Social Semiotics History is Never Sure

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History is never sureMichel de Certeau

a

aBerry College, USA

Available online: 29 Apr 2009

To cite this article: Michel de Certeau (1996): History is never sure , Social Semiotics, 6:1, 7-16

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History i s Never Sure*M I C H E L D E C E R T E A U ( T R A N S LA T E D B Y M I C H A E L B S M I T H )

AbstractHi sto ry is Neve r Sure' is the introduction to Michel de Cer teau 'sbook (1970) Th ePossession of Loudun.As such it is a statem ent of thatwor k's methodology. More generally though , it is an outlin e of deCerteau 's view on historiography as it applies to a partic ular casehistory. Th e Possession of Loudunis a history of a 'possessio n' or'deviltry' among the Ursuline nuns in Loudun (in the department ofVienne) during the years 1632-1640. It presents source ma teria l in 14chapters, usually beginning and ending with de Certeau's ownreflections on the p rimary texts from a variety of perspe ctives:sociological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, semiotic, etcetera. Each halfof the bookthat is, the comm entary on the one hand, a nd thesource material on the otherexpresses not the 'truth ' of the other,but w hat is lacking in it. The book is thus a n extended illustr ation ofde Certea u's thesis that history is a distance, or a series of relativedistances, to be established in relation to texts through time .

Norm ally, the uncanny circulates discreetly below street level. But a crisis willsuffice to bring it flooding up everyw here from undernea th, pu shing asidemanho le covers, inundating the cellars, then the towns them selves. It alw ayscome s as a surprise w hen the nocturnal erupts into broad daylight. Wha t itreveals is an undergroun d existence, an inner resistance that has never beenbroken. This lurking force infiltrates the lines of tension within the society itthreatens. Sud denly it magnifies them; using the mean s, the circuitry alreadyin place, but reemploying them in the service of an anxiety that co mes fromafar-unanticipated. It breaks through barriers, flooding the social channels andopening new pathways that, once the flow of its passage has subsided, willleave behind a different landscape and a different order.Is this the outbreak o f something new, or the repetition of a past? The historiannever knows which. For mythologies reappear, providing the eruption ofstrangeness with forms of expression prepared in advance , as it were, for thatsudden inundation. These languages of social anxiety seem to reject both the

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MICH EL DE CERTEAU (TRANSLATED BY MICHAE L B SMITH)

limits of a present and the real conditions of its future. Like scars that mark thespot of an earlier illness for new ones, they designate in a dvance the signs andlocation of a flight (or return?) of time. W hence there arises that quality of theimmem orial associated with the irregularities of history, as if they harked backto a beginning without p ast, the dark recesses of an insecurity, a latent'singularity', revealed in the continuous plurality of events. But how valid isthis imp ression, too quick to relate the facts to an atemporal neutrality? Canwe so easily exile panic from history-make it into som ething outside or belowhistory, or history's law ?A Diabolical CrisisIn the past, these strange mo vements have often taken the form of thediabolical. In the societies that have ceased being religious or are not religious,they assume other physiognomies. Bu t the great resurgences of sorceries an dpossessions, such as the one that invaded Europe at the end of the sixteenthand the beginning of the seventeenth century, mark serious fault lines within areligious civilisation-perhaps the last that could be expressed by mean s of thereligious apparatus: the last rifts before a new beginning. They appear to signalan end that can not yet be spoken; hence their eschatological character. Theybetray before the future also an un certainty, the very expre ssion of whichbecomes an object of panic and repression. They bear witness to a gap that theyattempt to fill with the means (still religious) at hand.Entire groups are nolonger sure abou t 'obvious facts' that, though not susceptible of proof, werepreviously taken for granted by a social order and an organisation of values. Towhat will they turn to escape these intolerably shifting sands? Ho w can firmground befound to replace those certainties now underm ined by su spicion,those no longer credible resources and situations hen ceforth devoid o fmeaning? De viltries are at once symptoms and transitional solutions.The 'diabolical' crisis has a do uble significance. It reveals the imbalance of aculture, and it accelerates the process of its mu tation. It is not merely an objectof historical curiosity. It is the confrontation (one among others-more visiblethan others) of a society with the certainties it is losing and those it isattempting to acquire. All stability rests on u nstable equilibria that aredisturbed by every intervention intended to reinforce them. In spe cific socialsystems, witchcraft and possessionmake manifest-but in a wild, spectacularway-a sudden widening of a rift. Thesefault lines, ever in proportion to the

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History is Never Sure

culture in which they occur, take on different traits elsew here. But in any case,history is never sure.Loudun: A TheatreAs W. Muhlmann has remarked, there are 'times rich in demons' (1968:183).That is the casefor the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century.The possession of Loudun is situated almost at the end of a long epidemic, andduring the very years (1632-1640) when reasontook a brisk step forward withthe publication of D escartes' Discourse on Method (1637). By then, deviltryhad already taken on more subtle forms. It w as a public forum in whichtendencies of all kinds emerged, confronting one another with word andgesture. Possession became a great public trial: a confrontation between scienceand religion, a debate on w hat is ce rtain and what uncertain, on reason, thesupernatural, authority. This debate was orchestrated by an entire eruditeliterature and popular press. It was a 'theatre' that attracted the cu rious fromall of Franceand practically all of Europe; a circus for the satisfaction ofthese Gentlemen, according to the wo rding of m any official transcripts of theday.The show wa s staged in Loudun for almost ten years, and soon provided acentre for edification, apologetics, pilgrimages, and pious or philanthropicassociations. The diabolical was becoming commonplace. It was graduallybecoming profitable. It was reintroduced in the langua ge of a society, w hile atthe same time continuing to perturb it. In that history, the diabolical playedthe role set out for it by the rules of the already traditional Commediadel l 'ar te . An entire evolution was unfolding. The devil, violent at first, wasslowly becoming civilised. He w ould lead disputations. He was discussed. Hewould end up repeating himself monotonously. The horror was transformedinto a spectacle, the spectacle into a sermon. True, there was still weeping a ndwailing du ring the exorcisms that continued to be carried out after theexecution of 'the sorcerer' Urbain Grandier, but that did not prevent theserving of snacks to the spectators who filled the churches.Possession and SorceryIn order to understand that evolution and this fragment of history, we mustfirst set it within a larger framework.Possession is not the same thing as sorcery. The two phenomen a are distinctand they alternate with on e another,despite the fact that many early treatises



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associate the two, and even mix them up. So rcery (epidemics of sorcerers an dsorceresses) comes first. It extends from the last quarter of the sixteenthcentury (1570, Denmark; 1575-1590, Lorraine; etcetera) to the first third of theseventeenth century (1625, in Alsace; 1632 in W iirzburg, or 1630 in Bam berg,etcetera) with p rolongations until 1663 in Massachusetts, until 1650 in Neisse(Saxony), 1685 in Meiningen (Saxony). It raged in Fran ce (Brittany, Franche-Com te, Lorraine, Alsace, Savo ie, Poitou, Beam, etcetera), in Germany(Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony), in Switzerland,in England, in the Netherlands,but not, it seem s, in Spain or Italy (except in the northern and mountainousregion ofComo). During the period Lucieri Febvreconsidered that of the great'psychological revolution' (1958: 639), between 1590 and 162 0, sorcery seemsto delineate two Euro pes: the northern, in w hich it aboun ds, and the so uthern,in w hich it is rare. One last trait, but that is of great importance: it ispredominantly a rural phenomen on. Even if the co urts involved carry out themajor trials in the city, they are obliged to delegate com missioners and judgesin the country (such as B oguet, de Lancre, Nicolas Remy, etcetera). A differentspecies of the same genus comes after sorcery, existing side by side with it for awhile, then superseding it: possession. It first appears, tentatively, blocked ou twith dotted lines, in isolatedfemale cases, such as those of Nicole Aubry,Jeanne Fery, Marthe Brassier in p articular (1599). Its m odel is establishedwith the trial ofGaufridy in Aix-en-Provence (1609-1611), immediatelyorchestrated by the b ook that was to circulate everywhere and define the newseries: Histoire admirable de la possession et conversion d'une penitente.. . by Father Sebastien Michaelis (Paris, 1612). Other 'possessions' would

follow-Loudun especially (1632-1640), Louviers (1642-1647), Auxonne (1658-1663), etcetera. Each one invents on the basis of the initial sche ma, exhausts itsclientele, and propagates its own literature.This species is no longer rural, but urban. It no long er has the wild,massivean d bloodyform of primitive sorcery. It focuses on a few star performers only.It reveals personal relations and psychologies (involving individuals or micro-groups). The social milieu it involves is higher and more homog eneous; thecharacters are of a more 'middle' level, and there is less social differencebetween the judges an d the accused, who henceforth understand one anotherand m ove within the same kind of discourse. The former binary structure(judges-sorcerers) becomes ternary, and it is the third term, the possessedwom en, that receives an increasingly large portion of public attention: in otherwords, they have become victims, and are no longer guilty. As for the

