Decriminalisation Was Not an Event: Witchcraft and Judicial Procedure in France from the 17th to the 20th Century

One evening in 1935, Alfred Jably knocked at the door of his landlord Abel Tennegain during dinner. Tennegain ‘stood up, without saying anything or giving anyone time to do anything, picked up his gun and a cartridge, and walked out, loading the gun as he went.’ Moments later, and without having said a word, he fatally shot Jably in the yard. A few months later, a jury in the Maine-et-Loire assize court cleared Tennegain of murder and set him free. French juries do not provide explanations for their decisions, but the most likely explanation for this acquittal was the story that Tennegain and the witnesses for the defense told about Jably as a well-known ‘witch’ who had caused all sorts of harm, and who Tennegain had killed in desperation and fear.
For European historians, ‘witchcraft’ calls to mind the late medieval and early modern trials. Between us and them stands decriminalization: no state in Europe prosecutes people for witchcraft today, and cases like the 1935 murder of Jably are what Gustav Hennigsen has called witch trials ‘in reverse’. Rather than accused witches, it was people who attacked suspected witches that have been prosecuted in recent centuries, allowing modern Europeans to congratulate themselves that the horrors of witch-hunting are a thing of the past. My goal in this chapter is to problematise the domesticated revulsion that underpins this story. One way to achieve lies in the project of historical imagination to reconstitute the horrors of judicial interrogations and torture, the processes of indoctrination that encouraged some suspects to admit that they were witches, the atmosphere of panic, desperation, and abject terror of the great hunts. This is the way of the medievalists and early modernists who have produced compelling accounts of the worlds of the witches and the witch hunts. As a historian interested in later periods, my approach here is different. Rather than restoring a picture of the persecutions of the distant past, I want to use examples like the 1935 murder to question the distance between witch-hunting then, and the persecution of witches in very recent history in France.