Europe's inner demons

A hoax of this kind fits perfectly into the career of Lamothe-Langon. For Lamothe-Langon was not a historian at all but the author of innumerable vaguely historical novels, with a marked taste for the sinister, the mysterious and the melodramatic. He came from Toulouse: the countryside and city where he sets his drama of witches’ sabbats and witch-burnings was familiar to him in every detail. Also, he specialized in fabricating spurious historical sources, which he produced in thousands upon thousands of pages. For such a man nothing would have been easier, or more diverting, than to concoct the confessions of Anne-Marie de Georgel and Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort.

The matter, and the man, call for closer attention.⁽²¹⁾ Etienne-Léon de Lamothe (to give him his original name) was born in 1786, of a noble family: his ancestors included capitouls, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been councillors of the parlement

of Toulouse. Along with a number of similar public figures from Toulouse, his father was guillotined in Paris by the revolutionary government in 1794; which, since Mme de Lamothe was a totally ineffective person, left the eight-year-old boy to manage his life for himself. He avoided any formal schooling and educated himself in his father’s library, devouring every book he could lay hands on, indiscriminately and without any kind of guidance. At the age of sixteen he began to write, and within four years he had turned out four tragedies, six comedies, three operas, a novel and sundry other works. And if these juvenilia circulated in manuscript only, by the age of twenty-two he had published four novels, including a five-volume novel on the troubadours which was translated into English, German and Italian.

Meanwhile a tumultuous love-life with a series of fashionable mistresses, first at Toulouse, then in Paris, consumed the remnants of a fortune which had never been large. Lamothe set out to find employment in the imperial administration, and he found it — first as auditor to the Conseil d’Etat, then, at the age of twenty-five, as sub-prefect of Toulouse. He carried out his duties with distinction and proved himself a good administrator. On the other hand, it would be absurd to take seriously his claim that during this period he also laid the foundations of his Histoire de l’Inquisition by studying manuscript sources.

⁽²²⁾ His appointment at Toulouse lasted only two years (1811-13) and was certainly no sinecure. Moreover, he had no training in paleography; and when he quotes unpublished materials, he never supplies verbatim transcriptions — as serious historians commonly did, even at that time.

Lamothe’s administrative career was closely identified with the imperial cause — during the Hundred Days he resumed service, as subprefect at Carcassonne — and with the final overthrow of Napoleon all prospects of official employment vanished. He tried to ingratiate himself with the royalists by writing a satirical account of his late master, entitled Bonaparte

; but in vain. So he turned to writing as a full-time occupation. Under the names of Lamothe-Houdancourt (from 1815 to 1817) and of Lamothe-Langon (from 1817), and also under a vast number of pseudonyms, he became the most abundantly productive author in France, in an age when many authors were abundantly productive.

In the years following Napoleon’s fall the public was insatiable for novels, criticism was at low ebb, publishers were concerned with quantity not quality, and the few novelists who existed were mostly poor devils whose only choice lay between non-stop production and starvation. Lamothe did at least make a great deal of money (which he spent as fast as he made it, or faster) but at the cost of becoming the supreme hack in a generation of hacks. Late in life he commented bitterly on his fate: “Despite the force of temperament and the mental energy with which I was blessed by our divine Creator, I could no longer carry on.... Fifty years of unremitting labour, beginning each day between three and four o’clock in the morning and continuing to two o’clock in the afternoon — labour surpassing and crushing human strength — in the end extinguished my imagination and annihilated my energy.”⁽²³⁾ In sheer bulk his achievement was indeed prodigious— some 400 works, in prose and verse, representing some 1,500 volumes of manuscript.