French History Advance Access originally published online on September 3, 2007
French History 2007 21(3):289-312; doi:10.1093/fh/crm016
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Sorcery and publicity: the Cadière–Girard scandal of 1730–1731
* Jason T. Kuznicki defended his dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University in 2005. He may be contacted at kuznicki{at}jhu.edu
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The Cadière–Girard trial of 1730–1731 is an early example of a sensational, nationally publicized French trial in which the major parties were private individuals. Cadière, a female penitent, accused Girard, her Jesuit confessor, of bewitching and raping her; Girard claimed that Cadière was guilty of slander. It was to be the last witchcraft trial in the francophone world. Another notable feature of the trial was its publicity, in which the contesting parties almost immediately became stand-ins for the Society of Jesus and for its Jansenist adversaries. This paper argues that certain anti-Jesuits, particularly Cadière's defence team and in the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence, acted to prolong the trial with the aim of creating as much bad publicity as possible for the Society of Jesus; it also shows how Jansenist publicists took advantage of the lengthy process, creating literature that ‘burned Girard in spirit’, and with him, the Jesuits as a whole.
What a noise! What a shock! What a scandal! The courts and the public have been inundated with Mémoires, Requêtes, Comparants, writings in verse and in prose, in print and in manuscript; all the libel sheets and gazettes have been made to speak in the most infamous and outrageous manner, not only against Father Girard himself but also against all the Jesuits in general.1
These observations, made by the attorney of Father Jean-Baptiste Girard in 1731, were entirely apt. Denunciations of aberrant sexuality by or about public officials were nothing new—consider the mazarinades during the Fronde—but the allegations against which attorney Jean-Baptiste Pazery de Thorame now argued were quite another matter. Never before had the trial of two private individuals received such nationwide public attention. Never before had the print media been so important to the outcome of a case, and almost never before had it dared to supply what amounted to an entirely different verdict when the official one did not meet the publicists' approval. In a very real sense, the Cadière–Girard trial was the first modern French scandal, fuelled as it developed by sensational allegations in the print media, allegations aimed more at a popular audience than at the court itself. Yet while the trial gave rise to important innovations in public discourse, it was also the end of an era: Girard would be the last individual in the francophone world to be judicially accused of witchcraft.
Father Girard stood before the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence accused of bewitching Marie-Catherine Cadière, a young and beautiful female penitent, as well as several other women under his direction. The charges against him also included rape, abortion and spiritual incest, the crime of fornicating with someone under spiritual direction. Each of these could have meant death at the stake. In turn, Girard accused Cadière of defamation and false testimony, crimes that could have meant death by hanging. By the trial's end, writings in verse and prose, print and manuscript had been joined by popular songs, pornographic engravings, burnings in effigy, angry mobs and the celebrated gift of a very large tuna, which the fishermen of Aix gave the fishmongers to mark Cadière's acquittal.2 Girard, too, was acquitted, though even his supporters agreed that he had lost the media battles of the day: all of France, indeed all of Europe, now knew the story of Cadière and her demonic Jesuit confessor. Accounts of the trial were particularly popular in Britain, where they were used to a distinctly anti-Catholic effect, playing on negative stereotypes of the fornicating priest and the perfidious Jesuit. As if all of this were not enough to pique a historian's interest, the trial also touched on the Jesuit–Jansenist controversy, quietism, drugs and poisons and the role of print culture in eighteenth-century France.
Despite the fascinating subject matter of the case, historians have generally shied away from the Cadière–Girard affair. I am aware of only one published historical article discussing the case, Robert Kreiser's ‘The devils of Toulon: demonic possession and religious politics in eighteenth-century Provence’.3 Besides unpublished dissertations, the last published monograph on the affair was Gaston Delayen's 1928 La Sainte de M. de Toulon.4 Before this, Jules Michelet's 1862 La Sorcière also devoted a section to the case. Michelet depicted Girard as an unscrupulous schemer, envious of the contemporary Jansenist miracles happening at the tomb of deacon François Pâris in the Parisian cemetery of Saint-Médard—an accusation that is chronologically difficult to support.5 As we shall see, both Cadière's perfect innocence and Girard's total villainy may well be doubted, and I will refrain from judging either.
In contrast to the relative lack of material on Cadière–Girard, the last major witchcraft trials of the anglophone world, those of 1692 at Salem, Masachusetts, have produced a large and diverse historiography. The extensive 1632–1640 witchcraft trials at Loudon, France, have also attracted considerable attention.6 But Cadière–Girard remains largely unknown, perhaps both because of its late date and its complexity. Historians of the eighteenth century are often reluctant to take up witchcraft trials, seeing them—more or less rightly—as the domain of specialists in earlier eras.7 And the details of the case are particularly difficult to unravel: the printed records alone take up several large folio volumes at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, more than any trial I know of in the eighteenth century. Several manuscript collections also exist; diary entries and newspaper accounts are likewise numerous.8 The material is full of repetitions, retractions, contradictions and pure impossibilities. Trying to determine exactly what went on between Cadière and Girard will probably always remain impossible.
Rather than delve directly into this confusion, I would like to propose an argument about why it exists in the first place. In this article, I will show that many of the claims presented in favour of Cadière and against Girard could only have been made for public consumption and were not offered with the intent of achieving a conviction in court. I will also show strong circumstantial evidence that a faction within and around the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence was well aware of this tactic and that they tolerated or even encouraged it with the aim of prolonging the trial. Their target was the Society of Jesus, their venue was the print media and their method was to create a sex scandal in the public domain. The anti-Jesuit actors in the trial, particularly Cadière's lawyer Jean-Baptiste Chaudon, worked on many different levels towards achieving these ends. In doing so, they acted against the wishes of many magistrates on the court, against the pleadings of Cadière's mother and even in defiance of a direct royal order commanding them to hasten the trial.
During the course of the year-long scandal, the anti-Girard magistrates may or may not have realized that they lacked the votes to burn Girard at the stake for abortion, rape and spiritual incest. They almost certainly knew, however, that French law forbade them to rule on the charge of supernatural witchcraft. In 1682, following a spate of embarrassing trials collectively known as the affaire des poisons, Louis XIV had entirely removed this power from the French civil law system.9 Yet the anti-Jesuits of Aix-en-Provence clearly understood that the law courts were not their only resource. Even while the Parlement ultimately deadlocked, and while the case yielded no convictions at all, the anti-Jesuit publicity machine could still ‘burn Girard in spirit’, as several contemporaries noted. And that is exactly what they did.
Were these anti-Jesuits simply Jansenists? Determining who was and was not a Jansenist was a task that confounded even contemporaries, but we do have some answers regarding the Parlement of Aix. Genuine Jansenism among the magistrates was comparatively rare, argues Monique Cubells.10 Accordingly, I have used the phrase anti-Jesuit throughout the article where any doubts existed. But again according to Cubells, the magistrate Paul-Augustin d'Arnaud de Nibles had a ‘truly Jansenist library’, while the Le Blanc, Galice and Gaufridy families, each with at least one member in parlement at the time, all had distinct Jansenist sympathies. However the individual cases may resolve themselves, the anti-Girard magistrates seem to have acted with a high degree of unity throughout the trial, suggesting that opposing the Jesuits was their real aim, rather than promoting any particular Jansenist doctrinal agenda.
