[The emergence of the Québec asylum in the 19th century.]

This team of five philosophers analyses the 18th and 19th century Quebec discourse on the subject of insanity. The 18th century saw the insane excluded from social contact with the state recognizing only their indigence. They were relegated either to the "Loges", designed to expiate their sins since insanity was linked to an abuse of mind and body, or to prison for appropriate punishment, since madness was considered to lead to crime. But economic pressures produced by the growing number in indigents, including the mentally ill, led to the creation of the Beauport asylum in 1845. The authors then describe how the urban insane, marginal to both the French Canadian and English Canadian communities* were placed in private institutions and subjected to a system of profit maximization controlled by bourgeois physicians. This situation increased the distance between proprietors and occupants, and accounts for the lack of original discourse on the subject of insanity. In addition, the reasoning of the alienist physicians was without scientific foundation, taking root rather in the dominant industrial capitalist ideology. As for the content of the discourse, the Beauport physicians borrowed from moral treatment and restraint system notions, giving them a certain Quebec character.