A Lilliputian Quarrel

In the world of Raisian studies (impossibly pseudish expression stolen from Michel Meurger) everything moves with glacial slowness. Think how long it took for word of the 1992 retrial to seep out into the English speaking world. Lately, however, a near controversy has blown up. Consider this -

We all know Gilles de Rais' dates, don't we? All the fours, as in the Britannica entry. Wikipedia, however, has recently taken an independent tack and is insisting on "unknown, not earlier than 1405". Now, this is not just a minor quibble - Wiki is saying that everybody else for nearly 600 years has got it wrong. The only citation given is Romanian historian Matei Cazacu's relatively recent biography. 

A small furore took place on the Talk page of the relevant Wikipedia entry. Personally, I have never attempted to edit Wikipedia because I am not King Canute and have no illusions that I could make a permanent difference. But I have friends who do, and one of them tried to change the date back to 1404. After a couple of attempts, he was banned from editing.

So the editor who is so determined that Gilles de Rais was born in 1405 (or even later!) is playing hardball. There will be no discussion: Cazacu is right and everybody else is wrong. It seems a strange hill to die on, but goodness knows we all have our little idées fixes and I am nobody to judge. Far be it from me to insist that Heers or Benedetti or (heaven forfend!) Bossard were right about any given point.  Something about this stinks, however.

Cazacu's dating depends entirely upon the interpretation of documents and it does clash with other information that we have. Gilles de Rais came into his inheritance - and reached his majority - in 1424, when he was twenty. His brother René inherited in January 1434, which is one reason I consider it certain that he was born in 1414 rather than the often-given 1407. We do not know exactly what Gilles' role was in the rescue of Jean V in 1420, but we do know that both he and his grandfather were lavishly rewarded, which would seem unlikely if he had been only a page or a squire. He was made Marshal of France in 1429, at a phenomenally young age even if we consider that he was in his twenty-fifth year. If he had been twenty-three or even twenty-two, that would have been quite remarkable.

This may seem an esoteric point, and in a way it is. If the Wiki entry had been amended in a less arrogant way - "traditionally 1404, although some historians argue for 1405 or later" - there would be no problem. Nobody really knows either the month or the year of Gilles de Rais' birth and probably nobody ever will. This, however, is an aggressive attempt to make the claim that Matei Cazacu is the only reliable biographer, and this cannot be allowed to stand. 

One good thing has come out of this grubby little squabble. If you see Gilles de Rais' date of birth given using the rubric "unknown, not earlier than 1405", you will know that the article has been directly or indirectly sourced from Wikipedia and should be consigned to the dustbin. 

August 1973

The story of how I became Gilles de Rais' representative on earth has already been told. What I never mentioned is that, eighteen months or so after reading the book that changed my life, I managed to parlay my urgent need to improve my French in time for my A-levels into a family holiday to Nantes.

These are some of the photographs, mostly of Champtocé with one of Pornic and another on the drawbridge of the Chateau Ducale in Nantes (our hotel was right behind the castle). They are poor quality because they were originally slides, and for various reasons I only recovered them recently. There are none of Machecoul; at that time, it was not possible to see the ruins of the castle. I regret that deeply, and also the fact that we never made it to Tiffauges.

But here they are, for what they are worth. They are part of the story, and somebody may enjoy them.

The first six pictures were taken at Champtocé

 The castle, Pornic

 On the drawbridge of the Chateau Ducale, Nantes

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 

Select bibliography: books in English

There is no one book about Gilles de Rais, either in English or French, that gives all the known facts free of myth and with no agenda. All accept Bossard as an authority, and Bossard knowingly used the forged trial account by "The Bibliophile Jacob", Paul Lacroix, and invented a Bluebeard folklore that simply did not exist at that time. Also, there is no revisionist biography in English.

With these reservations, this mini bibliography may be helpful:

1 Jean Benedetti  This was the first book about Gilles that I read and I still have a soft spot for it. It is a short book, possibly too short, but it does sketch in the background to the life. Its weakness is that it deals too briefly with the trial. Its strength is that it does point out the likelihood of a plot between Jean V and Jean de Malestroit. I would recommend this as a starter book; if, like a few internet commentators, you find it "boring", you should accept that this is not the subject for you.
[My earlier blog post about Benedetti's book can be found here.]

2 E A Vizetelly The nearest to a revisionist biography in English, although not that near. Vizetelly occasionally expresses astonishment at some of his material - "This might be taken almost for the cry of an innocent man..." - but is unable to accept that Gilles might not have been guilty. This puzzled scepticism is the strength of his book; he also gives a detailed account of the other contender to the Bluebeard title, Comorre the Cursed. But it is an older book and not as free from myth as later biographies.

