Trial of Gilles De Rais

by George Bataille

  I will later provide in full (pp. 111 to 125) the details of what Gilles’ confessions and Henriet’s, Poitou’s, and Blanchet’s, not to mention Prelati’s, testimonies permit knowing of the invocations that followed one another from the spring of 1439 to the arrest in September 1440. From rather numerous, rather precise descriptions we get a rich idea of the ritual of conjury of this period … I should only like to depict without further delay the atmosphere that was created in the castle at Tiffauges by these appeals to infernal powers. Prelati discovered, at the same time that he learned of his master’s superstitious piety, the cruel murders that were impossible to do without; he was therefore going to make him live in the paradox that came from a vain expectation of a savior-devil and the demonic atmosphere that sprang from the children whose throats had been cut. To the evasions of this devil, for whom Rais kept waiting in the marvelous euphoria of inexhaustible gold … was answered only by the nightmare of bloody heads and the threat of final catastrophe, which it was each day a bit more childish to ignore.

  In the first place, Prelati had his master drop the habit he had of participating at invocations. He attributed the devil’s hesitation to some dissatisfaction or another; the devil, on the other hand, appeared each time the scrupulous Italian operated alone! From April to December 1439, the latter was able to maintain a kind of enchantment over this bloody man who was blindly forging ahead. But the situation became graver. Around July-August, Gilles went to Bourges, where he stayed long enough to have news and even a present sent to him from the devil: a “black powder on a slate stone” given to Rais by Barron, Prelati’s personal demon. The Italian wrote to his master regularly at this time. At first Gilles carried the powder around his neck in a silver box. But after several days he admitted that it was not doing him any good … Probably after his return to Bourgneuf from Bourges, where Rais had encountered the Duke Jean V of Brittany, he must have forced Prelati to let him attend an invocation conducted on the premises, with the intention of obtaining from Barron the Duke’s good graces. In vain. Deceived and depressed, Gilles immediately yields to his thirst for blood: a fifteen-year-old child, Bernard Le Camus, loses his life on this day. But nothing does the trick; the criminal, apparently, cannot find appeasement: terror and remorse oppress him. Even at Bourgneuf he dreams of reforming himself, of going to cry before the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is probably after this setback, which the crisis followed, that Prelati, divining the need to take his master in hand, proposes what could be a last resort: the irritated demon asked Gilles for a sacrifice! It was time to sacrifice an infant to the Devil. At first this proposition seems to have left Gilles in anguish. Prelati must have known in advance that this superstitious man would tremble; he knew the reticence of the criminal who never ultimately abandoned the hope and anxiety to save his soul; Gilles could not dissemble what was impardonable and repugnant in the sacrifice of an innocent, of a miserable child to the “unclean spirit.” However, at bay, at all costs wanting to save, as with his soul and life, what was left of his riches, he appeared one evening carrying the hand, heart, and eye perhaps, of a child. He was so eager to see the devil! During the night, the Italian presented the horrible offering, but the devil did not come …

  We can easily imagine Rais’ state of mind during the period that followed. Spattered with blood, it is possible that this man was feverish. Would Prelati have been able from then on to maintain the spell under which he had attempted to keep him? Everything ought to have terrified him. His only outlet, it seemed, was in anger, violence … On Blanchet’s request, Jean Petit had conveyed to him the public rumor that was mounting; he had requested that he not persevere in crime: the goldsmith went moaning into one of those terrifying prisons, from which, in order not to die, he needed to leave pretty quickly …

