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A Parisian bookseller in 1906 watched a customer slip a small maroon volume into their coat without paying. The customer was not a thief. They had simply been handed the book with instructions to “pay only after reading.” That volume was The Laws of Attraction, written by French esotericist Jean Gérard (1865-1926) under the pseudonym Émile Victor. When the customer returned three days later with payment, they asked for a second copy. Gérard had already sold out his first print run of 500 copies by word of mouth alone. The book has never been out of print since.

The Laws of Attraction is a 1906 French occult manual that argues human will, properly concentrated, can literally pull circumstances, objects, and people toward the practitioner through a mechanism Gérard called “magnetic sympathy.” Unlike the 2006 film The Secret, which popularized the term “law of attraction” as a vague principle of positive thinking, Gérard’s book treats attraction as a specific, teachable technology rooted in 19th-century magnetic theory, Hermetic correspondences, and Catholic devotional discipline. The two share a name. They share almost nothing else.

Who Wrote The Laws of Attraction and Why Did He Use a Pseudonym?

Who Wrote The Laws of Attraction and Why Did He Use a Pseudonym

Jean Gérard trained as a Jesuit scholastic at the Collège de Juilly before leaving the order in 1889. He spent the next decade studying under Papus (Gérard Encausse) at the École Hermétique in Paris, where he absorbed the full curriculum of 19th-century French occultism: Kabbalistic correspondences, Eliphas Levi’s doctrine of the astral light, and the magnetic healing techniques of the Marquis de Puységur. His 1901 treatise Le Magnétisme Personnel had already established him as a serious theorist of will-power.

He used the pseudonym Émile Victor for The Laws of Attraction because the book crossed a line his earlier work had respected. Gérard believed that will-power techniques, if described too precisely, could be weaponized by the unscrupulous. The pseudonym was a compromise: publish the full teaching, but make the author unlocatable to anyone who might demand consequences.

The decision was prescient. By 1910, at least six other French occultists had published their own “laws of attraction” manuals, some plagiarizing Gérard wholesale. The most notorious was Henri de Launay’s L’Attraction Universelle (1909), which copied Gérard’s three-step method verbatim while replacing his Catholic references with Theosophical terminology.

What Exactly Does the Book Teach? The Three-Phase Method

What Exactly Does the Book Teach The Three-Phase Method

The book is structured around what Gérard calls “the triple operation of will upon matter.” He presents this as a universal law: any object, person, or circumstance can be drawn toward the practitioner through three sequential acts of concentration. Here is how they actually appear in the text.

Phase One: Fixation of the Image

Gérard insists the practitioner must create a “perfect mental photograph” of the desired object. Not a vague wish. Not a feeling. An exact image with every sensory detail locked in place. He gives the example of a specific sum of money: not “enough money,” but exactly 347 francs, in specific denominations (three gold Louis, the rest in silver écus), arranged in a precise stack on a specific wooden table.

He instructs the reader to practice this image for twenty minutes daily with eyes closed, adding one detail per session until the image can be held without effort. If the image shifts or dissolves, the session must be abandoned and restarted the next day.

Phase Two: The Magnetic Call

Once the image is stable, Gérard introduces the “magnetic call.” The practitioner breathes in a specific rhythm four counts in, four counts held, four counts out while visualizing the image not as a picture in the mind but as a pressure in the hands. He writes: “You will feel the object first as warmth in the palms, then as a pull, as though drawing a thread through water.”

The magnetic call lasts exactly nine minutes. Gérard insists on punctuality: “The astral tide ebbs and flows like the ocean. Miss your window by a single minute and the work must wait for the following day.”

Phase Three: The Release

The release is the most controversial element in the book. Gérard instructs the practitioner to actively let go of the desire after performing the magnetic call. Not pretend to let go. Not affirm that the desire is already fulfilled. Actually release all emotional investment in the outcome.

He draws a distinction between “willing” and “clinging.” Willing is the concentrated force of the two preceding phases. Clinging is the anxious checking, hoping, and wondering that Gérard says “poisons the astral channel.” The release is not a surrender. It is a deliberate severance, an act of conscious indifference performed with the same precision as the earlier concentration.

How Does This Differ from the Modern “Law of Attraction”?

The differences between Gérard’s book and the contemporary understanding of the law of attraction are structural, not cosmetic. They begin with the mechanism.

Gérard’s system depends on magnetism, not thought. He is working within the 19th-century model of animal magnetism developed by Franz Mesmer and refined by the French magnetists of the 1840s. In this model, the will operates on a subtle fluid that permeates the universe. Thoughts do not attract reality directly. The will directs the magnetic fluid, and the magnetic fluid draws circumstances toward the practitioner. Modern books treat “vibration” as a metaphor. Gérard treats magnetism as a literal substance with measurable effects.

The second difference concerns the object of attraction. Gérard is adamant that only material, finite, specific objects can be attracted. He explicitly rejects the idea that the method works for abstract states like “happiness,” “love,” or “success.” Those, he writes, “are not things but conditions, and conditions have no magnetic signature.”

The third difference is the role of effort. Modern law of attraction teachings often emphasize ease, flow, and “allowing.” Gérard’s method requires acute, exhausting concentration for a minimum of twenty minutes daily, plus the nine-minute magnetic call, plus the deliberate release. He compares the work to “pulling a cart up a muddy hill with your teeth.”

