Cultural depictions of Gilles de Rais

Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc's comrade-in-arms, Marshal of France and confessed child murderer, has inspired a number of artistic and cultural works.

As early as the 15th century, the character appeared in a mystery play and a prose poem. He then underwent a long eclipse in cultural representations, before folklore transfigured him into Bluebeard.

From the 19th century onwards, literature revived the character, and cinema followed with films dedicated to the Maid of Orléans. Finally, comics and anime illustrate contemporary visions of the Marshal de Rais.

Iconography
All effigies of Gilles de Rais are posthumous and imaginary.

An engraving purporting to represent him was published in 1731 in Dom Bernard de Montfaucon's Les monumens de la monarchie françoise, qui comprennent l'histoire de France, avec les figures de chaque règne que l'injure des tems a épargées. Captioned "Gilles de Laval", this equestrian figure reproduces a 15th-century miniature on parchment captioned simply "Laval", included in the Armorial of, herald of King Charles VII of France.

Whether in the fifteenth-century Laval illumination or the eighteenth-century engraved "Gilles de Laval" copy, the knight's facial features in armor are concealed by his closed helmet, while his shield and mount cover prominently display the arms of the Counts of Laval - not those of the Barons of Retz. Although Dom Bernard de Montfaucon believes he recognizes Rais in the illumination, the equestrian figure cannot be identified with certainty since it's an "abstract" representation of the Counts of Laval, a heraldic image rather than an individual portrait. Montfaucon's disputed identification was nonetheless later taken up by other authors, starting with Abbot Eugène Bossard.

In addition, Rais is depicted as beardless, with medium-length hair and "dressed in an anachronistic Renaissance costume" in two miniatures depicting his trial and execution respectively. The first miniature adorns a copy of the ecclesiastical trial, and the second a copy of the civil trial. Stamped with the Bouhier family coat of arms, the two illuminations and their manuscript supports were once kept by the jurist and historian Jean Bouhier, president at the parlement of Dijon. Partly inherited from his grandfather, President Bouhier's collection of manuscript compilations was part of the scholarly tradition, in the 17th and 18th centuries, of assembling copies of trials relating to crimes of lèse-majesté as examples of the legal condemnations meted out to the nobility.

Dating back to the 16th century, the miniature of the execution depicts the repentant criminal, hands bound and joined in a gesture of prayer, head and eyes humbly lowered in contrition. The other miniature, dating from the 17th century, depicts Rais, holding his headdress in hand and addressing the mitred bishop who presides over the officiality during the ecclesiastical trial.

The most famous artist's view remains, commissioned on December 29, 1834, by the government of King Louis Philippe I to legitimize the July Monarchy "by recovering and instrumentalizing historical representations of old France" in the Palace of Versailles. Against the backdrop of the assault on Meung-sur-Loire, with his "well-trimmed beard" and pageboy haircut, firmly planted on dilapidated rubble and leaning on an axe, Gilles de Rais in damascened armor takes his place, as a military figure of the Hundred Years' War, in the Gallery of French Marshals of the Musée de l'Histoire de France. Like the other full-length portraits of this gallery, the oil on canvas depicts Rais "on a battlefield with [his] attributes of command".

Folklore
Like other historical figures such as Conomor or Henry VIII, Gilles de Rais has frequently been associated with the main character of the Bluebeard tale, to such an extent that this association has become "a cliché of folklorist literature", points out Catherine Velay-Vallantin, French specialist in the study of fairy tales. She adds that "it's pointless to look for the origin of the Bluebeard tale in this true crime", stressing that the tale "exists independently of the historical fact of Gilles de Rais". Vincent Petitjean, French doctor in comparative literature, nevertheless highlights the fact that "the confusion between the two characters is effective and is bound to make sense."

Gilles de Rais, inspiration for Charles Perrault's tale?
The life and deeds of Rais bear little resemblance to the wife-killer depicted in the folk tale. Historian and archivist-paleographer, though, considers that the circumstances of Rais' execution and burial offer plausible premises for his assimilation to Bluebeard. His hanging might have left a mark on the minds of the little children who were probably whipped on the same day, in accordance with the custom of corporally chastising them when a criminal was executed. Furthermore, Rais' coffin was carried by several noble ladies and demoiselles before his burial on Christian soil. Cazacu also believes that a process of folklorization is already underway in the 15th-century Chronique of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, which attributes wrongly to Rais murders of pregnant women in addition to child murders.

In the following century, in his treatise Of the Demon-mania of the Sorcerers (De la démonomanie des sorciers, 1580), Jean Bodin also refrains from mentioning child sexual abuse, borrowing from Enguerrand de Monstrelet the motif of the satanist assassin sacrificing fetuses removed from their mothers' wombs. Bodin adds that Rais was about to kill his own son in this way, but his wife noticed in time, so he was hauled off to trial. Again, Matei Cazacu observes that these fanciful elements seem partially reminiscent of the myth of Bluebeard. Either way, history writing seemed then to be more comfortable with a heretic (an idolatrous sorcerer immolizing children to the devil) than with a sadistic killer.

