The Devils of Loudun

First published in 1952, this work of narrative nonfiction reconstructs one of the most notorious episodes of religious hysteria in European history: the alleged demonic possession of an Ursuline convent in the small French city of Loudun during the 1630s and the judicial murder of a charismatic priest accused of sorcery.

Huxley opens by establishing the social and religious landscape of early 17th-century France. Jesuit colleges flourished across Europe, producing pupils like the young Urbain Grandier, who spent more than 10 years at the Jesuit College of Bordeaux before his ordination in 1615. Around 1617, at age 27, Grandier received the living of Saint-Pierre du Marché in Loudun, a city of about 14,000 inhabitants divided between Catholics and Huguenots (French Protestants). Handsome, eloquent, and socially ambitious, Grandier quickly won admirers among the town's women and intellectuals, including the Governor, Jean d'Armagnac. He also accumulated enemies among monks whose congregations he poached, husbands who resented his attentions, and professionals he mocked with his sharp wit.

Grandier's private life was flagrantly at odds with his clerical vows. He composed a treatise arguing that priestly celibacy was not binding and conducted affairs with widows and parishioners. His most consequential seduction was of Philippe Trincant, the daughter of Louis Trincant, the Public Prosecutor and Grandier's closest friend. Grandier cultivated Philippe's infatuation through Latin lessons and the confessional, consummated the affair, and abandoned her when she became pregnant. Trincant transformed overnight from Grandier's staunchest ally into his most implacable enemy. Earlier, Grandier had also gratuitously offended the Prior of Coussay, Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, the future Cardinal and eventual absolute ruler of France, by rudely claiming precedence over him in a religious procession.

A cabal of enemies formed around the apothecary Adam's shop: Trincant, Canon Mignon, the surgeon Mannoury, and others. Meanwhile, Grandier fell genuinely in love with Madeleine de Brou, a pious and wealthy aristocratic woman, and performed a secret midnight ceremony in which he served as both priest and groom. This union only multiplied his enemies. The cabal brought accusations of immorality before the Bishop of Poitiers, who sentenced Grandier to fasting and forbade him from exercising priestly functions at Loudun. Grandier appealed to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Henri de Sourdis, who lifted the interdiction in November 1631 and reinstated him. Grandier returned to Loudun in triumph, but his position remained precarious. When Cardinal Richelieu ordered the demolition of provincial fortresses, Grandier served as de facto vice-governor during d'Armagnac's absences, opposing the Cardinal's Commissioner, Laubardemont. This defense of Loudun's castle made Grandier a direct political irritant to Richelieu.

A separate drama was unfolding at the local Ursuline convent. The Prioress, Jeanne des Anges, born Jeanne de Belciel, was a diminutive, slightly deformed woman of sharp intelligence whose chronic resentment at her physical unattractiveness manifested as sarcasm and a craving for dominance. Without ever meeting Grandier, she developed an obsessive fixation on him fueled by gossip about his sexual exploits. When Grandier declined her invitation to become the convent's spiritual director, her desire curdled into hatred. She recruited Canon Mignon as confessor, and when a practical joke involving fake ghosts frightened the younger nuns, Mignon seized the opportunity to reinterpret their hysteria as demonic possession, declaring the nocturnal visitors were devils sent by Grandier. Public exorcisms turned the convent into a spectacle. The Bailli (Chief Magistrate) de Cerisay investigated and found only sickness and fraud. The Archbishop of Bordeaux sent his physician, who confirmed the finding, and issued an ordinance restricting the exorcisms. For several months the nuns calmed down.

The situation changed decisively in autumn 1633 when Laubardemont returned to Loudun for the castle demolition. After visiting the convent and consulting with Grandier's enemies, he carried their accusations to Paris. On November 30, 1633, Louis XIII commissioned Laubardemont to investigate the possession and bring Grandier to trial. Huxley argues that Richelieu's motives included personal vengeance, suspicion that Grandier had authored a libelous pamphlet, anti-Huguenot strategy, and a possible experiment in establishing inquisitorial methods in France.

