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The psychoanalytic dimension of this most famous, massively documented and reinterpreted case of possession lies no doubt in the popular term (eschewed by Certeau) of ‘mass hysteria’ and, more carefully prepared by him in his introduction, of the ‘return of the repressed’ (105). ‘Normally, strange things circulate discreetly below our streets’, the text begins, ‘but a crisis will suffice for them to rise up, as if swollen by flood waters, pushing aside manhole covers, invading the cellars, then spreading through the towns’ (1). Certain moments are like fault-lines of historical change in ‘a world poised between what is disappearing and what is beginning’ (6); in particular, ‘this “diabolical” crisis has a double significance: it reveals the imbalance of a culture, and it accelerates the process of its mutation’ (2). Following just a few months after a protracted plague, the second in a single generation, and taking place in a town that stood as ‘an outpost, a frontier town’ (24) of Protestantism which, just 34 years after the Edict of Nantes, now faced the retrenchment of Catholic royalism, the possession at Loudun is charged with a heady mixture of politics and religion, but it is more than either of these: conceived and enacted as grand spectacle, gradually a mass media one, it also stands for ‘the birth of a language […] at once archaic and new’ (27) which both frees up expression and inters it inside a closed system.
In this spectacle, the dramatis personae follow the solemn hierarchy of social rank, but also upset it. All classes of person eventually got access to the stigmata of Jeanne des Anges when, a few years after the events at Loudun, she went on a national tour of the faithful. At the height of the possession and trial, even though positions are starkly polarized—‘one must be for or against’ (27)—as Certeau quotes Jarry as saying: ‘“possession by the Holy Spirit and by the devil are notably symmetrical”’ (5). In short, ‘Sorcery is a word that, in its ind