The Loudun possessions and the burning of Urbain Grandier

Founded in 1626, the Ursuline convent at Loudun held 17 nuns with an average age of 25. Their prioress was Jeanne des Anges. In the town lived the priest Urbain Grandier. He had opposed the demolition of Loudun's fortifications, part of Cardinal Richelieu's campaign against Huguenot strongholds. He had also written a satire of Richelieu.

The night of 22 September 1632. Three nuns were each visited by an apparition of "a man of the cloth" asking for help. They were the prioress, the sub-prioress Sister de Colombiers, and the junior nun Sister Marthe de Saint-Monique. Later retellings named the figure as their recently dead confessor, Father Moussaut.

The nuns heard disembodied voices. They felt blows from unseen sources. They fell into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Hawthorns were "passed from a ghostly hand into the palm of the prioress." One modern retelling adds "a black orb … seen floating around the convent, as well as skeletons wandering through the halls."

The first exorcism came on 5 October 1632. On 11 October Canon Jean Mignon informed the magistrates, and Grandier was named. Soon exorcisms ran "once or twice a day, simultaneously in five churches and chapels," before thousands of onlookers. The nuns shouted, swore and barked; "They threw themselves back till their heads touched their feet, and walked in this position," wrote des Niau, a counsellor at La Flèche. The Mother Superior "was carried off her feet and remained suspended in the air at the height of 24 inches." She answered in Latin, Greek, German, Turkish, Spanish and Italian.

In 1635 Thomas Killigrew, a future dramatist then 23, came to watch. He saw one nun's "belly and breasts … swell before his eyes, as if she was pregnant." His verdict shifted between "laughably histrionic" and "obviously supernatural."

In November 1633 the royal commissioner Jean de Laubardemont had Grandier arrested and held at Angers. The evidence included a pact with the devil, written in backwards Latin and signed by Grandier, several demons and "Satanas."

On 18 August 1634, Grandier was convicted of "the crime of magic, maleficia, and of causing demoniacal possession of several Ursuline nuns." He was tortured with "the boot" but never confessed to witchcraft. That same day he was burned on the place Sainte-Croix after being promised strangling first. By one account the exorcist Lactance lit the pyre early. Monks threw holy water in his face so his last words could not be heard.

In December 1634 the Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin arrived. He prayed with Jeanne and asked that her demons pass into him, "and they did." For about 20 years he suffered "hallucinations, seizures and temporary paralysis." In 1637 the words "Jesus, Maria, Joseph, François de Sales" appeared inscribed on Jeanne's hand. In 1638 she showed it to Louis XIII and Richelieu, and the manifestations ended.

In 1634 the Saumur doctor Marc Duncan blamed "error of the imagination, fantasmata reinforced by fasting, vigils and solitary religious life." In 1645 Balthasar de Monconys examined the hand. "With the tip of my fingernail, with a light touch I removed the leg of the M," he wrote. In 1679 John Locke called the affair "a contrivance of Cardinal Richelieu," the nuns "playing their tricks well, but all was a cheat."

Michel de Certeau later read it as hysteria, political theatre and scapegoating. Aldous Huxley retold it in The Devils of Loudun in 1952. Ken Russell filmed it as The Devils in 1971. Jeanne's 1637 interrogation survives in the Archives nationales.