Shadows of a Doubt

The Shadows of a Doubt describes how sorcery transformed from a 'survival' of premodern superstition in the early nineteenth century, into twentieth-century fears of black magic, bound up with anxieties about colonialism, psychology, parascience, consumerism, and conspiracy. Although there was no crime of witchcraft in France after the Revolution of 1789, fears of harmful magic continued to trouble the courts from 1790–1940. Drawing on more than 1,200 cases from the press and regional archives, William G. Pooley demolishes common assumptions about gender and the decline of magic. He reconstructs the perspectives of different actors involved in witchcraft disputes, from magical 'unwitchers' and fraudsters, to judges and the police, occultists and journalists, tracing contradictions and disagreements amongst them. As a result, this clash of doubts reveals an explanation for the puzzling endurance of witchcraft into modernity. The Shadows of a Doubt ultimately shows how, in the twentieth century, witchcraft was reshaped into a modern form of racial, psychological, and existential anxiety—never a coherent belief, but a question posing unresolvable problems to authorities, psychiatrists, and jurists alike.