Sympathy for the Devil: Gilles de Rais and His Modern Apologists

Summary

The soldier, nobleman, and multicide Gilles de Rais ranks among the most notorious criminals of the fifteenth century. Executed at Nantes in 1440 for a host of crimes, which apparently included heresy, the invocation of demons, and the murder of an undetermined number of children, he is a figure tailor-made for lasting infamy. However, Gilles has also enjoyed an extraordinary posthumous career, even undergoing something of a procès de réhabilitation in the vein of his former companion Jeanne d'Arc. This exoneration seems to have begun at the very moment of his death. He was apparently followed to the gibbet by “a great crowd of people praying to God for the condemned,” and some years later his daughter Marie built a memorial fountain on the site of his execution. Other contemporary observers are no less forgiving. The fifteenth-century chronicler Monstrelet, for instance, strove to convince his readers of Gilles's ultimate merit: “In spite of the false and inhuman will he had, at the end he was very graceful and pious … The greater part of the Breton nobility, and especially those of his family, had very great pain and sadness.” Among these medieval witnesses, therefore, there is a tacit desire to “reintegrate” this deviant figure into the codes he violated. The gestures of Monstrelet and Marie de Rais show a common desire to draw this criminal, “the savage baron more terrible than the ravening wolf,” back into the value-system of his society.