Conservative journalists, desperate for a scapegoat, invented the pétroleuses—torch-wielding women desperate to burn everything. In this text, fairy-tale critic Wren Awry ties the pétroleuses into a long line of mythologized fire-wielding devil-women—women like Baba Yaga, the youngest sister in the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird,” and the women burned during the great witch hunts of early Modern Europe—as a source of revolutionary inspiration.