The Prince and the Magician

Portrait  of Orléans by Jean-Pierre Franque, musée de Dreux
https://webmuseo.com/ws/musee-dreux/app/collection/record/188

Here is a curious episode from the late-eighteenth century world of Freemasonry,the occult and ritual magic.  It involves no less a figure than the duc d'Orléans, later Philippe d'Égalité.   According to the fullest account, events took place near Orléan's  residence at the Château du Raincy, about ten kilometres north-east of Paris.   An unnamed Jewish sorcerer led the duke into a forest thicket where an demonic being materialised from a supernatural fire. The apparition conferred on him a talismanic ring and imparted an unknown secret: 

"He conversed for more than an hour with this real or phantasmic figure whose hand sealed an iron ring around his neck.  He showed us this ring, but did not confide in us what had been predicted.  He only told us "The matter is of the highest importance, but it is a mystery".  These are the exact words he used.  [D'Allonville, Mémoires secrets (1838), vol. 1, p.145] 

In later commentaries, notably the history by Auguste Viatte published in 1928,  the  mysterious Jew is identified as Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk, the so-called "Baal Shem of London",  a famous Kabbalistic magician of the later eighteenth century.  It was generally assumed that the duke had been promised a magical guarantee for his accession to the French throne. [see Viatte, p.184]

The Sorcerers of Lyon

The affair of the "sorcerers of Lyon" was a further, far more extensive, trial involving magic quests for treasure.  Proceedings took place over a three-year period, from 1742 to 1745, and involved the arraignment of no less than twenty-nine individuals.

This episode is fascinating, not only for the insights into legal practices and attitudes to witchcraft but also for the details of the lives and hopes of  ordinary people that it revealed.

The trial is unusually well-documented: the library of the Château Grosbois-en-Montagne in Bourgogne preserves a comprehensive manuscript dossier, including full transcripts of the many interrogation.  This  compilation was the work of the commissioning magistrate for the case Jean-Claude Perreney de Vellemont (1718-1810), conseiller, and later  Procureur-général  in the Parlement of Dijon.  According to family tradition Perreney was an austere and conscientious man, who got up at four in the morning to attend early mass and habitually spent his days in study. This is borne out by the manuscript, which amounts to 400 folio pages, laboriously transcribed in small neat handwriting.

The fortified manor house of Grosbois en Montagne, much embellished by the Perreney family in the 18th century.
http://www.chateau-fort-manoir-chateau.eu/chateaux-cote-or-chateau-a-grobois-chateau-de-grobois.html

A full account of the case, based on the dossier, was published by Henri Beaune  in 1868.  More recently, in 2001, the evidence has been revisited in an article by Mathias Dupas Didier.  

Some treasure-seekers

Magical treasure-seeking featured prominently in 18th-century grimoires, and seems to have become a particular preoccupation of the time.  Perhaps it can be viewed as one more aspect of the quest for riches and upward mobility so prominent in all walks of life during this period. From time to time the antics of the treasure-hunters surface in detail in the judicial or police record.  As Professor McManners observed, these cases reveal "something of the popular superstition and the judicial ferocities underlying the crystaline wit and sophisticated adventures of thought of the Enlightenment" (p.237). 

The Extravagant Imaginings of Monsieur Oufle

Nothing is so easy as to persuade the Credulous into a belief of whatever one pleases; especially when what is propos'd to them falls in with their Prejudices.
(Bordelon, A History of ..M. Oufle, p.195)

By the opening decades of the eighteenth century, belief in magic and the supernatural was already becoming an object of ridicule. The landmark text is the splendid Histoire des Imaginations Extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, a comic novel by the abbé Laurent Bordelon published in 1710.

