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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.

Everything you always wanted to know about Gilles de Rais (but were afraid to ask)

As my book, The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais, nears the end of its final edit and approaches publication, this extract will tell you what to expect. 

“Any story told three times becomes a fiction.” 

Julie Atlas Muz

Aleister Crowley was to have begun his “forbidden” lecture on Gilles de Rais to the Oxford Poetry Society with a conundrum:  how much prior knowledge of his subject should he assume in his audience? T H Huxley, he claimed, faced with a similar problem, consulted an experienced lecturer and was told: “You must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything, or that they know nothing.” Huxley took the second course: Crowley affected to find this appallingly rude. “I shall assume that you know everything about Gilles de Rais; and that being the case, it would evidently be impertinent for me to tell you anything about him.”

I have experienced the same problem in writing this book. Most readers are likely to have read something about Gilles de Rais, some of them in considerable depth, others on websites of variable reliability. For a few, this book will be their introduction to him. How to explain a complicated life, and literary afterlife, to these latter without boring and alienating the former? I have endeavoured to tell the story as clearly as possible without stopping the action every time a new character appears. For those reading about Gilles for the first time, there is a detailed chronology in the appendices, which I hope will be of help. Most of the authors cited in the text are listed in the bibliography. For those who have read earlier biographies, or the trial record itself, surprises will nonetheless be in store.

This is not a conventional biography. The biographical facts are recounted, such as they are, but often given a different interpretation. All speculation has been marked as such. In some ways this is an anti-biography, firmly crossing from the record all the myths that have crystallized around Gilles over centuries of fictionalisation. At the end of the book, the thoughtful reader should feel, as I do, that he or she knows less about Gilles de Rais as a person than they did at the start.

The first part of the book tells the story of the life and prolonged afterlife of Gilles de Rais. The material in the appendix consists in part of vital information, such as the summaries of evidence and the  details of missing children. These chapters are followed by a few short pieces that would have held up the narrative if included in the first section. There is also a chronology, a bibliography and two maps.

I have used French orthography throughout, mostly to avoid the ugly Anglicism “Joan of Arc”, which is both a poor translation of her name and a title that Jehanne herself never used; she called herself La Pucelle, the Maid. Since there is considerable variation in the spelling of some names, I have opted in these cases for the most familiar. 

Rais is the most usual spelling of Gilles' name; others are equally  acceptable, although Retz is incorrect and would cause confusion, as it is the name of a quite different and prominent family. Gilles himself gave us no help in the matter: he simply signed his first name, like a prince. 

Gilles de Rais Day: 26th October

As a little treat, or a penance if you prefer, Gilles de Rais Day this year sees Making a Medieval Murderer: The Exoneration of Gilles de Rais, an article by Jessica Cale featuring an interview with yours truly. Since my Gilles de Rais biography is a matter of days from publication, this is by way of a taster.

The Tuscaloosa News, 11th November 1992

Interesting report from The Tuscaloosa News  It adds little to what we know of the 1992 retrial, although there is a meaningless quote from the always-amusing Michel Fleury, who seems to have gatecrashed the proceedings.

It is also a reminder that the defenders of Gilles de Rais planned to appeal to the then French President, François Mitterand, to look into the matter and formalise the verdict of the retrial. There is no indication that this was ever done. The rehabilitation of Gilles de Rais remains unofficial.

Something needs to be done about that...

Talking Sh*t

The penultimate alleged murder, that of an anonymous boy in Vannes, should have been vivid in the minds of all concerned, since it happened only a few months earlier and the circumstances were exceptional. For some reason, however, there was no agreement about such crucial points as where exactly the murder took place and whether the head was severed and burned, although a burning head in a private house would surely have been memorable. André Buchet provided the child and was present throughout, so he might have been a useful person to ask, since he was living in the Duke of Brittany's household at the time of the trial. However, Buchet was quietly removed from the list of suspects halfway through the trial and never held accountable.

