Possessed or Not Possessed? The Devils of Loudun

This is a gothic thought experiment, not a factual claim. In this case, unusually, I am not the skeptic in the room; the skeptics were there at the time, and I am mostly agreeing with a man who died in 1704. I am reading a real historical horror through the old language of possession to show what that language was actually used for.

Most of the time in this series I am dragging a case backward from belief toward the mundane, and the believers resent me for it. Loudun is different, and I want to say why up front, because it changes the whole tone. At Loudun, the mundane reading is not my modern imposition on a credulous past. It was the reading held, at the time, by the most senior churchman on the scene — and by a philosopher a generation later, and by nearly every serious historian since. For once I am not the lonely doubter. I am just the latest person to point at something that was obvious to the honest witnesses while it was happening. What was obvious was that this was not a haunting. It was a murder with a demon painted over it.

The case

In 1632, in the French town of Loudun, the Ursuline nuns of the local convent began to show the signs. It started with their prioress, Sister Jeanne des Anges, and it spread: convulsions, contortions, blasphemies, the whole vocabulary of possession, performed by women who claimed that demons had been sent into them. And they named the man who sent them. He was Urbain Grandier, the parish priest — and this is the first thing to understand about Grandier, because it explains everything that followed: he was exactly the wrong man to be accused, which is to say he was exactly the right one.

Grandier was handsome, arrogant, and worldly. He had fathered a child. He had written a book against clerical celibacy, which he was conspicuously bad at observing. He had made powerful local enemies with his affairs and his pride. And — the detail that turns a scandal into a death sentence — he had publicly opposed Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful man in France, over Richelieu’s plan to pull down the town’s fortifications, and had written a stinging satire against him besides. Grandier was a man with a great many people who would not have minded seeing him gone, and one of them ran the country.

Here is the part the legend usually skips, and it is the part that decides the case. Early on, before it became a machine, the affair was examined by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who was not a fool. He had the nuns sequestered — separated, observed properly — and the possession subsided. Taken out of the theatre, away from the audience and each other, the demons quieted down. That is not how demons behave. It is precisely how suggestion behaves, and hysteria, and performance, and the Archbishop, seeing it, ordered the exorcisms stopped and found nothing genuinely supernatural in it.

And it would have ended there, except that Grandier’s enemies did not want it to end there, and neither did the Cardinal.

The machine

So Richelieu sent his own man, a commissioner named Laubardemont, with the authority to reopen the whole thing, and from that point it stopped being a possession and became a prosecution. The exorcisms resumed, now as public spectacle, drawing crowds. The evidence assembled against Grandier included a signed “diabolical pact” supposedly recovered from hell’s own filing system. And Grandier, who maintained his innocence throughout, was tortured — his legs crushed in the boot — and on the eighteenth of August, 1634, he was burned alive. The accounts say the promised mercy of strangling him first was denied, and that the friars threw holy water in his face so his last words could not be heard. He never confessed, because there was nothing to confess to.

And here is the detail that should end any lingering supernatural reading, the one that gives the whole thing away: after Grandier was dead, the possessions did not stop. If the demons had been his, sent by his sorcery, his execution should have freed the nuns. Instead the fits continued for years, as public performances, because they had never been about Grandier at all. They had been about power, and the power had got what it wanted, and the show simply ran until the audience got bored.

The mundane reading, which is just the historical one

I hardly have to do any work here; the record does it for me. The philosopher John Locke, looking at the case decades later, called it flatly a contrivance of Richelieu to destroy Grandier — the nuns, he said, played their parts, but the whole thing was a cheat. Modern historians read the nuns’ symptoms as a genuine outbreak of what we would now call mass psychogenic illness — real suffering, real conviction, in a cloistered community of young women under enormous religious and sexual pressure — which was then seized, cultivated, and pointed, by men who understood exactly what it could be used for, at the one target they most wished to hit.

Both things are true at once, and holding both is the whole of the ethics of it. The nuns were not frauds in the simple sense and they were not evil; they were, most of them, genuinely afflicted, and then genuinely used. Sister Jeanne des Anges believed, and suffered, and was also a weapon someone else was aiming. And Grandier — vain, compromised, no saint — was nonetheless an innocent man judicially murdered by the state, using possession as the instrument, in front of a cheering crowd. That is the horror of Loudun. Not a devil in a convent. A cardinal with a grudge, and a legal system that would burn a man alive on the testimony of a haunting that its own church had already investigated and dismissed.

The verdict

Verdict: Not Possessed.

The demon at Loudun was a cardinal. This is the archetype the whole series exists to keep in view — the case that shows what the language of possession is for, in the wrong hands. It is not always a comfort or a folk tale or a frightened family reaching for an old explanation. Sometimes it is a weapon, and a very efficient one, because it converts a political murder into a holy duty and gives everyone involved permission to feel righteous while they light the fire.

Aldous Huxley wrote the definitive book on it, and Ken Russell made a film so disturbing it was censored for decades, and both understood that the real subject was never the supernatural. It was the machinery — church and state, working together, turning a convent’s real distress into a stake in a public square. I keep this one in the series precisely because it is not fun. When you strip the devils out of Loudun, you are not left with a tidy debunking and a small clean satisfaction. You are left with a man screaming in a fire he did not deserve, and a crowd that came to watch, and the oldest lesson the gothic has to teach, which is that the monster is almost never the thing with the horns. It is usually the people holding the torch, and they are usually quite sure they are doing the right thing.