The Angel in the Top-Hat

“L'ange donc ordonne à Martin d'aller trouver le roi ..." Source Armand Fouquier,Causes célèbres de tous les peuples

When the Archangel Raphael first appeared to Thomas-Ignace Martin on a wintry afternoon in 1816, the peasant farmer didn’t recognize him. But then again, the Archangel was wearing a white frockcoat and a top-hat, so who could blame him? Martin’s visitor, appearing suddenly in his field in Gallardon, related a dire message:

You must go find the king [Louis XVIII]; you must tell him that his life is in danger, as well as that of the princes; that wicked people are still trying to overthrow the government; that several writings or letters have already circulated in some provinces of his States on this subject; that he must make an exact and general inspection of all his States, and above all in the capital; that he must also free the day of the Lord, that we might sanctify it; for this holy day is so ill-known by a great part of his people; he must cause all public works to cease on these days; he must order public prayers for the conversion of the people; he must abolish and annihilate all the disorders that are committed in the days which precede Holy Lent. If not, France will fall into new woes. The king must act towards his people like a father towards his child, when he deserves to be punished; for thus must he punish a small number of the guiltiest so as to intimidate the others.

Shortly after commissioning Martin with this divine warning, the stranger rose into the air and disappeared before his eyes. This was just the first of many apparitions that year—twenty-five, in total. The man in the top-hat, who did not identify himself as the Archangel Raphael for near two months, repeatedly encouraged Martin to begin his mission. Occasionally he added moral injunctions, such as avoiding cabarets.

Martin was not extraordinarily pious, and he resisted this call at first. Likewise, his sympathetic parish priest attributed these “pensées déraisonnables” to the tumultuous political events of the previous year. But as these visions persisted, the priest changed his mind. He wrote to his superior, the Bishop of Versailles. The bishop was skeptical; he informed the police, the better to test for fraud. The local prefect interrogated both Martin and his priest, finding no evidence of imposture. Yet he remained unconvinced by Martin’s story, and sent him in custody to Paris. There, he eventually landed in the Hospital of Charenton, where the celebrated alienists Royer-Collard and Philippe Pinel both examined him thoroughly. As Tony James notes, “Their report is circumspect, in part because of the political dimension of the affair, but they cannot categorically state that Martin is insane.” They concluded that, at the very least, he was no imposter. He experienced something. It was only at this point that Raphael disclosed his true identity.

And while Martin was at Charenton, the French nobility started to hear of his story. Vicomte Sosthènes de La Rochefoucauld sought out Martin and had an interview with him at the hospital. In the course of this conversation, La Rochefoucauld was impressed by Martin. He wrote,

It would have been difficult to encounter a more honest and sweeter face than his. Every time he responded to common or insignificant questions, it didn’t have any other allure than that of a very simply peasant; but whenever one came to the angel and to the mission that he had received, Martin’s traits and discourse elevated and took on something of the solemn and inspired. More than ever, my curiosity was moved and my interest excited.

This curiosity worked in Martin’s favor. La Rochefoucauld spread the story among the higher nobility and the royal family, and obtained Louis XVIII’s agreement to meet with Martin on 2 April, 1816.

Louis XVIII in Coronation Robes by François Gérard

There are differing accounts of what happened in that meeting. As Phillippe Boutry and Jacques Nassif point out in their study of Martin, the peasant-prophet was only willing to reveal certain essential details of the encounter in 1828, after Louis’s death. As a sign of his message’s supernatural origin, Martin told the king a secret. While hunting in the forest of Saint-Hubert with the late Louis XVI, the then-Comte de Provence was tempted to kill his childless brother in order to take the throne for himself, making it all look like a tragic accident. Hearing this, the king allegedly cried, “O my God! O my God! That is very true; only God, you, and me know it. Promise me to keep all these communications in the greatest secrecy.” Martin agreed, then warned the king not to receive the traditional royal consecration, “for if you receive it, you will be struck with death in the ceremony of the coronation.” Louis wept. In the event, he was never anointed.

