L’“altérité” de l’autre: quelques réflexions sur la représentation des Basques et des Tsiganes dans les œuvres de Pierre de Lancre1

Abstract

In 1609, the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre (1556-1631) was sent by King Henri IV to the border region of Labourd, in the Pyrenees, to investigate and try alleged cases of witchcraft. A few years later, in his Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Demons (1612), de Lancre describes the Basque population of Labourd as prone to vagrancy and versed in the practice of witchcraft, two characteristics that, in his L’Incredulité et mescreance du sortilege (1622), he will later apply to ‘Gypsies’. In light of de Lancre’s investigative and judicial work in Labourd, his “othering” of the local Basque population as a people in some ways similar to ‘Gypsies’ has profound implications. In such a perspective, the vagrancy of the ‘Gypsies’, on which he focuses in both Tableau and Incredulité, is a key to understanding not only his depiction of Labourd’s sorcerers, but also his conception of frontiers and boundaries. In order, then, to better understand the cultural and intellectual background to Lancre’s “othering” of the native Labourd population as well as of the ‘Gypsies’, this article will examine the various ways in which his attitudes to these groups are present in his works and reflect a wider, European fear of the “other” as evidenced, for example, in Italian literary sources such as comedies.