The Devils of Loudun

The small French town of Loudun was, in the years of 1633-34, the showplace for occurrences that gained renown throughout Europe, being followed at the time in a mixture of religiously feverish repulsion and voyeuristic exactitude by contemporary Europeans and extensively documented. Urbain Grandier, the village priest of Loudun, was accused in 1633 of having bewitched the nuns, above all Prioress Jeanne, of the newly founded Ursuline-Cloister. Under torture he admitted to regretting his lapsed lifestyle - he had relationships with two women, of which one expected a child from him - refused steadfastly, however, to confess to his “Devil’s Work” despite “proofs” of the same. In the summer of 1634 he was burned at the stake. For years afterwards the obsessions of the nuns occupied doctors and exorcists, the events ending only as Cardinal Richelieu withdrew his financial support of the cloister.
The trial against Urban Grandier was included in François de Pitaval’s collection of famous criminal cases. This source, along with the autobiographical recollections of Prioress Jeanne from 1644, and two reports of the trial from 1634 and 1693, was available to Aldous Huxley as he expounded on this theme in 1952 for the production of his The Devils of Loudun. Eight years later, John Whiting dramatised Huxley’s writings; the German version of which, by Erich Fried, being the starting point for Penderecki’s libretto, in which the composer sets the accent resoundly on the political level. “For him (Penderecki) The Devils of Loudun is a work about tolerance and intolerance. Grandier was the victim of a political intrigue, where even Jeanne was not really his enemy, but a victim of religious-political fanatics; her erotic neuroses exaggerated by Richelieu’s handiwork into a necessary possession by the Devil.”