The witch as rebel

JOHN CALLOW looks at how a French historian reassigned the feared and maligned into an personification of of liberty, equality and independence

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THE reds and golds of Halloween find their expression in the fallen leaves and pumpkin lanterns that herald the witch’s tread.

Popular culture has banished Guy Fawkes from the season, and the All Hallows’ feast of the Christian Church has given way to the resurgence of a much earlier festival that heralded the coming of winter.

Exported to North America by Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 19th century, Halloween has been vigorously reimported from the US since the late 1970s. Heavily commodified and stripped of its folk customs, it celebrates inversion, misrule, and an edgy engagement with horror and the occult, that finds its surest expression in the figure of the witch.

Yet, for modern “guisers,” “trick-or-treaters” and party goers, the witch can transcend the storybook image of the Brothers Grimm and the accusations of 17th-century lawyers, to appear as an empowered and empowering figure of female rebellion.

Still, this remarkable change of fortune, and public perception, effected by the Second Wave of Feminism, and the conjoining of the ecological movement with the women’s, owes its primary inspiration to the writings of Jules Michelet (1798-1874).

Michelet’s career sought to define progress as the key to French history, creating many of its enduring national myths, and transforming the writing of the past.

Whereas his rival, Leopold von Ranke, pursued strict empiricism and claims to academic impartiality, Michelet produced grand sweeps of emotive, popular, narrative history, where the imagination was permitted to spark alongside the primary documentation that he spent his life recovering from the French National Records Office.

The son of a Parisian printer, this scholarship boy heard accounts of the French Revolution direct from an old Jacobin typesetter; grew up, knowing poverty, in the ruins of a deconsecrated church; and rose (through a combination of personal abilities and academic patronage) to become the tutor to real life, as opposed to fairy tale, princesses.

Navigating monarchist reaction, liberal nationalism, and the rise and fall of the Paris Commune, in 1870 he would sign an internationalist manifesto calling for peace alongside Marx and Engels.  

However, his career foundered upon his trenchant criticism of the church and his uncompromising opposition to Napoleon III’s empire. He was stripped of his professorial chair and the glowing reviews in scholarly journals dried up, overnight.

Secret policemen haunted his footsteps and made notes on his public lectures, and, by the beginning of the 1860s, he found himself in desperate need of a popular literary success to stave-off his creditors and compensate for the unexpected loss of his livelihood.

It was against this background that he turned to the symbolic figure of the witch.

If the witch had, hitherto, been a source of fear, then Michelet sought to make her a source of inspiration, as a positive, feminine (if not yet feminist) archetype.

In the pages of his short study of The Witch (La Sorciere), published in November 1862 – and never, since, out of print in France – he recast her as a symbol of the liberating potential of the people and of the rebellious, self-realisation of womanhood.

With this in mind, he sought to locate the horror of witch persecution within the narrowing world view of medieval Catholicism and its crushing of the “the free exercise of reason.”

The book falls into two parts. In the first, Michelet (due to the lack of source materials from the victims’ perspective) presented reconstructions of medieval village life, the impact of feudalism, and the revolts of the peasantry, to create a vision of, and feel for, the “mentalite” of the witch.

In the second, he skilfully deployed accounts of well-reported witch trials across the 17th and early 18th centuries (namely, those of the Basque witches hunted by the judiciary; the destruction of Urbain Grandier and the “possessed” nuns at Loudun; and the persecution of the young Charlotte Cadiere at the hands of the Jesuit Order), to attest to the blind cruelty occasioned by religious intolerance and the guiltlessness of those accused of the crime of witchcraft.

As the individual stories unfold, fear is replaced, first by pity, and then by a growing respect for the victims.

Part Marianne (the official allegorical symbol of the French Republic embodying liberty, equality, fraternity, and reason), part Circe (a mythological Greek sorceress and goddess), Michelet’s witch was the agent of social and political change.

Through the power of his pen, she became the foremost popular expression of the optimism, empowerment, and insurgency latent within the peasantry.

If, today, we might scorn Michelet’s objectification of women, his idealism, and romantic attachment to a rural arcadia; then we need to recognise that, within the context of the Second Napoleonic Empire, his vision of the witch represented a heady cocktail of the erotic and the incendiary, carrying within it the seeds of both social and sexual revolution, striking directly at the pillars upon which Napoleon III’s regime had been founded.

In an age when “traditional” gender roles were being reasserted through the schoolroom and the pulpit, and French society was being fundamentally militarised through spiralling state expenditure and campaigns of colonial conquest in north Africa, The Witch challenged bourgeois morality; attempted to break the alliance between ecclesiastical authority and rural conservatism; and contrasted the violence of church and state with the wisdom, care, and concern of the village healer.

It was small wonder, therefore, that The Witch was quickly banned and that copies of a second edition had to be printed in Brussels and smuggled over the border to sell out within hours upon the street corners of Paris.

Michelet had intended it to be an inflammatory challenge to the power and authority of clerical, and imperial, France and the book was judged by his contemporaries to sit alongside Hugo’s Les Miserables and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal as representing a new wave of highly subversive, charged, and challenging literature.

Yet The Witch did something more. It recast the French peasantry in a progressive light; identified capitalism and patriarchy as the root causes of alienation; and presented a feminine-inspired and nurtured form of egalitarianism (based around the values of 1789) as the means of self-realisation and societal regeneration.

In this schema, the “anti-nature” of capital, industrial pollution, and clerical domination could – and should – be replaced by the “true” nature of social and economic equality, ecology, and pluralism.

In a few short chapters, the witch had become rebel, activist, and “every woman.”

No longer scorned and defined by her poverty and stupidity, she had thrown-off the rags and grime that had accrued to her over more than three hundred years of popular calumny and judicial repression.

Freed by Michelet’s art, she was at liberty to rediscover and renegotiate the terms upon which her power was based.

Confident, sexual – rather than sexualised – and erudite, she had taken form as the result of the intellectual and political freedoms seized by the European Enlightenment and by the powers of creativity and imagination unleashed by the Romantic Revival.

This Halloween, if we can look beyond the demonisation and persecution of the witch, then we have Michelet to thank for that.

La Sorciere, The Witch of the Middle Ages by Jules Michelet, in LJ Trotter’s 1863 English translation is free to read and download in PDF and EPUB formats at https://bdebooks.com/en/books/la-sorciere-jules-michelet/ Paperback copies are also available from https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/TheSorceress_10058849

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