In 1682 Montreal, an accused witch escaped sanction
Anne Lamarque was in trouble. She was 33 and already the owner of a popular Montreal bar and auberge. But she had got under the skin of Montreal’s parish priest, and the authorities threw the book at her. On June 20, 1682, she went on trial, accused of adultery, promiscuity, running a brothel and, ominously, witchcraft.
Witnesses were heard over the subsequent two weeks. For years, it was alleged, she had neglected her obligation to receive communion at Easter. She possessed a grimoire — that is, a book of spells — that was as thick as a finger, filled with words in Latin and Greek as well as French. Her own husband called her “a devil and a sorceress.”
Lamarque showed little sign of being cowed. The supposed grimoire was nothing but a catalogue of herbs and medicines, she said. The parish priest, she was heard to declare, “was not worthy to say mass and … committed so much sacrilege, being in mortal sin, that she threatened to beat him like a dog and tear his robe.”
That priest was probably Father Étienne Guyotte, a new arrival from France who was rapidly acquiring a reputation for irascibility. During his tenure in Montreal, he would often rebuke parishioners by name from the pulpit. On one occasion, Guyotte publicly refused communion to a woman wearing powder and jewelry, instead of admonishing her privately in the confessional. A young army officer serving in Montreal, Baron Louis-Armand de Lahontan, called him a misanthropic bigot: “Everything is scandal and mortal sin to this surly creature.”
As the proceedings against Lamarque dragged on into July, more than three dozen witnesses were heard, not all of them testifying against her. For example, one of her lodgers was happy to accept Lamarque’s explanation that there was nothing at all sinister about her mysterious book. Still, the balance of testimony was not in her favour and, had it been up to the priest, she would have been banished from the colony — or worse. But it was not up to him. The civil administration might have gone along with the notion of trying Lamarque, but that was all. Punishment was the royal administrators’ prerogative, and they were rather more enlightened than the clergy.
“Neither the common folk nor the colony’s leaders were particularly inclined to rigorist devotion,” historian Leslie Choquette has written of New France. “On the contrary, a measure of popular indifference was evident in proscribed behaviour, or even outright anticlericalism, and a modern mentality was often visible among the administrative elite.” And so Lamarque escaped sanction. Her case stands in stark contrast with what was going on just a few hundred miles away in the English colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts. In the Puritan settlements there, witchcraft was thought to be a constant menace. Connecticut’s first supposed witch was hanged in 1647; more than 100 others, most of them women and including 20 people in Salem, Mass., would be executed in New England before the century’s hysteria subsided.
New France was a more enlightened place. It probably helped that women here could aspire to a social prominence denied their sisters in the Puritan colonies. It’s no coincidence that Anne Lamarque was a businesswoman independent of her husband and that she had friends, or at least acquaintances, in positions of authority.
In any event, throughout the history of New France, witchcraft trials were exceedingly rare. Furthermore, according to Raymond Boyer in Les Crimes et les Châtiments au Canada Français, “no accused found guilty was ever put to death. This remarkable record is unique in Christendom.”
Lamarque’s trial surely had more to do with Father Guyotte’s rebarbative nature than with anything the woman might have been up to. The priest’s inability to shepherd his flock compassionately would eventually lead his exasperated superiors, in 1693, to recall him to France.