Europe's inner demons

The spuriousness of the story is confirmed by the silence of the contemporary sources. The sole contemporary mention of a witch-trial around 1275 says simply that the royal judge of Carcassonne, Barthelemi Dupuy, in 1274 tried a woman accused of simple sorcery.⁽¹⁰⁾ Perhaps this brief comment prompted Bardin to his flight of fancy; but however that may be, it is certain that Angela de la Barthe never existed. And indeed one might have guessed as much from the details of the story itself: the case has no real parallel in any recorded witch-trial, early or late, but represents, rather, an amalgam of various ideas about witches and about monstrous births, such as would have been familiar to a fifteenth-century lawyer like Bardin.

Yet the story as given by Hansen is not entirely the work of Bardin. It was the Baron de Lamothe-Langon who turned Angela into a lady of rank and gave her the age of fifty-six; who transformed her judge from a seneschal into an inquisitor; who located the place of her execution as the square of St Stephen at Toulouse. And one may reasonably ask on what authority this nineteenth-century writer made these additions to the traditional story — had he some source at his disposal other than Bardin and Bouges? The answer is that his source and authority lay simply in his own fertile brain. In 1823, six years before he published his Histoire de l’Inquisition, Lamothe-Langon had helped edit a Biographie toulousaine

. The entry on the fictitious Angela is clearly from his pen — and it contains, in addition to all these new “facts”, the curious sentence: “The chronicler Bardin adds that the sentence pronounced on this insane woman was still extant in his time. And truly it is to be found in the archives of the Parlement (of Toulouse); all these facts are given there at great length....”⁽¹¹⁾ So, like Bardin before him, Lamothe-Langon claims first-hand knowledge of a document which, as we have seen, never existed at all. As for other sources, not a word.

That is only the beginning of the story. The notion of the witches’ sabbat, in particular, is supposed to have been generated by the persecution of the Cathars and to have reached its full development as that persecution drew to its close: by 1330-5 the inquisitors at Toulouse and Carcassonne are said to have been trying women on charges of attending the sabbat and of practising Devil-worship as an expression of the Dualist religion. Briefly mentioned by Soldan, these trials are given fifteen pages of Hansen’s history.⁽¹²⁾ More importantly, in the massive collection of original sources which he published to accompany his history he printed what purport to be records of the trial proceedings, translated into French.⁽¹³⁾

In this case the whole of the material is taken from Lamothe-Langon’s Histoire de l’Inquisition.

The most striking of the trial records consists of the confessions of two witches, Anne-Marie de Georgel, and Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort, both of Toulouse.⁽¹⁴⁾ These confessions, which are explicitly stated to have been extracted by torture, contain lurid descriptions of the sabbat which the women had been attending, and of the maleficia which they had been practising, for many years. But they also contain a distorted version of Catharist doctrine: