The Devils Of Loudun By Aldous Huxley

The Devils Of Loudun, By Aldous Huxley Essay, Research Paper

‘The Devils of Loudun’, by Aldous Huxley

The Devils of Loudun is a historical account of religious fanaticism and sexual hysteria in seventeenth century France, and an investigation into the circumstances that led to the torture and execution of a local parson who, during a farcical ecclesiastical trial, was accused of having commerce with devils , and of bewitching a whole convent of nuns.

Huxley s erudition was legendary (it was even said of him that he knew everything ), and the range of his knowledge is apparent when one considers the variety of references and digressions he uses to support his inquiries and perspicacious observations; he quotes with equal ease from enlightenment works like the Provincial Letters of Pascal to the contemplative writings of the Zen Buddhists. As a psychological study The Devils offers a clear and convincing portrayal of unusual minds caught up in still stranger circumstances. As for the story, it is not at all surprising that Huxley chose to write about this particular episode in French history, as many of the events described exemplify themes that dominated his polemical novels and celebrated essays: present is the issue of man s ongoing obsession with self-transcendence which was so pertinent in the excellent, infamous Doors of perception ; the dilemma that recurs throughout his fiction, that of the cloistered and suppressed mind dealing with passionate human emotion, is here in extremis. On a functional level, The Devils of Loudun seeks to oppose humankind s tendency towards hypocrisy, malice and self denial, and expose some of the terrible results of those failings specific to the case: mutual temporary madness (or near madness) for nearly all concerned, and, when a scapegoat is found, death.

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, into an eminently academic family. His grandfather was T.H. Huxley, the nineteenth-century biologist and contemporary of Darwin, who was famous for popularising and defending the theory of evolution. His mother, who died when he was just fourteen, was a niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, and Aldous was a nephew to the Victorian novelist Humphry Ward. He suffered another blow upon the suicide of his brother Trevenen in 1914. The second illness to affect him early in life, after his Mother s cancer, was an eye infection which he contracted at the age of sixteen while studying at Eton. His vision was left permanently impaired, thus preventing any possibility of a scientific career. His brother Julian went on to become an eminent zoologist, while he recovered enough of his sight to study English at Balliol College in Oxford.

He was unfit for service during the war, and spent his post-Oxford years visiting and working for lady Ottoline Morrell, the famous Grande-dame of literary circles and patroness of the arts. He met a great many literary figures at this time, such as D.H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, and several of them appeared as characters in his early novels. His early collections of poetry, such as The Burning Wheel , are characterised by a reliance on French symbolism and a growing interest in mysticism and the inner spirit . Altogether he published over fifty complete works, the most enduringly popular being Brave New World , a satire on the domination of science and state control, and The Doors Of Perception , an essay on his first encounter with mescalin.

By 1919 he had met his first wife, Maria, and they spent the twenties and thirties living first in Italy, then France and finally California, where he spent the remainder of his life. He worked on film scripts for a time, but America eventually left him disillusioned: he described it as all waste . The Devils Of Loudun was published in 1952, three years before Maria died of cancer. It was adapted for the stage by John Whiting in 1961, and for the screen in 1971, by Ken Russell. He remarried a year after his wife s death, this time to Laura Archera, who was present by his bed when he died in 1963.

Chapter one places a young man -who would later become curate at Loudun- in his social and historical context. Urbain Grandier was educated at the Jesuit College in Bordeaux, and was ordained a secular priest after the necessary post-graduate studies. While his teachers purpose was to create well-rounded Catholics, in practice some of the Jesuits best pupils left school to become free-thinkers or even, like Jean Labadie, Protestants.

Deprived of any other information regarding Grandier s youth, Huxley shrewdly turned instead to the autobiography of Jean-Jacques Bouchard, which provided him with an account of a seventeenth century boyhood and ecclesiastical education so clinically objective that nineteenth century scholars could publish it only privately, and with emphatic comments on the author s unspeakable depravitity. This was an ostensibly pious (if divided) age for France, but in reality everyone from the Dauphin at Versailles to the peasant in the field were regularly indulged:

At school, under the good Fathers, there are no strenuous games, and the boys superfluous energy can find no vent except in excessive masturbation, and the practice, on half-holidays, of homosexuality.

At age twenty-seven, Grandier was assigned one of the parishes at Loudun. Most of the fairer sex approved of him -he was as hands