The End Of Magic: Superstition And “So-Called Sorcery” In Louis Xiv's Paris

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37002-5
• Published date: 15 December 2005
• Date: 15 December 2005
• Pages: 33-52
• Author: Lynn Wood Mollenauer

THE END OF MAGIC:

SUPERSTITION AND ‘‘SO-CALLED

SORCERY’’ IN LOUIS XIV’S PARIS

Lynn Wood Mollenauer

ABSTRACT

Through an analysis of the French crown’s investigation into the greatest

scandal of Louis XIV’s reign, this article examines the unstable boundary

between sin and crime at the height of the Catholic Reformation in France.

The prosecution of the suspects in the Affair of the Poisons, it argues,

allowed a key change in the French state’s definition of crime. In 1682, the

crown decriminalized magic. It continued to prosecute ‘‘so-called magi-

cians,’’ however, because their practices were deemed sacrilegious. Any

person convicted of ‘‘treason against God’’ was therefore sentenced to the

most severe form of execution inf‌licted under French law: to be burnt

alive. Louis XIV’s determination to ensure social order and religious or-

thodoxy was made manifest in the state’s rituals of punishment.

In the fall of 1678, the Parisian police received an anonymous tip that a

conspiracy to poison the king had been hatched. Their investigation into

what quickly became known as the Affair of the Poisons led directly to a

criminal magical underworld thriving in the heart of the capital. According

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 37, 33–52

Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37002-5

33

to police and judicial records, this loosely knit community of magicians,

sorceresses, and renegade priests was busily peddling love charms, demonic

rituals, and arsenic-based poisons known as ‘‘inheritance powders’’

throughout the city.

1

Clients, typically women seeking to rid themselves

of husbands or rivals for a lover’s affections, allegedly purchased solutions

of hemlock, vitriol, or arsenic from sorceresses who also provided instruc-

tions on how to best administer the poisons that they sold.

2

Victims were

furnished shirts treated with a type of arsenic (the poison was supposed to

irritate and then leach into the skin), served food and wine laced with

poisonous mushrooms, and given enemas containing mercuric chloride

(Nass, 1898). Even Louis XIV’s off‌icial mistress was suspected of trying

to poison her royal lover in a f‌it of jealous rage. The investigation into the

affair further suggested that countless Parisians – including a number

of the highest-ranking women at court – had commissioned love potions

and rituals of Christian magic from the denizens of the criminal under-

world as well.

Louis XIV reacted swiftly to the growing scandal. He immediately ap-

pointed a special commission to try all suspects, regardless of rank, impli-

cated in the affair. Its investigations were to be directed by Nicolas de la

Reynie, head of the Parisian police.

3

The king selected 13 magistrates from

the parlement of Paris, which functioned as the supreme court for approx-

imately half of the kingdom, to serve on the new commission.

4

The Chambre

de l’Arsenal (the commission was named after the building in which it met)

was a deluxe production in the genre of the seventeenth-century theater of

justice. Their proceedings a state secret, the magistrates sat in judgment in

the basement of the Arsenal, the windows draped in black cloth and the only

light in the hall provided by f‌laming torches. These torches lent the tribunal

its unoff‌icial name, the Chambre Ardente or Burning Chamber.

The Chambre de l’Arsenal followed standard French criminal procedure

as recently revised by the Edict of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1670

(Boulanger, 2000). Its rulings were without appeal, although the king re-

served the right to modify sentences. If the judges found a suspect guilty of a

capital crime, they customarily ordered that he or she be put to the question,

or tortured, before execution in order to extract the names of any accom-

plices (Silverman, 2001).

5

As the affair ran its course, Louis XIV closely

monitored each detail of the proceedings, receiving updates each morning

on the suspects’ interrogations and the judges’ deliberations from his Min-

ister of War, the marquis de Louvois (Lebigre, 1989).

By the time the king dissolved the Chambre de l’Arsenal in 1682, its judges

had investigated over 400 of his subjects, sending 36 to their deaths, four to

LYNN WOOD MOLLENAUER34