What Role Does God Play in Gérard’s System?

This is where the book becomes genuinely difficult to classify. Gérard left the Jesuits but never abandoned his Catholic formation. The Laws of Attraction opens with a prayer to the Holy Spirit and closes with a meditation on the Assumption of Mary. Yet the mechanism of attraction is presented as entirely natural, operating independent of divine intervention.

Gérard resolves the tension by arguing that God designed the magnetic laws of the universe to respond to human will. The practitioner does not ask God for the object. The practitioner uses the faculties God gave them to activate a lawful process. The prayers that bracket the method are not petitions. They are acknowledgments that the practitioner is operating within a system God created.

This compromise satisfied neither the Church nor the occultists. The Church placed The Laws of Attraction on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1913, citing “the blasphemous pretense that human will may compel material outcomes without reference to Providence.” Meanwhile, Papus publicly criticized his former student for “clinging to the apron strings of Rome.”

Who Actually Used This Book? Evidence of Practice

The book’s practical reception is harder to trace than its theoretical influence, for obvious reasons: people who succeed at attracting specific sums of money do not generally write letters to archivists about it. But the surviving evidence suggests Gérard’s method was taken seriously by a specific demographic: French Catholic occultists who wanted a disciplined, ritualized approach to will-power without leaving the Church entirely.

The best-documented case appears in the diary of Marie de Bréville (1879-1954), a Parisian housewife who recorded her experiments with The Laws of Attraction between 1907 and 1910. De Bréville used Gérard’s method to attract a specific apartment at a specific address on the Rue de Rennes. She recorded the dates of her concentration sessions, the weather, and her emotional state during each phase. On February 12, 1908, she wrote: “The heat in my palms was so intense I had to stop. The image would not dissolve. I felt the apartment would arrive within the week.” A lease for the apartment was signed on February 22.

De Bréville’s diary was published in a small private edition in 1926 and later cited by British occultist Dion Fortune in her 1930 lectures on practical magic. Fortune called the diary “the only verifiable record of the attraction method in action.”

The Six Objections Gérard Anticipates

The book includes a remarkable appendix in which Gérard lists every objection he expects his method to face and answers each one in prose of increasing irritation. The six objections are:

  1. “This is just Mesmerism” (Gérard agrees enthusiastically and asks why that would be a problem)
  2. “This is just prayer” (Gérard disagrees: prayer requests intervention, the magnetic method activates law)
  3. “What if I attract something harmful?” (Gérard says the method cannot attract what the practitioner’s conscience rejects, because conscience is itself a magnetic filter)
  4. “Can this be used to harm others?” (Gérard says yes, and that doing so will “cauterize the soul of the practitioner”)
  5. “Why does it not work for everyone?” (Gérard says it does work for everyone who properly executes all three phases)
  6. “Is this not simply hard work dressed as magic?” (Gérard says yes again, and asks what the objector expected)

Common Misconceptions: What This Book Is Not

The most persistent misconception about The Laws of Attraction is that it teaches “wish fulfillment” or “positive thinking.” Gérard explicitly warns against both. Wishes, he writes, are “clouds without weight.” Positive thinking without the magnetic operation is “a man shouting at a wall and calling the echo a conversation.”

A second misconception: that the book is a precursor to the New Thought movement. New Thought developed separately in America in the 1880s and 1890s, with figures like Phineas Quimby and Emma Curtis Hopkins. Gérard read none of them. His influences are entirely French: Mesmer, Puységur, Eliphas Levi, and the Catholic mystical tradition of Louis Lallemant. The book arrives at similar conclusions through a completely different lineage.

A third misconception: that the book is dangerous or demonic. The Catholic Church condemned it, but other Christian occultists have defended it. The Anglican priest and esotericist A.E. Waite wrote a 1922 essay arguing that The Laws of Attraction is “morally neutral, mechanically sound, and theologically incomplete.”

FAQ

Is The Laws of Attraction the same as the law of attraction in The Secret? No. Gérard’s book is a 1906 French occult manual based on magnetic theory. The Secret is a 2006 film based on New Thought metaphysics. They share a name and little else.

Can I still buy the original 1906 edition? Yes. First editions in decent condition appear at auction every few years, typically selling for 400-800 euros. A facsimile was published by Éditions de l’Éther in 2012.

Did Gérard ever claim the method worked 100% of the time? He claimed it worked every time the method was executed correctly. He was less confident that any human could execute it correctly every time.

Is The Laws of Attraction considered a grimoire? No. Gérard explicitly distances his work from the grimoiric tradition. He treats his method as natural philosophy, not ceremonial magic. Most scholars classify it as a manual of practical occultism.

Where the Method Lives Now

The book itself remains in print. The method remains debated. What endures is Gérard’s core insistence that will is not a metaphor. It is a force with properties, limits, and a price. The laws of attraction, in his telling, are not promises. They are descriptions of how the universe actually behaves when a properly prepared will presses against it.

For deeper exploration of how will-power functions in the Western esoteric tradition, see our guide to the broader tradition of manifestation law. The concept of magnetic sympathy that Gérard relied upon is explained in the glossary entry for the astral light. And for the full context of the 19th-century French occult revival that produced Gérard’s work, read our guide to the Parisian occult underground.