BEFORE THIS WEEK, I last read Jules Michelets Satanism and ...
Michelet was perhaps the leading historian of 19th-century France, a man who spent 30 years putting together a multi-volume history of his country?and turned out a book a year compiled from the leftover notes. Satanism was 1862's contribution and, from all accounts, his most personal, if not eccentric, piece of work. It also seems to be his only title in print in English.
What is history? That's been a topic of academic debate over the last half-century or so, during which time a trend developed away from chronicling the doings of kings and other big boys and toward finding out what the "real people" were up to. In this approach, Michelet was well ahead of the curve. Satanism and Witchcraft is a study of why and how the peasants of the Middle Ages turned to the devil to relieve the misery of daily life. Beset by brutal and arbitrary feudal lords who owned their bodies, their last hope was to keep some hold on their souls.
More surprisingly, the book is an extended paean to the place of women in the world, an enlightened view of feminism written at a time when women had fallen to their social nadir. Michelet also carries French anti-clericalism to its most extreme, excoriating the church for legislating the degraded life of the masses, and its minions for their uncontrolled and implicitly sanctioned licentiousness.
Michelet is by no means your dry, studied historian. He takes passionate, explosive sides, flailing those he sees as guilty and exalting the innocent. Despite occasional sentimentalism and florid asides, he's saved from petty partisanship by two sterling traits?his mastery of primary sources and a magnificent style (delightfully rendered by translator A.R. Allinson). This is a book you can read for the sheer flow of the words.
Much of Part I reads like a novel, as Michelet invents a typical peasant wife who escapes her lonely humiliation through friendship with a local nature spirit. Later, however, this spirit grows in size and power to become a manifestation of the devil, manipulating her into a feared witch-force and rival to the castle's lady. Turned on and turned out, she later takes to the heath to plot her revenge, but with time matures into a respected wonder-worker of health as she gains knowledge of nature. But now she has caught the church's jealous attention and must be put down?arrested, tortured and burned, but not before she has thrown her own belief in her judges' faces, admitting to her power and consort with Satan.
Michelet here pits the life force of nature against the death force of the church. He does not exalt evil?far from it?but rather the human urge to salvage hope from the midst of despair. There's some confusion as to what Michelet believes to be her imaginings and what are her actual doings. I think, at bottom, he refuses to make the distinction. It is a woman's place, not her particulars, that he is documenting.
Part II deals mostly with the most famous sorcery trials of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as that at Loudun (the basis of Ken Russell's finest work, The Devils). He ends with a crushing and horrifying study of Charlotte Cadiére, a naïve, possibly schizophrenic ecstatic who becomes the spiritual and sexual victim of a reprobate Jesuit. Again, Michelet takes sides, but the case he makes is all too miserably convincing.
This isn't a book for everyone, and it's certainly not a manual to comfort Satanists. In the guise of an historical treatise, it's an impassioned plea for the value of decency, woman as spiritual healer and the unconstrained human soul.
You can find a concise, solid article on Michelet at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Michelet.