LOUDUN POSSESSIONS

Opening

In the autumn of 1632, in the town of Loudun in western France, the nuns of a small Ursuline convent began to have fits, visions and convulsions. Their prioress, Jeanne des Anges, said they were possessed by demons. Under questioning by exorcists, the nuns named the man they said had sent them: Urbain Grandier, the town's handsome, clever and widely disliked parish priest, a man none of them had ever met.

For two years the exorcisms were held in public, before crowds who came from all over France to watch. In August 1634 Grandier was convicted of sorcery and burned alive. He never confessed. The possessions went on for three more years after he died.

Timeline

1626An Ursuline convent opens in Loudun. By 1632 it has seventeen nuns, led by the prioress Jeanne des Anges.

1632Plague strikes the town. About five months later the first reports of possession come from the convent.

11 October 1632After nearly a week of questioning, the nuns name Grandier.

November 1633Jean de Laubardemont, a royal commissioner and an ally of Cardinal Richelieu, is sent to investigate. Grandier is arrested.

1634Public exorcisms draw huge crowds. A written pact with the Devil, said to be signed by Grandier and by several demons, is produced as evidence. On 23 June Grandier is made to perform an exorcism himself.

August 1634A special court of local magistrates convicts him. He is tortured to make him name accomplices and confess, and he does neither.

18 August 1634Grandier is burned at the stake in Loudun. The friars throw holy water in his face so his last words can't be heard, and according to the historian Robert Rapley, the exorcist Lactance lights the fire before Grandier can be strangled, as he had been promised.

1634 to 1637The possessions continue. The Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin takes over the exorcism of Jeanne des Anges.

1638After a pilgrimage, Jeanne des Anges visits Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII, showing the names of Joseph and Mary that have appeared on her arm. The demons are said to be gone.

Key figures

Urbain Grandier was the parish priest of Saint-Pierre-du-Marché. He was a gifted preacher with powerful enemies: he had affairs, wrote against clerical celibacy, was linked to a satire of Richelieu, and had opposed the cardinal's plan to pull down Loudun's town walls.

Jeanne des Anges was the prioress and the central demoniac. She later wrote an autobiography and became a celebrity in her own right. Laubardemont ran the investigation. Surin, the most famous of the exorcists, later suffered years of mental illness that he himself believed was possession.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is extensive: trial documents, accounts by exorcists and witnesses, pamphlets printed at the time, Jeanne des Anges's own memoir, and the pact. The pact is a short text in Latin, written backwards in places, with the supposed signatures of demons including Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, Astaroth and Leviathan. It survives and is often reproduced. Whether Grandier ever wrote or signed anything like it, under duress or at all, is doubted by historians, and the demons' signatures were plainly written by human hands.

Things you might not know

• The nuns had never met him. Grandier had not been their confessor and had no known contact with the convent.
• It was a tourist attraction. The exorcisms were public performances, and visitors travelled to Loudun to watch.
• The town walls mattered. Richelieu wanted fortifications across France demolished, and Grandier had stood in the way at Loudun.
• The exorcist broke down. Jean-Joseph Surin spent many years afterwards in a state he described as possession, unable at times to read or write.
• It became an opera. Besides Aldous Huxley's book and Ken Russell's film, Krzysztof Penderecki wrote The Devils of Loudun in 1969.

Competing explanations

A political execution. Grandier had made enemies of powerful men, including the cardinal. The possession gave them a way to destroy him, and the commission that tried him was run by Richelieu's man.

Hysteria in a closed convent. Young women, many placed in the convent without a calling, under strict rule, after a plague, encouraged by exorcists whose attention rewarded every symptom. Jeanne des Anges's own later writing suggests an obsession with Grandier she had never acted on.

Real possession. The view of the exorcists and many who watched. The nuns' performances were extraordinary. They were also staged in public and shaped by their questioners.

Later life of the case

Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun (1952) made the case famous in English, and Ken Russell's film The Devils (1971) made it notorious. Like Salem half a century later, it is now studied as a case of law and fear working together.

Finding

Urbain Grandier was burned on the evidence of possessed nuns who had never met him, in a trial run by allies of a cardinal he had crossed. Most historians see politics and the dynamics of a closed community behind it, and the possessions outlived the man supposedly causing them.

What still will not resolve: what Jeanne des Anges believed was happening to her in 1632, before Grandier's name was ever spoken.