To what extend priests and alienists have been solely competing with each others in the nineteenth century asylum? Having both founded their practices on moral grounds which were mainly inspired by a christian tradition, those two figures of spiritual guidance have been actually working together. While the generation of the founders have been rather distrustful towards religious practices, many alienists whose career take place during the Second Empire, do not mind appealing to religious practices, whether by conviction or by a pragmatic attitude. The way their profession starts to develop cannot be only reduced to a linear and straightforward secularisation process. From the reconstitution of a scene displaying the psychiatric power, namely the blessing of the chapel of the Quatre-Mares; asylum near Rouen, what is at stake is not only an «active cooperation» between those two men but also the unfolding of religious practices within the institution. What is staged is the increasing influence of the medical world on the religious one, thus comforting in the late 19th century the psychiatrist in his status of the renewed spiritual director.
