FAQs #7

The 1992 retrial was just a publicity stunt, right? After all, no mediaeval historians were involved.

Yes and no. Gilbert Prouteau was a mischief -maker, but he seems to have been sincere. He did no original research, but based his case on the writings of his predecessors, Salomon Reinach and Fernand Fleuret. There was much that was wrong with the retrial – for instance, overtly fictional material from Prouteau's novel was admitted as evidence. Also, it carried no formal weight: it did not officially overturn the verdict of the 1440 trial, as some accounts imply. However, the lack of historians was not particularly a flaw. Few historians have written about Gilles. His first biographer, on whom all subsequent biographies lean heavily, was not a historian. There is no indication that any writer has paid due attention to the contemporary documents since Bossard's day. In order to have a more informed opinion, any historian would have to have specialised in Gilles' period and to have looked closely at the trial record. It is unlikely that such a person existed in 1992; there are precious few even now. Mediaeval historians had nothing to do with creating the myth of Gilles de Rais and nothing to do with this attempt at unravelling it.

Further reading -
1992 news reports
"History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there."

You say he was tortured? But he wasn't tortured, he was spared that in return for a confession.

This myth is based on a universal misreading of the trial record. At no point did his judges offer to waive the torture altogether, merely to defer it until the next day if he cooperated. He was given a few hours to think about it, and made his first (out of court) confession that same day. His second (in court) confession was given the next day, in a rare evening sitting. There is every reason to suppose that he was tortured in the morning. That would have been the norm; torture was routinely applied merely to confirm a confession.

Not much more than two years after Gilles de Rais' execution, the King wrote letters  asserting his innocence, using highly emotive language and claiming that he suffered "attentats" - outrages - in prison. Clearly Charles, too, believed that he was put to the Question. 

It is vital to correct this error, since it is often stated that Gilles confessed voluntarily, at the mere threat of torture. This has the double effect of making him seem a coward and his forced confession a spontaneous effusion of guilt.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Further reading -
Was Gilles de Rais tortured?
Wrongly, unduly and without cause

FAQs #3

Did you really translate the trial record yourself? And why do I keep reading that your book was responsible for the 1992 retrial?

This is quite embarrassing. These strange misapprehensions first appeared on an otherwise-impeccable web article that I cannot now find. If there had been a comments section, I would have corrected the errors. There wasn't. I should have contacted the author, and I intended to. I forgot. I didn't think it would make much difference. I, of all people, should have known better:, I'm fully aware of how myths start and how easily they spread. Of course, others picked up on these mistakes. "What I tell you three times is true". Now it's the truth and I have to go round stamping on the pesky errors wherever they pop up. 

These are the facts. No, I didn't translate the trial record. I did, however, compare all the French and English translations available, & check them against the Old French and Latin of René Maulde's redacted transcription. As far as I know, I'm the first to do this. 

Obviously I had nothing to do with the unofficial retrial. It was twenty-five years before my book was completed! (Yes, the anniversary was kind of deliberate). The prime mover there was the glorious Gilbert Prouteau, and I have written about him often. I feel mortified to have stolen his thunder. However, I can't help feeling that the naughty old enfant terrible would find all this uproariously funny. I picture him cackling "Mort de rire!" and falling off his cloud in his hilarity. Sorry, M. Prouteau...

Further reading:
A vexing, perplexing, vital book: my review of Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup
Qui veut innocenter Barbe-Bleue?

Some web pages have Gilles de Rais performing sex acts on severed heads. Surely that isn't mentioned in the trial record?

No, it certainly is not! This is one of the silliest of the fantasies that have been circulating recently. I first saw it in 2016, on Twitter, in the rococo form of Gilles biting a hole in the child's neck and using it instead of the more usual orifices. I wondered at the time who could have come up with such a sick notion and why they would think the supposed confessions needed any such embellishment. Later I saw it a few times in its more usual form, with the "hole" where the neck had been severed forming the locus of gratification. Hole? 


Eventually, it was a most unusual podcast that helped me to understand where this strange notion had its origins. On Episode 144 of the 13 O'Clock Podcast, Jenny Ashford and Tom Ross puzzle their way through the story of Gilles de Rais, trying and failing to make the evidence cohere, as any intelligent person must. The odd story about the severed heads is mentioned and sourced, as I might have suspected, to Wikipedia, that fount of all ignorance.  At best  the Gilles de Rais page is a jigsaw of fact and fiction. Like all Wiki pages, it is a muddle of repeated and clumsy c&p and slapdash editing by many hands. At one point somebody  had deleted, or simply forgotten to add, the details of the sexual perversion Gilles had been accused of, a jejune if rather confusing form of frottage, in the correct place. The sentence skipped from the severing of heads to the phrase: According to Poitou, Rais disdained the victims' sexual organs, and took "infinitely more pleasure in debauching himself in this manner ... than in using their natural orifice, in the normal manner." The article did mention the perversion Gilles was supposed to have favoured, but earlier on. Anybody skim-reading might easily miss it. Nature abhors a vacuum, so somebody filled the hiatus with something that seemed to make sense. Chinese Whispers took over and a new myth was born. 

Further reading:
Bluebeardery and copypasta

Publicity material for The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais

Gilles de Rais was executed on October 26th 1440 for a string of offences including heresy, black magic, sodomy and murder. He was revered as a saint for three hundred years after his death. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, he has quite wrongly been regarded as the inspiration for Perrault's Bluebeard. What are we to make of such contradictions? 

Historians have long assumed that the life and death of Gilles de Rais had been thoroughly researched and held no secrets. The converse was the case. Properly examined, the dry court documents are full of contradiction and absurdity. Many supposed facts, on close scrutiny, turn out to be pure fiction. Unimportant characters sidle from the shadows, having turned out to be spies. Important ones may never even have existed. 

