La Voisin, the 17th-Century Witch Who Ran a Huge Abortion Network in Paris

Catherine Monvoisin (commonly known as La Voisin) was born in 1640—but in many ways, it feels like she belongs to the year 2026. She enjoyed telling fortunes; was anti-king enough to (almost) kill off Louis XIV; and despite living in a time when abortion was illegal, was not afraid to provide women with life-saving care. Per some records, it also seems like she slept with a good fraction of Paris. Good for her! If she were alive today, I’m sure we would have been great friends.

Alas, she died at 40, when she was executed for alleged witchcraft, after failing to murder King Louis. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Little is known of La Voisin’s early life; she was born as Catherine Deshayes—likely to a poor family—and spent her childhood telling fortunes, living on the streets, and selling palm readings to Parisians. At age 20, she married a jeweler-slash-merchant named Antoine Montvoisin, who, well, was clearly not as good a businessman as his wife. His business was failing when she decided to take matters into her own hands.

Targeting a clientele of French aristocrats, La Voisin sold her palm-reading and “face-reading” services at premium prices. A big part of this eventually became telling unhappy wives how to fix or leave their marriages, though—again!—if she lived in the year 2026, a quick Google search might have allowed her to refer her clients to Giuliana Tofana’s services, about 900 miles west. As her fame started growing, so did her list of services. 

Along with palm-reading, La Voisin also started taking on midwifery and herbalism—and started helping women get abortions, even though it was illegal in 17th-century France, as the Catholic Church had a strong say in creating the country’s rule. (Sounds… familiar.) Specifically, the Church considered abortion “homicide.” Everything old is new again, I guess.

I digress. Donning a crimson robe embroidered with gold eagles, La Voisin welcomed all kinds of clients—often women, often seeking some relationship help, often wanting to terminate their pregnancies. She never charged peasants, but would charge premiums for aristocrats. (Nice.) She’d create potions for all kinds of desires, ranging from women wanting to get men to fall in love with them, to women who wanted their husbands to die. And despite the concerns of the Church, she managed to convince religious zealots that her skills were God-given, and thus was allowed to continue with her services.

Even when she started conducting black masses, pretty much the complete opposite of a normal mass and which are typically used to, well, make deals with Satan. Through these services, she created a huge network of fortune-tellers, alchemists, and abortion providers.

It was sabotage that brought her down. 

In 1676, Madame de Brinvilliers, a French aristocrat who was accused of conspiring with her lover to try and kill the men in her family so they could inherit the estate, was found guilty of, well, exactly that. Her trial triggered an inquiry, the findings of which found that much of France—from nobles to Aristocrats to commoners—were using female fortune-tellers to get drugs, poisons, and for criminal activities. This launched the infamous “Affair of the Poisons” (L’affaire des poisons), one of France’s biggest crime scandals of the century.

Louis King XIV was especially paranoid about being poisoned, and got the Paris chief of police to weed out these so-called female fortune tellers. Soon, Magdelaine de la Grange was arrested, followed by Marie Bosse, a poisoner and one of La Voisin’s biggest rivals. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake, but not before she named La Voisin.

La Voisin was arrested in March 1679, just outside the Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle. During her trial—where she was likely tortured—she admitted that some of her clients were members of the Royal Court.

One of these was allegedly the Marquis of Montespan, who was a mistress of the king’s. It’s believed that while Montespan initially asked La Voisin for a potion that’d help Louis fall in love with her, this quickly soured, and she instead asked La Voisin for poison, instead. 

La Voisin was charged and executed for witchcraft and poisoning, and was one of 36 women who were found guilty during 210 trials in the Affair of the Poisons. It’s rumored she poisoned slash killed over 1,000 people—but really, if you ask me, history has a funny way of demonizing powerful women.

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