  What ought to have put the finishing touch on Gilles’ distress was the sudden visit of the future Louis XI, then the Viennese Dauphin. This sinister character was sent into Poitou by his father with the mission of putting an end to the mayhem of wars that had not stopped reigning in these regions. He came to Tiffauges, where it seems that Rais had just enough time to have the alchemical ovens destroyed. An old ordinance by Charles V prohibited, in effect, the practice of alchemy. The ovens being gone, the Dauphin — with whom so shabby a marshal as Lord de Rais in 1439 held no prestige — restricted himself to arresting the captain of men-at-arms at Tiffauges, guilty of pillages and “requisitions” in the countrysides of that region. The arrest was in response to the fact that Rais’ men-at-arms often lived off the land … This hostile visit actually had a disastrous result: the destruction of the ovens announced to the criminal that he simply would not soon get his hands on that gold, which he sought in anguish for the possibility of avoiding ruin. It is true: by alchemy, if he had so desired, the demon would have granted his zealous servant the object of his request! But obstinately the demon refused to appear! For Gilles, Prelati’s illusion and quackery were merely good for a few month’s respite. The euphoria announced the catastrophe; the burst of life precipitated the definitive fall.

  By the beginning of the year 1440, everything is theoretically played out. The Marshal’s fortune and moral credit are at an all-time low. Everything fails at the same time. The Devil mocks him. If Prelati’s seduction had not bewitched him, he might have sent packing the braggart who had succeeded at nothing. But Gilles could not have endured being alone in his misery. Prelati’s company was precious. They could speak Latin together and, at any rate, the Italian’s conversation was refined. Gilles’ French companions were probably louts, cruel killers like Sillé; Briqueville was a vulgar profiteer; Henriet and Poitou, younger, perhaps had some charm: their depositions are lively …, and we know above all that Poitou, who had been Gilles’ lover, was handsome. But these boys were bumpkins, and it is logical to suppose that Prelati, who perhaps on his own behalf offered himself to his master’s embrace, granted him the satisfaction that came of his education. Growing tired of one orgy after another, it was impossible for Gilles to pass up on this handsome braggart. For lack of having saved his master by means of the Devil, Prelati at least knew how to amuse and distract him at a moment when his life was ending up sinking into the nightmare which his thirst for blood had confined him.

  He came so far short of these last hopes; the sinister Marshal was now nothing more than flotsam. For a long time he was living in a hell, intersected by excessive joys, that is the eroticism of one who has abandoned a reasonable life.

  In his depressed state an impulse of exasperation, of anger, blinded him. He had sold to Geoffroy Le Ferron, the Treasurer of Brittany, one of his last remaining castles, one of his castles in the Rais domain, Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte. He learned that Lord de Vieillevigne, one of his cousins, would have voluntarily bought this castle because it had once been part of his family’s endowment. Rais thought that Geoffroy Le Ferron would accept going back on the transaction. He was wrong. We do not know why Rais persisted. But he could not accept the treasurer’s refusal. Against all wisdom, he decided to forcibly reseize the castle that had been sold. There was no garrison at Saint-Etienne-de-Mermorte. The treasurer had only installed his brother Jean, who was of the Church and who was protected by ecclesiastical immunity.

  Not only did Gilles de Rais strike out against Jean V’s treasurer, but this high officer was undoubtedly only a signatory for the Duke himself. Whatever his reasons were, there was a sort of dementia in the obstinacy of Gilles who, bearing arms, burst screaming into the village church where the treasurer’s brother was attending to the Divine Office.

  Threatened with having his head immediately cut off, the clergyman saw himself reduced to opening the doors of the castle for the energumen, who thereupon had him put in irons.

  This impulse of rage pitched him violently against those who were going to bring him down, provoking at the same time the reactions of the Duke of Brittany and the Bishop of Nantes.

  He struggled; he hoped to save himself by taking a
dvantage of the multiplicity of powers. He transferred his prisoner Jean Le Ferron, who was answerable to the Duke of Brittany, from Saint-Étienne to Tiffauges, which was independent of the Crown.

  He strove to negotiate with Jean V But four months were enough. On the one hand, Jean V held an interview with Rais that made him believe in a possibility of appeasement. At just about the same time, the Duke got his brother, Charles VII’s constable, to seize Tiffauges and liberate Jean Le Ferron, whom Rais was counting on as a hostage. On September 15th, Jean V’s men seized Lord de Rais at Machecoul. They arrested him in order to lead him to the prison at Nantes at the same time as Prelati, Eustache Blanchet, Henriet, and Poitou.