3 Leonard Wolf The most recent biography in English, it is comprehensive but entirely lacking in soul. It does not pretend to be a work of original scholarship, but nor does it bother to hide the author's borrowings from other sources. Wolf simply puts his material on the page unquestioningly and has no truck with dissenters. The book is dedicated "To the victims", which tells you all you need to know about his attitude.

4 Georges Bataille It is essential for anybody who wants to get to the truth about Gilles de Rais to familiarise themselves with the trial record. I have dealt with this book in my French bibliography, but there is also an English version. Kudos to Amok Books for making this crucial text available to us monoglot English speakers, but the translation is poor and in places confusing - that a man who died before his thirty-sixth birthday should be accused of committing unspeakable crimes for forty years is symptomatic either of supernatural precocity or a schoolboy error on the part of the translator...

[Click on the author's name to see the book on Amazon. E A Vizetelly is out of copyright, so the link goes to a free ebook.]

Update: my own biography is now available, paperback only, £12 - 

The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais

Money matters

It is often said that the men who brought Gilles de Rais to supposed justice had an interest in his downfall. This was financial as well as political. As Jean Benedetti, among others, has pointed out, his trial was not properly disinterested because most of his judges, in particular Jean de Malestroit, had entered into business deals with him.

Jean V, who feigned friendship with Gilles up until the moment when he handed him over to the Church and the Inquisition, had even more irons in the fire than the judges. He had long coveted the fortresses of Champtocé and Ingrandes, as had his father before him. They were of great strategic interest, being situated on the border between Brittany and France. For several years, the Duke had been buying up Gilles' properties, often through proxies because it was against feudal law for him to buy properties from his vassals. St Etienne de Mer Morte, for instance, was bought for Jean V by Geoffroi Le Ferron.

Eventually, he pulled off the deal he had been scheming for - Champtocé and Ingrandes were his, in exchange for waiving a mortgage he held on Gilles' properties, including Machecoul, in his barony the Pays de Retz.

There was a catch, however. These castles were sold with the proviso that Gilles had the option of buying them back within six years. Jean V passionately did not want this to happen. He therefore had good reason to hope that something might happen to put Gilles in a position where it was impossible for him to redeem his properties.

Most biographers discount this as a motive. After all, they argue, Gilles was virtually bankrupt: how would he ever raise the money? But this is to look at the matter through modern eyes.

Gilles was confident that he would succeed in transmuting base metals to gold, and sooner rather than later. If Jean V and Jean de Malestroit were searching for evidence that they could use to get rid of him, the first thing they would have discovered was that Gilles had dealings with alchemists. At that time, alchemy was universally credited as a science. Jean V would have felt he had good reason to fear that Gilles would recover his fortune and buy back his lands.

The question is not: why would the Duke of Brittany and the Bishop of Nantes have plotted together to destroy Gilles de Rais?  The question is: given the heady mix of political and financial motives, how could they ever have done anything else?

The ruins of Champtocé

Alias Poitou

Considering that their forced confessions put the rope round both Gilles de Rais' neck and their own, Henri Griart and Etienne Corillaut (alias Poitou) are given short shrift in most accounts. If they are distinguished at all, Henriet was possibly Gilles' librarian and Poitou possibly his lover.

Their evidence is identical in almost every respect, a sure sign that they were tortured into telling the story that the prosecution wanted to hear. Poitou, however, is distinct from Henriet in one crucial respect. He had, he said, survived Gilles' allegedly murderous sexual attentions once. Or twice...

The story he told the ecclesiastical tribunal was that he was assaulted as soon as he came to be Gilles' page, at the age of ten. He was threatened with a dagger, he said, but spared because of his good looks. This would be around 1427, which accords perfectly with the prosecution case that the murders began in 1426, when Gilles was still Jehanne's companion and protector. This timing was critical to Jean de Malestroit's plot to smear the Pucelle by implying that she knowingly consorted with a sodomite and murderer.

Gilles' confession, given under threat of torture and excommunication, not surprisingly follows the template of his servants' statements in every detail - except one. For whatever reason, he insisted that his supposed crimes began in the year of Jean de Craon's death, that is around 1432, five years after Poitou claimed to have been assaulted and almost killed. The discrepancy is glaring.

