As for the names of the two witches, Georgel and Delort, it seems that Lamothe-Langon took them neither from the fourteenth century nor from the seventeenth but from his own times. Both are decidedly rare names in France — but both were borne by literary personages who lived in Paris at the same time as Lamothe-Langon and who worked in the same fields as he. They were the abbé Jean-François Georgel, whose six volumes of memoirs, published posthumously in 1817-18, are almost as fanciful as the memoirs that Lamothe-Langon was to produce in such abundance; and Joseph Delort, who was a contemporary of Lamothe-Langon’s, and came from the same region.(37) Delort achieved precisely the kind of career that Lamothe-Langon had hoped for: he became a successful civil servant, rising to be deputy head of the section for science, literature and the arts. He also wrote historical works of a decidedly romantic kind, at the same time as Lamothe-Langon was producing his historical romances. Lamothe-Langon cannot have failed to know the works of Georgel and Delort, and everything suggests that the names of his two witches represents the private joke of a man who — as the Naundorff episode also shows — was quite a joker.
One feature of the spurious confessions remains to be accounted for: the references to the Dualist religion. No other witch, in the entire history of European witchcraft, ever seems to have maintained that God and the Devil are equal powers, locked in eternal struggle; or that the Devil is on the point of defeating God; or that this earth is the Devil’s realm; or that the souls of the dead belong to the Devil and serve his purposes. These ideas were contributed by Lamothe-Langon himself. As a Toulousain, he knew something about Catharism — indeed, a major part of his history is concerned with the Inquisition’s struggle against that exotic heresy. By introducing these distortions of Catharist beliefs into his portrayal of witchcraft he effected a major falsification of history.
In 1828 Karl Ernst Jarcke, writing in Berlin, launched the notion of a society of witches going back to pre-Christian times. In 1829 Etienne-Leon de Lamothe-Langon published in Paris his fabrication of an inquisitorial report attributing Dualist beliefs to a pair of fourteenth-century witches. It is hard to say which did more to bedevil research into the true origins of the great witch-hunt.
Historians might have been less willing to believe in the fourteenth-century witch-hunt in the south of France but for the fact that the same thing had apparently happened in the north of Italy. Here the authority looked absolutely unimpeachable: a legal opinion written and signed, some time around 1350, by the great Italian jurist and professor of civil law Bartolus, or Bartolo, of Sassoferrato. In his own day Bartolo’s prestige was unique, and for centuries after his death his remained a name to conjure with. Certainly nobody seems to have questioned the authenticity of the legal opinion with which we are concerned. Nevertheless it is a forgery. This can be proved; and in addition the approximate date of the forgery can be established and the forger identified.
The first modern historian to draw attention to the text seems to have been Johann Joseph von Görres, who summarized it in the third volume of his Christliche Mystik, published in 1840.(38) Three years later another German, Wilhelm Soldan, mentioned it in his pioneering history of the witch-trials, alongside the stories which he took from Bardin and Lamothe-Langon.(39) Soon it was being used for frankly polemical purposes. In 1869 Pope Pius IX decided to make papal infallibility a dogma of the Church, and called the first Vatican council to promulgate it. In the furious controversy which this step provoked within the Church, the celebrated Bavarian historian and professor of theology Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger emerged as the most formidable critic of the new dogma. In a work which attracted attention throughout western Europe, he marshalled the historical arguments against papal infallibility. Here the Bartolo text appears in a peculiarly sinister light. When dealing with the treatment of suspected witches by the Inquisition, Dollinger writes:
At first the inquisitors.... took legal opinions. The most famous jurist of his time, Bartolo, writing around 1350, favoured death by burning. This legal opinion, which marks the start of witch-burning, is most noteworthy. Here the evil effects of the authoritarian, crudely materialistic interpretation of the Bible, as practised by popes and their legal and theological parasites, are palpably evident. . The papal lawyers ruined theology and the papal theologians ruined jurisprudence. In this spirit jurists declared, as Bartolo did in this opinion, that a magic-making woman must be burned, because Christ had said that whoever left his community must be cast out, like a withered branch that one burns.(40)
Since then the text has figured in most histories of the witch-hunt. In particular, in 1900-1 Joseph Hansen printed it in full in his collection of sources and summarized it very fully in his history — which was enough to ensure its acceptance right down to the present day.(41)
In its original Latin form the opinion is presented as a reply by Bartolo to an enquiry from the bishop of Novara. Minus the references to earlier legal authorities, it can be translated as follows:
The witch-woman concerned.... ought to be delivered up for the ultimate penalty and burned at the stake. For she is said to have renounced Christ and her baptism; therefore she should die, in accordance with the saying of our Lord Jesus Christ in the gospel according to John, chapter 15: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” And the law of the gospel takes precedence over all other laws and must be followed even in disputes in the law-courts, since it is God’s law.
This witch confesses that she made a cross of straw and trampled it underfoot, and that she made the cross for the purposes of trampling it underfoot. By itself this would be enough to earn her the death penalty.
Furthermore the witch confesses that she has adored the Devil, bending the knee to him. For this she should suffer the death penalty.
She confesses that she has bewitched children by touch and glance, so that they died. It is certain that they died, and their mothers voiced complaints about their deaths. For this the witch should die, as a murderess. For I have heard from holy theologians that the women who are called witches can harm, even fatally, by touch or glance, bewitching men or children or beasts, because these women have corrupt souls, which they have vowed to the demon. But this last point, as to whether witches can harm by touch or glance, and particularly whether they can kill, I leave to Holy Mother Church and to the holy theologians to decide. For the present I do not pronounce on that point, for the preceding reasons are sufficient for this witch to be delivered up for the ultimate penalty, and for her goods to be confiscated and handed over to the treasury of lord Joannes de Plotis, bishop of Novara, who is lord of the spiritualities and temporalities of the town of Orta, where the witch comes from.
As to whether, if the witch repents and returns to the Catholic faith, and is prepared publicly to abjure her error to the satisfaction of lord Joannes de Plotis, bishop of Novara, she ought to be spared temporal penalties and death in this world: there is no doubt that she ought to be spared in that case; I mean, if she returns to the faith, and gives signs of repentance, immediately after the detection of her offence. But if this happens not immediately, but after a lapse of time, I think it must be left to the judge to decide whether the signs of repentance are genuine or whether she is moved by fear of punishment; in the former case she should be spared, in the latter not. I say that this should be left to the judgement of the lord bishop Plotis and the lord inquisitor. If however it is conceded that she is a murderess, she shall not by repentance avoid death in this world; but, as I said, I leave the matter of murder to be decided by Holy Church.