A new history of the seventeenth-century Basque witch-hunt usefully blows away some old myths, but fails to explain convincingly why it happened, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

In the early years of the seventeenth century, Basque provinces on both sides of the Franco-Spanish border were convulsed by accusations of witchcraft. In 1609, the Bordeaux Parlement sent Pierre de Lancre and Jean d’Espagnet as witchcraft commissioners to the Labourd, one of the French Basque provinces, to investigate. There, children and young people told them that they had been taken from their beds and transported to witches’ sabbats, where the witches gathered to cast spells, feast on dead bodies and worship and have sex with the Devil. Some parents, Pierre de Lancre reported, were so desperate that they had resorted to moving their families to sleep in churches so that the witches couldn’t get at their children in the night. By the end of 1609, the witchcraft commission in the Labourd had executed around sixty to eighty men and women for witchcraft, with more put to death by the Inquisition on the Spanish side of the border.

The Basque witch-hunt was part of the wider European witch-hunt, which saw sporadic but sometimes intense persecution of people for witchcraft across Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It is a well-known example not because it was especially ferocious or unusual, although Machielsen points out some idiosyncratic elements of Basque beliefs about witches, but because of the witch-hunter. Pierre de Lancre published his history of the witch-hunt in the Labourd, Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Démons, in 1612. It was full of sexually explicit detail of the supposed goings-on at the witches’ sabbats and included in its 1613 edition a fold-out engraving of the naked feasting, dancing, Devil-worshipping and sex. The rambling work, Machielsen comments, ‘straddles many genres, among them ethnography and “scholarly pornography”’ (p.6). De Lancre’s lurid account has made him one of the best-known European witch-hunters (he’s surely the only one to have a comic fantasy country named after him), simultaneously the main source for the Basque witch-hunt and the reason it is remembered.

Machielsen’s aim in The Basque Witch-Hunt is to depart from the tradition which focuses on de Lancre and to start instead with the Labourd, telling the story from the point of view of the people of the area rather than the witch-hunters. The book is also an exercise in dispelling various popular perceptions about the witch-hunt. In part, this is about the numbers of people killed. In common with older historiography about the European witch-hunt in general, which greatly exaggerated the numbers executed, some modern accounts of the Basque witch-hunt still ‘cling to an older, discredited figure of six hundred deaths’ (p.11).

Nation-building myth

Machielsen argues however that the myths about the Basque witch-hunt go further than this general over-estimation of the numbers killed. They also include the idea that the people of the Labourd and of the other Basque provinces resisted the witch-hunt. This view is adopted for example by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch, when she quotes from Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World, to claim that when the men of the cod fleet of St-Jean-de-Luz, in the Labourd, heard about the witch-hunt, ‘the 1609 cod campaign was ended two months early. The fishermen returned, clubs in hands, and liberated a convoy of witches being taken to the burning place. This one popular resistance was all it took to stop the trials.’[1]

This is not borne out in reality. Machielsen calls such historiographical accounts ‘fanciful tales’ (p.110) and concludes that ‘the evidence, then, for Basque sailors saving the day – and saving their women – is thin at best’ (p.168). Indeed, the notion that the men of St-Jean-de-Luz, fishing for cod on the Grand Banks, out in the Atlantic some 2,500 miles away, could hear about the witch-hunt back home, is, Machielsen points out, ‘a logistical impossibility unless they were warned by witches travelling at supersonic speed’ (p.168).

The idea of Basque resistance to the witch-hunt is perhaps inherently attractive – for Silvia Federici it provides a welcome example of men who were prepared to go against the general trend and defend their women against persecution – but it seems likely that it also owes its persistence to the role which ideas about the Basque witch-hunt specifically play in the formation of modern Basque national identity. In the Spanish Basque country, ‘the witch-hunt is seen as part of a longer history of cultural genocide’ (p.10) carried out by the Spanish authorities against the Basque people. Local historians on both sides of the modern border have seen witch-hunting by both the French and Spanish authorities as an attempt to stamp out remnants of ancient Basque religion and culture.

This version of the witch-hunt constructs it not only as appallingly unjust episode of official violence, but violence and injustice ‘committed by an outsider on an innocent community’ (p.8). The witch-hunt was not something which the community of the Labourd and the Spanish Basque provinces did to themselves, it was something done to them by the French and Spanish, and something which they attempted to resist. Against this, for Machielsen, the Basque witch-hunt was something that arose from within the society, as a reaction to the specific situation of these provinces at the turn of the seventeenth century and the particular challenges that they faced. It was not, Machielsen argues, an attack on the community from outside, but an exercise in a community tearing itself apart.

This was especially the case because the principal accusers in this witch-hunt were children and young people, accusing sometimes prominent people in their community and sometimes (although, Machielsen points out, we do not have accurate figures for this) their own parents. This must have given rise to intense panic and distress, not just for the accused parents but across the community, as social bonds broke down. As a friar, Matthias de Lissalde, wrote in an eye-witness account of the witch-hunt, in the Labourd at this time, ‘everyone was their own master, each person made justice for his or herself’ (p.124).

