Mythbusting #1

That human remains were found in any of the castles of Gilles de Rais either during his lifetime or more recently

One of the most common tropes in online discussions is "but bodies were found!" This is largely because of the Chinese Whispers effect, and also because Joe Public is unable to distinguish between evidence and allegations.

The prosecution claimed that "suspicious" ashes and a bloodstained, stinking child's chemise were found at Machecoul. Not, please note, in the château as you might expect, but in a small hovel of ill repute on the outskirts of the village, where Blanchet and Prelati lived for a short time. Nobody has ever claimed that any murders or magical operations took place there or that Gilles ever visited it. It was a tiny building with, obviously, a correspondingly small fireplace and chimney, so burning bodies to ashes there would have been completely out of the question. 

The other allegation that is regularly treated as indisputable fact is the supposed discovery of a barrel" or "conduit" (the word used is ambiguous) full of children's bones at Champtocé. This has entered into contemporary myth to the point where a 1900 fantasy picture of Gilles' arrest has become current on the internet. The image shows him pinioned, brutish and hangdog,  watching while a barrel of bones is tipped over in front of him. It goes without saying that nothing of the kind happened

The myth of the cache of children's bones comes in the testimony of Guillaume Hilairet, an interesting serial witness who is also named as a "person of interest". He did not, himself, see the thing he reported, he was merely repeating what he was told by one Jean Jeudon. It is, in fact, classic ouϊ-dire (hearsay) evidence. M. Jeudon, like all the alleged eyewitnesses, does not appear in court. 

Many of the people who claim that "bones were found" imagine that they have been found recently. Occasionally somebody asks if the castles have been excavated and whether skeletal remains were dug up. Indeed, there have been excavations, unsurprisingly. Nothing incriminating has ever been unearthed. 

Here is a recent post about excavations of the sousterrains of Tiffauges. Inevitably, one ghoul could not contain herself & was politely but firmly told: No. No bones at all. Other commenters challenged her about the Champtocé claim. She was unable to defend her assertion. 

Further reading -

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

Gilles de Rais: A Case for the Defence

Almost everything we think we know about Gilles de Rais has come from corrupted sources and is false. Briefly, up until the late 19th century there was no authoritative biography. Everything written about him was fictionalised and sensationalised. Eugène Bossard, an abbot from the area round Tiffauges, seized on him as a suitably obscure subject for a thesis. His speciality was French literature: he was not a historian. And he was completely ignorant of folklore, which is why his identification of Gilles with Bluebeard is so utterly spurious. Every biographer since has leaned heavily on Bossard, assuming him to be reliable. He is not.

Bossard accepted as genuine a known forgery, the account of the trial penned by Paul Lacroix, "The Bibliophile Jacob". Lacroix was a writer of titillating fictionalized pieces, with a fascination for anything bloodthirsty or lubricious. Many of his inventions have entered later biographies as fact. To complicate matters further, J-K Huysmans plundered Bossard to write his scandalous novel, Là-Bas, and added some myths of his own. Because Huysmans has been widely translated, but Bossard has not, much of the English-speaking world takes its information about Gilles de Rais from the former.

It is often said that "most historians" believe that Gilles de Rais was guilty. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. Nobody has taken a poll. Probably most historians have never given the matter a thought. Certainly, the only historians whose opinion would be more relevant than Joe Public's would be those who specialise in that particular time and place, and preferably those who are acquainted with the relevant documents, a tiny minority. One contemporary historian who fits the bill exactly is Professor Thomas Fudge, who wrote a chapter about Gilles de Rais and researched the subject deeply. He came to the conclusion that it's a troubling case and there are strong grounds to suppose that it may have been a stitch-up.

In general, though, historians have had precious little to do with creating the legend of Gilles de Rais, and are unlikely to have much to do with his rehabilitation. Briefly, there are few primary sources, most of them are compromised and unreliable, and biographers (for the most part non-historians) simply do not look at them. The historical method has been much ignored in assembling the traditional narrative of the life of Gilles de Rais.

