Huysmans and Là-bas: Gilles de Rais and Satanism in fin-de-siècle Paris
Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1891 novel: the writer Durtal, his research into Gilles de Rais and the occultist world of late nineteenth-century Paris.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, pen name of Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, was born in Paris in 1848 and worked for more than thirty years as a civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior. After his beginnings in Émile Zola's naturalist circle, he broke away in 1884 with À rebours, the novel of the aesthete Des Esseintes. Seven years later, in 1891, he published Là-bas, the book that made him famous as the chronicler of Parisian Satanism.
Durtal and the Marshal of France
The protagonist, the writer Durtal, is a double of the author. Tired of naturalism, which he considers unable to describe the soul, he is working on a biography of Gilles de Rais, comrade in arms of Joan of Arc and Marshal of France, tried and executed in Nantes in 1440 for the murder of many children and for practices of sorcery and the invocation of demons.
The pages devoted to Gilles alternate historical reconstruction and imagination. Huysmans is interested above all in the passage from mysticism to crime, in the possibility that the same religious intensity may turn into its opposite. Some later scholars have questioned the reliability of the trial, and the case is still debated among historians today.
Contemporary Satanism
Alongside the Middle Ages runs the Paris of the 1880s. Durtal frequents a small group of friends: the doctor Des Hermies, the astrologer Gévingey and the bell-ringer Carhaix, who lives in the tower of Saint-Sulpice and speaks passionately about the symbolism of bells. Through them he discovers the existence of occultist circles and of priests who practise Satanic cults.
The most disturbing character is Canon Docre, an apostate priest who celebrates black masses. Durtal attends one through his lover, the mysterious Madame Chantelouve. Huysmans describes the scene in tones meant to scandalise, relying on disgust and sacrilege, but his interest remains more psychological and moral than documentary. Durtal comes away disturbed and disgusted, and decides to break off the affair with his lover.
Real sources and the war of spells
For the novel Huysmans gathered information from real people. The character of Dr Johannès, who fights the Satanists by spiritual means, is modelled on the former abbé Joseph-Antoine Boullan, a priest condemned by the Church who lived in Lyon and with whom the writer corresponded. Boullan was in open conflict with the Rosicrucians of Stanislas de Guaita, who accused him of immoral practices.
When Boullan died in January 1893, some of his supporters, among them the journalist Jules Bois, accused Guaita of having killed him with spells cast from afar, and Huysmans lent credence to the charge. Newspaper polemics and even a few duels followed, in an affair that has gone down in history as the war of spells, a mirror of the rivalries among occultists in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Là-bas was only one stage of Huysmans's journey. In 1892 the writer stayed at the Trappist monastery of Igny and returned to the Catholic faith, recounting his conversion in the novel En route of 1895, again with Durtal as protagonist. The voyage into Satanism, which had so struck his readers, turned out for him to be the first step towards Christian mysticism.