Martin chastised the king for insufficient public thanksgiving to God for the fall of Napoleon, whom he called the “usurper,” and the Restoration of the Bourbons. This theme was hardly unique to Martin, and became a major feature of the expiatory spirituality of French Ultramontanism—mostly famously in the construction of the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre, also known as the “Church of the National Vow.” Moreover, Martin attributed the king’s laxity in this regard to the fact that he was not the legitimate king. The clear implication was that Louis XVII had survived his imprisonment and was hidden somewhere in secrecy, waiting to return and take up his rightful throne. This was the heart of his message to the king: to search for and find the true king.

For the rest of his life, Martin kept the true matter of his meeting with the king a secret. As his Jansenist and royalist admirer, Louis Silvy, wrote, “He observed the double precept contained in the words of the Archangel Raphael, ‘It is good to hide the secret of a king: but honorable to reveal and confess the works of God’ (Tobit 12:7).” As for the “true king,” Martin thought he had found him in the person of Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German hoaxster who posed as the long-lost Louis XVII. Mostly, Martin returned to his life as a peasant. However, the publication of his story as early as 1817 won him admirers. Before dying in 1834, he received plenty of visitors eager to speak to the prophet of Gallardon.

While apparitions of Jesus, the saints, and angels are a part of the Catholic landscape today, they were rarer in the 1810s. Martin’s visions were especially unusual. First, he was a man. From Joan of Arc forward, most French visionaries have been women. Martin stands out insofar as his story doesn’t fit the typical gender dynamics of the larger pattern. A male angel appears to a working farmer, who is then passed around among experts (priests, physicians) before gaining a hearing among the nobility and, finally, the king himself. Men have all the leading parts in this drama. Second, the visions strongly evoke and even dramatize an aspirational Catholic politics of class. In the wake of the Revolution, the Catholic Church sought to win back French society. One strategy to buttress the sacred order of the Restoration was to appeal to the working and middle classes. Martin, a peasant farmer, is given a mission to “save” the king, and thus the kingdom, by an angel who dresses like a good bourgeois. All the classes are represented; all have a part to play in the task of national salvation. Whatever else may have happened to Martin, the story he told became an allegory of re-Christianization.

The afterlife of Martin’s visions illustrates the complex fate of the supernatural in late modernity, even beyond the official efforts of the Catholic Church. In June of 1856, a British spiritualist journal known as The Spiritual Herald published an article on the Martin case. After describing the whole narrative, the anonymous author concludes, “The purpose of the visit of the visit of the angel seems trifling, whilst his object was unattained. But the real purpose of all such visitations is probably not the apparent. They serve to keep alive the idea of spiritual intercourse, without interfering with human liberty.” Six months later, the same article appeared in The Medical World, a scientific journal. The only difference was that the spiritualist reflections at the start and end were lopped off, in favor of a more clinical, naturalistic commentary. Under a headline entitled, “Hallucinations,” we read,

Psychological researchers have thrown very little light on the real nature of the mind. Without a brain there are no mental phenomena…Hallucinations are even more difficult of explanation, if possible, than ordinary manifestations of the soul. Here is one of those marvelous facts which defies explanation upon any known principle. It actually seems like a direct and positive intercourse with a superhuman agent; and yet we must call it a hallucination, notwithstanding the verification of many statements of the individual who figures in the narration.

Although committed to a materialist worldview which ruled out the possibility of any real contact with spiritual beings, the editor of The Medical World is willing to reprint a large body of text from a spiritualist journal. Martin’s story is that compelling.

Angel statues of Église Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul de Gallardon

It is impossible to say with any degree of certainty what Martin experienced, or if he was telling the truth at all. But Martin’s case is not just a curious episode in the occult history of French politics. Set in the context of his own reception, Martin becomes an illustration, in miniature, of the complex entanglement of the forces of enchantment and disenchantment in the nineteenth century. That was a dynamic which both Church and State participated in, as did physicians and spiritualists—and angels in top-hats, too.

Richard Yoder is pursuing a PhD in History at Penn State University, where he specializes in early modern religious history.