Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (review)

Although the “Affair of the Poisons” is one of the most notorious scandals in French history, the fresh perspective of this historian adds much to the existing scholarship. Using court and police records, memoirs, and letters surrounding the “Affair,” Lynn Wood Mollenauer deftly and vividly reconstructs a world whose focal point was Louis XIV. Most interestingly, however, this world included not merely the glittering public society of the royal court but also a powerful, though less visible, social network that extended from some relatively humble and rather shady precincts and citizens of Paris to the bedchamber and the body of the king himself. The author’s investigation of this latter “shadow hierarchy” is among the most valuable of her contributions to our understanding of the mentality and power relations characterizing court society and the populace that served it.

The case will probably be forever shrouded in mystery, partly because the king destroyed some of the evidence concerning his courtiers and mistress as well as silenced the most dangerous witnesses. Moreover, the judges of his specially commissioned court, the Chambre de l’Arsenal, were forbidden to pursue the most damning and intimate lines of inquiry. Whether or not the king’s life was genuinely threatened by a plot to poison him—and the degree to which his official mistress, Madame de Montespan, was involved—have long been subjects of learned speculation. But this author wisely chooses to emphasize the plausibility rather than the veracity of witnesses’ depositions and suspects’ confessions, seeking “to establish the reasons why their testimony seemed believable to the French public, La Reynie [lieutenant general of the Paris police], Louis XIV’s judges, and the king himself” (p. 5).

The reasons for both official and public belief in the testimonial evidence lie in the social world that Mollenauer so imaginatively re-creates. Beneath the stringent politesse of Louis’s court lay a murky Parisian netherworld of poison sellers, abortionists, magicians, renegade priests, conjurers, and fortunetellers. Courtiers and others sought occult services to improve their fortunes or to thwart rivals by means of love potions, magic, the summons to demons, “amatory masses,” or, most lethally, “inheritance powders” (poisons).

Although it is commonplace to credit women with a veiled power “behind the throne,” this work explores more fully the unique influence of women in the absolutist court of a heterosexual king at the height of his power. Only women could have the most intimate access to the king’s body, the center of power and the embodiment of the state and the nation. Despite this greatest of informal powers, the legal weakness of women sometimes required the use of poison in the pursuit of love, liberty, or wealth obstructed by inconvenient husbands, rivals, or coheirs. The author argues that the sophisticated public had little trouble believing in poisonous women motivated by ungoverned passions, because elite cultural scripts included the story of Medea and the even more horrifying contemporary poisonings by the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who murdered her husband and several other relatives with the connivance of her lover, and may also have tested her poisons on poor hospital inmates. Her execution in 1676 marked the beginning of the alarming discoveries of the “affair.”

As for the magical means to success, Mollenauer argues that rites and potions were considered most powerful and credible to Parisians when sacred Catholic objects and ordained priests were involved. Interestingly, both religious fervor and judicial skepticism motivated the condemnation of occult practices under Louis XIV. Catholic reformers demanded the repression of popular superstition, while royal judges had long since refused to accept evidence of efficacious witchcraft and condemned the accused for their treason, fraud, sacrilege, and subversion of the moral, social, and religious order. In other words, one was allowed to believe in demons but not in the means to summon...