The story as it is presented to us has been cobbled together by a process of Chinese whispers, where each biographer copies the others and nobody bothers to check back to the primary sources. Evidence is relentlessly cherry-picked, contradictions and impossibilities ignored. That boy who supposedly disappeared while scrumping apples? Accounts vary, but this was said to have happened either on June 1st or at Easter. Apples? Really? What are referred to as "witnesses" are more properly complainants. The eye witness accounts come from inside his household and were produced by torture. The seventy-odd people who appear in court are, for the most part, not parents of the allegedly missing children. They are giving hearsay evidence. It's often as lame as "I saw a man in Machecoul looking for his son" or "I used to see these two brothers working the fairs, but I haven't seen them for a long time." Even Bataille (not a historian) naively points out a whole slew of children who apparently went missing from Machecoul when Gilles was living at Tiffauges. Those sinister old procuresses who fill the gap by ferrying boys across country? Not mentioned by any of the insiders when they were listing the other accomplices, and not produced in court even though (apparently) arrested.

In no particular order, some of the easily-dispelled myths about Gilles de Rais -

The most notorious fib, copied by Bossard and passed on to almost all of his successors, is that there was an illustrated Suetonius that had a corrupting effect on Gilles. There is evidence that such a book did not even exist at that time, but even if it did it would be irrelevent. The Suetonius story does not come from a primary source, it is a mid-19th century confection.

Another legend, which has been quoted as fact by many writers (including, shamefully, the historian-biographer Emile Gabory) is that the evidence at the trial was so shocking that the Bishop of Nantes veiled the crucifix. This derives from that notorious novel by J-K Huysmans; he got the idea from Lacroix and changed it for dramatic effect. Lacroix had Pierre de l'Hôpital covering the cross so that Henriet would not feel inhibited by it as he gave his testimony.

Almost all biographies of Gilles de Rais include the Suetonius or the veiling of the crucifix or both, indicating how very little research their authors did. They simply make no attempt at using contemporary sources. These are mistakes that could not be made by anybody who had done proper research.

At the moment, there is a craze for clickbait sites mentioning the "forty naked bodies" that were supposedly discovered - that is simply not true. At the trial there were allegations that a conduit (or barrel) of dead children was found at Champtocé; there are no eye witness accounts, the evidence was hearsay. No forensic evidence for this or any other accusation was produced in court, which means that a huge number of bodies must have been disposed of without trace. Nobody reported any foul smell or suspicious smoke.

Another falsehood concerns Gilles de Rais' military career. He never executed enemy soldiers. The ones he had hanged were French collaborators - traitors. Every commander did this. Treason was a capital offence.

Also, he never abandoned Jehanne. The army was disbanded after the failed attack on Paris. Joan never saw any of her commanders again. She was fighting her own unofficial war at Compiègne when she was captured; Gilles would probably have known nothing about it. Documents place him at Louviers, just across the river from Rouen where Joan was on trial, in the winter of 1430/1431. La Hire was with him. Both men were at the head of armies. They were in the heart of English-occupied Normandy. Clearly a rescue operation was planned - the English obviously thought so, as they threatened to throw Joan into the river and drown her if any attempt was made to save her.

Another common misconception is that Gilles de Rais confessed freely, without torture. This is untrue. He was not, as everyone insists, given exemption in return for a confession. He was told that if he confessed, the torture would be deferred till the next day, and sure enough there was a convenient gap the next morning, when the court met in the evening instead. There were only two evening sessions; the other one handily occurred after his servants were tortured.

As many people know, there was a rehabilitation trial in 1992, fronted by the Breton novelist Gilbert Prouteau, which acquitted Gilles completely. It was unofficial, and contentious. It did, however, bring the matter to the public eye and has very gradually seeped across the internet to the point where someone will bring it up on a relevant thread. I have been researching Gilles de Rais for many years and feelings about his guilt have definitely changed dramatically in the last twenty years.

See also Gilles de Rais: A Case for the Defence (Part 2)

As stated, the biographies are a poor lot. These two stand above the rest, because they at least acknowledge the possible political and financial motives for a stitch-up.

