Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [24]
New France
If witchcraft was everywhere in New Mexico, its presence was more episodic in other parts of North America. For many other Europeans—especially the French and Germans—settlement in North America offered fewer opportunities or venues for bringing charges of witchcraft. New France illustrates this shift. France lay in the heartland of Europe’s witch craze, and perhaps 1,000 people were executed there as witches. Canada was settled by the French precisely in the period of prosecutions. There were, for example, major outbreaks of possession in France in 1611 and 1634. In Normandy between 1600 and 1629, 119 people were condemned to death for witchcraft (although given the French system of appeal, only 59 people were executed).93 In 1608, during this period of intense witch activity, Samuel de Champlain launched a modest French settlement at Quebec, one dependent on Indian allies for its survival and commercial success. Missionaries joined French traders and soldiers in 1626, and the colony limped along, sustained by the fur trade and crucial diplomatic alliances with Hurons and Algonquian-speaking nations, and reaching a population of 356 (240 men and 116 women) in 1640.94
The French possessed an array of witch beliefs, but these beliefs found little traction in the altered circumstances in New France. Although those who migrated to New France seem to have carried their witch beliefs with them, there is no surviving evidence of any witch trials in New France. There was a reported case of demonic possession in Quebec around 1661, which allegedly resulted in an execution. Marie Catherine of Saint Augustine, a member of a religious order, was apparently quite preoccupied by demons.95 Her concern reveals important continuity with French cases of mass possession, which typically took place in convents, most famously at an Ursuline convent in Loudun in 1632–1634. Yet in New France there is no surviving documentary evidence that accusations there led to trials.
Why? There are a number of possible explanations. One centers on the status and position of the clergy. In France, priests played an especially important role in fostering witch beliefs. Parish priests were often poorly educated, and they relied in part on magic to sustain their status within the community. Their emphasis on magic occasionally led to priests themselves being accused of witchcraft. In the Normandy outbreak, for example, priests were accused of possessing books with diabolical incantations. Convicted priests endured especially gruesome torments. One defendant was ordered to make a public apology at Rouen’s cathedral, after which his tongue was pierced with a hot iron and he was hanged.96 If poorly trained priests could stimulate witch beliefs in France, such was not the case in New France, where there were not many priests; those who lived in the colony tended to have excellent educations; and they worked instead to combat beliefs in magic (as they identified it) among Indians, not to foster them. Also, the European inhabitants of New France proved not to be diligent attenders of mass. It was, in fact, Native Americans who were most likely to identify priests as witches (see documents 2 and 3).
Moreover, it is not clear how much the Jesuits of New France (who comprised the majority of priests there) worried about the Devil. Their attitude toward the Devil differed somewhat from that of their missionary counterparts in New Spain, where missionaries sought a spiritual conquest to accompany Spanish occupation. In New France, the church was weak, with priests few in number. Early missionary efforts (to Acadia from 1610 to 1616 and later Quebec) were aborted, and the Jesuits did not return