In 1992, there was an unofficial retrial, spearheaded by the novelist Gilbert Prouteau. Gilles  was spectacularly acquitted, but there has been a great deal of controversy about what many see as a jape or a publicity stunt and his reputation remains in limbo. 

Was he a saint, or the Devil incarnate? History is undecided.

The purpose of this book is to scrutinize the generally accepted account of Gilles' life, including the evidence given at his trial, to expose the commonly believed myths and to posit a more credible alternative narrative. There is a much stronger case for his innocence to be made than that put forward in 1992. 

However, this is not simply a rehash for English readers of the arguments put forward by various French writers. It is a work of original research. In addition, since existing biographies are inaccurate and patchy, it is an attempt at a truly encyclopaedic account of the life of Gilles de Rais. Everything you always wanted to know about Gilles de Rais (but were afraid to ask), if you like. All the facts are there, as well as all the lies and legends. 

This is not a conventional biography.  But Gilles de Rais was no conventional man.

"History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there."

Now that an increasing number of people know that the case of Gilles de Rais was history's foulest miscarriage of justice, the last resort of the people who need their Bluebeard monster is "but historians say".

(Click to enlarge)

"Others"? Who can they mean?

Who are these historians? We are never told. The only historians who wrote biographies of Gilles were Emile Gabory, Jacques Heers and Thomas Wilson, none of them free of the most egregious errors. Jean Kerhervé wrote a diatribe against Prouteau's Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup, and he is a mediaeval historian, but his case was hardly bulletproof and mostly consisted of  nit-picking tiny mistakes that had nothing to do with the central issue. In fact, he seemed less concerned with the enormity of innocence or guilt than the fact that a pesky novelist was intruding on his patch. 

Whoever these hypothetical historians were or are, they must be mediaevalists who have studied all the relevant documents, otherwise their opinions would be of even less value than those of us others who have merely spent nearly a decade studying the subject.

Is it true, then, that "historians are all pretty darned convinced of his guilt, even if others arent"?

Well, this one isn't - “It’s my impression that Gilles’ actual guilt is much held in doubt by historians today,” says John D. Hosler, an Associate Professor of History at Morgan State University who specializes in the European Middle Ages and the history of warfare.

And then, in 2016, Thomas Fudgé pitched into the fray with a scholarly book called Medieval Religion and its Anxieties: History and Mystery in the Other Middle Ages, which includes a chapter on Gilles de Rais. This chapter makes the revisionist case; only as a possibility, but as a very real possibility. Do click on his name and check out his impeccable credentials; Professor Fudgé is the mediaevalist's mediaevalist, with an interest in heresy, which makes him perfect to examine Gilles' trial. His book, sadly, is an academic title with a limited print run, and therefore costly: nearly £70 hardback and not much less as an ebook. This review gives you the taste of it -

Chapter three ("Piety, perversion, and serial killing: the strange case of Gilles de Rais") is a tour de force of historical writing, blending narrative with analysis. Gilles is perhaps best known as the model for Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, the subject of a book about his trial by Georges Bataille (which Fudgé draws upon) as well as a central figure in J.-K. Huysmans’ novel Là-bas. Fudgé’s foreshadowing is immediately made evident: ‘If the criminal prosecution of animals figures in the other Middle Ages, there are equally disturbing juridical proceedings involving people underscoring social anxiety’. The story of Gilles de Rais is one of infamy; he is, perhaps, one of the better known characters on display here, ‘comrade-in-arms to Joan of Arc’, but Fudge is more concerned with the portrait that emerges from the historical past, the picture that emerges from folk memory, historical sources, legal documents which position Gilles de Rais ‘rather firmly in the shadows of the other Middle Ages and consign him to a type of perpetual infamy’. Fudgé tells how a quarrel over property had unforeseen consequences for the wealthy and outwardly pious Gilles and how the ‘idea, expounded in canon law, that arrest on charges of heresy also implied seizure of property had significant ramifications for Gilles and tremendous advantage for his enemies’. Like all the chapters in this volume, the author’s abundant research is lightly worn throughout the narrative but firmly underpins the whole enterprise, attesting to a careful close reading of the sources as he forensically analyses the trial of Gilles de Rais, and others, on charges of the murder of children and sexual depravity. Controversially to some perhaps, Fudgé asks whether it was all a stitch-up. Was the trial of Gilles and others a travesty of justice, or worse, was there a conspiracy, a land grab? The author highlights the various elements that point in such direction and skilfully extracts the full value of story from the history within. It is a most useful addition to the English language works available on this subject.   

Excerpt taken from this review.

This particular other is no historian. I have never claimed to be any more than a dogged amateur who has read up on the case of Gilles de Rais obsessively over many years. However, "Team Gilles" is no longer a ramshackle band of mischief makers, Satanists, novelists, poets, mystics and lunatics. The historians are getting on board. I am confidently expecting someone with a relevant history degree to produce a book on the subject before too long. 

Postscript: The single chapter Piety, Perversion, and Serial Killing: The Strange Case of Gilles de Rais is available separately as a PDF at a rather more pocket-money price than the whole book. 

Title reveal

It is no secret that , although there have been several biographies in both French and English, Gilles de Rais has been ill served by his biographers. Most lean heavily on his first biographer, Abbé Bossard, who is unreliable, partisan, and props up his ludicrous Bluebeard theory by quoting liberally from a fictionalised account of the trial by Paul Lacroix, the Bibliophile Jacob. Consequently, myths such as the "illustrated Suetonius" that supposedly had such a corrupting influence, and the wholly fictitious veiling of the cross at a critical moment during the trial, are almost universally accepted as fact. Even Gilbert Prouteau mischievously copied Bossard's errors, notably by killing off Gilles' two fiancées, whereas at least one, and probably both, outlived him.

