Fighting ghosts in court: the Anne du Moulin Affair

In January 1572, Anne du Moulin was found dead with her children and their nanny in Paris rue des Augustins. This "horrible massacre" led to a trial during which the advocate Bamabe Brisson, lacking any tangible proof, tried to produce in court the testimony of the ghost of Anne Du Moulin. She would have appeared to her husband and accused her cousin Blosset d'Arconville for being her murderer. This article offers to examine in the early modern justice what kind of actions ghosts were capable of doing. Perpetrated on the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the du Moulin's case occurred also shortly after the Cross of Gastines Affair and was related to popular anxieties in Paris. Ghosts were thus endowed with a "social energy" which could be applied in a court case. In the long run, this case sheds also an original light on the "spectral grammar" in the French legislation which was then in its infancy. At its core lies the polysemic adage, le mort saisit le vif ("the dead seize the living"). This exemplary case illustrates the "spectral moment" at the dawn of modernity, during which ghosts were promoted by different kinds of knowledge (theology, law, medicine, natural philosophy, etc.) which made their existence possible and provide them with some agency.