Wherever the boy was killed, all are in agreement that his body (with or without head) was disposed of in the latrines. The story we are told at the trial is that the corpse failed to sink into the sludge of human waste and therefore Poitou descended into the cesspool to push it out of sight. It was only with some difficulty that Gilles' other accomplices (including Buchet) pulled him out again. The episode is presented as broad farce.

Nobody has ever remarked upon the obvious dangers of this operation. The latrines would have been full of sewer gases – hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, methane, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides – which would have been released in greater quantities when the body was thrown in and pushed under. These gases are extremely toxic and would have been present in high concentrations; at the highest level, one breath would be enough to cause unconsciousness. The latrines were deep enough that he needed a rope to get into them and required help to get out, so he must have been there for several minutes. He would have been dead.

This is merely one of many impossibilities in the trial of Gilles de Rais which have gone unchallenged for nearly 600 years.





[Illustration is a plaque available from this site].

The Elephant in the Room (postscript)

Although many witnesses suspected that Gilles de Rais had abducted their children, they did not know for what reason he had seized them. One reads that there were numerous rumors, all false, about the abductions: it was reported that Gilles abducted boys in order to turn them over to the English as ransom for one of his soldiers [sic], Michel de Sillé, that he ate children, and that he was writing a magical book with the blood of infants. There is no evidence in the testimony of witnesses that it was rumored that Gilles sodomized the missing children. Indeed, only a very few of Gilles' chosen servants, sworn to secrecy, were aware of how he abused children. It is surprising, therefore, that the first document relative to the prosecution, dated 30 July, refers specifically to declarations by these same witnesses that Gilles “committed the sodomitical vice” with children. It is apparent that this document and a number of others were emended after the truth of the crimes was divulged by Gilles' accomplices Etienne Corrillaut on 17 October. It is doubtless, too, that the prosecutor's articles of accusation, dated 13 October, were emended after the confessions of Corrillaut and Griart, for the accusations contain many details about the crimes, such as the number of victims, the circumstances of the murders and the secret cremation of the corpses, that only Gilles and his accomplices could have known. It is probable that these articles were emended years after the trial, since they consistently date Gilles de Rais' crimes between one and a half and four years earlier than they occurred. The emendation of the legal documents was a right which the inquisitorial court reserved for itself, as stated in the last paragraph of the articles of accusation. 

Reginald Hyatte, Laughter For The Devil, introduction

When I wrote about this discrepancy in a blog post from 2012, The Elephant in the Room, I put forward various suggestions as to how it might have arisen. Reginald Hyatte, writing in 1984, was more radical, although he may not have realised it. Anxious to avoid any implication that the trial testimony was a tissue of lies from start to finish, he advanced the theory that the minutes of the trial might simply have been altered after the event. This is a highly controversial but plausible theory; it does explain some of the odd chronological errors, such as the misdating of the incident at Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte to 1439.

Professor Thomas Fudgé, a scholar of mediaeval history, feels that it is most unlikely that the records were tampered with in this way - "There is the possibility that notaries or other court officials fraudulently manipulated the legal record of the trial of Gilles de Rais. I can find no grounds for sustaining this possibility." Hyatte differs, and for once I find myself agreeing with him. It is perfectly true that a rubric at the end of the articles of accusation reserves the right to edit the document: in Hyatte's own translation, without violation of of the rights of correction, expansion, emendation, diminution, objection, amelioration and further presentation and proof, if need be, at the opportune place and time. 

It is also true that, if the documents were edited, it poses an enormous problem for the traditionalists. The record of the trial is the only contemporary document we have concerning the supposed crimes of Gilles de Rais. If it was partially rewritten afterwards, that compromises its authority enormously. Put bluntly, if it was altered to update the charges against Gilles, which other sections may have been tinkered with? Which parts, if any, can we trust?

Excellent questions, of course, and ones that revisionists are happy to see asked. Reginald Hyatte, I suspect, not so much.