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.]

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.

Le Procès Inquisitorial de Gilles de Rais, Maréchal de France, avec un essai de réhabilitation

Full text of this 1921 revisionist work now available here. Various formats available. Language: French. Ludovico Hernandez was the nom de plume of Fernand Fleuret.

Noble, valiant, gentle prince...

Bossard, in trying to date the Mystère du Siège d'Orléans, goes to great lengths to establish that it must have been written and staged prior to Gilles de Rais' disgrace in 1440. After that time, he insists, the playwright could not have shown Gilles at Jehanne's side, praised by her as one of her nobles, vaillans princes gentilz, and playing a decisive part in her victory. Nor would any audience have tolerated the spectacle.

The picture below was published in International History Magazine in 1974. It shows a pageant in honour of Jehanne d'Arc and riding by her side is a dark, bearded figure who clearly represents Gilles de Rais. So, although Gilles was expunged from French history books and, indeed, from many contemporary chronicles for reasons that Bossard makes all too plain, evidently he has always played a part in local celebrations. Orléans celebrated its liberation yearly and Gilles was a principle agent in that victory. He was fond of Orléans, once spending almost a year there, and the Orléanais were fond of him, and bought his standard to use in their reenactments. His reputation there was that of a hero and a generous patron of the arts. It seems quite likely that, in the general disbelief at his fall from grace, the Orléanais were likely to be more cynical than most and that he would have kept his place in the annual celebrations, as he does today.

The Bibliophile Jacob

Anybody who has read about Gilles de Rais in a biography or on a website and later gone on to read the trial records will have wondered why the latter seem so pallid in comparison. The small details that so enliven other accounts are simply absent. In particular, anybody who has read The Bloody Countess by Valentine Penrose, with its counterpointed story of Gilles de Rais, will have marvelled at the first person quotes and the colourful anecdotes and descriptions.

The reason is that Penrose and other biographers leaned heavily upon a "more circumstantial" record of the trial, penned by Paul Lacroix, The Bibliophile Jacob, in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a very strange document, entirely bogus. M. Lacroix claimed to have had access to a far more detailed copy of the record than the one kept in the archive at Nantes. Instead of being written in a distancing third person, he uses first person speech throughout. Henriet and Poitou come out best in this account, they are clearly distinguished as personalities and their motives for confessing are explained. These do not include torture, the Bibliophile is far from a revisionist. On the down side, we do lose Prelati's testimony as he has unfortunately died before coming to trial. There is a prototype for the veiling of the cross, but it is done by Pierre de l'Hôpital before Henriet gives his evidence; J-K Huymans much improved upon and dramatised the scene.

It is, in short, a piece of fantasy loosely based on Gilles' trial. But it is highly entertaining and of interest, so a link to the full text is given here. Only in French, unfortunately, but not difficult to decipher if you have a little French from school days. If not, you can get the flavour of it from Penrose's book (which deals mainly with Elisabeth Bathory) or from the extracts from that book in Dark Star: the Satanic Rites of Gilles de Rais, edited by Candice Black.

And is the Bibliophile Jacob's work of fiction relevant to our theme? Yes, because it is so obviously and consistently in error throughout that anybody reading it in parallel with a genuine account of the trial would immediately realise that it is unreliable. Yet several reputable biographers, including Bossard, borrow from it to add a bit of colour to their story; and that is how Gilles de Rais has come to be surrounded by myths and untruths, and why a truly authoritative biography does not exist. 

Interesting article (French and English versions)

In 1975 this article appeared in Reader's Digest magazine. It is very revisionist for an English-language piece at that time. Not surprisingly, it seems to have been translated from the French. The original article is here. The final paragraph, speculating on Gilles' relationship with Jehanne, is not present in the English version and looks as if it was added at a later date. There are obvious inaccuracies, but it is a very enlightened article for the mid-seventies.

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