“The movement that tried to kill the witches is also, unwittingly of course, that which paved the way, later on, for the lives and thought of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Kant.” In conclusion, he gives his blessing to a logic that he sums up with the maxim: “Killing the women of the past to create the men of the future.”115 And, in doing so, Bechtel shows, once again, that historians of the witch-hunts are themselves products of the world that hunted the witches, and that they remain locked inside the frame of reference that the witch-hunts created.