It seemed to me that an accurate biography would not only need to retell the life, but also track down those pernicious myths to their source and debunk them.

After several years of research and writing, I am preparing to publish my alternative biography in October 2017. The title is The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais. Updates will be posted here, on Twitter, and on my Facebook page. 

Whitewashing Bluebeard 1925

Hutchinson Herald, 3rd May 1925

(click to enlarge)

Lighthearted article suggesting that anybody attempting to whitewash Gilles de Rais and other "villains" should face the death penalty. In 1925, in the wake of Joan of Arc's canonization, there was an attempt to rehabilitate Gilles, led by luminaries such as Salomon Reinach and Prouteau's mentor Maurice Garçon. Why the American press of the twenties, thirties & forties expressed such a marked interest in the matter is a minor mystery. Why Prouteau never mentioned it is another. 

Pranks of oral tradition

"But," Chantelouve went on, "there is one point which I never have been able to understand. I have never been able to explain to myself why the name Bluebeard should have been attached to the Marshal, whose history certainly has no relation to the tale of the good Perrault."

"As a matter of fact the real Bluebeard was not Gilles de Rais, but probably a Breton king, Comor, a fragment of whose castle, dating from the sixth century, is still standing, on the confines of the forest of Carnoet. The legend is simple. The king asked Guerock, count of Vannes, for the hand of his daughter, Triphine. Guerock refused, because he had heard that the king maintained himself in a constant state of widowerhood by cutting his wives' throats. Finally Saint Gildas promised Guerock to return his daughter to him safe and sound when he should reclaim her, and the union was celebrated.

"Some months later Triphine learned that Comor did indeed kill his consorts as soon as they became pregnant. She was big with child, so she fled, but her husband pursued her and cut her throat. The weeping father commanded Saint Gildas to keep his promise, and the Saint resuscitated Triphine.

"As you see, this legend comes much nearer than the history of our Bluebeard to the told tale arranged by the ingenious Perrault. Now, why and how the name Bluebeard passed from King Comor to the Marshal de Rais, I cannot tell. You know what pranks oral tradition can play."

From Là-bas by J-K Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans among his books, which did not include a reliable biography of Gilles de Rais

There is a complex relationship between the Abbé Bossard and J-K Huysmans. The latter's novel À Rebours, "the breviary of the Decadence", was published in 1884 and arguably his representation of his protagonist, Des Esseintes, influenced Bossard in his depiction of Gilles de Rais as an educated, refined aesthete. We know little enough of Gilles as a person, and to parlay his possession of a number of books into a love of literature is probably stretching the evidence; however, Bossard's attempt to show him as a cultured man as well as a warrior has been hugely influential. The Gilles de Rais we imagine today is essentially Bossard's creation. Without his intervention, Gilbert Prouteau would have been unable to present Gilles to a modern court as a man who announced the Renaissance.

When Huysmans himself wanted to make use of Gilles in a novel, he had little choice but to follow Bossard's narrative, padded out with juicy, mostly invented, details from the Bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix). No other complete biography was available. Huysmans questioned almost nothing in his sources, and was responsible for spreading a number of mendacities that are still believed to this day.

The one point at which he drew the line was Bossard's ill-informed or mischievous attempt to link Gilles with the legend of Bluebeard, as we see from the above passage. The hero of  Là-Bas, Durtal, is researching for a biography of Gilles de Rais which never seems to be completed. Questioned about the Bluebeard connection, Durtal completely repudiates the notion. As an educated and well-read man, like the author he acts as a mouthpiece for, he knows that there is a far better claimant to the Bluebeard title in another local figure, Comorre.  Tactfully, he does not mention Bossard - " You know what pranks oral tradition can play". 

Even Huysmans, who swallowed every word of the Bibliophile Jacob and unwittingly unleashed so many falsehoods on the world, could see that Bossard's Bluebeard thesis was a canard. 

The English language version of Là-Bas is available here at Project Gutenberg, a great source of older and out-of-copyright books.

Opening lines

Everybody who has heard the name of Gilles de Rais knows the outline of his story, together with a few mordant details. He was one of Joan of Arc’s captains, but after her death he went mad. He shut himself up in his gloomy castles and surrounded himself with alchemists and magicians. Having bankrupted himself on selfish pleasures, he attempted to create gold by alchemical means. When this failed, he turned to the Devil and held Black Masses at which children were sacrificed. Strange lights were seen in a tower, screams were heard and a constant pall of smoke hung over the castle. Wherever the Baron de Rais travelled, boys vanished, to the point where some villages had no children left at all. Eventually, the bereaved parents complained to the Bishop of Nantes and Gilles was arrested. The evidence at his trial was so lurid that at one point the bishop rose to his feet and veiled the face of Christ on the crucifix. A parade of mothers and fathers bore witness to the loss of their sons and daughters. Eventually Rais repented his sins and made a full confession, after which he was condemned, hanged and burned. He is remembered today as the legendary Bluebeard.

A striking story. As we shall see, barely a word of it is true.

(This blog has gone part-time because of the pressing need 

to write an English-language revisionist biography that will 

go a lot further than Fleuret or Prouteau. 

These are the first few lines of the introduction.)

How I became Gilles de Rais' representative on earth

Gilles de Rais has fascinated me for many years. I first encountered him when I was a teenager, in a book I had just bought, The Devil And All His Works by Dennis Wheatley; I was flicking through it idly and came across a small black-and-white picture of a dark man in armour leaning on a battle-axe. I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. The caption read: “Gilles de Rais, one of the blackest sorcerers in history”. He obviously stuck in my head, because when, a few months later, I read a review of a new book, Gilles de Rais, the Authentic Bluebeard by Jean Benedetti, I immediately ordered a copy, something I had never done before and very seldom do now. I still have the clipping of that review that changed my life: it was headlined The Beast who saved Joan of Arc before he became ‘Bluebeard’.

