The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

152 Louviers Possessions
three times. Inevitably, the Royal Commission passed
sentence on August 18, 1634: After the first and last degrees
of torture, Grandier was to be burned alive at the
stake. Even under extreme torture, Grandier maintained
his innocence, refusing to name accomplices, so angering
Father Tranquille and the others that they broke both
his legs and claimed that everytime Grandier prayed to
God, he was really invoking the Devil. Grandier had been
promised he could make a last statement and be mercifully
strangled before burning, but the friars who carried
him to the stake deluged him with holy water, preventing
him from speaking. And the garotte was knotted so that
it could not be tightened, leaving Grandier to be burned
alive. One monk who witnessed the execution reported
that a large fly buzzed about Grandier’s head, symbolizing
that Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, had appeared to
carry Grandier’s soul to HELL.
But Grandier had the last word. As he struggled,
Grandier told Father Lactance that he would see God in
30 days. The priest died accordingly, reportedly crying,
“Grandier, I was not responsible for your death.” Father
Tranquille died insane within five years, and Dr. Mannoury,
the fraudulent witch pricker, also died in delirium.
Father Barre left Loudun for an exorcism at Chinon,
where he was finally banished from the church for conspiring
to accuse a priest of rape on the altar; the bloodstains
turned out to be from a chicken. Louis Chavet, one
of the judges who was skeptical of the possessions and
who was denounced by Jeanne as a sorcerer himself, fell
into depression and insanity and died before the end of
the winter.
FATHER JEAN-JOSEPH SURIN, who arrived as an exorcist
in 1634 after the death of Grandier, succumbed to possession
by Jeanne’s devils. For years after Grandier’s death,
Surin was haunted by the exorcisms, eventually becoming
unable to eat, dress himself, walk, read, or write. He
no longer prayed to God and continually saw visions of
devils, black wings, and other terrors. In 1645, he tried
to kill himself. Only after Father Surin received tender
care from Father Bastide, the new head of Surin’s Jesuit
College at Saintes, in 1648, did he begin to recover. Surin
finally wrote again in 1657 and walked in 1660. He died
at peace in 1665.
Grandier’s death did not stop the possessions at Loudun.
Public appreciation of the exorcisms had been so
great that the convent continued the performances as a
type of tourist attraction, led by Mignon and three other
Jesuit exorcists who arrived in December 1634 (one was
Surin). Twice a day except Sundays, the afflicted nuns
were exorcised for the amusement of the crowds. They
lifted their skirts and coarsely begged for sexual relief.
They beat their heads, bent backward, walked on their
hands, stuck out blackened tongues, and used language
that, according to one account, “would have astonished
the inmates of the lowest brothel in the country.” Such
shows continued until 1637, when the duchess d’Aiguillon,
niece to Cardinal Richelieu, reported the fraud to her
uncle. Having satisfied his original aim—to demonstrate
his considerable power—Richelieu righteously cut off the
performers’ salaries and put the convent at peace. Jeanne
des Anges, convinced of her saintliness by Father Surin,
died in 1665.
Huxley’s account of the madness at Loudun forms
the basis of Ken Russell’s film version, The Devils (1971).
Vanessa Redgrave plays Jeanne des Anges, portrayed as a
deformed, bitter, and sexually repressed woman. Oliver
Reed plays the unfortunate Grandier.
FURTHER READING:
Ferber, Sarah. Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern
France. London: Routledge, 2004.
Huxley, Aldous. The Devils of Loudun. New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1952.
Louviers Possessions (1647) Mass demonic POSSES-
SIONs at a convent chapel of the Hospitaller sisters of St.
Louis and St. Elizabeth in Louviers, France. The Louviers
Possessions have similarities to the AIX-EN-PROVENCE
POSSESSIONS and the LOUDUN POSSESSIONS. Conviction of
the priests involved hinged mainly on the evidence of
the possessed DEMONIACs.
On the promptings of Sister Madeleine Bavent, 18
nuns were possessed, allegedly as a result of bewitchment
by Mathurin Picard, the nunnery’s deceased director, and
Father Thomas Boulle, vicar at Louviers. According to
Bavent, Picard was bewitching the nuns from his grave
and causing them to become possessed. This, in turn,
was due to certain questionable spiritual practices previously
associated with the convent. The bishop of Evreaux
ordered Picard’s body to be exhumed.
Bavent confessed to authorities that the two clergymen
had taken her to a witches’ SABBAT, where she married
the DEMON Dagon and committed horrible and obscene
acts with him on the altar. (See BLACK MASS.) During the
orgy, she told, babies were strangled and eaten, and two
men who had attended out of curiosity were crucified and
then disemboweled. Dagon disturbed the peace of some
of the other nuns as well, and all showed the classic signs
of possession: contortions, unnatural body movements,
glossolalia (talking in unknown languages), insults, blasphemies,
and the appearance of strange wounds, which
just as quickly vanished.
One writer who observed the exorcisms tells that one
young nun “ran with movements so abrupt that it was difficult
to stop her. One of the clerics present, having caught
her by the arm, was surprised to find that it did not prevent
the rest of her body from turning over and over as if
the arm were fixed to the shoulder merely by a spring.”
Besides seducing the nuns to unspeakable sexual acts,
SATAN tried to lead the nuns of Louviers down heretical
roads as well. According to the account of the proceedings
at Louviers published in 1652 by Father Bosroger,
the Devil, appearing as a beautiful ANGEL, engaged the