  Already the inquest into the murders of children was well advanced. It had been ordered on July 30th by the Bishop of Nantes, Jean Malestroit, Jean V’s chancellor and right-hand man.

  The absurd Saint-Étienne affair had set off legal proceedings that the starvelings, whose throats so great a lord had cut, would not have roused for a long time still.

  The Spectacular Death

  It is only recently that the judicial execution of men ceased to be a spectacle intended for the entertainment and anguish of the crowd. There was no corporal punishment in the Middle Ages that was not spectacular. Death by corporal punishment was then, in the same capacity as tragedy is on the stage, an exalting and significant moment in human life. Wars and massacres, stately or religious parades, and corporal punishments dominated the crowds in the same capacity as churches and fortresses: thence was dictated the moral sense and generally the profound sense of every aspect of life (but maybe at the same time its little moral sense and, finally, its little sense). Before being judged and consequently executed, Gilles de Rais was thus destined for the crowd at the instant of his arrest; he was promised to them as is a choice spectacle on a theater bill.

  Likewise, ten years earlier, Joan of Arc had been promised to the same anonymous crowd, the noise and fury of which continues to reach us through the ages …

  Of all the victims offered to this crowd, Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, these companions in arms, are opposed to each other in the same way as are derided innocence and the crime that exhibits in the same breath the horror and tears of the criminal! In the case of both these victims, a single aspect lends itself to comparison: the emotion that this thundering mass could have had, before which Joan died in flames; the emotion that was evidently attached to this same anonymous thundering at the moment that Gilles, in his turn, appeared in the flames. As strange as it sounds to us, the fright that his crimes inspired (the innumerable children whose throats the assassin cut, spilling his seed on them, according to his confession) contributed, with the spectacle of tears, to the crowd’s compassion. It contributed to it because in excessive social commotions it is always possible to obtain the best as well as to expect the worst; on this day the crowd had been invited to show up early in procession to the place of execution, praying to God for Gilles and his accomplices, who were being led to their death. Thus, that day the crowd could discover in their tears that this great lord who was to die, being the most infamous criminal, was like everyone in the crowd.

  We know nothing of the reaction that Gilles de Rais must have had at the moment of his arrest.

  It is possible that at first he believed in the possibility of extricating himself from the bad move that the Saint-Étienne affair had been. Initially he is the object of regard appropriate to his rank. He is given a high room in the castle that has nothing in common with the dungeons in which one locks the wretched (so little in common that an interrogation of the accused was done there in front of ten or fifteen people). Proceedings were begun before the ecclesiastical tribunal, over which the Bishop of Nantes and the Inquisitor of the Faith presided. The ecclesiastical proceedings alone had a dramatic aspect that gave the trial of Gilles de Rais the eminent place that it occupies among all criminal trials. (The secular trial proceedings were less important; the ecclesiastical proceedings are, on the other hand, the only ones of which a detailed record has come down to us.)

  Of all the executions in the Middle Ages, as spectacular as they were, that of Gilles de Rais seems to have been theatrically the most moving. Likewise it appears that, in the beginning, his trial was at least one of the most animated and pathetic of all time.

  This was a man accustomed to making men tremble who confronted the judges, a far more difficult accused party than those in our criminal courts.