Why would anti-Jesuits, and Jansenists in particular, be so eager to stir up a controversy of this type, one that might seem to cast them in as bad a light as their enemies? One answer is that the once-strenuous backlash against the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus had more or less shrivelled by 1730. The Sorbonne, purged of its appellant doctors, now accepted the anti-Jansenist bull as its official doctrine.11 In 1727, the Council of Embrun (held in Haute-Provence) had removed the appellant bishop Jean Soanen of Senez, and, despite significant protests, it was clear that Jansenism was discouraged among the bishops of France. These developments coincided with a renewed insistence that all candidates for academic degrees and ecclesiastical benefices sign the formulary of Pope Alexander VII, a renunciation of the doctrines condemned as Jansenist in the previous century.12 Meanwhile, the older generation of appellants was dying off, and the movement needed a new cause to concretize its beliefs and to illustrate its virtue and the vices of its enemies.
To Jansenists, whose weekly newspaper the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques was far too busy printing the obituaries of the old guard, the Cadière–Girard scandal must have seemed, despite its sulphurous content, like a sign from above. Jean-Baptiste Girard quickly became Unigenitus made flesh; his lax doctrines, the same ones that the bull arguably endorsed, had insensibly led Cadière from Molinism, to Quietism, to debauchery and even to demonism. While not everyone accepted the idea of supernatural witchcraft (and the editors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques openly doubted), even those who rejected it often found the scandal indicative of all that was wrong with the Jesuits and their doctrines. Cadière–Girard was a powerful confirmation of the Jansenist world view and a deep embarrassment to the officials who were then persecuting the movement.
The anti-Jesuits relied above all on mémoires judiciaires to make their case. These were documents filed by barristers arguing cases before a court; a longstanding privilege exempted them from prior restraint censorship, meaning that even if they contained thoroughly salacious material—as the Cadière–Girard memoranda certainly did—the public could still obtain them legally. They could also contain materials, such as an extended description of Girard's alleged sorcery, upon which the parlement had no power to rule. Sarah Maza has written that in the late eighteenth century the judicial memorandum often served as a vehicle for the spread of new ideas about family and politics emanating from the Enlightenment. Although Maza's work focuses primarily on the 1770s and 1780s, the Cadière–Girard scandal also shows that the judicial memorandum was an important vehicle for public discussion much earlier in the century and that it could be used in a context thoroughly removed from the Enlightenment.13 Peter Campbell and David Bell have likewise explored the mémoire judiciaire in the context of Jansenist parlementary action in Paris.14 Where the mémoires that Maza studied served as propagators of Enlightenment ideas about natural rights, social contract, class, privilege and the family, the mémoires of the Jansenist barristers in the capital served chiefly to further the continuing religious struggle in the wake of Unigenitus. The mémoires of the Cadière–Girard trial served a similar function, in that they depicted the Jesuits as the enemies of good morality.
In their religious orientation and firm endorsement of the supernatural, these mémoires might seem far removed from the ones in Sarah Maza's study. Yet these earlier judicial memoranda were quite similar to their later counterparts: Both urged that the public itself, rather than the magistrates, could and should rule definitively on the charges at hand. Also, like Maza's mémoires, their influence extended far the jurisdictions of the courts that heard the cases. Printed copies circulated rapidly; letters, newspapers and diaries of the time indicate that the memoranda were eagerly awaited in the capital and that the case was discussed contemporaneously in several foreign countries.15 The Cadière–Girard trial convicted no one, but it amply demonstrated the public's willingness to pass judgement all the same. With this in mind, let us turn to a brief synopsis of the events leading up to the trial.
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Jean-Baptiste Girard arrived in Toulon on 8 April 1728.16 He already had a reputation as a preacher and a confessor to holy women. Soon, quite a number of Third Order Carmelites were drawn to take Girard as their confessor, eschewing the ordained Carmelites who might otherwise have filled the role.17 Owing to longstanding rivalries, the two orders were already suspicious of one another, and, as memoranda for both sides attest, Girard's initial success did not help.18 The town's bishop, Louis de La Tour du Pin de Montauban, seems to have held a favourable view of the Jesuits in general and of Girard in particular. Yet he was not present in his diocese for very much of Girard's career there; he returned from an absence of two years on 27 June 1730, just five months before the trial began.19
Marie-Catherine Cadière was born on 12 November 1709.20 Her father, Joseph Cadière, was a merchant who died while Catherine was quite young, leaving his widow Elisabeth Pomet to care for her and her three older brothers. Two of them became priests, one secular and one Dominican. Marie-Catherine had long wanted to dedicate herself to a strict contemplative order; she also perhaps hoped to be known a saint.21 She was nineteen years old and a member of the Third Order Carmelites, a lay religious congregation associated with the Carmelite order. She was also among the penitents drawn almost immediately to Girard. By all accounts, Cadière was a young girl with a beautiful and innocent appearance. Cadière's previous confessors and the other members of the Third Order had long noticed that la Cadière was unusual. Even before meeting Girard, she seems frequently to have fainted or lost consciousness during prayers and services.22 Her peers understood these events to be divine in origin, perhaps thinking them akin to the ecstasies of Sainte Marie Alacoque, Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Avila herself.23 Regardless of how these episodes originated, Cadière had always been recognized as having something uncanny about her.24
Cadière confessed she had first seen Girard surrounded by an aura, while a voice proclaimed Ecce homo: ‘behold the man.’25 Although a vision of this type was extraordinary in itself, the sentiment that it conveyed was not. A close relationship between confessor and penitent was particularly important for all those who wished to practise their faith with intensity. This was particularly true for women, as women were often thought more susceptible both to divine and demonic influences. A good confessor would help the penitent tell the difference—and for obvious reasons the Church closely policed the relationship between male priest and female penitent.26 Yet even among the most innocent, the strict observance of confession made intense demands upon both parties. Perhaps owing to these very difficulties, Cadière had gone through four previous confessors before choosing Girard in late April or early May 1728.27 The rigours of confession might also explain why Cadière was willing to spend so much time with Girard alone, why she seemed to place such great trust in him and why her family permitted the two of them so many long and private conferences that might otherwise have aroused suspicion.
At the outset, few suspected anything was amiss about their relationship; indeed, most believed just the contrary, including her brother François Cadière, who had come to think his sister might have been a saint.28 During the second year of Girard's direction, Cadière's trances grew in strength and frequency. A small wooden cross supposedly descended to her from Heaven.29 But it seems that the sheer excess of Cadière's miracles began to strain credulity, and the strain showed first among those who were already suspicious of the Jesuits. They noted that she enjoyed considerably more freedom than proper for a would-be nun; she was even rumoured to experience her visions while drunk.30 Dark tales circled about debauches with Girard's other female penitents, including one at which they celebrated of the Feast of Saint Catherine, ‘with one of the Jesuits’ boys' whom Girard had offered for the purpose. As one source sardonically noted, Cadière promptly experienced one of her ‘ordinary ecstasies’.31 Finally, during Lent of 1730, Cadière received the Stigmata and the impression of a Crown of Thorns, miracles that tradition ascribed only to the greatest of saints. On Holy Thursday, she had a vision where she endured all of Christ's sufferings and then ascended spiritually to Heaven.
