Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Foreword
The Tragedy of Gilles de Rais
THE TRAGEDY OF GILLES DE RAIS
The Sacred Monster
Bluebeard and Gilles de Rais
Glaring Truth …
The Heir of Great Lords
The Maternal Grandfather: Jean de Craon
The Grandfather and the Grandson
Georges de La Trémoille and Gilles de Rais
The Foolishness of Gilles de Rais
Childishness and Archaism
Sexual Life: War
Sexual Life: The Child Murders
The High Rank of Gilles de Rais
The Tragedy of the Nobility
The Theatrical Ruin of Orléans
A Desperate Attempt: The Appeal to the Devil
Prelati, Final Euphoria, and Catastrophe
The Spectacular Death
Analysis of Historical Facts
ANALYSIS OF HISTORICAL FACTS
The Historical Facts in Chronological Order
Various Problems and Historical Facts
The Trial Documents of Gilles de Rais
« PART ONE » - Verdict of the Ecclesiastical Court
I - PRELIMINARY RECORDS
II - RECORDS OF THE HEARINGS
III - DEPOSITIONS OF WITNESSES
« PART TWO » - The Secular Court Trial
I - SEMI-OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE COURT’S DISPATCH
II - INQUEST BY COMMISSIONERS OF THE DUKE OF BRITTANY
III - RECORDS OF THE FINAL DAYS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The texts of the two trials of Gilles de Rais were based on the minutes and annotated by Georges Bataille.
The Latin text of the ecclesiastical trial was translated into French by Pierre Klossowski.
This book was originally published as Le Procès de Gilles de Rais, © 1965 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris
Cover Design: Tom Dolan
English Translation © 1991 Richard Robinson
ISBN 1-878923-02-1
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The publishers would like to thank Matias Viegener for his extensive editing of the translation of Bataille’s writings, and Nikki Halpern for her extremely thorough editing of the trial documents. Their contributions were integral to the shaping of this project.
We would also like to thank Melissa Hoffs for her painstaking proofreading and accomplished revisions of various drafts; Peter Wollen for his advice; Michael Intriere for his production expertise; and Sarah Koplin, Monica Moran and Michael Sheppard for their additional editorial assistance.
FOREWORD
Abbot Bossard wrote that the trial of Gilles de Rais was “in all things the polar opposite of Joan of Arc’s.” But he adds that “together they compose the two most celebrated trials of the Middle Ages and perhaps also of modern times.” We have known other exciting trials since then, but something here holds true. And if it is true that Abbot Bossard’s book, the most important as yet dedicated to Gilles de Rais, is obsolete today, this is not the case with the trial documents: this is not the case with these most terrible documents. At one time published in a defective form, however, the texts are unobtainable today. One can see their republication here; they have been the object of a long and meticulous study, which we hope proves worthy of the exceptional interest of the document.
In the second part of the introduction we have held ourselves to saying whatever was known of this individual, as it seemed to us. We have added to this a certain number of historical facts, given in chronological order whenever possible.
N.B. — For place names, we have followed the current, officially designated usage. However, we have made an exception of Rais. We have not followed the currently accepted spelling, which is Retz. In fact this spelling involves an absurd pronunciation. In the 15th century it was most often written as Rais, or occasionally Rays. The pronunciation, always observed in the region, was ray. We have gotten rid of the y, which is nothing but an idle embellishment.
For the names of people, we have striven to give the most probable spelling, taking into consideration the incoherence and fancy of that given in the texts. Let us specify only that each time the texts give the spelling cz (e.g.: Princzay), or cs, we have written c (e.g.: Princé), which corresponds to the pronunciation.
The Tragedy of Gilles de Rais
THE TRAGEDY OF GILLES DE RAIS
The Sacred Monster
Gilles de Rais owes his lasting glory to his crimes. But was he, as some affirm, the most abject criminal of all time? In essence, this speculative affirmation is barely defensible. Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us. On the night marked out by our fear, we are bound to imagine the very worst. The worst is always possible; and also, with crime, the worst is the last thing imaginable.
That is why — more than the actual crimes — legend, mythology, literature, and, above all, tragic literature set the standard of our fear. We can never forget that it is crime’s legendary aspects alone that have ordained the truth of crime.
That said, we cannot enter upon the story of Gilles de Rais without granting him his privileged place. In the end, we cannot leave the evocative power held in everyday reality unmentioned. And faced with Gilles de Rais’ crimes, we do get the sense, perhaps misleading, of a summit. His nobility, his immense fortune, his lofty achievements, and his execution in front of a scandalized crowd (which was perplexed, however, by his remorse and his many confessions and tears) consummate his apotheosis.