Grandier was arrested, his papers seized, and his mother's appeal to the Parlement of Paris annulled by royal decree. Laubardemont adopted a doctrine, previously condemned by the Sorbonne, that devils under priestly constraint were bound to tell the truth. Anything the nuns affirmed during exorcism therefore counted as guaranteed testimony. The public exorcisms resumed on a massive scale. Huxley applies the Church's own four official tests of genuine possession, including mastery of unknown languages, preternatural strength, levitation, and clairvoyance, and demonstrates that the nuns failed every one.

Huxley pauses to analyze the 17th-century theory of human nature, arguing that prevailing psychology conceived the soul as simple and indivisible, leaving no room for understanding subconscious mental activity. Phenomena like split personality therefore had to be attributed either to fraud or to demonic intervention.

Thirteen magistrates from outside Loudun unanimously condemned Grandier to torture and death by burning. Huxley narrates the final hours in sustained detail. In his cell, Grandier was visited by Father Ambrose, an Augustinian, who heard his confession and counseled acceptance of God's will. For the first time, Grandier experienced genuine contrition, recognizing his lifelong self-worship as the root of his failings. During the judicial torture, his legs were crushed between boards by progressively thicker wedges while Father Lactance, one of the exorcists, swung the mallet and shouted for a confession. Grandier refused. At the stake, the friars denied him the promised mercy of strangulation and lit the pyre prematurely. His last audible words were "Forgive them, forgive my enemies" (221). In the aftermath, several of Grandier's persecutors met disturbing ends: Lactance died raving within a month, and Mannoury died after reporting visions of Grandier's ghost.

The narrative then follows the intertwined fates of the Prioress and Jean-Joseph Surin, the Jesuit mystic sent to Loudun in December 1634 as her exorcist and spiritual director. Rather than relying on conventional exorcism alone, Surin attempted to train Jeanne in mental prayer and contemplation. He also prayed to suffer in her place and soon began experiencing what he described as a terrifying coexistence of two selves within one body: one at peace with God, the other filled with rage and despair.

Over several years, the devils departed one by one. With each expulsion, the Prioress acquired new miracles: sacred names appeared on her hand, anointing oil materialized on her chemise. Huxley analyzes these phenomena as likely mixtures of autosuggestion and deliberate fraud. The last demon departed in October 1637. In 1638, Jeanne embarked on a triumphal pilgrimage displaying her miraculous hand to enormous crowds, prelates, and royalty. Cardinal Richelieu kissed her chemise, and Queen Anne of Austria held the miraculous hand for an hour. The chemise was laid across the royal abdomen during the birth of the future Louis XIV. Jeanne returned to Loudun and never left again, dying in January 1665.

Surin's fate was far more harrowing. After returning to Bordeaux, he experienced a catastrophic mental and physical collapse lasting nearly 20 years. He became convinced he was already damned, experienced partial paralysis, and attempted suicide in 1645. His fellow Jesuits treated him with the casual brutality the era reserved for people with mental illness. Yet a part of Surin's mind remained lucid: Unable to read or write, he composed mentally and dictated his greatest work, the thousand-page spiritual treatise Le Catéchisme Spirituel. Recovery began in 1648 when Father Bastide, the only colleague who believed Surin could recover, treated him with kindness. The ability to write returned in 1657 and the ability to walk in 1660. Huxley describes with particular tenderness the moment Surin walked into a garden for the first time in 15 years and looked at the world with fresh eyes. He died in spring 1665, having arrived, Huxley writes, at the place where he had always been.

In a concluding Epilogue, Huxley expands his analysis into a systematic survey of the substitutes through which human beings attempt to escape the prison of insulated selfhood: alcohol and drugs, elementary sexuality, crowd-delirium, and identification with causes or groups. He warns that modern technologies of mass manipulation have made it possible for the few to exploit the many's craving for self-transcendence on an unprecedented scale, and argues that only upward self-transcendence into spiritual awareness can prevent civilization's highest achievements from generating counterbalancing evils.