Witchcraft by Marion Gibson

Author:Marion Gibson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2023-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

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The trial of Marie-Catherine and Jean-Baptiste was a turning point in witch trial history. Opinions that witchcraft was both real and fake shaped it and the outcome was a fudge. But the court eventually judged Marie-Catherine to be innocent of any form of witchcraft. She was not guilty of sacrilege or blasphemy, and even the accusations had steered clear of the old fantasy acts of killing a neighbour’s children or worshipping the devil, so she was no witch. Neither was Jean-Baptiste Girard. Yet both were accused of new versions of the demonologists’ imagined crimes and the charges wavered between old and new definitions of witchcraft. The heretical Quietist beliefs attributed to Jean-Baptiste were obscurely linked to the old kinds of demonic temptation to worship Satan. Jean-Baptiste also appeared to be guilty of ‘baby-killing’ – by abortion, not curses. Both he and Marie-Catherine were imagined as sexual sinners, seducing people by magic – not at Sabbaths, inducting them into a demonic cult, but merely luring them into bed. Both were accused of attacking pious people’s reputations with poisonous words rather than murdering them with spells and potions.

By the 1730s, the crime of witchcraft was becoming a metaphor for other kinds of transgression and subversion. This was potentially an empowering idea. If witchcraft was unreal, no longer a matter for law courts but for private judgement, then all manner of imaginative possibilities were released. By the late eighteenth century, French radicals had seized on these in the wake of the French Revolutionary period of 1789–1799. If the historical witch was not a real criminal but a victim of tyranny – a young girl like Marie-Catherine menaced by evil old demonologists, judges and priests – then in revolutionary times could she be reimagined as a populist heroine? By the mid-nineteenth century the premier French historian Jules Michelet had turned this idea into historical orthodoxy.

In the 1850s Jules and his wife Athénaïs investigated historic French witch trials, including the trial of Marie-Catherine Cadière. They decided they were relics of superstition, part of France’s pre-Revolutionary infatuation with religion, as they saw it. The Michelets had rejected traditional Catholicism and identified as pantheists, believing a universal spirit animated the world. As a result of their ‘new age’ investigations of witch trials, in 1862 Jules published an extraordinary book, La Sorcière (The Witch). It stated that medieval and Renaissance French ‘witches’ had been early pantheists too: revolutionary pagan priestesses, healers and mesmerists, sexually liberated, and in touch with an old deity wrongly demonised as Satanic. Jules’s version of witch trial history was nonsense, but it was exciting nonsense. By liberating themselves sexually and imaginatively, Jules argued, witch-women had gained true magical power and resisted the predations of their feudal lords. They were executed, but they died glorious martyrs. For Jules and Athénaïs, women who were accused of witchcraft more recently, like Marie-Catherine, were as much victims of patriarchal conspiracy as their foremothers. Their religious ecstasies were the best they could muster as resistance against church and state tyranny.

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