These Lenten experiences came near the high point of Cadière's reputation as a saint, and it would appear that she, Girard and several outside observers began to doubt the whole matter shortly thereafter. Faced with growing misgivings, Girard moved to limit Cadière's public exposure. In May 1730, he ordered that Cadière be secluded in the unpleasant convent of Sainte-Claire d'Ollioules.32 Still, her reputation grew, convincing even bishop Montauban. He began carrying a cloth impressed with Cadière's Crown of Thorns in his pocket to convince others of the truth of her miracles.33 However, her last and most extravagant manifestations seemed out of place given the dark rumours about her conduct. If there were any truth at all behind them, Girard would have all the more reason to seclude Cadière. Nonetheless, her behaviour did not in any sense become more subdued in the remote and dreary surroundings. Despite the privilege of meeting behind locked doors with Girard for many hours—a privilege that none of the other nuns enjoyed with their confessors—Cadière was not content at Sainte-Claire d'Ollioules. Her health suffered, and her altered mental states disturbed the community. Girard then attempted to transfer her out of the diocese.
Bishop Montauban refused his request; he agreed that Cadière should leave Sainte-Claire, but only to return to her family—and to begin seeing a new confessor. At the urging of Catherine's brothers, Montauban assigned Cadière to the fiercely anti-Jesuit Carmelite Father Nicolas Girieux. Montauban later admitted that he had not known Girieux when he made the decision, one that would prove decisive in the events to come.34 Cadière's confessions to Girieux brought him to conclude that the girl's miracles were neither the product of saintliness nor of imposture, but of a demonic possession that Girard had imposed.35 Under Girieux's direction, Cadière confessed that in November 1729 Girard had enchanted her with a peculiar magic breath, and that her visions had begun with this enchantment.36 She claimed that Girard had insisted that she surrender herself completely to God, urging her to ‘forget herself and let go’, injunctions that to a trained theologian signified Quietism. According to the Church, Quietism refers to a complex of mystical beliefs shared by several different heretical sects in which it is held that the highest spiritual perfection consists in a physical and intellectual passivity wherein the soul is united with God.37 Interestingly, the Quietist movement properly speaking had gained its greatest notoriety in France through another relationship between a confessor and a female penitent, in this case Madame Jeanne Marie de Guyon and the Barnabite Father François Lacombe.38 While this episode is beyond the scope of the present discussion, the parallel would have been apparent to contemporaries. And although it often exaggerated on this score, the Church also taught that Quietist heretics sometimes held that prayers were unnecessary to those who possessed a perfect union with God. Indeed, the Church even held that some Quietists taught that outright sins would not affect the goodness of a soul that had achieved quietistic union, a position similar to antinomianism.
It therefore made all too much sense when Cadière claimed sometimes to have awakened from a trance unclothed, with her confessor touching her in indecent places. The allegations of sexual misconduct were surprisingly explicit: ‘Father Girard came to her often, in view of the extraordinary state that she found herself in, having several times fallen senseless and in ecstasy; Father Girard being with her, when she recovered from her ecstasy, she felt pain in certain parts, and she felt wet; of which she complained, and the Father said, I can well believe it, my poor child!’ 39 A new story coalesced: Girard had seduced Cadière by magic and had used the cover of religion to conceal his actions. The indecencies, the visions and the altered states from which Cadière still suffered brought Girieux to ask permission to exorcise her and two other penitents of Father Girard's, a permission that bishop Montauban granted in mid-October 1730. Following an inconclusive result, the bishop apparently changed his mind and revoked both Girieux's priestly powers and those of the Dominican Father Etienne Cadière.40
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Catherine Cadière returned to her family home after the exorcism, and there her manifestations continued. On the night of 16–17 November, Father Girieux and Cadière's two brothers performed a second, unauthorized exorcism upon her. It was by all accounts one of the most bizarre such rituals ever conducted, one that would continue through the following day and night as well. Notably, it took place near an open second-storey window, and by the second evening, an angry mob had gathered just outside the home. Catherine's shrieks and her brothers’ prayers were audible below to the consternation of the entire neighbourhood. Already, sorcery was more a publicity tool than a serious charge. ‘It is enough to recall’, wrote Girard's lawyer Pazery de Thorame, ‘that on that night they assembled people from all about, and that the cries of Father Nicolas [Girieux] and [François] Cadière could be heard from the windows: "Let the people enter, we need to have witnesses. Help! The devil is strangling the Cadière girl!".’41 As Kreiser has noted, the practice of public exorcism was virtually unheard of; as performed here, it constituted something more like a theatrical ritual, one calculated to achieve maximum exposure. ‘Although they no doubt hoped to effect her "disenchantment"’, he wrote, ‘they also wished to demonstrate, supposedly out of the mouth of the devil himself, that the Jesuit priest was a sorcerer and that he had bewitched his former penitent.’42 Cadière obliged, but in somewhat peculiar fashion, declaring repeatedly and in a loud voice that the demon who tormented her was named ‘Jean-Baptiste Girard’.43
The next day, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities both questioned Marie-Catherine Cadière. By his own admission, bishop Montauban hoped primarily to end the ‘noisy and scandalous scenes’ that the affair was causing. Surprisingly, Etienne Cadière seemed almost to have been on the point of agreeing and of dropping the case entirely.44 For reasons that are not entirely clear, however, the process continued; Montauban claimed in a later statement to the Parlement of Aix that the Cadière family had been offered 50,000 livres from an undisclosed source to cover their court costs.45 Whatever the real motives were, the events of the previous months were developed into a complaint made against Girard before the lieutenant-général of police at Toulon; Girard sued at the officialité, the ecclesiastical court system of the diocese. In reply to this suit, Cadière's attorney, Jean-Baptiste Chaudon, promptly filed an appel comme d'abus, a legal motion whereby a parlement could revisit an ecclesiastical procedure.46 Under questioning, Cadière recounted the scenario laid out above, adding many details that have been recorded in surviving court documents. Among these was the claim that Girard had given her an abortifacient.47
At that time he brought her ... a sort of reddish liquor, of a very bad taste, meanwhile frequently touching her abdomen. One day she noticed that she passed a mass of blood that fell all at once, and from then on she continued to lose much more, of which the said Father wanted to be a witness, telling her to place herself on the chamber pot in front of him, and afterwards taking the pot to the window to examine the blood, and even wanting to see her nightclothes.48
Cadière further claimed that Girard had indulged in some frankly bizarre devotions: ‘After this, when she received her stigmata during Lent, he came every day to suck on these wounds, both the one on the side and the one on her foot.’ Again, it was as though Girard himself were a demon, a claim that may demonstrate the unfamiliarity that even certain of the principals of the affair actually had with traditional demonological beliefs.49
Of course, the trial supplied mundane crimes as well. Its memoranda gave some of the most explicit descriptions of the sexual act to be found in any authorized venue in the eighteenth century. For example, Cadière testified that, ‘every time Girard was shut in a room with her, she felt something like a finger about her . . . she found herself quite wet and complained of feeling pains’. Cadière's testimony led readers to understand that she did not know the source of these feelings.50 Chaudon's first memorandum in support of Cadière set the scene as follows:
This case, which has been the subject of conversation and attention from all the Christian world, is of the highest importance because it is in the interests both of religion and of all the public.... Here we have a vicious Confessor ... who, under the false appearances of an austere virtue and an air of mortification, has played the role of the most delicate, sensual, and passionate lover.51
During the initial phase of the trial, Cadière was forced to stay in the Ursuline convent of Toulon, a house associated with the Jesuits of that city. There she claimed that one of the other women drugged her before she was called to testify, and that, for more than two weeks afterwards, the potion caused her to speak favourably of Girard.52 While the claim is hardly credible in itself, one can easily imagine the other pressures she must have faced. Meanwhile, Catherine Cadière's mother, the most likely of anyone to have had her daughter's own interests at heart, accused the officials of treating Cadière as though she were already guilty. On 14 January 1731, she wrote bitterly to the chancellor of Toulon:
Girard continues to exercise all his sacerdotal functions; he has the bishop and the official [ie, the judge at Girard's case] as auditors for his sermons. By contrast, my daughter scarcely has the freedom to go to confession. She is confined in a convent that has for its superior the sister of a Jesuit, one that is even under the spiritual direction of Father Girard himself.... I would almost feel that you would do me a favour by transferring her to the public prisons instead.53
Two days later, on 16 January 1731, Louis XV transferred both of the cases to the grand-chambre of the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence, ‘to hasten the end of a trial whose length cannot fail to be accompanied by the same scandal that it has already occasioned’.54
Where Cadière's mother sought a speedy trial for the sake of her daughter's comfort, the king wanted it for a different reason: his religious policy had consistently favoured the Jesuits, and so long as the scandal lasted, it posed a major embarrassment both to him and to the Society. The subsequent months would only accentuate these difficulties, as they saw a number of related battles in the ongoing war between pro-Jesuit and pro-Jansenist factions in the kingdom: in early 1730, Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury, first minister to Louis XV, had begun to intensify the official persecutions against Jansenists in the capital. Newly appointed Archbishop Charles-Gaspard-Guillaume de Vintimille du Luc, the successor to the Jansenist-friendly Archbishop Louis-Antoine de Noailles, readily cooperated in these efforts. On 3 April 1730, Louis forcibly declared the anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus to be a law of state through the legal mechanism of a lit de justice, an act that precluded meaningful parlementary opposition—while doing much to galvanize the dissenters.55 Not entirely by coincidence, the first publication of the miracles of the appellant deacon Pâris came in November 1730. As if all of this were not enough, the trial's verdict, on 10 October 1731, coincided with the Parisian barristers’ strike, also a controversy pitting Jansenists against the monarchy.56 Though many of these events fell together by chance, they nonetheless aggravated the tensions and biases among all interested parties. If ever a moment arrived when the subjects of the ancien régime could soberly evaluate their religious and political situation, 1730–1731 was certainly not that time.
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Despite the wishes of the king and of her mother, Cadière's attorney and those of her brothers and confessor filed a series of motions demanding that all of the many dozens of witnesses in the trial be re-examined de novo by the Parlement of Aix, on the grounds that Cadière's mistreatment denied her the ability to defend herself properly during the interrogations. There may or may not be significant merit to these claims, but they were in any case the first in a series of motions that would have the effect of prolonging the trial. Taken together, these acts indicate that at the very least, those who had a negative view of Girard and the Jesuits wanted a longer trial with greater publicity, while those who wished to exonerate Girard wanted the opposite on both counts.57
Against this backdrop, the charge of witchcraft takes on an entirely new purpose. More than any other aspect of the trial, the question of witchcraft caused the Parlement enormous delays—delays that it certainly did not have to suffer if it had not wished to do so. In May 1731, Jean-Baptiste Chaudon began issuing a string of mémoires in preparation for the forthcoming hearings; he was utterly frank about his belief in supernatural witchcraft: ‘On this subject’, he wrote, ‘it may be extremism to believe everything, but it is a still greater extremism to believe nothing.... Indeed, Holy Scripture, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the ecclesiastical and profane histories of all eras prove the truth of the matter, and to deny the possibility of sorcery would be to deny the Son of God and his Apostles the glory of their most striking miracles.’58 This reasoning had been quite common during the heyday of the witchcraft persecutions. We might well term it the Pascal's Wager of witchcraft, for it proposed that believing in the supernatural was far safer than scepticism. The penalty for belief in the demonic was that one might occasionally become superstitious: the penalty for scepticism was a denial of Jesus Christ himself.
It did not necessarily follow, of course, that because sorcery existed, Girard must indeed be a sorcerer. To support this claim, Chaudon cited Cadière's own testimony, in which she declared that a demon had revealed this secret to her.59 Chaudon's memoranda also cited the testimony of many witnesses—sometimes quite against what they had actually testified—in support of this contention.60 But sorcery was no longer an offence for which the parlements could convict, and the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence would have been well within its rights to dismiss these charges. Consider Louis XIV's declaration of June 1682, which read in part:
The execution of the ordinances of the kings our predecessors against those who call themselves Diviners, Magicians, and Enchanters, having been neglected for a long time, and this relaxation having attracted many of these impostors from foreign countries into our kingdom ... these people have tricked many ignorant or credulous persons, who have become engaged with them unwittingly, passing from vain curiosities into superstitions, and from superstitions into impieties and sacrileges, and by a ruinous train of events, those who are most under the control of these seducers have gone even to the criminal extremity of Malefice [Maléfice] and Poison, and to impieties and sacrileges ....
So as to omit nothing that might be for the greater glory of God [la plus grande gloire de Dieu], and the security of our subjects, we have judged it necessary to renew the ancient Ordinances, and to take ... still greater precautions, both as regards all those who use Malefices and Poisons, and those who in the vain profession of Diviners, Magicians, and Sorcerers, or other similar names ... do infect and corrupt the spirit of Peoples.61
The most important aspect of this declaration lay in what it did not do: nowhere did it affirm that genuine supernatural witchcraft existed. Indeed, even the ordinances of the previous kings of France were said to apply only to ‘those who call themselves Diviners, Magicians, and Enchanters’, as if no one had ever sincerely believed such things. The 1682 declaration specified punishments for divination, but divination was not claimed to have any real supernatural power. It also punished impiety, sacrilege and poisoning, all of which were closely associated with popular witchcraft beliefs, but which still were not witchcraft. Almost imperceptibly, the declaration folded witchcraft into a matrix of mundane fraud, blasphemy and poisoning, while leaving only the mundane crimes subject to prosecution. The closest the declaration came to acknowledging the supernatural lay in its use of the word maléfice, which the 1694 Dictionnaire de l'Academie française still defined as an ‘action by which evil is produced ' by the employment of sorcery, poison, or some similar thing’. Later versions of the Dictionnaire would remove the word ‘sorcery’, suggesting just how much the understanding of this concept was in flux.62 Neither the dictionary nor the declaration stated that maléfice was ever accompanied by supernatural intervention.
