The lurid tales of witchcraft and child sacrifice that QAnon believers swallow wholesale are nothing new. For centuries, Christians accused the Jews of blood libel, an anti-Semitic canard in which the blood of virgin children was allegedly used in the preparation of matzos. However, no figure is more indelibly linked to the idea of ritualistic child sacrifice than the infamous Gilles de Rais. A warrior and scholar, Gilles de Rais went from being one of the most celebrated and richest men in all of France to being remembered as an unconscionable monster. For centuries, the life and crimes of Gilles de Rais have stood as one of history’s darkest mysteries. But what actual evidence is there that Gilles de Rais was guilty? Do we have good reason to suspect his innocence?
Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, was born either in 1404 or 1405 (scholars disagree on the exact date). Both of Gilles’s parents died in 1415, at which time he was placed under the care of his maternal grandfather, Jean de Craon. Through an arranged marriage and various land grants, Gilles would eventually become the wealthiest man in France. Commanding the Royal Army in the Hundred Year’s War against the British, Gilles earned a reputation as a brave and skilled warrior. The height of Gilles’s fame came when he served alongside Joan of Arc on several successful campaigns, including the Siege of Orleans. On July 17, 1429, Gilles was awarded the title of Marshal of France, one of the highest military honors.
Following the deaths of Joan of Arc in 1431 and his grandfather Jean de Craon in 1432, Gilles gradually withdrew from public life. Developing a reputation for lavish and reckless spending, Gilles quickly bankrupted the family fortune and began selling off the deeds to many of his lands. Allegedly, when this failed to secure his finances, Gilles turned to alchemy in an attempt to literally conjure money out of thin air. One of the alchemists he hired, a conman by the name of Francois Prelati, assured Gilles he could summon a demon named Barron who would restore his fortune. Naturally, no such invocation ever took place, and Gilles was all the poorer for it.
On May 15, 1440, Gilles tried to recover land in Saint-Etienne-de-Mer-Morte, which he had ceded to the Duke of Brittany. Gilles burst into the chapel during mass and proceeded to kidnap the priest, who happened to be the Duke of Brittany’s brother Jean le Ferron. As one can imagine, this didn’t go over well. The Bishop of Nantes gave the order, and both Gilles and his bodyguards, Poitou and Henriet, were arrested on September 15.
According to the official story, Poitou and Henriet and two other servants were tortured, and from their confessions, Gilles was charged as having “killed 140 children or more, boys and girls, in a treacherous, cruel and inhuman fashion … that the said Gilles de Rais offered the limbs of the said innocents to evil spirits; that both before and after their death and as they were expiring, he committed the abominable sin of sodomy … and abused them against nature to satisfy his illicit, carnal and damnable passions” (Benedetti 1971).
Under threat of torture and ex-communication from the church, Gilles confessed to the charges and acknowledged “that he did them in accordance with his own imagination and thought, following no man’s counsel but his own, solely for his pleasure and carnal delight, and with no other end in view.” On October 25, 1440, Gilles de Rais was sentenced to death and subsequently hanged the next day. Unlike Poitou and Henriet, who were also hanged as accomplices, Gilles body was cut down prior to being burnt and turned over to “four ladies of high rank” (Wolf 1980) for burial.
What evidence do we have for the guilt of Gilles de Rais? There’s good reason to doubt the confessions of the accused, obtained as they were under torture. While several parents of children alleged to have been murdered by Gilles testified at his trial, the fact is that none of them had any proof that either Gilles or his accomplices had abducted—let alone killed—their children. The most that could be said was that their children had disappeared, a not-uncommon fate at a time when children were often sent alone into the city or countryside to beg.
No physical evidence of mass graves was ever produced: no scraps of clothing, no fragments of bones. Even granted that the bodies were burnt, given the magnitude of crimes of which Gilles was accused, one would expect some traces to remain. Biographies of Gilles de Rais mention “some forty bodies” (Beneddeti 1971) having been recovered from Machecoul in 1437; however, none of them elaborate on who recovered them. If forensic evidence of Gilles’s crimes was available, why wouldn’t it have been presented at the trial? The passage appears, almost word for word, in biography after biography, and I can only conclude that it was uncritically copied from an earlier source.
While there may be no proof of Gilles’s guilt, it may be reasonable to conclude not only that he was innocent but that he was the victim of a conspiracy. James Douglas Penney suggests a motive for the accusations pointing out that both Jean V de Montfort, the Duke of Brittany, and Jean de Malestroit, the Archbishop of Nantes, had begun to acquire significant portions of Gilles’s estate leading up to the trial and “as a result of this condition, the buyers—effectively Gilles’s prosecutors—clearly developed a vested interest in Gilles’s demise since only his death or long-term incapacitation could have safeguarded their ownership of Gilles’s property in the short term” (Penney 2012).
John D. Hosler, Associate Professor of History at Morgan State University specializing in the European Middle Ages and the history of warfare, argues: “All in all, the affair contains a number of pretty standard medieval tropes and accusations. It’s my impression that Gilles’ actual guilt is much held in doubt by historians today” (Vatomsky 2017). That said, there’s simply not enough evidence or credible testimony to establish either guilt or innocence. Although there may be a reason to doubt his guilt, it’s unlikely any new evidence will be uncovered, and the records we do have of his trial contain omissions, inconsistencies, and additions made by later authors, which have been cataloged extensively by the author Margot Juby in her The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais. Ultimately, the legacy of Gilles de Rais will likely remain one soaked in blood and tainted by horrors, as Gilles himself told his inquisitor, “I have told you greater things than this, and enough to hang ten thousand men” (Benedetti 1971).
References
Benedetti, Jean. 1971. The Real Bluebeard: The Life of Gilles de Rais. Sutton, UK: Stroud Publishing.
Penney, James. 2012. The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Vatomsky, Sonya. 2017. The Modern Movement to Exonerate a Notorious Medieval Serial Killer. Online at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gilles-de-rais-bluebeard.
Wolf, Leonard. 1980. Bluebeard: The Life and Times of Gilles de Rais. New York, NY: Clakston N. Porter, Inc.