Gaëtan LEYMARIE

The story

Born at Tulle on 2 May 1817, Pierre Gaëtan Leymarie came early to Paris. The coup d'état of 1851, by which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power, threw him onto the roads of exile with thousands of other republicans, and he returned only with the amnesty of 1859. Those eight years out of France made him a man of conviction rather than of career, trained to defend minority causes.

A great reader, he discovered the writings of Allan Kardec, the founder of spiritism, and became one of his most ardent disciples. The doctrine promised communication with the dead and presented itself not as a religion but as a science — which was enough to win over a century that believed in progress as much as in the beyond. Table-turning filled the drawing rooms of Paris at the time, and followers in France were counted in hundreds of thousands.

On Kardec's death, in 1869, Leymarie was appointed administrator of the Société spirite, then became editor-in-chief and director of La Revue Spirite, the organ of the movement. He was also the publisher of the Works of Allan Kardec: to run the review and publish the founder's books was to hold the whole doctrine — an enviable position, and therefore an exposed one.

In 1875 the photographer Édouard Buguet confessed that he had manufactured false photographs of ghosts by double exposure; Leymarie, who had published them in his review, was tried alongside him for “fraud” and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of five hundred francs. On appeal his good faith was recognised. He died in 1901 and lies in Division 70; his epitaph calls him “continuateur de son Œuvre, de 1870 à 1901”, the continuator of Kardec's work, before ending on six words: “Ce fut un homme de bien” — he was a good man. The stone gives his birth as 1827 — ten years too many.