Sorcières
In Mona Chollet’s *Sorcières* (2018), the witch is not a figure of folklore but one that feminism reclaims. Three types of women targeted by the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries live on in her: the independent woman, the childless woman, the older woman. Rehabilitating the witch means lifting the “double curse” cast on both women and nature, and turning this persecuted figure into a beacon of emancipation.
La sorcière incarne la femme affranchie de toutes les dominations, de toutes les limitations ; elle est un idéal vers lequel tendre, elle montre la voie.
Chollet turns an insult into a banner. The word “witch,” she reminds us, “was once the worst mark of infamy, the false accusation that led to torture and death for tens of thousands of women.” Today’s feminists, “even more than their 1970s predecessors,” are “haunted” by it: the witch is “both the absolute victim, for whom justice is demanded, and the stubborn rebel, untouchable.” Chollet makes this dual figure a landmark.
Her book unfolds it through three portraits of women whom centuries of witch-hunts “censored, erased, suppressed”: the independent woman—widows and single women were especially targeted—the childless woman—those who claimed control over their fertility—and the elderly woman, “who became, and has remained ever since, an object of horror.” The persecution didn’t just kill: it left behind “prejudices” and “representations” still shaping what a woman is allowed to be.
Hence the act of reclamation. The word, she writes, “evokes a grassroots knowledge, a vital force, an accumulated experience that official knowledge scorns or represses.” To reclaim the witch is to name that force and challenge the “warlike relationship” that has developed “toward both women and nature”—the “double curse still to be lifted.” Chollet isn’t inventing this current: she points to the neopagan movement of California’s Starhawk, whose work Isabelle Stengers brought into French; it’s there, not in her own prose, that the militant vocabulary of magical reclamation resides.
Chollet’s witch ≠ the folkloric cliché of the pointed hat and broomstick, a “honorary title” or Halloween decoration: she first points to a real historical violence, not a costume. And ≠ a “superpowered” heroine of fiction: Chollet rejects this “misunderstanding” that turns what was once terror into fantasy. The figure she reclaims doesn’t console—it “shows the way.”