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 #3

One of the most striking oddities in the trial of Gilles de Rais is the deafening silence from members of his household. We are given the forced confessions of his body servants and the self-extenuating words of Prelati and Blanchet, but of his two hundred-strong army, the members of his chapel (including the allegedly abused boys in the choir) and the various other pages, squires and sundry domestics who lived at close quarters with him, we hear nothing. Surely somebody would have noticed something incriminating? Surely, for instance, the porter at Machecoul could have been summoned to court and asked to explain exactly what he imagined was going on when an elderly crone handed young boys into his care? And, although he was no longer in Gilles' choir, it would have been interesting to hear from André Buchet, who could have told us if he was sexually assaulted and might even have answered questions about whether, when Gilles was at Vannes, he supplied him with a boy for purposes he knew all too well. Buchet would have been easy to find, as he was employed by the Duke of Brittany...

The one voice speaking up for Gilles' entire household is that of a certain André Brechet, a soldier in the garrison at Machecoul. But Brechet has nothing to say about lost children, strange sounds or foul-smelling smoke. Instead we are treated to a completely irrelevant anecdote about standing sentry duty on the ramparts at Machecoul. He was clearly not a good watchman, as he fell asleep. He was woken by a small man, a stranger to him, who threatened him with a dagger & told him "You're dead." However, the stranger did him no harm and went on his way, leaving the hapless sentry in a muck sweat. The next day, Brechet met Gilles de Rais on his way to Machecoul. And, he tells us, he no longer dared keep watch at Machecoul, which must have been an easygoing kind of garrison where soldiers could pick and choose their duties.

What are we to make of this tale? It sounds as if somebody played a prank on the sleeping soldier and frightened him badly. It has no relevance to Gilles or to the charges against him - he was not even at Machecoul, since he arrived the next day. The small man with the dagger was unlikely to be one of Gilles's friends, as Brechet would have known them by sight and his testimony is firm that the man who threatened him was not known to him.

The only purpose this slight anecdote serves is to give the impression that Machecoul was a sinister place where uncanny & quasi-supernatural events were commonplace. And also, of course, to pad out the testimony with more meaningless and unsubstantiated verbiage.

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.

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

La Meffraye

Perrine Martin, La Meffraye, is a strange and, it has to be admitted, convenient figure in the mythology surrounding Gilles de Rais. She seems incongruous; she and her lesser-known crony Tiphaine Branchu are the only women connected to his entourage, the only representatives of old age amid all that youth and beauty. They stalk the countryside like fairytale witches, striking fear into all hearts, to the point where Martin is given her menacing soubriquet of The Terror. She wears black and covers her face with a veil, yet children are curiously drawn to her.

In spite of her inexplicable powers of attraction, the children are not allowed simply to walk with her into the castle - they are accosted by the mysterious empocheurs, anonymous henchmen who overpower them and put them into sacks. This seems rather unnecessary when they are going along with her willingly and when we know that at least one porter is in on the secret - Gilles, presented with a young boy at the Hôtel de La Suze, instructs Martin to lead him to Machecoul and hand him over to the porter. It seems that the mythmakers wanted it both ways: a sinister old crone who lures children away like the Pied Piper, but also violent abduction by thugs who lurk in the bushes.

Martin's testimony has not come down to us, say gullible biographers; like so much else in the heavily-edited trial documents, it has been lost to history. She does not appear to have given evidence in court, but her prison confession is widely broadcast. In fact, her words are often the only link between Gilles and a missing child - one wonders how so many parents came to learn of her accusations. However it came about, it is strikingly convenient for the prosecution, especially as La Meffraye is supposed to have died in prison before being brought to trial.

More strangely yet, although she must have cut an odd and conspicuous figure, the doughty married couple Jean Estaisse and his wife Michele swear that they have never heard of her; nor, indeed, of any rumours about Gilles de Rais until he was arrested.

So who was La Meffraye? Was she, as she is presented, a procuress for Gilles? Was she some witch or local lunatic who could serve as a scapegoat for local child abductions and be used to inculpate him? Did she die under torture? Was she killed? Did she collude with the authorities and earn her release? Or did this shadowy creature exist at all? May she not merely be a figment of the collective imagination, perhaps used to frighten children into obedience, and gratefully latched onto by Jean de Malestroit?

As so often, we are left with more questions than answers and an uneasy feeling that there is something not quite right here.

Illustration by Jean Pleyers

taken from this blog.

Catholic logic

On February 3rd 1930, Aleister Crowley was scheduled to give a lecture about Gilles de Rais to the Oxford University Poetry Society. The lecture was never given; it was printed as a pamphlet instead and is now universally known as The Banned Lecture. It is readily available online and regularly reprinted

Was this some artful self-publicity on Crowley's part or was it really banned? It seems that it was, by the Catholic chaplain, Father Ronald Arbuthnott Knox; alternative arrangements were made for the lecture to be given off-campus, but Knox threatened sanctions against any student who attended and so cancellation was the only option.

The reason for the ban is not clear. In the unlikely event that Knox had seen a draft of the lecture,he would certainly have been outraged by Crowley's thesis that "Gilles de Rais was to a large extent the victim of Catholic logic. Catholic logic: and the foul wish-fantasms generated of its repressions, and of its fear and ignorance." However, he is more likely to have taken exception to the identity of the lecturer, the subject of the lecture, or the horrible combination of the two - the Wickedest Man in the World expatiating on the supposed monstrous child-killer Bluebeard must have been the stuff of nightmare for a staid Oxford chaplain.

Crowley reacted with amusement. He told a reporter: "Perhaps the refusal to let me lecture has come because Gilles de Rais is said to have killed 800 children in ritual murder, and in some way this was connected with myself, since the accusation that I have not only killed but eaten children is one of the many false statements that have been circulated about me in the past. Probably the authorities are afraid that I may kill and eat 800 Oxford graduates."

Having had his little jest, he went on to make a serious point, and make it unequivocally: "The main point about my lecture was to show that the allegations against Gilles de Rais were unfounded, just as they were against Joan of Arc. Those were curious times, and anyone was liable to be burned as a witch on the least evidence."

Crowley loved to provoke, and certainly his vanity would have been piqued by the thought that a Wickeder Man in the World than himself may have existed, but one feels that he was genuine in his defence of Gilles de Rais. His lecture  is frivolous and drifts around in a stream-of-consciousness manner - no doubt it would have been delightful to listen to him deliver it in person - but there is a steely logic underlying it and he makes several telling points. "Did the disappearance of the first four hundred, say, put no parents on their guard?" he asks, disingenuously, and one does wonder why so few apparently intelligent historians over the years have asked that obvious question.

It should be remembered that Crowley did not prepare his lecture in a vacuum; no doubt he was inspired by an attempt to rehabilitate Gilles only a few years earlier, spearheaded by Salomon Reinach and Maurice Garçon. It was widely reported at the time but is now virtually forgotten; only Crowley's apparently ephemeral "banned" lecture remains as its memorial

1992 news reports

For the sake of completeness, here are the 1992 newspaper cuttings from The Guardian and The Times announcing the retrial of Gilles de Rais. The Guardian story that gave the verdict is already on this blog, here.