The Cadiere/Girard Affair: Seduction and Heresy in 18th-Century French Political Culture

FAIN: FB-53316-07

Mita Choudhury
Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY 12604-0001)

This project is a microhistory of the 1731 Cadière/Girard trial, in which a young penitent, Catherine Cadière, accused the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Girard, her former spiritual director, of bewitchment, seduction, and heresy. The trial illustrates how the theological and political disputes over the anti-Jansenist papal bull Unigenitus (1713) transformed a scandal involving confessional irregularity into a national political minefield. The appeals made to the public and the multilayered public response to the trial reveal the emergence of modern political values. Numerous sources, which included legal briefs, pamphlets, and fiction, pointed to a secular community comprised of autonomous individuals.

Associated Products

The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France (Book)
Title: The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France
Author: Mita Choudhury
Abstract: This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French society. Both contributed to the French people’s ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king. Choudhury builds her story through an extensive examination of archival material, including trial records, pamphlets, periodicals, and unpublished correspondence from witnesses. The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint offers new insights into how the eighteenth-century public interpreted the accusations and why the case consumed the public for years, developing from a local sex scandal to a referendum on religious authority and its place in French society and politics.
Year: 2015
Publisher: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

"Genre, religion et histoire de la culture politique et de la privee en France: le proces Girard-Cadiere" (Book Section)
Title: "Genre, religion et histoire de la culture politique et de la privee en France: le proces Girard-Cadiere"
Author: Mita Choudhury
Abstract: na
Year: 2014
Publisher: Louvain: Presses Universite de Louvain
Book Title: Echelles de pouvoir, rapports de genre: femmes, jesuites et modele ignatien, siecles XVIII-XIX

"An Unlikley Pair: Satire and Jansenism in the Sarcelades, 1731-1764" (Article)
Title: "An Unlikley Pair: Satire and Jansenism in the Sarcelades, 1731-1764"
Author: Mita Choudhury
Abstract: na
Year: 2013
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: French Historical Studie, 36, 4 (Fall 2013): 543-570

"Female Mysticism and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France" (Book Section)
Title: "Female Mysticism and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France"
Author: Mita Choudhury
Editor: Katherine Quinsey
Abstract: na
Year: 2012
Publisher: Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press
Book Title: Under the Veil

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