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sorcerers, they are frequently priests, physicians or well-educated people,sometimes considered to be 'libertine'; they thus contravene in an alreadycompletely new way the traditional or popular image of the cure, the chaplainor the physician. With these new 'sorcerers', it is still a secret lore that isconsidered threatening and treated as magic, but a modern lore, creating adifferent form of distancefrom the group.Deviltry movesfrom violence directed against the mag icians to a pityingcuriosity for its victims . It is located in the convents, and no longer in themoors and re mote villages. It becomes less vengeful, punitive, but moreapologetic and predicating, and changesfrom a 'war' on the sorcerers to aspectacle that ha s something of the circus and so mething of the popularmission-even though the 'show' continues to require an execution. Possession'thus constitutes a next step in relation to sorcery. But it w ill lead in turn tothe po litical trials of [female] poisoners.These two mom ents of deviltry ma ke up but o ne segment in a larger, ongoingevolution. On the one hand,the 'diabolical' phenomeno n will espouse morecultural forms, expressing itself in literature and folklore, dissolving also intopopular astrology and 'pastorals' in w hich many anti-establishment themessurvive. On the other hand,it will expand,but, as it becomes politicised, it willbe transformed; the resistance of the common folk will manifest itself in apanoply of new languag es, from riots to pedlar pamphlets, though it willcontinue to be marginal.The Marriage of Heaven and HellWhatever the c ase may be concerning the intricacies of theseevolvingphenomen a, em phasis must also beplacedupon the instances of synchroniccohesion. One of these latter concerns religious history more particularly.There is a connection, in a grea t many cases, as if b y som e strangely pre-arranged meeting, between the possessed or the 'possessionists' (thoseconvinced of the reality of the possession) and the communities of 'spirituals'.On the map of mid-seventeenth century Fr ance, the cases of possession and themost 'devout' (in the most positive sense of the term) groups are often found inthe same places: Nancy, Evreux, etcetera. During its wild years, Loudun wasalso a school of spirituality. At the centre of that demonologicalfair, for threeyears Jean-Joseph Surin, one of the greatest mystics of the seventeenth century,was present. He was at once the Don Quixote and the H olderlin of that'extraordinary adventure'. The devil's theatres are also centres for the mystics.



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This is no mere coincidence. A cultural transformation seems to marginaliseall the expressions of the sacred, from the most suspect to the purest. Theyconverge at the same position in society: on its outer limits. Sim ilarly, theshaken ecclesiastical institutions let through their cracks and force out at thesame points a kind of 'melange' of the most archaic and the most radical (Surinnoted this) religious symptom s that are then suspected and frequently accusedtogether of constituting the same social and doctrinal 'heresy'.More fundamentally, Alfred Jarry is correct in saying about Loudun that the'possession by the Holy Spirit and by the devil are notably symm etrical' (1964:81). Both 'possessions' present an ana logous structure. In the m odality ofcontrary solutions, they respond to a problem of meaning, but stated in theterms of the formidableand constraining alternative-God or the Devil-thatisolates the quest for the absolutefrom social mediations. Mysticism andpossession often form the same pockets in a society whose language thickens,loses its spiritual porosity and becomes impermeable to the divine. The relationto a 'beyond' vacillates in such a case between the imm ediacy of a diabolicalseizure or the imm ediacy of a divine illumination. Jeanne des Anges herself, themost famous of the possessed, would appear afterward, during the last twenty-five years of her life, in the persona of a 'mystic' visionary.Metamorphoses of HistoryFrom this perspective there is a complicity, and, to take up one of WilliamBlake's titles, a 'marriage of heavenan d hell'. This is a ch aracteristic trait of'possession'. It coincides with one of the themes of baroque art, metamorp hosis.The instability of the ch aracters, the reversals of experience, the uncertainty oflimits indicate the mutation of a mental universe. Like the grotto in Florence inwhich Bernardo Buontalenti sculpted hum an bodies still undecided in theprimitive m ud, wh ich lets them emerge or pulls them b ack into it (cf Heikamp1964: 2-9), it being unclear which, so Loudun is in itself-tucked away in aFrench province, on the bo rder between Catholic and P rotestant c onvictionsthat oppose and relativise each other-a w orld poised between what isdisappearing and what is beginning. Co mplex, at once savage and subtle, it isa place of instability. It may be defined as a point of passage . Here adhere theanguish and amb ition that are inseparable from society's shifting sa nds. Deepshifts are m anifested here, revealed by the 'metamorphoses of the devil', dear toHenri Lefebvre (1962: 63 -71,1995 : 56-64).