Apparently the judges were content to let this pass. Magnanimously, they allowed Gilles de Rais to decide the exact timing of the crimes he never committed. An obvious attempt to tidy the matter up was made, however, at the civil trial. Under interrogation for the second time, Poitou once more divulged that he had been raped and threatened. This time, however, it was not when he was a child and new to Gilles' service, but as a young man of twenty, after he had seen incriminating evidence in the form of two dead children. In this case, the sex was a form of initiation into the sport of Caesars.

Almost all biographers ignore or conflate these incidents. Jean Benedetti makes a game effort to square the circle by theorising that there might, in fact, have been two attacks on Poitou, so similar that he confused them. This seems highly unlikely. Rape at knifepoint as a child of ten would have left a profound impression, not likely to be muddled with something, however traumatic, that happened less than three years before.

The best explanation is the simplest one. Poitou was tortured into reciting the words that were put into his mouth. When those words did not fit with his master's "confession", his torturers merely changed the script.

Gilles at Louviers

One of the few things we know for certain about Gilles de Rais is that he spent the winter of 1430 at Louviers, less than sixteen miles from Rouen, where Jehanne was imprisoned. We know he was there because of a document which states that he owes to "Rolland Mauvoisin, his squire, captain of Le Prinçay, the sum of eighty gold crowns for the purchase of a black horse, saddled and bridled, which he promised to give to his very dear and well-beloved squire, Michel Machefert, captain of the men-of-arms and bowmen of his company, directly they arrived at Louviers, to induce him to come with him on that journey." (Quoted from E A Vizetelly)

Most biographers suppress this detail. Where they mention it, they gloss over it - Benedetti, for instance, quotes this document but omits the last part, so that it ends "...and bowmen of his company at Louviers" (my italics), thus making it appear as if Gilles went to Louviers specifically to buy a horse.

Now, Louviers is in Normandy, which at that time was controlled by the Anglo-Burgundians. It was occupied territory and was in a state of guerrilla warfare. Louviers itself had been taken by La Hire twelve months previously (it fell to the English again in October 1431.) Some of the towns to the south had been liberated by Jehanne's Loire campaign, but Louviers (and Rouen) were further north.

It is also between 330 and 391 kilometres (205-243 miles), depending on the route, from Champtocé, the closest of the castles Gilles habitually inhabited: further from Machecoul, Tiffauges and the Hotel de la Suze in Nantes. A car journey today would take three to four hours. In 1430, that would have meant at least a week on horseback, allowing for stops to rest the horses, for much of the time through hostile terrain.

It seems highly unlikely that Gilles would go to these lengths simply to buy a horse - which, in any case, he seems to have bought before he set off as a bribe to his squire for accompanying him on this perilous journey.

He had an army with him - necessarily so, travelling through Normandy - and was later joined by La Hire, also at the head of an army. It seems almost certain that there was a plan to rescue Jehanne, which failed for some reason.

But the anti-Gilles faction cannot bear the thought that he ever did a brave or noble deed or had a generous impulse. So when he keeps open house and gives his guests expensive gifts, or puts on a free show for the groundlings, or endows a hospice, he is prodigal rather than good-hearted. And when he rides through Anglo-Burgundian Normandy, with an army, to stay in tenuously-French Louviers across the river from Rouen - he is merely there on a whim to buy a horse.

The first map shows the location of Rouen - Louviers, not marked, is on the other side of the river and slightly to the east - in relation to Brittany.  The second shows the location of Gilles' estates; most are clustered to the south of the Loire. (Both maps taken from Gilles de Rais The Authentic Bluebeard by Jean Benedetti.)

The modern map I consulted, showing the distance from Champtocé to Louviers, can be seen here.

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.

Jean Benedetti: on the side of the angels

Jean Benedetti, author of Gilles de Rais the authentic Bluebeard (1971) died on March 27th of this year (obituary here.) This book was the first I ever read on the subject and I have a considerable soft spot for it. (Here is my review on Amazon.) It is concise and sympathetic towards its protagonist. Its only fault is that it completely omits any mention of the revisionist theories, which were in the ascendant in the early 1970s when Benedetti wrote this biography.

However, a close reading of the text shows Benedetti flirting with revisionist ideas without ever committing to them. For instance -

Jean V had sound personal reasons for refusing to ratify Charles' edict [banning the sale of Gilles' property]. He had noted Gilles' increasing dissipation and had decided to use it to his own advantage. Gilles' estates cut right across the frontier between France and Brittany, giving some of his possessions, Champtocé and Ingrandes in particular, considerable strategic importance. Even at the time when Jeanne Chabot was looking for an heir, Jean IV, the present Duke's father, had tried to get hold of them. Jean V inherited his father's ambition. By lending Gilles money, he was prepared to lead him deeper and deeper into debt, so that he could, later, present an ultimatum. It might take years but he was willing to pursue a long-term policy. There was only one difficulty from his point of view; the Dukes of Brittany were forbidden, by law, to acquire property from their subjects. This he circumvented by using proxies, and it is more than probable that many of the undistinguished merchants who bought estates from Gilles were in fact Jean's agents. At all events he took possession of La Mothe-Achard in Poitou on August 11 [1435], although officially it had been sold to Guy de la Roche-Guyon.