Some books of magic

According to the historian of the grimoire, Owen Davies, books of magic spells and incantations circulated widely in 18th-century France.  Police reports from the opening years of the century reveal a lively trade in manuscripts and clandestine texts among enterprising Parisians, most of them humble members of society: priests, prostitutes, abortionists, chemists, labourers and tradesmen.(Davies p.96)  

France rapidly became the European centre for the production of popular books of magic.  In the course of the late 18th and 19th centuries, tens of thousands of illegal cheap editions, part of the so-called Bibliothèque bleue, were distributed throughout the country by colporteurs.  The centres of production were in Troyes, Rouen and Paris, places of high literacy where standard French was spoken. (Davies, p.98)  The earliest title, the Grand Albert was mainly a compendium of "natural magic",  but true grimoires, which included methods for the invocation of demons and spirits, became increasingly available - no doubt  in response to a growing demand. 

As Owen Davies notes, exact bibliographic details are not easy to trace.  It is often not clear in the police reports, which works are being described, or whether they are manuscripts or printed texts.  The books in question were in any case usually destroyed. Paradoxically, the  cheap ephemeral editions of the Bibliothèque bleue are now quite rare.  Even when  they do survive, origins remain uncertain, since publishers commonly gave false dates and hid behind fanciful imprints -  such as Beringos Fratres of Lyon, whose premises were located "at the sign of Agrippa".  

Le Grand Albert 

The Grand Albert, the oldest magical staple of the bibliothèque bleue,  was a heterogeneous compilation of herbalism, household hints and popular superstition.  Principally, it  gave instructions for the esoteric use of natural materials - to change the properties of inert or living things;  or for divination.  The contents covered such subjects as  gynaecology, physiognomy, alchemy, medicine, and from 1703 it included an almanac of propitious days.

Although the Grand Albert did not contain spells, curses or  incantations, its proliferation still generated concern;  in 1709 it was listed by censors as a book to be condemned and confiscated,  along with a whole range of religious and pseudo-religious works printed in Rouen. (See Davies, p.98)

The text  may date in part to the 13th centuries.  Almost sixty manuscript copies survive from the 14th to 16th centuries. The work subsequently diffused widely in print, in the original Latin, then in Italian, German, French and English translations. It was was not officially proscribed until 1604 when the first part, Les secrets des Femmes, was placed on the Index;  this section was then reproduced only in Latin editions. By the later 17th century cheap French editions were being published regularly in Troyes by Jacques Oudot.


The "classic" French version, which includes Les secrets des Femmes,  appeared for the first time at the beginning of the 18th century under the title Les Admirables Secrets d’Albert Le Grand.  The first edition, of which Bibliothèque nationale possesses a copy, dates from 1703 and is a high quality publication, with five fine engravings.  Almost certainly it originated outside France.  

There were many subsequent editions, following this same basic format.  The earliest examples have the imprint "Cologne chez le dispensateur de secrets" and the later ones "Lyon Beringos Fratres".   As time passed, the quality tended to decline - for instance the use of contrasting red type was dropped.

Magic in the early 18th century

Edict of 1682

Édit... pour la punition de différents crimes [magie, sortilèges, empoisonnement]. Registré en Parlement le 31 aoust 1682
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8607061d/f1.image

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries longstanding laws on witchcraft were repealed the throughout Europe.   In France a new framework was provided by the Edict of 1682, which redefined crimes relating to magic in the wake of the "Affair of the Poisons" and a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice by the provincial parlements. The Edict in effect placed the supernatural outside the jurisdictionof the secular law courts.  Witchcraft and magic practices were no longer punishable directly, but only in so far as they involved imposture or criminal activity.  Severe penalties were retained for blasphemy and poisoning.

The Edict identified three different sorts of offences:

1. Divination 
All persons who practice divination or claim to be diviners were to be  summarily banished from the Kingdom as soon as the Edict was published, on pain of corporal punishment.

2. "Superstitious practices" 
These were defined as abuse of the the words of Holy Scripture or the prayers of the Church; , also recourse to deeds and words "which have no relation to natural causes". Punishment was left to the discretion of the judge but must be "exemplary".

3.  "Impiety and sacrilege" 
Those who added "impiety and sacrilege" to superstition in the practice of "supposed magic" were liable to the death penalty. This included attempts to invoke or make pacts with demons, and the misuse of Catholic ceremonial, sacred vessels and sacraments.

All those involved in poisoning or trading in poisons also faced execution.