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These metamorphoses, which can be deciphered through the se ries ofepisodesthat constitute o ver almost a decade the war ofLoudun, extend into thesuccessive interpretations given to the events. From the libelli of 1633 to theopera by Penderecki (The Devils of Loudun , 1969) an entire literature isdevoted to them. It includes Alexandre Dum as, Alfred de V igny, JulesMichelet, Aldous Huxley, etcetera. In d ifferent cultural spaces, the old debatesserve new causes. Other wars transform the history ofLoudun into the legendof a present. Yesterday's antagonists, mobilised by the participants in morerecent conflicts, offer the latter a m eans of entering into a dialogue with theirown devils. In part, h istorians perform the service to society of putting thevocabulary of a past at its disposal. The figures of ormer times become theeponymous heroes of a present.Th e bibliography ofLoudun is the history of this recycling. The theatre ofyesteryear is en rolled in new trials that assign to U rbain Grandier a wholeseries of roles. The 'sorcerer' of yore ha s become now a victim of Catholicism,now a 'precurso r of free thinking',1 now a prophet of the scientistic spirit, nowa herald of the gospel of progress. His 'adversaries' are promoted to similar butopposite destinies: Jeanne des Anges reappears as a martyr of persecutedChristianity; Surin, a s a witness to a universal 'magne tism' or to the'primordial fact'; the exorcists or Laubardemont as zealous servants of a'social' or political 'order'.... There is a history of the history ofLoudun.Visit LoudunStill today, visit Loudun, no w dim inished by two-thirds of its formerinhabitants, shrunken dow n upon itself, its little streets clutching too manyabsences, too many phantoms. You w ill be instructed to follow, from the palaisde justice to the church Sainte-Croix, the 'stations' staggered along theHero's final journey, a s if the town had rearranged its architecture into a W ayof the Cross. Isolated spots reconstitute, thanks to the voice and gestures of the .guide, the unfolding of a lost history: the room in which the de ath sentence waspronounced; the place w here he fell the first time; the street-corner where 'amonk' struck Grandier with a staff; the porch of the church Saint-Pierre, infront of which the condem ned man had to confess his misdeeds publicly, b utwas helped by Father Grillau, a good soul; and last of all the square ofMarcheSainte-Croix, for that is where, before the priest Rene B ernier, the repentant'good robber',2 and ben eath the gaze of Louis Trincant, the persecutorinsolently installed at his window, the Cure perished in the flames lit by his



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exorcists themselves. Deatribulatory, the questfor thepast has taken the formof a legend; the itinerary, an initiatory cha racter.But what historical research does not setout from a legend? Inprovidingitself with sources or criteria of information and interpretation, it defines inadvance what is to be read in a given p ast. From this point of view, historymoves together with thehistorian. It follows the flow of time. It is never sure.A Book DividedHow could history be otherwise than unsu re? History books begin with apresent. They are constructed on thebasis of two series ofdata:on the on ehand, the 'ideas' we have about apast, ideas that are still conveyed by oldmaterial, butalong pathways instituted by a newmentality; on theotherhand,docume nts and 'archives', remains saved by chance, frozen in collections thatattach meanings to them that are also new. Between the two, a difference makesit possible to disclosean historical distance, the wayobservation from twodistant points ma de possible LeVerrier's invent ion ofa planet as yetunknown.It is within that interspace that this boo k on Loudun was formed. It is crackedfrom top to bottom, revealing the combination, or therelation; that m akeshistory possible. For, thus divided between comm entary and archival sources,it becko ns toward a reality that once had its living unity, and no longer is.Itis, in short, broken by anabsence. Its form is in proportion to what it tells: apas t . That is whyeach of its halves says w hat theother is missing, rather thanits truth.Archives of PossessionThe 'sources' of the half madeup ofarchivesare considerable. They are givenelsewhere.3 Contrary to theway things were in the time ofsorceries, thepossessed had the floor. Henceforth, theaccused and thevictims com e not justfrom the illiterate and close-mouthed countryside, alm ost as if condemned toranting protests that today can only be heard through the reports or graphs ofnotables or judges (de Certeau 1970). With thepossessions, thedevil speaks.He writes. If I dare say so, he publishes, but because his clients belong tohigher social strata. That is why wehave hundreds of letters andwritings ofthe possessed, particularly writings (which abound,butare for themost part

