The witch enters the modern world. This is the latest feminist recruit. It seems that they have all read the book by Mona Chollet (Witches. The Unconquered Power of Women, Zones, 2018). Dominique Eloudy-Lenys' documentary shows how this archetype of sultry woman – a “mythical, historical, artistic and even political” character – became over the 20th and 21st centuries a “feminist icon embodying power and independence”.
“More and more women, young women, are reinvesting in this figure of the witch, reclaiming it,” says Elisa Thévenet, journalist. Exit the broom, hello TikTok: on the social network, videos with the hashtag
It all begins in the Quattrocento (15th century), the gateway to the Renaissance. Christianity, says Ludovic Viallet, historian, author of Witches! The great hunt (Armand Colin, 2013) is experienced as a “fortress under siege”. She is looking for scapegoats. Women are on the front lines. “The iconographic representations correspond to little witches mounted on brooms or sticks,” continues the historian. They thus go, “at night, by air, to demonic ceremonies, which will very quickly be called “sabbath””.
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Witches will fuel an abundant literature “in the pure tradition of the clerical and misogynistic literature of the time”, benefiting from the invention of printing. In 1486, a bestseller emerged: Malleus Maleficarum (“Witches’ Hammer”).
Written by two Dominican inquisitors, the work “defines witchcraft as an absolute heresy”, underlines Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, author of Literary Demonology and other witchcraft (Hermann, 2022), and offers a “how-to” for judges to track down and make witches confess. With the famous “question”, which “allows us to generate the confession, to properly condemn the woman as a witch”, says Maxime Gelly-Perbellini, doctoral student in medieval history.
The modern era also begins there, underlines Elisabeth Moreno, the former minister of equality between women and men (2020-2022): “It was enough for a lover to be rejected, for a master not to have the right to abuse his servant, that a husband is fed up with his wife, for a woman to be denounced as a witch and thrown into the public square. We can consider that all these murders are the first feminicides in history. »
Another historic “first”: in 1781, the Swiss Anna Göldi filed a complaint for… sexual harassment. This did not prevent it from being condemned and burned in 1782.
