems to us that there is nothing easier than understand the true meaning of such a simple argument and to give it an accurate assessment. But Mr. Director of La Vérité, instead of just faithfully reproducing our exposition, he got a better kick out of providing his readers with a beautiful sample of our course in his newspaper.

It is, nonetheless, that report that strikes the lack of logic and sincerity at every line that you found appropriate to provide as the foundation of the malevolent insinuations that tend to present us to your readers as someone that sneaks into your private matters and that from a simple supposition reaches an absolute outcome; that calculates your account balance to turn that into a public teaching. Such accusations thrown there out of the blue and without any proof fall by themselves. Like the expression of a former writer one just need to publish them to have them refuted. Vestra exposuisse refellisse est.

When you finish your article you thought appropriate to teach us how to do a course of theology. As for ourselves we shall abstain from giving you lessons but allow us to at least give you a charitable advice if you want to avoid being belied many times by no longer accepting at least with certain mistrust reports given by your corresponding members because and now borrowing the language of our good La Fontaine:

“It is easy to Mr. Allan Kardec to state that Spiritism is stronger than ever and then mention the appearance of Ruche and La Vérité as proof of that! That is a comedy, ladies and gentlemen! Couldn’t those two journals exist without the conclusion that Spiritism has moved one step ahead? If you tell me that they have costs and that is the reason why they need subscribers or that they need great sacrifices I will still tell you: It is a comedy! Mr. Allan Kardec’s budget is very good from what I hear. Isn’t that fair and rational to expect him to help his disciples?”



These words were extracted textually from the journal La Vérité from April 10^th, 1864. We just added the very natural reflections that came to mind saying that we do not assign anybody with the right of assessing our balance and prejudge the use of what they believe we have and even less turning that into the subject of a public teaching. (See the May issue of the Spiritist Review).



Without verifying if Father Barricand pronounced the words that he denies or equivalent it is remarkable that he had not requested, to begin with, a rectification from the paper from where we extracted them. The paper edition is from April 10^th. It is published weekly and sent to him. His letter though is from May 19^th and in that interval another five editions were published. It is either one or the other: his words are true or false. If they are false the editor that declares having seen them in the professor’s lesson invented them. How can he protest in the same article against the allegation of being SUBVENCIONADO by us, saying that he needs nobody’s help and that he can walk on his own? He would have been strangely mistaken. How come Father Barricand allowed two months to pass in the presence of those statements and without protest? His silence, that could not go unnoticed by us, must have been considered by us as an approval since it is clear that if they were rectified in the La Vérité we would not have reproduced them.



In his letter Father Barricand returns to the thesis that he sustained before with respect to the supposedly decadence of Spiritism but now restricting the reach of his words. Considering that such a thought brings him peace we will leave it like that for we have no interest in dissuading him. Thus, he may take any conclusion about the number of Spiritists that he likes but that shall not preclude things to follow their course. Never mind if our adversaries belief or not in the progress of Spiritism. On the contrary, the less they believe the less they will bother and the more they will leave us in tranquility. We will even pretend we are dead if that pleases them. It would be up to them not to wake us up. But while they scream, fulminate and say anathemas; while they employ violence and persecution they will not make anybody believe that we are dead for good. Up until now the clergy had thought that the means of scaring people away with respect to Spiritism was in exaggerating the number of followers beyond measure. How many times in sermons, ordinations and publications of all kinds such numbers were not presented as invaders of society and endangering the Church by its increase? Better than anyone else we attest the progress of the Spiritist ideas but we never allow us to fall into hyperbolic numbers; we have never said, like a certain preacher, that in Bordeaux alone in a short period of time more than 170,000 francs were obtained from the sales of our books. It was not us who said that there were 20 million Spiritists in France nor, like in a recent book, that there was 600 million around the whole world what would be equivalent to more than half of the population of the planet. The result of these figures was much different from what they expected. Now if we wanted to proceed by induction we would suspect that Father Barricand wanted to follow an opposite tactics by diminishing the progress of Spiritism instead of exalting it.

Nonetheless it is impossible to provide an accurate statistics of Spiritists given the immense number of persons that are sympathetic to the idea and that have no reason to put themselves in evidence because the Spiritists are not recruited like in a fraternity. We would be greatly mistaken if we took into account the number of groups officially known considering that less than a fraction of the followers participate in them. We know some cities in which there is no regularly established society and that count on more Spiritists than others that have several societies. As a matter of fact we have already said that the societies are not a necessary condition to the existence of Spiritism. Some are formed today and disappear tomorrow without affecting in any way the march of Spiritism. Spiritism is a matter of faith and belief and not of association.



Whoever may share our convictions with respect to the existence and manifestation of the Spirits and the moral consequences that stem from that is in fact Spiritist without the need to have a registration number or a diploma. A simple conversation is sufficient to get to know the ones that are sympathetic to the idea or reject it and from that one may judge if that idea gains or loses terrain.



The approximate estimate of the number of followers is based on internal reports because there isn’t any basis for the establishment of a strict figure that is in fact constantly changing. A letter, for example, can reveal to us a whole family of Spiritists and sometimes several families that we had no idea about. If Father Barricand saw our correspondence he could perhaps change his opinion. But never mind.



The opposition to an idea is always in direct proportion to its importance. If Spiritism had been a utopia people would not have given any attention to it like many other theories. The aggravating struggle is a clear indication that it is taken seriously. But if there is struggle between Spiritism and the clergy history will tell who the aggressors were. The attacks and slander that were used against Spiritism forced it to use the same weapons and show the vulnerable side of its adversaries. Have they precluded its march by attacking it? No. It is an attested fact. Had they have left Spiritism alone even the name of the clergy would not have been mentioned and perhaps they would have gained with that. Attacking Spiritism in the name of the dogmas of the Church forced Spiritism to discuss the value of the objections and for that very reason to enter a field that Spiritism did not want to touch. The mission of Spiritism is to fight disbelief by the evidence of the facts; it is to reconnect those that have neglected God; it is to demonstrate the future to those that believed in nothing. Why then the Church says anathema to those that receive such a faith from Spiritism more than when they believed in nothing? By repelling those that by the force of Spiritism believe in God and in their soul is the same as forcing them to seek refuge beyond the Church. Who was the first to declare Spiritism as a new religion with its cult and priests if not the clergy? Who has ever seen up until now the cult and priest of Spiritism? If it one day becomes a religion that was provoked by the clergy.