French Charmers and Their Healing Charms

Abstract

Numerous examples of healing charms can be found in the work of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French folklorists, and in the later work of academic ethnologists such as Marcelle Bouteiller, Dominique Camus and André Julliard. Camus’s extensive interviewing of Breton charmers during the early 1980s, for example, has provided us with an important corpus of 160 formulae. However the emphasis of such ethnologists’ work has understandably focused on the charmers themselves and the practices and symbolism of the tradition in religious, medical and sociological contexts. Less attention has been paid to the content, structure and typology of the charms and their wider comparative significance. Little of the French research has been published in English and so this chapter will provide an overview of the tradition as well as a selection of the range and typologies of the formulae. It will also provide some comparative analysis with regard to the English charm corpus. Although the tradition of charming continues in contemporary France I use the past tense throughout the following discussion as the research it is based on was conducted some twenty or more years ago. Little substantive work has been produced since. Julliard’s and Camus’s more recent writing on the subject is still based largely on their original PhD research.