Undoubtedly, nothing completely vindicates the passion of the crowd that flocked to his execution. Gilles de Rais was simply a brutal man of war, a powerful nobleman without discretion, without scruples. Nothing designated him for the final sympathy of that crowd. His violence at least warrants the astonishment provoked by such an uncalculating and, as it were, bewildered passion. The violence of remorse corresponded, in effect, to the sick violence of vice, which brought this criminal to so many murders. Popular emotion was the consequence of the excess that had commanded a life never dominated by calculation. Gilles de Rais is a tragic criminal. The main constituent of tragedy is crime, and this criminal, more than any other perhaps, was a character of tragedy.
We must picture these sacrifices of dead children, which kept on multiplying. Let us imagine an almost silent reign of terror which does not stop growing, and for fear of reprisals the victims’ parents hesitate to speak. This anguish is that of a feudal world, over which are cast the shadows of massive fortresses. Today, tourists are attracted to the ruins of these fortresses; then they were monstrous prisons, and their walls evoked torments of which they only occasionally muffled the cries. In the presence of Gilles de Rais’ fairy-tale castles, which people will later call the castles of Bluebeard, we ought to recall these butcheries of c
hildren, presided over not by wicked fairies, but by a man drunk with blood. His crimes arose from the immense disorder that was unwinding him — unwinding him, and unhinging him. By the criminal’s confession, which the scribes of the trial took down while listening, we also know that sensual pleasure was not of the essence. Ostensibly he would sit on the belly of his victim and, in this fashion, masturbating, come on the dying body; what mattered to him was less the sexual enjoyment than to see death at work. He liked to watch. He had the body cut open, the throat cut, the members carved to pieces; he relished seeing the blood.
However, only one last satisfaction was missing for him. Gilles de Rais fancied himself a sovereign lord. As Marshal of France, after the victory at Orléans and the consecration of Charles, he had himself bestowed with quasi-royal arms. He rode preceded by a royal escort, accompanied by an “ecclesiastical assembly.” A herald of arms, two hundred men, and trumpeters announced him; the canons in his chapel, a kind of bishop, cantors, and the children in his music school made up his retinue on horseback, glittering with the richest ornaments. Gilles de Rais wanted to be dazzling, to the point of ruinous expenditure. In providing for the necessities that his delirium commanded, he liquidated an immense fortune without thinking. Some sort of dementia was at the heart of his propensity to spend money; he underwrote great theatrical performances accompanied by gifts of food and drink. He was compelled to fascinate people at all costs, but he lacked what a criminal quite often lacks on this order of things; this makes him recognize, in his confession, his excessive display of what necessarily should have remained hidden: his crimes …
Crime, obviously, calls for night; crime would not be crime without darkness, yet — were it pitch dark — this horror of night aspires to the burst of sunshine.
Something was lacking in the Aztec sacrifices, which took place at the same time as Rais’ murders. The Aztecs did their killing in the sun atop pyramids, and they lacked the consecration that belongs to a hatred of the day, to a longing for the night.
Conversely, there dwells in crime an essentially theatrical capacity, demanding that the criminal be unmasked, wherein the criminal does not delight until finally unmasked. Gilles de Rais had a passion for theater; from the confession of his baseness, from his tears, from his remorse, he wrung the pathos of his execution. The crowd that assembled to see him die appears to have been paralyzed by the remorse and forgiveness that the tearful nobleman humbly begged of his victims’ parents. Gilles de Rais wanted to die in front of his two accomplices; in this way he could display his hanging and burning to the bloody companions who had assisted him in his butcheries, of whom one at least had known his carnal embraces. For a long time they had been able to watch him wallowing in endless horror; for them he had long been the “sacred monster” that he became, in an instant, before the crowd.
During his life, Gilles de Rais’ exhibitionism was appeased before a small number of witnesses, his accomplices: Sillé, Briqueville, Henriet, Poitou, and a few others. However, the spasmodic meaning of his death and confessions emerged when strangled, hanged, he appeared before the crowd through the executioner’s flames.