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unpublished in the case of the last two) by Urbain Grandier, Jeanne des Angesand Father Surin, on Loudun. We can hear what is going on on the other sideof the barricade .Furthermo re, with possessions, proceedings no longer take place in camera;they are no long er roundly expedited by travelling tribunals who move to thebad parts of the provinces. They are public, theatrical, interminable. Hence themassive files of minutes punctiliously written and signed day after day formonths a nd years. E ye witnesses have also left their accounts: not only thejudges, the exorcists, the local,diocesan and national no tables, but a lso thevisitors-the curious of all kinds, socialites on holiday, scholars hot on the trail,collectors of the extraordinary, apologists interested in an extra argumen t,controversists bent on refuting an objection, and especially the usual public atthis sort of spectacle, pilgrims of the uncanny for reasons their w rittenaccounts only allow us to guess. They converge on Loudun from Angers,Bordeau x, Lyon, Paris, but also from Scotland, Italy, the Netherlands, etcetera.The archives also give us acce ss to the m ines of a more secret and m ore officialhistory: reports addressed to Richelieu or Louis XIII; correspondence of theFather General of the Jesuits (Rom e) with Paris, Bordeaux and Loudun; lettersfrom Laubardemont; medical testimony, theological consultations; warningsfrom administrations in Paris or Poitou; etcetera.All these manusc ripts (which have had to be assembled like the scattered piecesof a puzzle) represent the rest of the iceberg, what lies below the water'ssurface. They restore the hidden depths to what w as 'given to the public' fromthe start. Still, the extent of contemporary publication was already quiteconsiderable. It was in the form of lampoons, histoires extraordinaires,veritables relations [true accoun ts], and leaflets that p ublishers wo uld re-editfrom town to town, often in the same year, for their regional publics: Ang ers,Lyon, Paris, Poitiers, Rouen. These 'pieces' are to be situated betweendevotional booklets and the first newspapers (cf Martin 1969:164-89,253-75). They are still propaganda, but tend progressively in the direction ofthe news item. Though scattered to the four winds since then, and not listed inthe inventories after the death of the individuals or booksellers, they seem tohave had a wide distribution. In any case, as far back as 1634, the Mercurefrangois, used by R ichelieu and Fa therJoseph as a mean s to directing andcorrecting public opinion, gave almostforty pages to the official version of thepossession.4



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Thus the uncanny is deeply rooted in the substance of a society. It is connectedby too many sociocultural ties to be isolated from it. To attempt to extract itwould mean draw ing along with it all the soil to which it is attached in somany ways. P erhaps it reveals an overall change that, once again, consists inexorcising or marginalising the first symptom s of a crisis as the latterprogressively gives rise to a new order.But first we must try to understand.

Berry College, USANotes* [The phrase 'never sure' is of prime impo rtance in unde rstan ding deCerteau 's approach, according to Guy Pet i tdemange, who points out tha t i treappears a few pages later with a different meaning given to the word'history' (1988: 126-7). In the latter case it is no longer history qu a the objectof the study of history that is never sure, but the historian's view and/orwriting of history.Trans.]1. This is the title of the wo rk on Urbain Grandier by Thomas Bensa, publishe d

in Paris in 1899 by the Socit d 'ditions littraires.2. [The French 'bon larraon' or 'good robber' would be recognisable by deCerte au's French re aders as an oblique reference to Luke 23: 39.Trans.]3. The list may be found in de Certeau 1966: 92-99, and in the additio nalinformation given by Robert Mandrou's general introduction to hisMagistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe sicle (1968: 18-70).4. Mercure franois, vol. 20 (year 1634), (Paris: E. Richer, 1637), 746-780.Referencesde Certe au M ed 1966 Jean-Joseph Surin, Correspondance Descle De Brouwer,collection Bibliothque europ enne Paris1970 'Une muta tion cu lturelle et religieuse. Les magistrats deva nt les sorciersdu XVIIe sicle' Revue d'histoire de l'Eglise de France 56: 300-319 (R epublish edin de Certea u M 1973 L'absent de l'histoire Mame Paris: 13-39)Febvre L 1958 Annales ESC 13: 639Giard L 1988 Le voyage mystique: Michel de Certeau Les Editions du Cerf /Recherches de Science Religieuse P arisHeikam p D 1964 'L'architecture de la mtamo rphose ' L'Oeil 114/June : 2-9Jarry A 1964 L'Amour absolu Mercure de France ParisLefebvre H 1962 Introduction a la modernit Editions de Minuit Paris1995 Introduction to Modernity Trans J Moore , Verso LondonMandrou R 1968 Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe sicle Plon ParisMartin H-J 1969 Livre, pouvoirs et socit Paris au XVIIe sicle Droz GenevaMhlm ann W E 1968 Messianismes rvolutionnaires du tiers-monde Gall imard ParisPetitdem ange G 1988 'Voir est dvor ant' in Giard ed 1988: 125-145

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