The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France 1560–1620 (review)

The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France 1560-1620. By Jonathan L. Pearl. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 181. $39.95.)

Jonathan Pearl's study of French demonological thought during the Wars of Religion advances three related arguments. The first is that only a relatively small minority of the learned elite in France subscribed to what might be referred to as extreme demonological beliefs. The second argument is that relatively few executions occurred in the kingdom of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Professor Pearl attributes this low number to the way in which the French judicial system functioned, especially the strict evidentiary standards it upheld and the mandatory review of capital sentences by the regional parlements. If the demonologists wished to inspire large-scale witch-hunting (and it is not clear that they did), the judges of the courts, who generally did not harbor extreme witchcraft beliefs, prevented them from doing so.

The third and most important argument of the book is that the most intolerant expression of demonological thought came from members of the Catholic zealot party, which after 1584 was known as the Catholic League. These ideologues identified their Protestant and Catholic politique adversaries, including many of the judges who were lenient toward witchcraft, as part of a satanic conspiracy against Tridentine Catholicism. The most prominent of these Catholic zealots was the Jesuit theologian Jean Maldonat, who influenced an entire generation of demonologists, including Martin del Rio. Maldonat and his followers used demonology as a rhetorical political weapon in order to classify Protestants as moral and political subversives whose heresy allied them with the Devil and witches.

This thesis has the virtues of simplicity and clarity, but Pearl's identification of three "adversaries" of the Catholic zealots' political demonology raises questions about its applicability. It makes sense that the humanist Michel de Montaigne, who was skeptical of witchcraft beliefs, would be included among this group, but it is less obvious why Estienne Pasquier, who apparently wrote nothing about witchcraft, is linked with him. The most surprising "adversary" is Jean Bodin, the jurist and political theorist who wrote De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580). A revisionist interpretation of Bodin might put him in the same camp as other politique magistrates, since Bodin did demand more judicial caution in witchcraft cases than he is usually given credit for. But the differences between Bodin's demonology and that of the Catholic zealots were hardly fundamental, and on some issues, such as the reality of lycanthropy, his views were more extreme and credulous than theirs. Bodin was in many respects closer to the Catholic zealot party than to Montaigne.

The difficulty of placing individual French demonologists in one ideological camp or the other becomes even greater in the last chapter, which is devoted to the famous witch-hunter and demonologist, Pierre de Lancre. As this chapter unfolds it becomes increasingly difficult to see how de Lancre's demonology and his judicial conduct in the witch-hunt of 1609 in the Basque-speaking Labourd region support the main thesis of the book. The assertion that de Lancre was not a typical judge or demonologist does not help to resolve the problem. Pearl presents a plausible argument regarding the political inspiration of French demonological thought, but he leaves the reader looking for clearer and more illustrative examples. In this book the devil is in the details.

Brian P. Levack
University of Texas at Austin

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