Chaudon aimed to expose Girard's evil deeds before the public and to do so he was obliged to reveal information that might otherwise be kept secret: ‘As we are persuaded that justice and the public will be thrilled to see us develop the essential circumstances of this quite curious and quite interesting case, which the Jesuits have hidden or disguised with such care until now, we will set forth ... a naive history of the direction of this Jesuit and of the vexation that the Demoiselle Cadière has suffered ....’63 The material of the Cadière–Girard trial was scandalous enough that under almost any other circumstances the censors would have quashed it. But here, Chaudon declared that he was ‘exposing’ precisely the same information for precisely the same reason, namely for the moral benefit of the public.64
The Parlement of Aix began formal hearings on 1 June 1731, four and a half months after Louis XV's reassignment of the case to it. Although, as we said before, the magistrates had no obligation to entertain supernatural testimony, they did so anyway. Even some of Girard's enemies came to view this emphasis on the supernatural as a mistake—and wished, for the sake of a faster punishment, that the accusation had never been made. Girard still stood to burn for the crimes of rape, spiritual incest and abortion. ‘It seems that by trying to prove too much, Chaudon's mémoire for Cadière will end up proving nothing’, wrote one anonymous eyewitness. ‘Because in the end, the girl who imagined that she had been ravished is also the same girl who imagined she was possessed. And there may well be imagination in the first charge, for there is certainly imagination in the second.’65 Or, in the words of one counsellor at the Parlement, recorded just four days after the start of the hearings, ‘We would have made Girard into a match for the fire over a month ago if it weren't for all these visions and sorceries’.66
Seven days later, on 11 June 1731, Louis XV ordered the Parlement of Aix to continue working even while it should have been in recess—a recess that should have begun at the end of June, but that would have lengthened the trial still further. Apparently yet another delaying tactic had drawn the king's attention: Cadière's attorneys had apparently attempted to force two of the judges to withdraw from the case because they had ties to the Society of Jesus. While it certainly slowed down the trial, it would also be a foretaste of the method that would be used in the early 1760s to purge provincial parlements of the Jesuits' potential supporters during their expulsion. At least as far as removing the judges went, however, the attempt backfired. The two magistrates continued to hear the case, and Cadière herself was fined 75 livres.67 The arrêt du conseil noted that ‘[The case] has been delayed by various incidents that several of the accused have pretended to stir up and to multiply, with the aim that the case will not be decided during the present session of our Parlement, which is due to finish on the last day of this month’.68 This concern was also expressed by Jean-Baptiste Boyer d'Argens, the noted author and son of a magistrate in the Parlement: ‘No longer was it either about Cadière or Girard, but instead about two factions that divide the state, and that, sooner or later, will cause dangerous troubles within it.’69
The Parlement continued to deliberate, and although it did continue working through the scheduled vacation, a decision was still months away. Many others grew weary of the trial, and not all of them supported Girard: despite an evident dislike for both Girard and his order, the abbé de Caveyrac professed an even greater dislike for the trial, which had ‘fatigued all of Europe with deliberations that stretched though all four seasons’.70 Ultimately, the Parlement accepted the testimony of over one hundred witnesses, many of whom had previously appeared in the civil case at Toulon. Each side issued a lengthy mémoire judiciaire, followed by a critique of the other side's, an examination of testimony and several replies to the publications of the opposition. As we have noted, ancien régime law made all of these texts available to the public.71
This availability was instrumental to the anti-Jesuits' real agenda, which was not to burn Girard, nor even to exonerate Cadière, but simply to expose what they viewed as a case typifying the evils of the Jesuits. Chaudon continued playing directly to the public throughout the remainder of the trial, so much so that the Parlement of Aix itself later condemned his conduct. It declared that Chaudon had refused to plead the case behind closed doors (which the scandalous nature of the case demanded), that he was abusive towards the judges and that he had employed ‘unjust stratagems ... sometimes to re-hear the evidence, sometimes to hear new witnesses, sometimes to cause a mistrial, sometimes to transport the cognizance of the case to another tribunal, and all of this with the design to disclose it, to prolong it, to stir it up, and to elude a definitive judgment’.72 The anti-Jesuit intent of these manoeuvres becomes even clearer when we consider that, even according to Chaudon, Catherine Cadière was suffering considerable hardships during the entire length of the procedure. For instance, in August 1731, an acte protestatif complained about the miserable conditions at the Second Convent of the Visitation at Aix, where Cadière had been transferred during the Parlement's hearings: On her arrival, the mother superior refused her entry, leaving Cadière ‘exposed to the yells and insults of the Jesuits' emissaries for three or four hours’. Finally inside, her lodgings were cramped and uncomfortable. The nuns pressured her to recant and sang defamatory songs under her window. And again, they allegedly threatened her with a potion of some sort.73 Were these legitimate complaints? It is difficult to say. Yet the Jesuits’ enemies turned these complaints into part of the scandal itself, generating numerous printed protests about her mistreatment.
Although the king might have ended the Parlement's jurisdiction by evoking the case to his Conseil d'Etat, he never did so, perhaps owing to the troubles he already faced in Paris with the Saint-Médard controversy, the Parisian lawyers threatening to strike and the renewed difficulties from Jansenist clerics in the capital.74 Without further intervention, the trial lumbered on, until on 11 September 1731—nearly ten months after the procedure began—the gens du roi presented their preliminary findings by a three to two vote: Girard should go free, and Cadière should hang as a fraud.75
In ancien régime law, this sort of capital judgement was always provisional, and the Parlement now had to consider whether to adopt, alter or reverse it. Its members spent nearly another full month debating what to do. In early October, First President Lebret suggested that the magistrates redouble their deliberative sessions so that the trial might finish earlier. In response to his suggestion, there came a revealing reply: The judges remained silent. Hoping to put his plan into action, Lebret declared that he would take their silence as an assent. ‘But then the président de Maliverny said that such was not at all his opinion, and that the affair had to be examined maturely; there should be no jumping to conclusions.’ Another member, the président de Ragusse, then suggested that they should prolong the trial by adding an extra day of rest between every session, ‘to give more time to reflect’. De Maliverny and Ragusse later voted to send Girard to the fire, while Lebret voted to free both Girard and Cadière. The exchange again indicates that Girard's supporters acted to encourage a speedy trial, while his enemies generally preferred to draw matters out, the better to harm the Jesuits.76
On 10 October, the Parlement delivered a confusing final verdict. No judges had voted to accept the provisional conclusions of the gens du roi. Twelve had voted to burn Girard and liberate Cadière; twelve others opined for releasing Girard; this last group split in its opinions about the proper punishment for Cadière, with the harshest recommending perpetual seclusion in a convent. In the end, Girard and Cadière were both acquitted when the premier président Lebret cast the decisive vote for clemency on both sides. Girard was sent back to the ecclesiastical courts but released almost immediately and without a further trial.77 The verdict surprised most observers, who had believed that one or the other must be convicted: either the charges against Girard were true—or Cadière had lied. Yet the Parlement reached neither conclusion.
What exactly had taken place? Ultimately, I cannot accept Kreiser's claim that the verdict represented the triumph of elite scepticism over popular belief.78 I would argue instead that it was a case of elites manipulating popular belief: the judges who voted to burn Girard would later insist in writing that they certainly did believe in witchcraft, and that they thought it might have taken place in the Cadière–Girard scandal—but that they, as judges, could do nothing about witchcraft in particular, ‘for want of the power to rule upon the charge’.79 Instead, they questioned, examined and helped to publicize anything that might have had the odour of witchcraft about it, creating a witchcraft trial in all but the letter of the law and leaving the public to find a verdict. While there were many who despised Girard and who therefore wanted to see him burn as soon as possible, the Parlement instead spent months of its time on evidence it could not use. Their intent here was not to punish Girard, but to create an impression before the public. In a sense, then, the Cadière–Girard trial was both the last of the early modern witchcraft trials—and the first of the mass media witch-hunts.