Gilles de Rais is preeminently a tragic hero, the Shakespearian hero, whom perhaps this sentence from a judicial report evokes no less forcefully than the trial. (Published under the title of Mémoire des Héritiers, the text was edited after his death through the efforts of his family, who wanted to prove that he had dilapidated its fortunes lavishly — with reckless extravagance): “Everyone knew that he was notoriously extravagant, having neither sense nor understanding, since in effect his senses were often altered, and often he left very early in the morning and wandered all alone through the streets, and when someone pointed out to him that this was not fitting, he responded more in the manner of a fool and madman than anything else.”1 He was, moreover, conscious of this monstrous character. He said he had been “born under a constellation such that no one could understand without difficulty the illicit things he committed.” One participant in these horrors heard him say “that there was no man alive who could ever understand what he did.” Now he was moved by his planet to act as he did …
He doubtlessly developed a superstitious image of himself, as if he were of another nature, a kind of supernatural being attended by God and by the Devil. A victim of the profane world, of the real world, which had loaded him with advantages at his birth, but which had not supported him in the end. He was persuaded that the Devil, at his first beckoning, would run and fly to his aid. Through crime, as well as through a lasting devotion, he had a feeling of belonging to the sacred world, which might in no way refuse to support him. The Devil would make good the wrongs he had suffered, which in truth had come from his own imprudence! But this recourse to the Devil ended by impoverishing him; it left him at the mercy of charlatans who exploited his credulity. His tragedy is that of a Doctor Faust, but an infantile Faust. Before the Devil, in fact, our monster trembled. Not only did the Devil — our criminal’s last hope — leave him trembling like a leaf, but Gilles de Rais was ridiculously, devotedly afraid of him. The Devil reduced him to begging. The monster was covered in blood, but he was a coward.
With astonishing impudence, Rais imagined saving himself to the end, despite his abominable crimes, and escaping Hell’s flames, which for him were the object of a coal-seller’s implicit faith. Even though he invoked the demon and expected from him the reestablishment of his fortune, up to the end he was naively a good and devout Christian. A few months before his death, still free, he confessed and approached the Sacred Altar. He even had a feeling of humility on this occasion; in the church at Machecoul, the common people moved aside, leaving room for the great lord. Gilles refused, asking the poor folk to stay beside him. This was a moment when anguish perhaps took him by the throat, when he wanted to renounce his orgies of blood. He decided then to go abroad, to go crying in front of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
He dreamed of the endless voyage that would save him … But he contented himself with the intention. He was hardened, and during his last days of freedom he again began cutting children’s throats.
This bedlam is not contrary to the truest Christianity, which is always — be it frightening! be it Gilles de Rais’! — ready to forgive crime. Perhaps Christtianity is even fundamentally the pressing demand for crime, the demand for the horror that in a sense it needs in order to forgive. It is in this vein that I believe we must take Saint Augustine’s exclamation, “Felix culpa!,” Oh happy fault!, which blossoms into meaning in the face of inexpiable crime. Christianity implies a human nature which harbors this hallucinatory extremity, which it alone has allowed to flourish. Likewise, without the extreme violence we are provided with in the crimes of one Gilles de Rais, could we understand Christianity?
Perhaps Christianity is above all bound to an archaic human nature, one unrestrainedly open to violence? In his mad Christianity, no less than in his crimes, we see one aspect of the archaism of a man who, “leaving very early in the morning, wandered all alone through the streets …”
Bluebeard and Gilles de Rais
It does not seem to me that Christianity above all requires the rule of reason. It may be that Christianity would not want a world from which violence was excluded. It makes allowances for violence; what it seeks is the strength of the soul without which violence could not be endured. Gilles de Rais’ contradictions ultimately summarize the Christian situation, and we should not be astonished at the comedy of being devoted to the Devil, wanting to cut the throats of as many children as he could, yet expecting the salvation of his eternal soul … Whatever the case, we are at the antipodes of reason. Nothing in Gilles de Rais is reasonable. In every respect, he is monstrous. The memory that he left behind is that of a legendary monster. In the regions that he inhabited, this memory is in fact confounded with the legend of Bluebeard. There is nothing in common between Perrault’s Bluebeard and the Bluebeard to whom the populations of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany later attribute
d the castles of Machecoul, Tiffauges, and Champtocé. Nothing in Gilles de Rais’ life corresponds to the forbidden room or the stained key of the legend, nothing to Sister Anne’s watch at the top of the tower … In any case, we cannot expect any logic in the materials of legend. With little significance beyond the transfer of a real person into a legendary being — in conformity with a monstrous past that memory paints darker and darker — Gilles de Rais’ castles and crimes were attributed to Bluebeard in popular imagination. We need not trouble ourselves here with what was, in its various, occasionally contradictory versions, the story of Bluebeard.2 It hardly matters, in particular, to know whether the origin of the character goes back to Brittany. Michelet and some others believed so. But in speaking of Gilles de Rais, we need only consider the tradition concerning him. Abbot Bossard, from whom we have the most serious work on the criminal, wanted to establish this tradition and knew how to give it the precision it could eventually be given.
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