Later we find this -

At some date which it is difficult to determine, Jean V joined forces with Jean de Malestroit, who had been on bad terms with Gilles since the fiasco of Saint-James-de-Beuvron in 1427 [when de Malestroit was flung into prison as a traitor], and began to engineer Gilles' downfall.

The indictment is described thus: "It was, in some ways, a confused document; dates were sometimes inaccurate and the chronology of events inexact." After quoting the principle charges, Benedetti continues -

The indictment insists time and time again, in spite of all statements to the contrary, that Gilles' crimes had begun in about 1426. The reason for this may have been political. Jean de Malestroit, who was mainly responsible for drawing up the document, had always been pro-English and had opposed the Duke's frequent alliances with the French. Now, eleven years after the siege of Orléans, he found an opportunity of attrubuting Gilles' success, like Joan's, to witchcraft and the devil. Even his high honours, Marshal of France and later Lieutenant-General of Brittany, had been obtained by the same trickery. Paragraph XXIV states quite explicitly that, aided by de Sillé, he had employed wizards so that they could 'obtain money for him, reveal hidden treasure, initiate him into other magic arts, obtain honours for him and enable him to take and hold castles and towns...' Gilles would be condemned and burned just as Joan had been condemned and burned, and the legend of their success would be undermined. De Malestroit's own policies would be vindicated and proved to be in accord with divine will. 

Having clearly shown that the trial was motivated by both mercenary and political reasons, Benedetti goes on to underline the machinations of the Duke and the Bishop -

There had been fifteen paragraphs out of forty-nine in the indictment establishing the court's authority, but it was suspect. The members were neither impartial, nor disinterested. Most of them had done business with Gilles, most of them would profit by his downfall.

This is the revisionist case in a nutshell. Yet at no point does Benedetti ever touch upon the arguments for Gilles' innocence. Possibly he felt that this was a discussion that had no place in his brief  account of Gilles de Rais' life. 

Rest in peace, Jean Benedetti. Your book lives on and will continue to sow a small seed of doubt in anyone who reads it with an open mind. You were on the side of the angels without knowing it.

Jean Benedetti became an honorary professor at Rose Bruford College in 2001

Common errors

There are literally hundreds of web pages about Gilles de Rais and more are being made every day. Many of them are lurid and inaccurate, cutting and pasting phrases from other sources which may or may not be reliable. How can you tell the good ones from the bad?

There are certain errors which are frequently made by cut-and-paste web sites. For some reason, the date of Gilles's death is commonly given as October 25th - actually the day he was sentenced. Presumably one person initially made this slip and others copied it without researching the facts. 

It is claimed that he had a blue beard, which is a myth - there is no contemporary portrait of him and descriptions are vague and general. An unusually-coloured beard would certainly have been remarked upon!

Often his date of birth is given - usually as November 15th, which was when his brother was born. Weirdly, although the month can vary, the date is always given as the 15th. In fact, the date of Gilles de Rais's birth is not known.

But by far the commonest error is that he was hanged and burned, or often just burned. He was not. His body was removed from the flames and laid to rest with full honours in the church of Notre Dame des Carmes in Nantes, among the heroes of Brittany. 

This post is illustrated with the final frames of an Eddie Newell cartoon, written by Steve Vance. In this case the error was not accidental, as the bibliography for the cartoon cites biographies by  Jean Benedetti  and Leonard Wolf. Giving Vance the benefit of the doubt, it seems probable that this change was made for dramatic effect. As a rule, however, it is an attempt to gloss over the final privileges granted to Gilles - the grand procession to the gallows with the people praying for his soul, the entombment in sanctified ground - because these sit uneasily with his reputation as evil child-killer. It was a cynical gesture on the part of his judges to allow his body to be removed from the flames because as a convicted practitioner of black magic he should have been burned to ashes in order to destroy the physical integrity of his body. He should certainly not have been allowed to rest in a tomb inside a church. But then, neither his judges nor the people who wept and prayed for his salvation ever believed him to be a heretic, a sorcerer or a murderer.