E A Vizetelly – Bluebeard: an account of Comorre the Cursed and Gilles de Rais (1902)

Jean Benedetti – Gilles de Rais, the authentic Bluebeard (1971)

The revisionist biographies are almost exclusively in French -

Fernand Fleuret/ Dr Ludovico Hernandez – Le Procès Inquisitorial de Gilles de Rais (1921)

Jean-Pierre Bayard – Plaidoyer pour Gilles de Rais (1985, reprinted 1992)

Gilbert Prouteau – Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup (1992)

My book, The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais, was published in 2017

FAQs #2

Well, if Gilles de Rais didn't kill the children, who did?

Nobody did. There is no evidence to indicate that more children than might be expected went missing in his vicinity. The country was in a state of upheaval, with bands of soldiers living off the land, and the years when Gilles was supposedly pursuing his murderous career were a kind of mini Ice Age, with long and bitter winters. The attrition rate would have been high, especially among homeless beggars. Around forty children over eight years in a wide area would not have been an alarming or unusual number. A close examination of the evidence shows that children were going missing from areas he had no reason to visit, from Machecoul when he is recorded as living at Tiffauges, and that many of the children had no link to Gilles or his entourage at all. The attempt to explain this by positing the existence of two or more female procurers ranging the countryside is unconvincing, especially as none of Gilles' friends mentions them, not even Poitou and Henriet.

Further reading:
The Beast of Extermination: a numbers game
La Meffraye

So was it all a plot by the Church?

Now that the theory of Gilles' innocence has reached a wider audience, it is quite common for internet commentators to blame the Catholic Church. But this popular scapegoat was not responsible in his case, although the ecclesiastical court was certainly weaponised against him. His judge, Jean de Malestroit, was Bishop of Nantes but he plotted against Gilles in his capacity as Chancellor of Brittany. He was a lifelong Anglophile and felt that the Duchy would be more likely to keep its independence if it allied with England rather than with France. Ironically, in 1488 Brittany was handed over to French governance by the Lavals, Gilles' family.

The Church did not profit from Gilles' demise: his estates went to the sons of Jean V.

Further reading:
L'évêque diabolique - ?

A likely story #5

Guillaume le Barbier, eighteen years old and therefore an unlikely victim, is one of a mere dozen vanished boys who is given a full name. The details of his case are contradictory, however. His father was Georget, a tailor – or, according to Blanchet, a pastrycook.  The former seems more likely, as the lad was apprenticed to Jean Peletier, the tailor to Lady de Rais and the rest of the household. A minor oddity is that the presence of her tailor implies that Catherine, who supposedly lived apart from her husband, was in residence at Machecoul while he was engaged on a murder spree. Although we are consistently told that his wife and daughter lived at Pouzauges, Abbé Bourdeaut calmly asserts that young Marie was brought up at Tiffauges où Gilles de Rais et sa femme demuraient habituellement. The presence of his family at both his favourite castles would rather mar their testosterone-soaked Sadean splendour.

The only suspicious circumstance surrounding this particular disappearance was that Blanchet saw the boy entering the castle of Machecoul – where, after all, he was employed – in the company of the automatically sinister Poitou. Nor is the date of his disappearance clear-cut; his father was firm that it was St Barnabas' Day, June 11th, whereas two other witnesses mentioned Easter. Both dates clash with Blanchet's evidence; he claimed that it happened while he was lodging with Etienne Ferron, but he only stayed there briefly and left in late February or early March. Poitou, however, affirmed before the civil court that Guillaume le Barbier was among the victims.

Blanchet asserted that the boy's possessions, including a silver coin, were returned to his father, which seems to indicate that he had died a natural death, since this would hardly have been done if he had been murdered. Although he must have come and gone from the castle at will, the descriptions of  his disappearance imply that he was abducted, which would hardly have been necessary. Even here, accounts clash: his father said that he vanished while playing with a ball of thread; the omnipresent witness André Barbe had him picking apples, which is a good trick in June, let alone at Easter.

