Witches!

To send a witch to the stake is to take her harmful powers seriously : is that really reasonable ? Montaigne expressed a few reservations on the subject. «After all, it is setting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive.» The question was debated in the sixteenth century : did witches really exist ? Most certainly, replied Heinrich Kramer [1], author in 1486 of the Malleus maleficarum (in other words The Hammer of Witches). Reissued more than thirty times until 1669, the work was published — all the same ! — in more than 35,000 copies and circulated throughout Europe. According to him, witchcraft was a specifically female characteristic — « Blessed be the Most High who until now has preserved the male sex from such a scourge. » — and these insatiable women, obsessed with their desire to frolic with demons, had to be exterminated. To deny their existence was to go against the Catholic faith. Jean Bodin, economist, jurist, political theorist, but also demonologist — one who studies the demon — took up this idea again in 1580, thereby fuelling a controversy with Johann Weyer, a Dutch physician, who had shown himself somewhat doubtful in an essay written in 1567 and entitled Five Books Concerning the Imposture and Deception of Devils, Enchantments and Witchcraft. For Weyer, witches were less malevolent beings than poor women, often old, melancholic and mentally weak, whose imagination had been corrupted by demons. To torture them, and even to try them, was to lack humanity. And Montaigne went further, thirty years later, in his essay On the Lame : these supposedly evil beings were merely individuals suffering from mental disorders, whom one might attempt to cure with a few medicinal plants rather than with the flames of a stake.