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How exactly did the Cadière–Girard trial harm the Jesuits? As we answer this question, the delaying tactics of Cadière's ostensible supporters take on new meaning. Consider the Jansenist weekly newspaper the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which was just 3 years old at the time. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques devoted numerous substantial articles to the case, starting on 6 February 1731, when it had only just been evoked to the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence.80 Its entry for 20 March 1731 made completely clear that the real problem was not with Girard as an individual, but with the Jesuits as a whole:
We have already spoken of the odious affair of Father Girard, but only with pain, and not without suffering do we return to it. Never would we consider such events in our memoranda, if they were not as public and as notorious as they are, nor if it were possible, as to the Society of Jesus, to regard them as purely personal facts. But who does not know that among the Jesuits, the misdeeds of individuals become in a sense the misdeeds of the entire Society, an event that virtually never fails to take place . . .81
The goal was to identify all Jesuits with Girard, and to make the case an allegory for the abuses of the Society as a whole. The article went on to deplore the conditions in which Catherine Cadière was being kept; in particular, it complained of how she had been deprived of her mother and forbidden the confessor of her choosing. Subsequent articles focused on the alleged misdeeds done to her, describing in detail how she had been intoxicated by a magic potion during her interrogations, how her interrogators had threatened her and how the Jesuits manipulated the process on many different levels to ensure Girard's acquittal.82 Yet the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques ignored the claim, widely voiced by certain of Girard's enemies, that Cadière could have gone free far earlier, but for the delays that this very sort of publicity had caused. Only a month into the trial, Cadière had already become little more than a pawn in the struggle between pro- and anti-Jesuit factions, the latter composed chiefly of Jansenists and their fellow travellers.
The news coverage in Paris also mentioned public demonstrations in Toulon, some of which can be verified independently. Reports of this type served to give credibility to the claim that the general public almost uniformly sided against Girard and against the Jesuits as a whole. ‘Ten pensioners of the Parlement dared to take a sack of straw, dress it as a Jesuit, then hang and burn it before their eyes. In the words of one of them, it was to do the justice that the judges did not want to do .... So much has the public taken interest that more than 200 trial factums have been sold for this affair.’83
While constantly insisting that it sought ‘only to abridge such odious stories’, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques now routinely opened each new edition with the latest news from the trial.84 Unfortunately, the editor found that many of the incidents of the case could not be summarized in his journal, which was sometimes read by persons of delicate moral sensibilities: ‘[This judicial memorandum] contains some passages that ... must not be exposed to all sorts of readers. It could be the scandalous details of so many infamies would become entirely too public.’ It was a concession to the conventional wisdom of the time, which held that scandalous stories ought not to be spread through the public, and which conceived of scandal as the sin of giving a bad example to observers.85 With fig leaf now in place, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques repeatedly alerted its readers that the judicial memoranda for the trial were on sale publicly in the capital and that they could quite easily be obtained by anyone with the resources to purchase them.86 In one article, following a lengthy refutation of Father Girard's judicial memorandum, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques declared that, ‘whatever writings should appear on this affair in the future ... we will not report anything further, save the sentences that will decide it’. The paper broke its promise less than a month later, when it again mentioned how readily available the judicial memoranda were in Paris.87 The trial's publicity had become more important than its outcome.
The same article noted that, ‘We have been inundated here with verses and songs against the small number of people who declare for the Jesuits’. These ephemera were an important part of the publicity campaign, and media images of Girard commonly depicted him as a sorcerer. Whether or not anyone believed that the supernatural was really afoot, Girard was still detestable, and sorcery was at worst a good metaphor for what he had done. He was sexually debauched, he corrupted others and turned them away from sanctity and he performed abortions and administered poisons. While entirely mundane, all of these had something of the air of witchcraft about them, as we have seen from the 1682 declaration. Here, a pro-Cadière writer summarized his feelings on the case:
The credulous and weak-minded say that the Father is a sorcerer .... Those without prejudice look for natural causes even in the marvelous ... they assure us that there are philters and potions that can work the most astonishing things .... Others claim that it is neither a matter of charms nor potions, but that Girard and Cadière were once in accord with each other [about fornicating and/or passing Cadière off as a saint] .... As for me, without settling on any one of these ideas, I submit that no matter which way we look at it, Girard is no less guilty.88
A popular verse of the time turned the indecisive verdict of the Parlement into a further proof of Girard's guilt:
Incomparable Parlement
We admire your wise judgement
By pardoning a maid seduced
The Jesuit's guilt is deduced
You burned a man without a fire
And that is all that we desire.
Incomparable parlement,
Nous admirons ton jugement
Absoudre une vierge seduite
C'est condamner le Jesuite,
C'est bruler un homme sans feu,
Le reste nous emporte peu.89
Another contemporary described the reaction that he observed as follows: ‘The cry of joy was universal; there had been great fear for the poor Cadière family, and many preferred to feel that every honest person had burned the Jesuit in spirit, rather than seeing him burned in reality.’90 The idea of burning Girard in spirit became a chief way of interpreting an otherwise disappointing verdict. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques clearly understood too:
The manner in which this judgment was carried out leaves everyone free to say that a Jesuit accused of grave and complicated crimes, and convicted in the proceedings . . . has been released by an arrêt of the Parlement of Provence—because he is a Jesuit.91
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Following the trial, Girard retired to his native Dôle in Haute-Provence. He died 2 years later. Marie-Catherine Cadière disappeared; no known sources indicate what became of her, and it is reasonable to suspect that she retired to a convent, perhaps voluntarily, perhaps under threat of a lettre de cachet. Although no one knew it at the time, the Cadière–Girard foreshadowed the formula that ultimately worked in expelling the Jesuits of France: a scandalous trial accompanied by an equally scandalous publicity campaign, in which public opinion—or at least, something that the publicists ‘called’ public opinion—was brought to bear against them. Stories similar to or drawing upon the Cadière–Girard scandal continued to circulate in verse collections, in commonplace books and in the chroniques scandaleuses, that collections of scandalous stories that would become increasingly popular throughout the rest of the ancien régime.92
The Cadière–Girard trial also became emblematic of the corruption of French religious life more generally: in 1748, the pornographic bestseller Thérèse philosophe deployed ideas from the scandal to ridicule the Catholic religion, and particularly its sexual mores, in favour of a materialist philosophy of sex—and, of course, for the reader's titillation.93 This is not to say that the Jesuits escaped all blame: even as late as the next century, propagandists still dragged out the Cadière–Girard trial to discredit the resurrected Jesuit order.94
Deep divisions also remained in the Parlement of Aix. Torn again by the refusal of sacraments controversy in 1753–1754, that body would remain divided at least until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762. In that year, several of the remaining judges from the Cadière–Girard trial would join with the descendants of many of the rest to rule on the question of whether the Jesuits had been legally received in Provence, and on whether they ought to be expelled from it. In general, they took the same sides they or their families had chosen in 1731.95 This is not to say that Cadière–Girard alone created the division; other parlements were certainly divided as well, and Aix no doubt would have been divided even without Cadière–Girard. Still, this glimpse into later events suggests how the political controversies of the ancien régime endured, growing progressively more brutal and public.
