Il pane maledetto di Pont-Saint-Esprit

In 1951, in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit (Gard), about 250 people presented with acute psychotic episodes, hallucinations, suicide attempts, attacks on neighbors and health workers, as well as physical disorders such as heartburn, gastritis, nausea and convulsions. The cause almost immediately hypothesized was bread: the local bakery was barred with a cross with exorcistic intent and the baker, seen as a plague spreader, risked lynching. Even the miller who supplied the bakeries in the area was arrested on charges of having mixed chaff with wheat flour, probably a vector of ergot, a grass parasite. Claviceps purpurea is a grass parasite. Its common name is the French term ergot, which in Italian means "spur". In fact, infected plants have spur-like sclerotia or horn-shaped growths, hence the name “ergot” to indicate the infected plant. These spurs contain various poisonous or psychoactive alkaloids from the ergot group (including lysergic acid), molecules that are resistant even to the temperatures of ovens where bread is baked, for example. Lysergic acid is best known for the fact that it can be used to synthesize the famous LSD. Ergot poisoning is called ergotism and manifests itself with two distinct syndromes, the gangrenous one (circulatory disorders in the limbs up to gangrene) and the neurological one (hallucinations, convulsions, etc.). Despite the fact that ergotism had been confirmed by a laboratory in Marseille and despite the miller Maurice Maillet's confession of having used spoiled rye flour in addition to wheat flour, conspiracy theories still abounded, ranging from bacteriological warfare to experiments involving the devil himself.