Loudun — the possessions of 1634

OVERVIEW

Loudun is a small town in the Vienne, in what is now Nouvelle-Aquitaine. In 1632 the Ursuline nuns of its convent, beginning with the prioress Jeanne des Anges, began to report being visited and possessed by demons. The affair ran for five years, drew crowds to watch the public exorcisms, and became one of the most notorious episodes of the French witch-hunt.

HISTORY

Urbain Grandier was the parish priest of Saint-Pierre-du-Marché — able, arrogant, and with a record of quarrels. Around 1629 Jacques de Thibault, vocal about Grandier's conduct with women, beat him with a cane outside the church of Sainte-Croix; the resulting trial saw charges raised that put Grandier before the ecclesiastical court, and the bishop barred him from public function. He had also written against Cardinal Richelieu. When the nuns' possessions began, Grandier was named as the man who had sent the demons. He was arrested, tortured — his legs crushed in the boot — convicted of sorcery, and burned at the stake on 18 August 1634. The case followed the legal precedent set at Aix-en-Provence in 1611, where testimony from the possessed had been admitted against a priest for the first time.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The record here is a court's, not a folklorist's: depositions, the exorcists' accounts, the sentence, and the execution. What was really happening in the convent has been argued over ever since — mass hysteria, coercion, political destruction of an inconvenient priest, or some of each. Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun (1952) made it famous in English. The entry records a place where a claim of the supernatural was used to kill a man, with the paperwork intact.

VISITING

An ordinary working town. The convent is gone; local museums and the tourist office cover the affair.