Urbain Grandier
A brilliant, hated priest. A convent of "possessed" nuns. A pyre.
Loudun, 1631. A charismatic, controversial priest named Urbain Grandier returns to his parish triumphant after a legal victory — and directly into the path of enemies his charm, his success, and his indiscretions have made among the town's rival clergy. Within a few years, an entire convent of Ursuline nuns will claim to be possessed by demons acting on Grandier's orders, and a case built on exorcisms, torture, and a forged pact with the Devil will end with Grandier burned alive at the stake. Dumas tells one of the strangest and most notorious stories in his Celebrated Crimes — a case still debated by historians nearly four centuries later.
One of History's Strangest Witch Trials
The events at Loudun remain one of the most thoroughly documented cases of supposed mass possession in European history, and one of the most studied. An entire convent of Ursuline nuns, led by their Mother Superior Jeanne des Anges, began reporting visions, seizures, and demonic voices, and eventually named Urbain Grandier as the sorcerer responsible — producing, as evidence, a written pact they claimed Grandier had signed with the Devil himself, in his own blood, countersigned by demons including Asmodeus and Leviathan.
Most historians today, including Dumas's own contemporaries, saw the case very differently: as a politically motivated persecution, likely orchestrated with the knowledge of Cardinal Richelieu, whom Grandier had personally offended with a pamphlet years earlier. Despite enduring torture, Grandier never confessed, but was convicted anyway and burned at the stake in 1634 — a verdict most modern scholars regard as a judicial murder dressed up in the language of witchcraft.
A Story That Outlived Its Century
The Loudun affair has proven to be one of the most enduring true crimes in Western literature and art, inspiring works far beyond Dumas's own account: Aldous Huxley's celebrated 1952 book The Devils of Loudun, adapted for the stage and then into Ken Russell's controversial 1971 film The Devils, as well as an opera by Krzysztof Penderecki and a novel by the Swedish Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson. Dumas's own retelling, written more than a century before Huxley's, was among the first to bring the case to a wide popular audience.
True Crime, Dumas's Way
As with The Countess de Saint-Geran, also on this site, this story comes from Dumas's Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection written years before his famous historical novels, when he was, in the words of one early English publisher, "not yet 'the elder,' nor yet the author of D'Artagnan or Monte Cristo, but a rising young dramatist." Dumas brings the same narrative instincts he'd soon apply to fiction to this very real, very strange chapter of French history — sparing, as his early publishers noted, no language in describing it.
First Published
1839–1840, as part of the eight-volume Celebrated Crimes.
Setting
Loudun, France, 1631–1634, during the reign of Louis XIII.
Genre
True crime and witch-trial history, later revisited by Aldous Huxley and Ken Russell.
Part Of
Celebrated Crimes, Dumas's collection of true historical crime narratives.