LES SORCIÈRES, PREMIÈRES FÉMINISTES ? MYTHE ET HISTOIRE | PAULE PETITIER, JULIEN THÉRY

🔴 Support, share, and join the fight for free, popular news on DTT and social media! https://www.lemediatv.fr/campagne ⚠️ Le Média is broadcast on Freebox channel 165 and on the free Molotov TV package. Follow Le Média on its second YouTube channel: 👉    / @lemédia24-7   👉 To sign the petition for a "more democratic DTT" and support our appeal against ARCOM: https://www.lemediatv.fr/campagne 👉 To receive the latest news, weekly recaps, and alerts about the latest programs published by Le Média, delivered directly to your inbox. https://newsletter.lemediatv.fr Since the late 2010s and the success of the #MeToo movement in particular, #witches have become almost consensual, even mainstream, emblems of feminism, as evidenced by the enormous success of Mona Chollet's book, Witches: The Undefeated Power of Women (Zone, 2018). In reality, as early as the late 1960s and 1970s, but in a much less favorable climate, feminists had already identified with the story of witches. Subsequently, Marxist eco-feminist philosophers such as Silvia Federici (with her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, Bodies and Primitive Accumulation, 2004, French translation 2014; see    • L'ESCLAVE, LA SORCIÈRE ET LE CAPITALISME P...  ) theorized the development of witch hunts in relation to the rise of capitalism from the late Middle Ages onward. A new relationship with nature and science was then established, which, combined with the growth of invisible and unpaid labor necessary for capital accumulation, sparked unprecedented repression against women. Some historians take a harsh and disapproving view of this interpretation and, consequently, of the contemporary use of the figure of the witch in an anti-patriarchal political logic. Their criticism is primarily based on a demand for factual accuracy: the number of victims was much lower than feminist literature often suggests (50,000 to 100,000 victims over three centuries, not a million as has sometimes been written); there were also many witches, even if they quickly became a minority from the 16th century onward. It would also be paradoxical to make poor victims, taken as scapegoats, mistreated, and often burned, into symbols of women's strength and their ability to overcome oppression. However, these censors generally ignore that the inventor of the witch as a symbol of feminine power, freedom, and revolt was a man—even if he claimed to have "both sexes of the mind"—and a very great historian, #JulesMichelet (1798-1874). The guest of this new episode of "La grande H.", Paule Petitier, is an eminent Michelet specialist, to whom she has notably dedicated a biography (Michelet, L'homme histoire, Grasset, 2006). She recently devoted a very fine study to the book entitled La Sorcière, published in 1862, in which Michelet elaborated the idea of ​​a feminine relationship to the world, and particularly to nature, which would have represented a resistance to the deadly spirit of Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and up to the 17th century inclusive (before the liberation represented in Michelet's eyes by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution). The theses of eco-feminist philosophers on the relegation of women concomitant with the new capitalist dynamic in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries seem to align, in other words, with Michelet's vision of a worsening of oppression that would explain a form of rebellion and the repression of witches during this same period. While positivist and "historicizing" historians (i.e., those haunted by the fear of anachronism), fixated on the details and singularities specific to each case, remain powerless to explain why witches were targeted in the late Middle Ages and during the first two centuries of the modern age, when they had not been the object of any particular concern or repression until then. Edited by Bérénice Sevestre. A program by #JulienThéry. Bibliography: -- Jules Michelet, La Sorcière, ed. presented by Paule Petitier, Dunod, 2025. -- Paule Petitier, La Pensée sorcière. Michelet 1862, CNRS Éditions, 2024. ▶ Support Le Média: 👉 https://soutenez.lemediatv.fr (Credit Card - SEPA - Check) 👉 https://dons.lemediatv.fr (Credit Card - SEPA - Check) 👉 https://fr.tipeee.com/le-media (Credit Card - Paypal) ✅ Follow us: Instagram:   / lemedia_tv   Facebook: http://bit.ly/FacebookLeMedia BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/lemediatv.bs... Youtube: http://bit.ly/YouTubeLeMedia Peertube: https://video.lemediatv.fr Telegram: https://t.me/LeMediaOfficiel TikTok:   / lemediatv   Join the Socios community!