It is at the twilight of the witch hunt that the case of the overly attractive priest Urbain Grandier and his very unsacerdotal turpitudes with the Ursulines of Loudun and their prioress, Jeanne des Anges, takes place. It all began in 1632 when she and a few sisters, as exalted as their superior, were seized by convulsions and said they were possessed by the demon. It must be said that nerves are on edge in a city where the plague has just claimed 3,700 victims out of 14,000 inhabitants. The nuns are exorcised of demons, who then begin to speak through their mouths and reveal their identities. By spouting the worst obscenities, the unfortunate women blame the parish priest of Saint-Pierre-du-Marché, the handsome Grandier, who has already seduced many of his parishioners, to the great displeasure of the ecclesiastical authorities, and in particular the canon. Mignon, chaplain of the Ursulines, who lashes out against the priest.
New convulsion scenes
Richelieu sent a man of his own to Loudun, State Councilor Jean Martin de Laubardemont, to supervise the demolition of the castle of this city which had long been a center of Protestantism. The investigation is entrusted to him. Grandier, arrested for witchcraft, may protest his innocence, but the possessed continue to overwhelm him, the confrontations only leading to new scenes of convulsions. Laubardemont, endowed with exceptional powers, received severe instructions from the new Keeper of the Seals, Pierre Séguier. The trial begins. The accused, convicted of magic, curses and diabolical possession, is condemned to be burned alive. The execution took place on the market square of Loudun, on August 18, 1634. Cruel effects of Richelieu’s revenge? This is what the title of this book dedicated to the affair suggests, written almost sixty years after the events by a Protestant refugee in Amsterdam, Nicolas Aubin. What about the real responsibility of the cardinal? Let’s reopen the file.
Grandier would be the true author of an anonymous pamphlet
In 1618, then bishop of Luçon, Richelieu already had to deal with the Loudune priest in an obscure question of precedence: Grandier jostled him during a synodal assembly. He was then able to aggravate his case by refusing to give the prelate a piece of land that the latter wished to acquire to enlarge the family estate on which he built the castle and the new town which bear his name. The cardinal is generally ill-disposed towards these Loudunais who are reluctant, despite his multiple incentives, to go and populate his town, 20 kilometers to the east, “those who wanted to withdraw having preferred to go and look for asylums and pensions everywhere else,” Aubin laconically specifies, suggesting that they undoubtedly preferred freedom in mediocrity to subjection in privilege. From there to making an example in the person of Grandier, there is a presumption that we must refrain from turning into certainty.
Because there is something more serious. It is rumored that Grandier is the true author of an anonymous pamphlet published in 1627, the Letter from the Queen Mother’s shoemaker to Mr. de Baradas. This is a plan for reforms of the monarchy, of which so many have been circulating since the assembly of notables, meeting in Rouen at the beginning of the year, launched an appeal to all those of good will for reform. Richelieu would not disavow the essential part of it, if the text did not end with two murderous sentences ordering the king, before completing any political project, to drive out from his State “this demon of litigation and chicanery, this vulture hungry which gnaws the insides of your subjects. Easy to guess who the amenities thus designate… And, in case there was any doubt, a second letter taking up the initial title soon circulated, full of even more explicit allusions to this prelate who took “with a syringe in his behind [Richelieu souffre d’hémorroïdes] more space in six months than the late Prince of Orange with sword in hand all his life” and hoping to soon see this “Baal stumble at the sight of his priests”. There are things that are not said. But who the hell could have uttered them?
Richelieu does not forgive the public disturbance caused by the affair
Baradas is the first squire of Louis XIII, struck by disgrace during the assembly of Rouen, for which the famous shoemaker, clearly identifiable, as for her, to a lady from Loudun, the widow Catherine Hammond, who supplied Marie, claims to console him. de Medici in shoes, and was for a time the mistress of the fallen favorite. But it is unlikely that she was the author of the pamphlet. So who ?
Five years later, the cardinal’s henchmen have still not succeeded in identifying the insolent man. And so begins the investigation of the Grandier trial, indicted by Canon Jean Mignon and by a correspondent of Richelieu in the city, René Mesmin de Silly, both authentically jealous of the public and feminine successes of the priest. They will find it convenient to attribute to the latter the authorship (plausible, but not proven) of the pamphlet, to provide material for the accusation. As for the reality of possessions, Richelieu, too Cartesian before the letter, is not fooled, as attested in his Memoirs his mention of “a few Ursuline nuns in the town of Loudun having appeared possessed”. What this man of order does not forgive is the public disturbance that the affair caused, and against which he wanted to make an example of the inflammable body of Urbain Grandier, even if it meant putting in the sanction a measure of personal revenge, as it is true that the greatness of an exceptional man is to know how to blend his private interest into the public interest.
1620: soon the end of the stakes for witches
Around 1620, the Parliament of Paris opposed witch hunts and even condemned certain magistrates for having them executed.
There was indeed a strong comeback, if not of witchcraft, in any case of the hunt for sorcerers and witches in Europe from the 1560s to 1630. It is inseparable from a period of fears, fights, famines, epidemics. and mixed heresies. Michelet saw in it a facet of the war between the sexes and a female aspiration to take revenge on male oppression. Nothing like. In fact, women have not systematically been the priority victims of repression: if they are ten times more prosecuted than men in regions such as the border areas of France, Flanders or the county of Essex, the Parliament of Paris condemns slightly more men than women for witchcraft. It is also necessary to distinguish the accusation of witchcraft strictly speaking, which presupposes voluntary and criminal relations with the devil – in the reality of which the judges believe -, from possession, the victim of which is mainly a woman, often a nun, but which in most cases comes from a sorcerer, often a confessor of the convent. The end of witchcraft trials coincides with the triumph of religious reforms, when we manage to differentiate between diabolical interventions, in which we hardly believe anymore, at least among the elites, and objectively criminal ones: fraud or poisoning. Thus, the Poisons affair, although it smelled of sulfur, never turned into a witchcraft trial: the Marquise de Brinvilliers was beheaded in 1676 for having killed her father, then her brothers, with her “succession powders”. The anthill of defrocked priests, magicians, abortionists and poisoners trafficking in philters and poisons that the investigators then flushed out (in all, 367 people presented to the Chambre ardente meeting in 1680, including the famous Catherine Deshayes, a Monvoisin woman, known as the Neighbor) is clearly distinguishable from authentic sorcerers. A judgment by Colbert in 1682 marked the end of the witchcraft trials.