I was on the cusp of 16 when I started reading Jean Benedetti's biography; I had my birthday while I was reading it. And I read it perfectly straight. I knew about miscarriages of justice, but I assumed that this was History and couldn't be questioned. It  must have happened, just as written. I didn't know about the revisionist viewpoint, because Benedetti doesn't mention that, and I didn't find out about it for many years. But I was sympathetic towards Gilles, because Benedetti was sympathetic; I do sometimes wonder what might have happened if my first encounter had been with a less kind biographer. I read the book, and it stayed with me, and not long after I started to wonder. Benedetti had made it quite plain that there was a plot against Gilles, that his judges had an agenda, and I began to think he might have been framed. This seemed a crazy idea, as far as I knew nobody else felt that way. I was outraged by the thought of such an injustice, because I was sixteen.

I started looking for books about him, which wasn't easy - no Amazon, no internet, just book search companies and ransacking every antiquarian book shop I could find. I still remember the helpful bookseller who sold me a book from his private library, the magical moment when I found a copy of Vizetelly in a small shop next to York Minster, the day when I had a sudden impulse to go back the way I'd come and look in a certain charity shop, where a copy of Frances Winwar's The Saint and the Devil was waiting for me on the bookshelves. What I could never find was Bataille's book, with the trial records in. That was RPND - reprinting, no date - every time I tried to order it. And when I finally did get it, well. It was in French. I  had learned French at school, but back then I "read French" in the same way I danced the polka - I had done it, but not with much success, and didn't fancy trying it again. I had to wait till a rather rickety English translation came out, in the nineties. And then I didn't want to read it, because I'd pretty much convinced myself that Gilles was innocent, but I expected the evidence against him to be overwhelming. I'd only read biographies: that's what I'd been told.

By this time, I knew I wasn't the only person who believed in Gilles' innocence, because some of the biographers addressed that issue, with a great deal of scorn. One June day in 1992 I woke to find that famous, fake picture of Gilles on the front page of my newspaper and the announcement of his retrial, based on Gilbert Prouteau's best-selling  revisionist biography; that was the greatest adrenaline jolt of my life. But there wasn't - and still isn't – a revisionist biography in English, and none of the French ones had been translated. I still had no idea how the evidence could be explained away, because I hadn't yet read the evidence and imagined that it was as I had been told: hordes of grieving parents telling their unimpeachable stories in court.

Now round about the turn of the millennium there was one revisionist website, by Kathleen Lehman; she later took it down, I suspect because trolls or other ne'er-do-wells had put pressure on her. Luckily I'd printed off a just-legible draft copy so I could still refer to it. Ms Lehman said there was no accurate biography of Gilles, that the people who wrote about him were "pseudobiographers". At the time, I thought that was hyperbole. She also strongly  implied that the evidence wasn't as watertight as it was reputed to be. At that point I had to bite the bullet and read the trial record.

I was completely blown away, because the evidence is tissue-thin. The point at which it really came home to me was when I read Poitou and Henriet's testimony before the ecclesiastical court. I knew the argument that the two statements were so similar that they could only have been produced by torture, but there's a difference between knowing something theoretically and experiencing it. The two statements are as near as damn it identical. I knew I'd been right all along. That was when I started my Gilles de Rais was Innocent blog and upped my web presence. I'm shameless, I will call out people who post mindless plagiarised articles about Gilles.

Two years ago I re-read all the books I had about him in English and then took a deep breath and decided to have a go at the Prouteau book that started all the fuss and led to the successful 1992 retrial. Then I tackled Bossard. And every other French book I could get my hands on. At some point I realised that I was researching my own book, which at that time I envisioned as a long essay more than anything. But reading all those biographies made me see that they really are a poor bunch, beset with myths. To cut through the myth, I'd have to write a proper biography.

I'm not a prose writer. I used to write poetry years ago. Short poetry. If the lines have to reach the right hand side of the page, I get uneasy. But the book has slowly taken shape. It started as a bundle of ragtag fragments, now it's a book with bits missing. That's why the blog looks so dead – all my energy is going into the book. I have gone through the account of the trial obsessively, sifting the evidence, pointing up the absurdities and contradictions. I have found unnoticed, damning details that even the revisionist writers failed to notice. When I finally present my evidence, I believe that it will be both persuasive and shocking, since I have gone much further than previous revisionists.

Nobody can prove that Gilles de Rais was innocent, after 500-odd years and with only a couple of corrupted and biased sources to rely on. But I am now one hundred percent certain that he was, and this conviction is sustained by my researches and not by the vague sense of injustice that inspired my adolescent self. I am not arrogant enough to suppose that I will be the one who finally restores Gilles to his proper place in history, but I hope that I am a strong link in the chain that goes back to Reinach and Fleuret, and that I will live to see the next biographer, or the one after, achieve that end. I am proud to be Gilles de Rais' representative on earth.

Margot K Juby 

Qui veut innocenter Barbe-Bleue?

 Jean Kerhervé

vs

Gilbert Prouteau

Not everybody was delighted by Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup, Gilbert Prouteau's mischievous propaganda victory for the revisionists. Jean Kerhervé, a Breton and a professional historian, seems to have been genuinely shocked by the way in which the media so predictably fastened on to this outrage against historical process. Prouteau, he protested, was a novelist! And one writing to a commission, moreover, which apparently compounded the felony, although Prouteau makes it plain that he went beyond his brief and that the tourist authorities had not intended to open this particular can of worms.

