Aix-en-Provence — the possessions of 1611

OVERVIEW

In 1609 the Ursuline convent at Aix-en-Provence began reporting demonic possession among its nuns. The early seventeenth century was the peak of the French witch-hunt, and Aix set the pattern that Loudun would follow twenty-three years later.

HISTORY

Madeleine de Demandolx de la Palud, a young aristocrat of seventeen, entered the Ursuline convent at Marseille in 1607 and confessed to the superior that she had been intimate with the parish priest, Louis Gaufridi. The mother superior sent her to Aix to put distance between them. In the summer of 1609 Demandolx began to show convulsions, shaking and the other signs then read as possession. Gaufridi was accused of causing it by a pact with the devil, convicted, tortured by strappado until his bones were dislocated, and in April 1611 strangled and his body burned.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

What makes Aix matter beyond its own cruelty is the precedent. Before the seventeenth century the testimony of a possessed person was not considered reliable, on the reasoning that anything they said was likely to come from the Father of Lies. Aix admitted it — and having been admitted once, it convicted Urbain Grandier at Loudun in 1634 and shaped the trials that followed across Europe and eventually across the Atlantic.

VISITING

An ordinary university city; nothing of the convent survives as a site to visit. The entry is for the record.