Jules Michelet

And the church didn't like that.

I found a quote from Jules Michelet from Satanism and Witchcraft written in 1862.

And he says, on Sundays after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help, and words were all they got.

You have sinned and God is afflicting you.

Writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy thought of witches as romantic rebels, and I mean romantic in the post-Enlightenment romance era sense of the word, or they were outlaws, and both writers described solitary rural witches and cunning women in their novels.

French writer Jules Michelet, an anti-monarchist and anti-Catholic, produced many books of social reform in history.

He advocated a turn from Christianity to worshipping a great mother goddess and held that women were morally superior to men and that witch trials were an effort by the elite to subvert the rights of women and the working class.

He declared in his 1862 book, La Sorcerie, that medieval witchcraft had been an egalitarian rural religion led by female priestesses.

And so what is going to happen is that first, Protestantism is throughout the 19th century going to be associated with modernity.

both by the partisans of this Protestant modernity, people like Michelet, people like Quinet.

There is a whole part of French historiography which emphasizes the connection between political modernity and Protestantism with this idea that the revolution is the daughter of the Reformation.

And you have that among many Republicans of the time.

For the witch, sexuality is good and scientific logic must be followed freely.

She's talking about Jules Michelet's La Sorciere.

That was sort of like a romantic retelling of the witch hunts.

It's super influential because a lot of people sort of took it as fact, and it's influenced a lot of contemporary feminists to this day because it sort of framed the witch as this sex-positive feminist, if you will.

Gregory of Tours, writing of a spouse, says, The bridegroom, having given a ring to the fiancée, presents her with a shoe.

Michelet, in his Life of Luther, says that the reformer was at the wedding of Jean Hulft, and after supper he conducted the bride to bed.

He then told the bridegroom that, according to common custom, he ought to be master in his own house when his wife was not there, and for a symbol he took off the husband's shoe and put it upon the head of the bed.

Avant qu'il traite ainsi la domination et gouvernement.

That is from The Contemporary, July first, eighteen eighty-one.

This flower of Talmudic doctrine has permeated the spirit of contemporary Judaism, mindful of the Bible's words, "All things obey money." On the freedom to practice user- usury, Michelet wrote, quote, "The Jews have resolved the problem of volatizing money.

They were granted the freedom to lend, and they are now free men, owners.

From transaction to transaction, they have transcended to the throne of the world." End quote.

It was said that Catherine was party to Charles IX's decision to kill them all, as he aimed to strike first against an expected Huguenot revenge attack for the shooting of Coligny.

The slaughter lasted for a week and spread outwards from Paris across much of France, where it lasted into the autumn, becoming a season of slaughter, as historian Jules Michelet put it.

In total, approximately three thousand Protestants were killed in Paris, and a further seventy thousand across the whole of France.

After the bloodshed finally abated in Paris, Catherine's reputation was in tatters, but she was not downcast.