Having sketched out a brief introduction to Gilles de Rais, in which he admits that Jean V behaved reprehensibly and offers more than a little justification for the revisionist position - Quoi qu'on en pense, on ne saurait donc dissumuler que le dossier d'accusation est chargé dans le double proces de 1440 et que Gilles, désargenté et privé de l'appui du roi, ait donné des armes pour le perdre à ceux qui avait intérêt à le voir disparaître – Kerhervé goes on to pick at historical errors in La Gueule du Loup. The most damaging of these is that he casts doubt on Prouteau's claim that Pierre de l'Hôpital signed every page of the trial transcript except the ones bearing Gilles' confession. Even this is only a minor problem, however, since l'Hôpital's ambivalence towards Gilles is transparent. Kerhervé does not, surprisingly, mention Prouteau's startling allegation that Gilles was an alcoholic and that Malestroit used this weakness to force him into confessing. This is pure speculation and anybody with a serious interest in Gilles de Rais would realise that it is unsupported by even a scrap of evidence.

The truth is that Prouteau was writing a novel, not a biography. Why would he do anything else? He was a novelist. He does not conceal the fact, from the fantasy childhood (shamelessly stolen from Jacques Bressler's Gilles de Rais ou la passion de défi) to Gilles' journal apocryphe. Kerhervé complains that Prouteau has Gilles born at Machecoul and damaged by the remarriage of his widowed mother, whereas modern scholarship has him born at Champtocé and his mother predeceasing her husband. Both these misapprehensions come direct from Bossard; the good abbot was no historian. Very few of Gilles' biographers are: apparently this only becomes a problem when they fail to follow the official line. I feel sure that Prouteau's intentions in printing the Bossardian legend were not innocent; he began by giving his employers exactly the book they wanted, which would chime perfectly with their plans for a Gilles de Rais tourist trail, and then undermined it by giving it an abrupt revisionist slant.

Kerhervé is perfectly correct when he asserts that, as a piece of original research into history, Prouteau's book is worthless. But then, Prouteau hardly pretends otherwise: his revisionist argument consists, for the most part, in rehashing the claims of Fleuret/Hernandez and Reinach. It is a magpie's nest of a book, crammed full of stolen trinkets, and it seems more than a little odd that  his antagonist fails to remark on this. What is valuable about it is that it was a splendid provocation and coup de théâtre, capturing the attention of the media world far beyond France and making front page news in the UK Guardian, for example. He flung a gauntlet and started a discussion, even in that pre-internet world of 1992. It is no longer possible to ignore the pressing questions concerning Gilles' guilt or innocence. For that, we owe Gilbert Prouteau a debt of gratitude.

It is notable that in quite a lengthy peroration, Kerhervé does not once address the issue of how compelling the evidence against Gilles was and whether or not confessions were extracted under torture, matters which are more significant than the date of Montezuma's death or a few misspelled Breton town names. He accuses Prouteau of cherry-picking the trial record for passages that support him, failing to note the irony that all Gilles' biographers have done exactly the same. He wilfully pretends that Prouteau misunderstood Jean V's politique de bascule; he did not, he merely emphasised the role of Malestroit, who was an Anglophile all his life and constantly sought to influence his cousin, the Duke. Anyway, Jean V signed an important treaty with the English on 13th October 1440, a strong indication of which way the pendulum was swinging while Gilles was on trial for his life. Matters of guilt and innocence do not greatly concern M. Kerhervé. It is sufficient, in his mind, merely to destroy the credibility of this pesky revisionist without making the case for accepting the verdict of 1440. And this speaks volumes about him.

Click here to read Jean Kerhervé's article (French language)

Select bibliography: books in French

The English reader, exasperated by the poor biographies available in their own language, might imagine that Gilles de Rais is better served by French writers. Sadly, this is far from the case.

1 Eugène Bossard  The Abbé Bossard was Gilles' first real biographer - previous writers had more or less fictionalised him. Bossard did not entirely reverse this trend. His biography is often called authoritative or comprehensive; it is certainly long. One tends to imagine the abbot as an elderly, bearded man bringing  the knowledge garnered in a long life to bear on his subject. In fact, the book began life as a thesis, written over six years by a relatively young man - he was in his early thirties when it was published. As a thesis, it had to make a new, striking, possibly contentious point, hence the connection between Gilles de Rais and Bluebeard, which had never been mooted before and which Bossard invented single-handed. This is a major flaw in the book. Other weaknesses are the virtual canonisation of the Bishop of Nantes, the mealy-mouthed refusal to print the more lurid accusations even in the original Latin and a certain lack of academic rigour in accepting the lively account by the Bibliophile Jacob to add colour to the dry court proceedings, although it is self evidently a forgery. Gilbert Prouteau rightly regarded Bossard as a myth-monger and fabulist, but his tome did at least revive interest in Gilles.

2 Georges Bataille  Pauvert should be applauded for publishing Klossowski's modern French language translation of the trial record and for keeping it in print. It is truly invaluable as the only translation of the mostly Latin original manuscripts without any obvious bias or agenda. The chronology, too, is extremely helpful. Bataille's introductory essay, however, is a disaster; a chaotic, rambling piece of anti-revisionist propaganda, at times aspiring to the state of utter meaninglessness. Discerning scholars will read the trial record and the chronology only.

3 Gilbert Prouteau, LudovicoHernandez/Fernand Fleuret, Jean-Pierre Bayard  Of the revisionist biographies, Prouteau's is by far the most influential - I have reviewed it in full here. However, he drew heavily on his predecessors for his best-selling book. "Dr Ludovico Hernandez", the pseudonym of Fernand Fleuret, is witty and urbane and an entertaining read. His book was written in 1921, part of an astonishing wave of affection for Gilles that culminated in an attempt to have him canonised.  It consists of a long essay and a full translation of the trial, the first to include the passages Bossard censored. Bayard's 

biography was written in 1985, although reissued in 1992, and it seems a pity that his considered work was overshadowed by the somewhat less substantial opus of the great showman Prouteau. Any of these books is worth reading as an insight into the revisionist argument: as we have seen, nothing similar is available in English. However, I do feel that they only scratch at the surface of the case for Gilles' innocence. If this blog is less regular than it might be, that is because there is a book to be written...