Just as shocking for the people of the Labourd would have been the members of the Church among the supposed witches. Eight priests were among those who were accused of conducting witches’ sabbats, three of whom were executed. These accusations were particularly disturbing for the community, causing ‘great uproar’ and ‘terror in the whole Pays de Labourd’, according to Pierre de Lancre (p.118). It was not a short-term scandal either: even in the 1640s, people in the Labourd were apparently refusing to have their children baptised by priests who had been implicated in witchcraft during the witch-hunt thirty years earlier.

Border anxiety

Machielsen presents a clear picture of the malign effects of the witch-hunt on the Basque provinces on both sides of the border. On the explanations for that witch-hunt, however, he is perhaps less persuasive. For Machielsen, it was the Basque country’s position as border country, divided between France and Spain, which was a key factor in the tensions which created the witch-hunt. It is true that the Franco-Spanish border was frequently in dispute into the early modern period, before it was finally fixed in the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. There would have been no sense, in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century Basque country, that the current border was permanent.

Towns like Bayonne, on the French side, were frontier fortresses and felt under realistic threat of invasion. The year 1591, for example, was later called the ‘Year of Fear’ because of the belief that the Spanish were about to attack. When Marie de Cornau, the wife of a Bayonne tailor, began accusing various members of the Bayonne elite of witchcraft, including a city guard, this, Machielsen comments, characterised the witches as ‘a fifth column, perilously close to destroying Bayonne’s well-built defences [and therefore France’s national defences], from within’ (p.176).

The potential impermanence of the border in 1609 reflected the recent history of the area. Parts of the French Basque country had been ruled by the English until 1451, while French Navarre was an even more recent part of France, only becoming French when Henri of Navarre became Henri IV of France in 1589. This did not include Upper Navarre, though, as this had been conquered by the Spanish in 1512 and from then on was formally part of Spain.

These national divisions concealed and had not yet substantially changed the way in which the Basque country was one community, in which the peasantry on both sides of the border would speak Basque and share the same cultural traditions. The border often failed to reflect reality on the ground, such as the position of the villages of Zugarramurdi and Urdax, on the Spanish side of the border but in the same valley as the French Labourd and cut off by mountains from their Spanish neighbours.  

All of this, Machielsen argues, gave additional political and military importance to the sort of local disputes which we might expect to find anywhere. The quarrel for example between the town of Hondarribia and the village of Hendaye over access to the Bidasoa river between them was by no means unique, but became a national flashpoint because Hondarribia was in Spain and Hendaye in France, with the river forming the border. The reports of witches’ sabbats on the beaches at Hendaye, overlooked by Hondarribia’s fortifications on the other side of the river, illustrate how ‘witches congregated wherever there was conflict’, meaning that ‘the witchcraft problem … was both an extension and an expression of the clashes between the communities and noblemen over status, resources and access to the sea’ (p.28).

This framing renders the witch-hunt not as something done to the Basque country by external forces, but as something ‘generated from within, as a side product of the Labourd’s many internal conflicts’ (p.168). It does not however make clear why these internal conflicts were so acute in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as opposed to at other times, that they gave rise to a murderous witch-hunt. The Franco-Spanish border was after all not new, and communities divided by the often rather theoretical borders of noble territories on either side of the Pyrenees had been suffering from and exploiting these for centuries, from well before either France or Spain could be regarded as states in the modern sense.

A problem for all times?

Areas in the south of France had been battlegrounds between French and Spanish nobles since at least the twelfth century, with the English also added into the mix in the south-west. There was similarly a long history of people moving across the border to escape persecution. Those who fled the Labourd in 1609 to attempt to prove themselves innocent of witchcraft to the Spanish authorities were following a well-worn path trodden by those accused of heresy since the thirteenth century. On occasion, the people of both sides of the border could also contemplate playing the competing noble authorities off against each other. When Barcelona revolted against the King of Aragon in 1285, for example, the plan was apparently to kill ‘the clergy, the Jews and all the rich men’ and then to ‘hand over the city to the King of France so that the King of Aragon could never make them pay for their misdeeds.’[2]

Clearly, none of this was conducive to peace and tranquillity in any of the border regions, but it is difficult to see why the same situation in the early seventeenth century was so substantially worse than in previous periods. Machielsen summaries the sources of strain giving rise to the witch-hunt as ‘the capricious border, the unforgiving sea and, during the 1610s at least, the worsening climate’ (p.236), which does rather emphasise the sense that these were constants for the Basque country in the medieval and early modern period rather than specific issues giving rise to an immediate social problem.

In this, Machielsen appears to reflect a trend in the recent historiography of witch-hunting, which sees it as a perennial problem for human societies in general. As Wolfgang Behringer argues, for example, ‘witches and witch-hunts are closer to being recognized as relevant for all mankind: they are – like magic and religion – a universal phenomenon.’[3] For Machielsen, similarly, ‘there is a potential witch and a potential accuser – someone willing to think the worst of an enemy – inside every one of us’ (p.237). This view rejects attempts to locate explanations for the European witch-hunt in specific social, political and economic changes in the early modern period, from the Reformation to the birth of capitalism, seeing it rather as an eternal verity of the human condition. In this view, a witch-hunt needs no special explanation, it’s a demonstration of a general tendency to murderousness that just needs an excuse to come out.