The Ghost of Gilles de Rais

As soon as the moon got up, I walked once

more down into the beautiful valley. to enjoy

the scenery by that peculiar light. All three

of my landladies joined in entreating me not to

think of going into or near the castle, assuring

me that it was extremely dangerous; that nobody

in Tiffauges would dream of going near

the ruins after dark, for that "il était impossible

de dire ce qu'il pouvait y arriver." lt is

curious that, of all the various names attached

to this old castle, and all the motley records

of its eventful history, the only name which

yet lives in the memory of the people, and the

only historical facts which have made a lasting

impression on the popular mind, are that

of Gilles de Laval, the wicked Marechal de

Retz, and the atrocities committed there by

him — so prone is the uncultivated mind to

the contemplation of horrors.

Throughout the neighbourhood a thousand

superstitions are current about the ruins of

the dwelling of the murderer and necromancer.

The hideous half-burnt body of the monster

himself, circled with flames, pale, indeed, and

faint in colour, but more lasting than those

the hangman kindled around his mortal form

in the meadow under the walls of Nantes, is

seen, on bright moonlight nights, standing

now on one topmost point of craggy wall, and

now on another, and is heard mingling his

moan with the sough of the night-wind. Pale,

bloodless forms, too, of youthful growth and

mien, the restless, unsepulchred ghosts of the

unfortunates who perished in these dungeons.

unassoiled, with lingering agony, as their

lifeblood flowed from their veins for the

impure purposes of' the tyrant's demon-worship

— these, too, may at similar times be seen

flitting backwards and forwards, in numerous

groups, across the space enclosed by the

ruined wall, with more than mortal speed, or

glancing hurriedly from window to window of

the fabric, as still seeking to escape from its

hateful confinement.

Despite these terrors, with which their old

tyrant still contrives to torment the descendants

of his former vassals, I enjoyed my

moonlight stroll exceedingly. The dancing

stream, the grey rocks on the side of the hill,

lying half in shade, half silvered by the cold

pale rays, ghosts of the departed sunbeams,

the ruins of the castle, exhibiting a thousand

capricious changes of light and shade, are all

well calculated to form a lovely moonlight

scene. And though possibly I might have

seen —nay, am rather inclined to think I did

see—some of the appearances of whose existence

 l had been warned, as the fitful light,

changing with every passing cloud that flitted

across the sky, brought now one part and now

another of the fantastically-shaped fragments

into relief, yet I had the comfort of knowing

that the Sévre's running stream was at

the time between me and them; and, thus

secured from their doing me a mischief, I

returned to my bed, and, I believe, to my good

hostesses' surprise, safe and sound from my

ramble.

Thomas Adolphus Trollope

from A Summer In Western France

A little treat for the Hallowe'en season. This account of supposed hauntings at Tiffauges is occasionally quoted but never given in full. It is the only reference to Gilles or his victims walking as ghosts, and whether it owes more to the imagination of Mr Trollope or his mischievous landladies is difficult to tell. At any rate, it is at least as reliable as much of Bossard. 

A likely story...

The testimony of outside witnesses at the trial of Gilles de Rais is supposed to constitute a cast-iron case against him. In fact, the evidence is feeble in the extreme; fragmentary, contradictory, largely hearsay and containing many improbable stories like the following:

The sixteenth recorded abduction/murder, in April 1439, was that of the son of Micheau and Guillemette Bouer. No name or age is given for him. The boy left his home near Machecoul to go to the castle and ask for alms; he never returned.

At the trial, his mother told a curious anecdote of how the next day, presumably long before she realised that her son was missing, a large stranger in black approached her as she was minding the animals in the fields and asked where her children were and why they were not doing the task. She replied that they (suddenly her son had a sibling or siblings with him) had gone begging at Machecoul.

The necessary implication is that somebody at the castle took the trouble to find out the name and home of the young presumed victim and deliberately travelled some distance to seek out his mother and ask a suspicious question.

Why? It simply makes no sense at all.

Particularly as Gilles was living at Tiffauges at the time, not Machecoul.

Illustration taken from the site of the Musée Pays de Retz, which relates Gilles life - the non-revisionist version - in French

The B Word

That Gilles de Rais is now completely entangled with the Bluebeard myth is almost entirely the fault of the Abbé Bossard, who deliberately set out to conflate the two. His contention, based on nothing but pure conjecture, is that Gilles was linked with Bluebeard from the 15th century onwards and that Perrault's version of the story was partly inspired by him. Thus, Gilles de Rais is the real-life Bluebeard suggested by so many books.