4 Paul Lacroix, "The Bibliophile Jacob"  True obsessives might like to look up the Bibliophile for entertainment value. Again, I have dealt with him in more detail elsewhere. His colourful elaboration on the trial is well worth reading, if only for the light it sheds on the origin of so many of the myths that cling to Gilles. Lacroix was, for instance, the first to describe him as having a blue beard, hence the attraction for Bossard. Since so many writers who should know better cite the Bibliophile as a legitimate source, it is helpful to read him at first hand and see exactly why he really is nothing of the kind.

[Several of these books are out of copyright, so links will lead to FREE e-books. Jean-Pierre Bayard is sadly out of print and may be difficult to find, but secondhand copies are usually available.]

A word about translations

(Taken from Bluebeard by Thomas Wilson, 1899. Click to enlarge.)

Few modern biographers have read the trial records in their original form. Deciphering old manuscripts is a science that has to be taught; so, although Gilbert Prouteau insisted on access to the documents, this was purely token, as he did not have the training to read them. Essentially all Gilles de Rais scholars are dependent on modern translations by Bossard (who did not feel able to render the more lurid passages into French and, indeed, in parts even censored the Latin), Klossowski and Fleuret. 

For the most part these translators agree. However, Fernand Fleuret - a revisionist with an axe to grind - is insistent that the phrase "I will do nothing for you as Bishop of Nantes!" was uttered not by Gilles de Rais but by Jean de Malestroit himself. This places a whole new emphasis on the dialogue and seems plausible. Others dispute this translation hotly. 

Who is correct? Who knows? This is a minor example of the mysteries that surround Gilles de Rais and his trial.  

A vexing, perplexing, vital book: my review of Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup

On June 17th 1992, The Guardian put a story headlined Second chance for Bluebeard on its front page. "More than 550 years after he was hanged and then burned" it began, with typical inaccuracy, "for offences ranging from sodomy to heresy, Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc's companion in arms, is to be retried in an official process of rehabilitation." This came as a pleasant shock to those of us who had long believed that Gilles was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. A few months later, the verdict was announced: Not guilty. This made news worldwide; the account in The Guardian, and also The New York Times, can be read online. Gilles de Rais' sudden return to the limelight, and rehabilitation, can be put down to one man, Vendéen novelist Gilbert Prouteau, and one book: this one.

Prouteau's masterpiece of revisionist literature has been cruelly treated by history, through no fault of his. It is easily the most influential book about Gilles de Rais ever published, as it is essentially the case for the defence which was put to a special court of appeal under the auspices of UNESCO and led to his sensational acquittal. But the book and the retrial were in 1992, before the internet, and both are mostly forgotten today. Prouteau's book, which I understand was a best-seller in France, has never been translated into English and I have been unable to find any detailed online reviews.

It is a strange book, not obviously a "biography" in the usual sense, and not at all what the tourist board of Brittany expected when they commissioned it. It opens with a recalled rant by Prouteau's late mentor, the lawyer Maurice Garçon, who memorably claims that if he had to defend Gilles de Rais in court he would get him off with "six months with remission". Prouteau then goes on to relate how a local dignitary asked him to write a biography of Gilles de Rais to tie in with a new tourist trail. By implication, Prouteau jumped at the chance.

The resulting book is a curious mish-mash of fact and fiction. Some, including the spectacularly parti pris Jacques Heers , have accused him of writing a romantic novel. It is that, in part, but it is also a lot more.

The biographical/romanesque section of the book proceeds in an eccentric fashion, opening with a character assassination of Rais's nemesis, Bishop of Nantes Jean de Malestroit, an outline of the bad feeling between the two and the trap that the bishop set for his foe. This section ends with Gilles' arrest and Malestroit arranging to have the heavy-drinking nobleman deprived of alcohol in order to weaken his resistance to interrogation.

The book then segues into a romanticised sketch of Gilles' life, written by Gilles himself as he languishes in the Tour Neuve at Nantes. In a way, this is the book the tourist board wanted for their wretched "circuit touristique" - we have the lonely boy wandering the grim castle, the parental neglect, the mother who abandons him (although it is more probable that she predeceased her husband) and, above all, the fallacy of the two young fianceés who both die, thus adding an atmosphere of doom and nodding to the spurious Bluebeard myth.

In the next section, Gilles is still writing, this time long letters to Pierre de l'Hôpital, President of Brittany and representative of the civil court. With much justification, Prouteau felt that Hôpital was sympathetic to Gilles and unconvinced of his guilt. These passages are intercut with extracts from the trial, which Gilles comments on. The final letter is followed by the words "Fin du journal apocryphe de Gilles de Rais" and a few pages describe his execution.

This is not, however, the end of the book. The most interesting section is still to come: it is titled "J'Accuse", in a very clear reference to the Dreyfus case, and it deals with Prouteau's attempt to have Gilles de Rais' name cleared. He sought out the aid of a barrister friend, Jean-Yves Goeau-Brissonnière, who agreed to represent Gilles in court at a specially-arranged tribunal, the details of which are frustratingly vague, and the next sixty or so pages record the peroration that Goeau-Brissonnière delivered before the court. Touchingly, we are not given the verdict; if the book had been held back from the publishers for a few months, it could have included the spectacular triumph of Gilles' acquittal. It seems that Prouteau did not really expect this result and wished to market the book on the sensation of the retrial, believing that the verdict would be a damp squib.

