The Devil in the Nineteenth Century: A Satanism Scare in Fin-de-Siècle France

This paper will describe and analyze one of the major religious scandals of the late nineteenth century: the Satanism scare the journalist Léo Taxil created in French Catholic circles with his invented stories of Devil-worship among Freemasons.  The reasons why Taxil undertook this hoax, and why Catholic audiences were so willing to believe it, do much to enrich our understanding both of the tensions that underlay French society during the era of the Dreyfus affair, and of the surprising ways in which Catholicism was changing during this period.  The late nineteenth-century fascination with things diabolical, I will argue, is a crucial and revealing part of the discourse of modernity.