First published in French in 1862 as La Sorcière, Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft is one of the nineteenth century’s most distinctive interpretations of European witchcraft. Rather than approaching the witch simply as a figure of superstition or evil, Michelet places her within a much larger history of medieval society, religion and popular resistance.

For Michelet, the witch emerges from the hardships of medieval life. He portrays her as healer, keeper of older traditions and, increasingly, an outsider standing against the religious and social authorities of her age. This was an unusual interpretation in the nineteenth century and gives the book much of its enduring character. Michelet’s witch is not presented merely as the subject of persecution, but as a symbolic figure through whom he explores oppression, rebellion, nature and forbidden knowledge.

The first half of the book develops this interpretation through chapters on the survival of older gods, medieval despair, domestic spirits, possession, the pact with Satan, charms and philtres, healing, the witches’ sabbath and the Black Mass. The second turns increasingly towards historical episodes and accusations, including the Basque witch persecutions, the case of Urbain Grandier and the possessions at Loudun, Madeleine Bavent and the events at Louviers, and the eighteenth-century case of Catherine Cadière. Classiques des sciences sociales

Michelet’s interpretation reflects his own nineteenth-century historical and philosophical outlook and should not be read as modern scholarly consensus on European witchcraft. Its importance lies instead in the distinctive way he reinterpreted the witch as a figure of resistance, placing the work within the wider history of changing attitudes towards witchcraft, persecution and religious authority.

That unusual perspective is precisely what gives the work its place in the history of witchcraft literature. Satanism and Witchcraft records a major nineteenth-century attempt to reconsider the witch—not simply as an object of fear, but as a figure through whom questions of religion, gender, persecution and social rebellion could be explored.