For all its dramatic effect in the real world, this is an imperfect work: Prouteau does, in the romanesque section, print the legend and to some extent play into the hands of the Vendéen tourist board, with their accursed son et lumière and "Sur les Traces de Gilles de Rais" nonsense. He does not cite his sources, so his extraordinary claim that Gilles was an alcoholic who was deprived of his drug in prison in order to extract a false confession from him can neither be challenged nor confirmed. And he does make the mistake of accepting certain parts of extorted evidence as gospel truth, which puts him in the unnecessary position of having to pen a defence of paedophilia.

Still, this is the book that forced France, if not the rest of the world, to look at her prodigal son in a new light. In this new century, one sees its influence on web sites and coffee table books even in the anglophone world. Few books have had such a resounding effect as this one, and it is worth the read, even for those of us who struggle with French as a second language. A translation seems unlikely so long after the original publication, but if one were forthcoming it would certainly repeat its success in a new market.

Gilbert Prouteau lived till the advanced age of ninety-five and died on August 2nd 2012, a round twenty years after La Gueule du Loup was published and Gilles de Rais acquitted. Shamefully, his death barely caused a ripple outside France. Let this book and its reverberations in the real world be his memorial.

Click here to see this review on Amazon.

Citizen Gilles...

According to the splendidly wrong-headed D B Wyndham Lewis, the rehabilitation of Gilles de Rais is a purely 20th century chimera. "It seems hardly necessary to add that one or two fervent friends of Progress have...established to their own satisfaction Gilles' entire innocence, which occurred not even to his own proud, shamed family." In a footnote he adds "Nor to anyone else until 1902."

Leaving aside the rather glaring fact that Gilles' daughter Marie and her first husband made a determined effort to establish her father's innocence, as Wyndham Lewis himself records, the first writers to assert that he was the victim of a plot were, improbably, political commentators during the Revolution.

One might assume that, to the Revolutionaries, Gilles would have been the paradigm of the wicked baron, preying on his vassals in the worst possible way. After all, both his tomb and his monument were destroyed during the Revolution. However, Gilles was not singled out for special treatment - he was buried with the nobility and the heroes of Brittany and every tomb was desecrated  and the church razed. Some Revolutionary writers certainly did see Gilles as a villain, but others saw him as a victim of a plot by the Church -

Le maréchal de Rais, à l'instant de son supplice, reprit tout sa dignité, il reprocha aux juges leurs bassesse et leur avidité, et marcha à son supplice, non pas en coupable, mais en héros.
[The Marshal de Rais, at the moment of his execution, recovered all his dignity, he reproached his judges for their baseness and their greed, and walked to his execution, not as a guilty man, but as a hero.]

These are the words of Joseph La Vallée, writing in 1792. He is quite explicit: Gilles was ruined by charlatans and forced to sell his estates cheaply to the Duke of Brittany. When he was bankrupt, the Duke and the priests accused him of "impossible crimes", when his true crime was having no more money to lavish on them. Two hundred years before Gilbert Prouteau, La Vallée put the case for Gilles' innocence in a nutshell

We should not assume that revisionist views about Gilles' guilt appeared out of nowhere in the twentieth century; they have run like a golden thread through history, from the moment of his death until the present day, appearing in the unlikeliest of places.

A likely story #2

Another typically improbable and unsupported anecdote from the witness statements.

In 1438 the son of Jean Bernard, aged 12, went to ask for alms at Machecoul - as Bataille helpfully points out, this is a distance of about 55 kilometres from his home in Port-Launay, Nantes, and he would have had to cross the river. He was not alone: his friend went with him, but they were clearly separated, and the Bernard boy did not turn up at their rendezvous.

Already the distance involved makes the story rather unlikely. Would a boy of twelve - we are not told how old the friend was - really have made such a lengthy journey? It is true that Gilles' almsgiving was legendary - but we are also told that there was a "public rumour" that he was abducting and killing children. No later than 1433 it was being averred that Machecoul was a place where "they eat little children", according to serial witness André Barbe.

We are not told whether the boys actually went to the castle when they arrived in Machecoul. Young Master Bernard went off in search of lodgings and for some reason his friend, the son of Jean Meugner, did not go with him. This seems odd in itself; why would they not stay together, especially as Machecoul was rumoured to be a dangerous place for children?

If he had appeared in court, the friend who survived the trip might have shed some light on exactly what did happen. But he did not. The disappearance of Jean Bernard's son was attested to by his neighbours: Jean Fouriage, his wife Jeanne and a couple of others, who had "heard the son of Jean Meugner" give his account of what happened; in other words, it was yet another example of what Prouteau dismissively calls ouï-dire, hearsay.

The boy's father was dead but his mother, very much alive, was heard complaining bitterly. In spite of her grief, she did not give evidence at Gilles's trial; she was too busy with the grape harvest.

So the two people who knew most about this case were not present in court and the boy's loss was attested to by neighbours of his dead father who produced hearsay evidence and, for good measure, added a gratuitous anecdote about seeing an old woman with a child pass through Port-Launay on her way to Machecoul and later return without the child. Without hearing from the son of Jean Meunier we have no idea whether the boys really reached Machecoul safely, how and why they came to split up, and whether they went to the castle and received alms or not.

It is a pointless and fragmentary anecdote with no real link to Gilles and no evidence other than hearsay from people with only a tenuous connection to the persons involved.

The Algebra of Need: was Gilles an alcoholic?

According to Prouteau in Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup, Gilles was an alcoholic who drank five litres of hippocras per day. This was wine fortified with spices and herbs and, at 20% by volume, twice the strength of ordinary wine. When he was imprisoned, his supply of alcohol was cut off and he was given nothing but water to drink, thus precipitating him into an attack of delirium tremens and rendering him highly susceptible to suggestion. It also meant that the court had in its gift the two things that Gilles could not live without: alcohol and the consolation of the Church. As soon as he admitted to the offences he had been charged with, he would be given hippocras and his excommunication would be revoked.

