[Historical aspects of bipolar disorders in French psychiatry]

The author presents a digest of the main French reference works on bipolar mood disorders from the outset of the 19th century to 1914. Contributions come essentially from the Paris psychiatric schools of Charenton (Esquirol, Ritti, Antheaume), Salpêtrière (Baillarger, Jean-Pierre and Jules Falret, Deny) and Sainte-Anne (Magnan, Gilbert Ballet). Publications by these authors prepared the ground for Kraepelin's manic-depressive madness (1899). Many clinical pictures recently updated in American psychiatry were described long ago by French authors: hypomania, cyclothymia, mixed bipolar disorders, type II disorders, rapid-cycling forms and seasonal forms. Two intellectual trends were simultaneously active during this period: the first was analytical, syndrome-based and empirical, and maintained that bipolar pathological features were a "disorder" distinct from unipolar depression, much like the American DSM IV; the other synthetic, stage-oriented and more theoretical tradition viewed it as an "illness", a very broad nosological group encompassing most mood disorders.