The Cadière–Girard trial was remembered in Paris, too. In 1762, the following lines appeared about the expulsion of the Jesuits:
My lords, deliver us from this Society of Fools. Dispel
These public pests
These crowned bankrupters
These horrid incendiaries
These double poisoners
These clerical mandarins ...
These Girardist confessors
These Pagan theologians
These unmasked hypocrites
These incorrigible delinquents ...
These holy liars
These sainted thieves
These moralists of Venus
These false Apostles ...96
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He would like to thank the Department of Special Collections at the Johns Hopkins University Library for generously acquiring several of the documents used in this article, the Bibliothèque du Port-Royal and its staff in Paris for welcoming a novice researcher into its excellent collection and David A. Bell, for advice on preparing successive drafts of this article.
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1 B[ibliothèque] P[ort]-R[oyal], L[e] P[aige] collection, 2032(1), Jean-Baptiste Pazery de Thorame, Second mémoire pour le Père Girard Jesuite, Servant de Réponse au nouveau Mémoire de la Cadière, & à ceux de ses Frères (Aix, 1731), p. 265.
2 B[ibliothèque] N[ationale] MSS Fr. 10980, for the burning in effigy and the angry mobs, Recueil des pieces concernant le procez de la Damlle Cadiere de la Ville de Toulon, et le P. Girard Jesuite Recteur du Seminaire Royal de la Marine de la dite Ville, here citing Extrait d'une lettre de Toulon 13 Octobre 1731, pp. 41–2. For the tuna, see ibid., p. 43, and also Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, ‘de Toulon’, 10 Dec. 1731; it is not entirely clear why this gift was seen as appropriate.
3 B. R. Kreiser, ‘The devils of Toulon: demonic possession and religious politics in eighteenth-century Provence’, in Church, State, and Society Under the Bourbon Kings of France, ed. R. M. Golden (Lawrence, Kans., 1982). A short summary of the case can also be found in R. H. Robbins (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (New York, 1981), pp. 69–74. L. Apps and A. Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2003), do not mention Cadière–Girard, although their book is highly informative in its own right.
4 G. Delayen, La Sainte de M. de Toulon (1928). Besides siding openly against the Jesuits, the work's title is somewhat misleading as well, since bishop Montauban of Toulon was absent from his diocese for all but the last five months of Cadière's public life.
5 J. Michelet, La sorcière (repr., 1966). Michelet's treatment is problematic: there is no evidence, nor any contemporary suggestion, that Cadière or Girard envied the miracles of deacon Pâris, and indeed, the chronology of the two events indicates that they developed independently of one another. For the development of the Pâris cult, see B. R. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, N.J., 1978), esp. pp. 70–98 and 120–2, and C.-L. Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard: miracles, convulsions et prophéties à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (1985).
6 For instance, M. de Certeau, La possession de Loudon (1990).
7 ‘More or less rightly’, because, as I. Bostridge has argued in Witchcraft and its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997), witchcraft beliefs in Britain were far slower to die than most historians are willing to admit. Bostridge offers political rather than scientific or religious reasons for the decline of British witchcraft beliefs. He also separates carefully the decline in prosecution from the decline in belief. On both points his argument is quite congruent with mine.
8 One important source is J.-B. Boyer d'Argens, Mémoires (1993), pp. 119–31; his father was one of the gens du roi, who recommended hanging Cadière, yet his own opinion of the case was that neither Cadière nor Girard had done anything criminal. Another of the more interesting accounts is BN MSS Fr. 23859, which comprises three folio volumes. Much of it suggests a very close familiarity with the process, in particular with the members of the Parlement of Aix.
9 See J. C. Petitfils, L'affaire des Poisons: Alchimistes et sorciers sous Louis XIV (1977); see also Déclaration du Roy, contre les magiciens, sorciers, & Empoisonneurs, Donnée à Versailles, au mois de Juillet 1682 (repr., Rouen, 1739).
10 M. Cubells, La Provence des Lumières (1984), p. 368.
11 See J. Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 1643–1656 (1996), for the turbulent story of this acceptance.
12 For the renewed persecutions, see D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: from Calvin to the Civil Constitution (New Haven, Conn., 1996), pp. 85–9; for a contemporary protest against them, see BPR LP 197(24), Lettre des Cardinaux, Archevesques et evesques au roy, Au sujet du Jugement rendu à Embrun, contre M. de Senez (1728).
13 Collection of the Johns Hopkins University Library (hereafter JHU), uncatalogued collection of print matter on the Cadière–Girard case; JHU II(xiv, 4): P. Thorame, Réponse à tous les factums faits contre le père Girard, in Recueil général des pièces concernant le procez entre la demoiselle Cadière, de la Ville de Toulon et le père Girard, jésuite, Recteur du Séminaire Royal de la Marine de ladite Ville, also Motifs des Juges qui ont mis le Père Jean-Baptiste Girard hors de cour & de Procès (Aix, 1733). S. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: the Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), p. 38, certainly does acknowledge the importance of the case but, while the Enlightenment denounced supernatural witchcraft as mere superstition, both sides in the Cadière–Girard case expressed a sincere belief in its reality.
14 See P. R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London, 1996), and D. A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: the Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford, 1994).
15 English translations and original works discussing the scandal were frequent in the years 1730–32; see, for instance The Historical Register, Containing an Impartial Relation of All Transactions ... a Chronological Diary ..., vol. XVI. For the year 1731 (1731), p. 245; ‘The Case of Mrs. Mary Catharine [sic] Cadière, Against the Jesuit Father John Baptist Girard. In a Memorial presented to the Parliament of Aix ... 10th ed., corrected’ (Edinburgh, 1730), and ‘A Defence of F. John Baptist Girard, Jesuit, and Rector of the Royal Seminary of Chaplains of the Navy in the city of Toulon ... 4th ed.’ (1732). All are listed in the English Short Title Catalogue; dozens more exist.
16 P. Thorame, Mémoire Instructif pour le Père Jean-Baptiste Girard, in JHU I(iii, 2).
18 JHU II(vii, 1), Second mémoire pour le Père Girard Jésuite, servant de réponse au nouveau mémoire de la Cadière & à ceux de ses Frères. JHU II(i, 3, 4), Pascal, Mémoire instructif pour le Père Nicolas de Saint Joseph, Prieur des Carmes Déchaussez du Couvent de la Ville de Toulon ... à l'occasion de la Plainte forée par la Demoiselle Cadière, contre le Père Jean-Baptiste Girard. The former, from Girard's defence lawyer, and the latter, that of Cadière's new confessor, both avowed the mutual distrust of the Jesuits and the Carmelites of Toulon.
19 JHU II(v, 1), Mémoire des faits qui se sont passez sous les yeux de M. l'Evêque de Toulon, lors de l'origine de l'affaire du P. Girard Jésuite & de la Cadière. This was well after Cadière had established some reputation for sanctity—and only five months before the trial began.
20 JHU I(i, 1), Jusitification de damoiselle Catherine Cadière, Contenant un Récit fidèle de tout ce qui s'est passé entre le Père Jean-Baptiste Girard, Recteur du Seminaire de la Marine des Jésuites de Toulon, & Elle.