This is a seductive theory; if Gilles was an addict deprived of his drug, he would have admitted to anything to have it restored to him. As William S Burroughs described the Algebra of Need: "In the words of total need: 'Wouldn't you?' Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way."  Also, a man in the throes of the DTs and hallucinating would be easy to convince that he had, in fact, done the most outrageous things. However, one has to treat it with caution. Apart from the script that Gilles was made to read about the excesses of his life and the exaggerations of the Mémoire des Héritiers, both highly suspect documents, there is no real indication that Gilles was dependent on alcohol. He may have been a fairly heavy drinker who suffered from forced abstinence in prison, but there is no proof that his gaolers deliberately withheld wine from him in order to break his will, although they certainly would have done if they had thought it would help to brainwash him.

This theory has to be regarded as unproven, but it is hardly needed to explain why Gilles de Rais, after refusing for so long to submit to the will of the court, underwent a complete change of character overnight. He had seen the evidence against him. He knew that it had been extracted by torture and that, subjected to the same torture, he would inevitably break and recite the same litany of atrocities. He knew that he would be condemned and executed. He believed that if he went to his death contumacious and excommunicate, he would be plunged into Hell forever. And so he took the only option that would minimise his pain both in this world and the next; he ate humble pie and read the confession that had been prepared for him and that is so clearly based on the forced testimony of Henriet and Poitou, even though that would inevitably lead to shame and death, because shame and death were infinitely preferable to torment on earth that would continue for eternity in Hell.

Illustration from La trilogie Gilles de Rais by Jacques Martin/Jean Pleyer.

(Interestingly, although it is not too difficult to find images of Gilles feasting, representations of him drinking are vanishingly rare.) 

.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones...

As yet another new web page insists that Gilles de Rais must have been guilty because "some time after the trial" fifty human skulls were discovered at the château of La Suze-sur-Sarthe, let us nail this persistent canard once and for all.

There were no skulls, bones or any other human remains found at any of Gilles de Rais' castles at any time. Even Bossard, that fausseur évangile as Prouteau calls him, balked at promoting this myth. He mentions it, but dismisses it as being on a par with the legend of the young girls (girls!) freed from the dungeons. It never happened. And Bossard would have loved for there to have been bones; if there had been, he would have gleefully reported it.

The sum total of forensic proof against Gilles amounted to: -

A bloodied and foul-smelling small chemise found, not at the château, but at the house on the outskirts of Machecoul where Eustache Blanchet lodged along with Francesco Prelati.  Hardly evidence against Gilles.

Some "suspicious" ashes found in the hearth at the same house. But, as Prouteau says, they might just as well have been from a suckling pig.  Ashes are what you expect to find in a hearth.

This seems very little to show for hundreds of murders. Where were the severed heads that Gilles was supposed to keep as trophies?

I repeat: there was no forensic proof against Gilles whatsoever. No credible witnesses. And a forced confession.

Anonymous French illustration, circa 1900

[Incidentally, the château of La Suze-sur-Sarthe did not belong to Gilles. Perhaps there is some confusion with the Hôtel de la Suze. But that was not a castle, it was a house in the centre of Nantes and would have lacked the extensive souterrains for the storage of multiple cadavers.]

The Guardian 10th November 1992

This is how UK national newspaper The Guardian reported Gilles de Rais' acquittal twenty years ago. It should be taken with a large pinch of salt; as you see he is hanged and burned in the first column and by the fourth he is disembowelled, a new embellishment. The passage about Gilles being given vast quantities of strong wine while imprisoned is also garbled. Prouteau's argument is that he was first, as a heavy drinker and possible dipsomaniac, deprived of alcohol completely for a long period and then allowed to drink all he wanted. This would certainly have deranged his senses to the required degree, but although Prouteau was given access to all the trial records, he does not back up this extraordinary allegation.

The Beast of Extermination: a numbers game

This is the list of "known victims" published in Gilles de Rais The Authentic Bluebeard by Jean Benedetti. There are fewer than forty. Of those, a full name is given for only a dozen. The rest have only a family name and sometimes an age. Three are simply "unknown boy" - there are no girls listed.  Apparently there were no known victims in 1434 to 1436 (and only one in 1437). We know that from the autumn of 1434 Gilles was travelling for a year, but according to the trial record this did not curb his insensate lust; he killed in hostelries, in private houses, in a field once, even under the roof of Jean V. Which in itself seems strange: did nobody hear or see anything amiss?

This is the Beast of Extermination, so-called by Michelet, who decimated the countryside, abducting and killing probably more children than were living there at that time. We have already looked at charge XV of the indictment - that "for the past fourteen years, every year, every month, every day, every night and every hour... [Gilles] took, killed, cut the throats of many children, boys and girls..." and pointed out that this means 1426 and not 1432. Jean de Malestroit had scoured the region searching for proof that Gilles de Rais was some kind of child-devouring ogre. Days had been taken up with witnesses giving evidence, much of it what Prouteau calls ouï-dire, hearsay. And the end result of all that labour, of that "public rumour" - thirty-seven boys missing, of which three are anonymous, in fourteen years. No more than you would expect, probably, in a country still at war and roamed by marauding gangs of armed brigands as well as dangerous wild animals.

Benedetti is the only biographer who lists the known victims, and one can see why. The numbers themselves are pathetic, before one even examines the quality of the evidence. No, if we are to keep our Beast of Extermination, far better to quote long, confusing chunks of the trial, with some witnesses brought in solely to back up the evidence of others and all that hearsay and rumour. It sounds so much more impressive than a bald list of thirty-odd names and half-names standing in for the hundred and forty, two hundred, even eight hundred that legend insists on and logic demands.

Death of Gilbert Prouteau

Sad to report the death of Gilbert Prouteau on August 2nd at the age of 95. Obituary, in French, here . Rest in peace, fierce warrior of the Vendée.