Pierre de Lancre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pierre de Lancre was the French judge of Bordeaux that conducted a massive witch-hunt in Labourd in 1609.

His granfather, Bernard de Rostegui, native of Lower Navarre, had changed his Basque surname for the French one of de Lancre upon migrating to Bourdeaux. This familiar renegation seems to have influenced him into a deep hate against everything Basque. He considered Basques to be ignorant, superstitious, proud and irreligious. Basque women were on his eyes libertines and Basque priests were for him just womanizers with no religious zeal. He believed that the root of Basque natural tendency towards evil was love of dance. All these prejudices are refelected in his work Tableau de l'Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Demons, published in 1613, not long after the process.

In 1622, he published a second book: L'incredulité et mescreance du sortilege, that is an extension of his first one. Thanks to these books we know something of what happened in the process that de Lancre directed against the people of Labourd, because the judicial records vanished during the French Revolution.

[edit] The Labourd witch-hunt of 1609

The process began with a dispute between the Lord of Urtubi and some people that had accused him and his men to be witches. This dispute evolved in sporadic fight and soon the authorities of Donibane-Lohitzune asked for the intervention of the Judge of Bourdeaux, who happened to be de Lancre.

Soon he put all Labourd upside down and in less than a year some 70 people were burnt at the stake, among them several priests. De Lancre wasn't satisfied: he estimated that some 3,000 witches were still at large (10% of the population of Labourd in that time). But the Parliament of Bourdeaux, eventually dismissed him from office.