Bossard cites three pieces of evidence in favour of his theory, a Breton complainte, a legend and a long poem. Conveniently, if improbably, two of them mention Gilles de Rais by name. The Lament of the Young Women of Pléeur, in which an old man interrogates a group of girls on the reason for their misery, is oft-quoted -

Old Man: (In terror) Bluebeard lives here! Ah! Fly quickly, my children. The ravening wolf is not more terrible than the wild Baron; the bear is more gentle than the accursed Baron de Rais.

Young Girls: We are not able to fly: we are bound to the Barony of Rais, and we belong, body and soul, to my Lord Bluebeard. 

Old Man: I will deliver you, for I am Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, and I have sworn to defend my flock.

Young Girls: Gilles de Laval does not believe in God!

Old Man: He shall come to a bad end! I swear it by the living God!


Bossard claims that he found this lament in the works of a writer named d'Amézueil, without specifying in which book it appears. The splendid E A Vizetelly remarks that he was unable to find this particular piece anywhere in d'Amézueil's published writings, that bears and serfs would be unlikely to make an appearance in a complainte of that period, and that this is probably a "modern confection".

The second allegedly old tradition is a story where Bluebeard, also known as Gilles de Laval, attempts to marry a young woman by force and is thus tricked into pledging himself body and soul to the Devil, who turns his red beard blue as a token of their pact. (One should remark here that Bossard accepts the Bibliophile Jacob's dubious and lurid account of Gilles' trial, including the physical descriptions of the accused with his blue-black beard.) Bossard makes no attempt to source this story to any particular folklorist or historian.

Bossard then cites a long poem in which a nameless poet reflects on his blighted childhood, spent in the haunted shadow of Bluebeard's castle, which, as this is supposedly a local poet, is clearly Machecoul or Tiffauges or Champtocé. The poem is anonymous, undated, unsourced and has been rightly ignored by later commentators. It cannot have been written much earlier than the eighteenth century, since by Bossard's own admission the name of Bluebeard was never mentioned by a French writer before Perrault and the refrain - "Anne, ma soeur, ne vois-tu rien venir?" - refers to a character, a situation and a dialogue invented by him in his influential conte .

It is interesting that Bossard is so lax about supplying a provenance for these "old, traditional" tales and rhymes, as throughout his long biography he has hitherto been scrupulous about footnoting the exact page of every work quoted. Even when he mentions oral tradition he insists that it comes from "old people" and once from a particular old lady who showed him round the ruins of Tiffauges. That what appears to be his strongest evidence is unsourced is suspicious in the extreme.

There is no doubt that there is a modern tendency to regard Gilles de Rais as the real-life prototype of Bluebeard; I have some 1973 postcards from Champtocé and Machecoul and they all refer to "la château de Barbe-Bleue". What is in dispute is whether the tradition goes back beyond the French Revolution - and, indeed, whether it might not have been influenced by Bossard's own writing.

All the indications are that when Gilles de Rais died, his death was greeted with tears and mourning. One contemporary claimed that the noble ladies who prepared his body for burial took some of his bones as quasi relics.We have seen that his expiatory monument was a place of pilgrimage and there is some indication that his tomb was similarly venerated. Up until the French Revolution, when his tomb was destroyed along with the church in which he lay, he seems to have been regarded as a Breton saint. It seems highly unlikely that a Bluebeard myth could exist alongside this memory of a paragon of Christian repentance; it could only have begun after 1789, when the tomb and the monument had gone and the pilgrimages and prayers came to a forced halt. Such a tradition could not have influenced Perrault, who died in 1703 and whose highly popular version of the story was published in 1697.

Gilles de Rais was not Bluebeard. And Bossard's determination to twist the evidence to make it confirm his own prejudices is indicative of his approach throughout his notionally authoritative biography.

[In this old newspaper report, firmly based on Bossard's account but written in English, you can read The Lament of the Young Women of Pléeur, the legend in which Bluebeard marries the Devil, and much other Bluebeard-related lore. Click here for Perrault's tale, English language version. The full text of Bossard's biography is available here, French only.]