From Rivail to Kardec

Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail was born in Lyon on 3 October 1804 and trained in Switzerland under methods developed by the educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, going on to a substantial career in Paris as a schoolmaster and writer of textbooks on grammar, arithmetic and moral education. He was in his fifties, already a respected figure in French education, when he was introduced in the early 1850s to the table turning and spirit rapping phenomena then fashionable across Paris salons.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rivail treated the phenomena as a subject for systematic investigation, questioning mediums methodically and recording their answers as if compiling data. Believing, by his account, that he was being told by communicating spirits that he had lived a previous life as a Druid named Allan Kardec, he adopted that name for his subsequent work, publishing under it from 1857 onward and building around it an entirely new religious and philosophical movement distinct from the looser spiritualism practiced in Britain and the United States. His earlier career as a pedagogical writer had already made him a public figure of some standing in France, publishing textbooks under his birth name on subjects ranging from arithmetic to comparative grammar, so his later turn to Spiritism carried with it an existing reputation for methodical, careful work rather than arriving as the reinvention of an unknown man.