  Far from being a rake, Gilles de Rais had, as I have said, a genuine foolishness. It showed clearly in his first reaction, his insults, which were followed by his breakdown, his tears, and his inadmissible confession. Whatever fearfulness he still possessed beforehand inclined the judges to no less prudence. With his first appearance they avoided approaching the essential; doubtlessly they wanted the accused to acknowledge their competence before measuring the gravity of the accusation. This appearance took place on September 28th. Abandoning him to the depression of solitude, they waited until October 8th before making him appear again. But the accusation this time appeared in its true light: inexpiable. Gilles was no longer accused simply of having violated the immunity of the Church at Saint-Étienne; he had conjured the Devil, he had cut the throats of children and violated them, he had offered the hand, eyes, and heart of a child to the demon. Gilles understood and his anger was unleashed. He must have known from the beginning that he was lost. He exploded, challenging his judges. Evidently he thought of dragging the trial out, hoping for an intervention. But he immediately came up against the resolute firmness of the judges, who revealed their decision: they wanted to do away with him at once. When Gilles appeared again on the 13th, his powerless rage was unleashed; he insulted his judges as outrageously as he could, addressing them as ribalds and simoniacs, trying in vain to oppose them to the president of the secular tribunal, present at the proceedings. The judges reacted coldly; they excommunicated the madman at once.

  In this day, excommunication had an overwhelming impact. Gilles de Rais managed, on the surface, to place himself above his judges. But the superstitious devotee — that he had not ceased being in spite of his crimes and satanic pursuits — broke down. Returned to the solitude of his room, he discovered again, more terrible than ever, the nightmare in which he raved.

  One frightening way out remained, however, which suited the madman. To make a blaze of the disaster! An unquestionably disastrous but spectacular blaze, ultimately a delirious blaze; the crowd that would approach its glare would be fascinated …

  In the course of the lengthy hallucination that he was living, the vain man that he had been came to a point where the violent movement of his thought exceeded its shabby limits. Succumbing definitively, his only authentic glory clung to his crimes. But he could only boast of these crimes under one condition:

  He was going — crying, desperate, already nearly dying — to confess them, but, at the same time, to revel in their horrible grandeur, a grandeur that would make men tremble!

  He was going to do what the Christian path had taught him, the path that, despite everything, he had always wanted to follow. While moaning, he would implore the forgiveness of God and all those who had suffered from the prodigious disdain that he had for others. He would implore while moaning, he would implore while dying; his tears, in this heavy apotheosis, would be authentic tears of blood!

  But we have, however, only a remote understanding of what goes on in a fragile mind at the moment when the possibility of making a stand is stripped away, before our comprehending or divining, if possible, what leads it from one point to another. Likewise when we can discern nothing on a stormy night, the traces of lightning that escape us are dazzling … provided they escape us; and what is forced upon us, more than a comprehensible aspect, is the dizzying mobility wherein the possible aspects succeed one another. We must no less illustrate — or try to illustrate — by beginning with some trifling thing, what the documents inform us could have happened. We cannot to any e
xtent forget that Gilles de Rais could never, unless vaguely — could not, in any case, but differently — have had the reactions which we impart to him. In their indecent precision what the statements suggest is the turmoil from which emanated these tears, these confessions, these entreaties that we are familiar with. But without the statements to suggest it, we would be no more familiar with the turmoil than we would be, asleep, with the storm that dazzled us. It is in this sense — only in this sense — that the commentaries add to the statement of facts. But need Lord de Rais’ theatrical death appear, conclusively, limited by the poverty of these facts? Could the facts be separated from the incomprehensible lightning storm of the possible?

  When on October 15, 1440, Gilles de Rais appeared again, the change that he had undergone in two days time in the solitude of his room was so great that it was comparable to death; only death might have brought about a more profound havoc … He was resigned; to his judges he came asking forgiveness for his insults; he was crying. He did not confess everything the first day, but if he denied what was the most serious thing to the clergymen, he immediately acknowledged the inadmissible: he had put children to death!

  On his knees, in tears, “with great sighs,” he pleaded to be absolved of the sentence of excommunication that the judges had pronounced against him. The judges, who had already forgiven him for the insults, absolved him as he requested. The hesitation of his first confessions is not necessarily significant. Doubtlessly, it is not unbelievable that at the outset profound reservations still stalled him. Would he have thought that a repentant great lord could be forgiven for putting to death poor children, whereas the conjury of demons warranted fire? It is possible.