Any argument which seeks an explanation for witch-hunting in a human proclivity for violence and suspicion is perhaps inevitably going to see witch-hunting as an inherently popular rather than elite activity. The role of the authorities in this version of witch-hunting is sometimes to encourage the witch-hunt, sometimes to attempt to restrain it, but always simply to respond to the witch-hunting instincts of the people. It was all, as Machielsen says about the sources of strain the seventeenth-century Labourd, ‘beyond anybody’s control’ (p.236).

For Machielsen, the Basque witch-hunt arose from the ‘deep roots of witchcraft beliefs’ (p.42) in the area, which were not specific to the seventeenth century but which in fact had given rise to a centuries-long tendency to accuse people of witchcraft and have them killed for it. The Basque provinces, he argues, were ‘particularly precocious’ (p.40) in witch-hunting, not just because of the previous major witch-hunts in 1525 and 1576, but a history of witchcraft cases going back in Navarre to 1279.

Witch-hunting, capitalism and class

The difficulty though for this argument is that the pattern Machielsen describes, of sporadic evidence of witchcraft accusations in the medieval period before sustained witch-hunting activity in the early modern period, is in no way unusual or restricted to the Basque country. There was a general belief in witchcraft across medieval European societies, but while medieval elites may have believed in witches, they did not tend to organise or support sustained witch-hunting against it. The most persuasive view of the factors in the European witch-hunt in the early modern period see it as the creation both of social strain at village level, as the development of early capitalist market structures fractured ancient social bonds, and of a fundamental change in elite attitudes towards ideas about witches and witchcraft.

While major witch-hunts could create considerable disorder and temporary loss of elite control, and were often stopped when this loss of control became too acute, this should not prevent us from seeing witch-hunting in general as a method of social control. Early modern states often concerned themselves closely with regulating people’s thoughts and morals, taking over that responsibility from the Church, and persecution of witchcraft was an important aspect of this project of controlling people through belief. The pattern across Europe was for major witch-hunts to occur in areas where elite control was felt to be under threat, either at national or local level, which is certainly true of the ‘fractured and factious world’ of the seventeenth-century Basque country. Machielsen’s portrayal of how enthusiasm for witch-hunting switched to persecution of refugees (specifically ‘Portuguese’, at this time in France, a term for Iberian merchants who were conversos, from formerly Jewish families who had been forced to convert to Christianity) demonstrates how witch-hunting can be viewed as part of early modern states’ use of oppression for social control.

Machielsen says little about class, whether of those accused of witchcraft or of their accusers. In places, he repeats the familiar idea of the witch as outcast, commenting for example that ‘suspected witches were often those who did not belong, living at the margins of their communities: they were the ultimate outsiders set apart by difference’ (p.220). Some incidents, however, such as the attack on one of the teenaged accusers by the family of the accused, suggest that the witches here may not always have been as isolated as the traditional picture would have them. Here, though, we are limited by the nature of our sources: Pierre de Lancre was much more interested in the beauty of the young, female accusers and their descriptions of sexy goings-on at the sabbats than he was in sociological analysis.

The accusations against authority figures like priests and parents may suggest that some of what was happening here was a framework for elite control being turned back on the (comparatively) powerful by the powerless, as was also to happen later in the century at Salem, in Massachusetts. On the other hand, Machielsen is not entirely clear on the extent to which the young people making the witchcraft accusations were doing so off their own bat, and how far they were being pressured into giving evidence against their families by the witch-hunters. The latter was common in early-modern witch-hunts: the key witness in the Pendle witch-trial in 1612, for example, was a child, Jennet Device, who accused among others her mother, grandmother and sister.

Members of local elites were not necessarily safe from major witch-hunts, since when a large-scale panic about witchcraft really got going, it could sweep up almost anyone. Accusations of witchcraft could also be used in both the early-modern and the medieval periods as weapons in intra-elite conflicts, as for example in England in 1441 when the Duchess of Gloucester was convicted of using witchcraft to commit treason. In the Basque witch-hunt, however, there were limits beyond which the accusations of witchcraft were not allowed to go. Marie de Cornau, the tailor’s wife from Bayonne, found that out when she claimed that members of some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the town were witches. Far from seeing those she accused executed for witchcraft, she was sued for slander and may have died in prison. Even the midst of the witch-hunt, it seems that class will out.

[1] Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World, (Penguin Books, London 1999), p.102, quoted in Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, (Penguin Books, London 2004), pp.208-9.

[2] Bernat Desclot, Chronicle of the Reign of King Pedro III of Aragon, F. L. Critchlow (ed. and trans.), (Princeton University Press, Princeton 1928-1934), 2 vols., vol.2, p.191.

[3] Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts. A Global History, (Polity Press, Cambridge 2004), p.3.