21 Documents from the period before 18 Nov. 1730 are virtually non-existent. During the trial, Girard's publicists claimed that she had been a fake all along, while Cadière's claimed that her innocence had been abused by the Jesuit.
22 One modern medical opinion describes these as psychogenic seizures, although this diagnosis rests on some very thin evidence: J. C. de Toledo et al., ‘Sexual molestation and psychogenic seizures: the 1731 trial of Marie Catherine Cadière versus Father Jean-Baptiste Girard’, Epilepsy & Behavior, 2 (2001), 601–2. The authors make a number of serious errors, however, that are beyond the scope of this paper to address.
23 JHU I(iii, 2), P. Thorame, Mémoire instructif. But cf. JHU I(vii, 3), Mémoire instructif, pour Messire François Cadière, Prêtre de la Ville de Toulon, Apellant du Decret d’assigné contre lui rendu le 23 février dernier, which claims that these spells did not begin until after Girard had been Cadière's confessor for several months. The conflict is not likely ever to be resolved.
24 See, for instance M. Greenberg, ‘Nun-sense: Marie de l’Incarnation, mysticism, and the oedipal trap’, in idem, Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), pp. 160–208.
25 BNF FOL FM 6745(1), p. 25, Chaudon, ‘Observations sur les reponses personnelles du P. Girard, Jesuite, et de la Demoiselle Cadière’, in Procedure sur laquelle le Père Jean-Baptiste Girard Jésuite, Catherine Cadière, Le Père Estienne-Thomas Cadière Dominicain, Mre. François Cadière Prêtre, et le Père Nicolas de S. Joseph Carme Déchaussé, ont été Jugez par Arrêt du Parlement de Provence, Du 10 octobre 1731, divisée par des nombres pour la facilité des Citations; avec les Pièces, Lettres, & Mémoires joints à cette Procedure. Le tout exactement collationné sur les Originaux On a joint à la fin un Précis, où tous les faits sont raportez, pour tenir lieu de Table des Matiéres, par ordre alphabétique (Aix, 1731). See also JHU I(iii, 2), P. Thorame, Mémoire instructif.
26 M. Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004), covers this phenomenon in detail, although she does not discuss Cadière–Girard specifically.
27 BNF FOL FM 6747(9), ‘Exposition de la Cadière’ in Procedure sur laquelle .... For the date that she chose Girard, see BN FOL FM 6745(1), ‘Observations sur les réponses personnelles du P. Girard Jésuite et de la demoiselle Cadière,’ (n.p. [Aix?], 1731).
28 JHU I(vii, 3), Pascal, Mémoire instructif pour Messire François Cadière.
29 BN MSS Fr. 23860 15–16, ‘Anecdotes sur le procès de la Cadière’, a collection of manuscript letters with supporting material; anon. letter dated 4 June 1731. Note that the author of this manuscript took a highly sceptical view of all miraculous evidence in the case, preferring the hypothesis that voluntary fornication was the heart of the matter.
30 BN MSS Fr. 23861 2r, ‘Relation de la prétendue sainteté de Cadière et de son Exposition contre le père Girard Jésuite son directeur pour servir de mémoir, fait à Malte sur des mémoires envoyés de Toulon’.
32 JHU I(i bis, 8, 9), Réponses du père Girard, Recteur de Toulon.
33 BN MSS Fr. 23861 1r–2v. Though rich in detail and often quite consistent with other documents, the manuscript claims that these events occurred in 1729. Trial documents, including BPR (general coll.) 2031(1) among others, make it clear that they took place in 1730. See also JHU II(i, 2), Mémoire instructif pour le père Nicolas de Saint Joseph, Prieur des Carmes Déchaussez ... Contre Monsieur le Procureur Général du Roy (Aix, 1731). JHU II(5), Mémoire des faits qui se sont passez sous les yeux de M. l'Evêque de Toulon, lors de l'origine de l'affaire du P. Girard Jésuite & de la Cadière, makes Montauban out to be considerably more sceptical, perhaps understandably given that this document was written during the trial itself.
34 JHU II(v, 4), Mémoire des faits qui se sont passez sous les yeux de M. l'Evêque de Toulon, lors de l'origine de l'affaire du P. Girard Jésuite & de la Cadière. Girieux was likewise a newcomer to the diocese; see JHU II(i, 1), Mémoire instructif pour le père Nicolas de Saint Joseph, Prieur des Carmes Déchaussez du Couvent de la Ville de Toulon, décreté d’ajournement personnel, à l'occasion de la Plainte formée par la Demoiselle Cadière ...
35 JHU II(i, 5, 6), Mémoire Instructif pour le Père Nicolas de Saint Joseph, Prieur des Carmes Déchaussés de la Ville de Toulon, contre M. le Procureur Général du Roy. The trial often presented an unusual blend of magic and demonology which was not consistent with previous beliefs about either. For example: ‘La Battarel [another of Girard's penitents] assured me that she was not possessed by the devil, but that she had swallowed Father Girard, that she carried him in her heart and in her eyes, that she had the heart of Father Girard, and that Father Girard had hers’, in JHU II(v, 7, 8), Mémoire des faits qui se sont passez sous les yeux de M. l'Evêque de Toulon, lors de l'origine de l'affaire du P. Girard Jésuite & de la Cadière.
36 BNF FOL FM 6746(4), Verbal d'Accedit de Catherine Cadière, le 18 novembre 1730, in Procedure sur laquelle ....
37 This discussion of Quietism draws on the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. ‘Quietism’, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12608c.htm, which characterizes Quietism not as a single unified heresy but as an element found in many different Catholic heresies and even present in Buddhist and Stoic thought.
38 An extended discussion of early modern French Quietism can be found in M.-F. Bruneau, Women Mystics Confront the Modern World: Marie de l'Incarnation and Madame Guyon (New York, 1998).
39 BN FOL FM 6745(i, 27), Chaudon, Observations sur les réponses personnelles du P. Girard, Jésuite, et de la Demoiselle Cadière, in Procedure sur laquelle...
40 BN MSS Fr. 23860 3v, Anecdotes sur le procès Cadière, 21 Mar. 1730.
41 BPR LP 2032(i, 233), P. Thorame, Second mémoire pour le Père Girard, Jesuite, Servant de Réponse au nouveau Mémoire de la Cadière & à ceux de ses Frères (Marseille, 1731).
42 Kreiser, ‘The devils of Toulon’, pp. 182–3.
43 No one on Cadière's side seems to have minded that her claim was inconsistent with traditional understandings of either witchcraft or demonology, but Girard's attorney certainly noticed: ‘As if there were a demon named Jean-Baptiste’, he scoffed. See P. Thorame, Second mémoire pour le Père Girard Jésuite, Servant de Réponse au nouveau Mémoire de la Cadière, & à ceux de ses Frères, p. 233.
44 JHU II(v, 7, 8), Mémoire des faits qui se sont passez sous les yeux de M. l'Evêque de Toulon, lors de l'origine de l'affaire du P. Girard Jésuite & de la Cadière.
46 JHU I(ii), Mémoire instructif pour Demoiselle Catherine Cadière.
47 A definitive monograph on abortion in eighteenth-century France has yet to be written. For some preliminaries, see L. Schie