Charles Perrault's Stories or Tales from Past Times, with Morals was published in 1697 by the Parisian bookseller and printer Claude Barbin. This book included La Barbe bleue, "a story [which] is not an invention by Perrault, but a folk tale and ballad that circulated throughout Europe long before 1697 under different names and in many variants", says Matei Cazacu. However, according to Abbot Eugène Bossard and Matei Cazacu himself, Rais' life may have inspired, directly or indirectly, the writing of the tale.

Thus, Cazacu speculates that Perrault may have planted several clues in his text that could lead back to Rais, starting with the absence of the usual "conte" (tale) subtitle in the original edition printed in 1697, among other sibylline allusions to an authentic story rather than a marvelous fable. Thanks to his law studies, the author of Mother Goose Tales could have had access to one of the many handwritten transcriptions of Rais' ecclesiastical and secular trials, since such copies circulated as medieval examples of lèse-majesté cases in 17th-century legal communities, fond of scholarly trial collections. In particular, Cazacu detects similarities between the themes of Perrault's tale (the forbidden room and female curiosity) and the confessions of Rais' accomplices mentioning a locked room containing human bodies or limbs, as well as the indiscretion of a certain "lady of Jarville" (maybe Jeanne des Armoises ? ) peering through a slit at Rais' servants removing the bones of their master's victims from Machecoul castle.

Nevertheless, the hypothesis that Rais served as inspiration for Charles Perrault is refuted as too uncertain by Vincent Petitjean. This scholar discerns no reference, however veiled, to Rais' story in the version put down on paper by Perrault. It is not established that the latter knew Rais' life, or that this knowledge was "decisive in the writing of the tale", affirms Petitjean, who clearly distinguishes this issue from another phenomenon: "the popular confusion between Gilles de Rais and Bluebeard".

Popular confusion between Gilles de Rais and Bluebeard
The written record of this confusion dates back to 1820, the year of publication of the "Description de la rivière d'Erdre depuis Nantes jusqu'à Nort" ("Description of the Erdre river from Nantes to Nort"), a letter subsequently included in the book Voyage pittoresque dans le département de la Loire-Inférieure. In this account of his journey through what is now the Loire-Atlantique department, writer was the first author to mention, in print, a popular assimilation between Gilles de Rais and Bluebeard. According to vernacular accounts, a legend was rooted in the remains of La Verrière castle on the banks of the Erdre, although these ruins were located outside Rais' historic domains: seven large trees stood there like monuments of expiation allegedly dedicated to the memory of the fabled wives murdered by the local lord.

In 1836, the amalgam was popularized in Notes d'un voyage dans l'ouest de la France, a report in which Prosper Mérimée (a writer as much as an inspector-general of historical monuments) also interpreted regional traditions relating to Bluebeard "as a mythologized memory of Gilles de Rais." The idea was later taken up by Stendhal in his Mémoires d'un touriste, another travelogue published in 1838.

In 1858, in his romanticized accounts entitled Curiosités de l'histoire de France, polygraph Paul Lacroix (also known by the pen name "Bibliophile Jacob") fictitiously endowed Gilles de Rais with blond hair that clashed with a black beard with "almost bluish highlights, which had given the Sire de Rays the epithet Bluebeard, a popular nickname in Brittany, where his story was transformed into a fantastic tale." Among other popular details invented by "Bibliophile Jacob", Rais' singular facial hair and sobriquet ostensibly assimilated him to the cruel husband of the folk tale, but Lacroix failed to specify which version of the tale he was referring to. Thus, he opened the path to Rais' conventional physiognomy in the literature of the time, taken up again and again by other novelists such as Émilie Carpentier (Mémoires de Barbe-Bleue, 1865) and (Les Mystères de Machecoul, 1871).

On the historical front, Jules Michelet devoted four pages to Rais in Volume V of his Histoire de France (1841), a passage that enjoyed great literary fortune. No connection with Bluebeard was then mentioned, but in a reprint published in 1876, the book stated that "the story of the Breton Retz, much softened, has provided the material for a tale; moreover (for the honor of the family or the country?), his name has been substituted for that of the English partisan Blue barb." In 1889, writer admitted to having "vainly sought the trace" of this enigmatic Englishman.



On another note, some witnesses (like Pierre Foucher, father-in-law of Victor Hugo, and Antoine-Étienne Carro, a librarian from Meaux) referred to popular beliefs that equate Rais with Bluebeard. Yet it was mainly Abbot Eugène Bossard who claimed to have gathered a number of local traditions in support of his dissertation defended in December 1885. Within Bossard's ethnological collection, several "naïve tales" ignored the historical Rais and enthroned Bluebeard in his place at Tiffauges, Machecoul and Champtocé. Hence, Bossard intended to demonstrate the constant, centuries-old nature of an "identical, universal" tradition of Breton origin, simultaneously preserving and distorting the terrible memory of Rais, as attested by a vox populi embodied by geographically dispersed witnesses and repositories of ancestral memory ("mothers, nannies" and other "near-nonagenarian" elders). In this way, Bluebeard would not be Rais, but a representation of him. The abbot concluded that the process of popular assimilation between Rais and Bluebeard predated the publication of Mother Goose Tales.

Abbot Bossard's assertions were severely criticized by the examination board when he defended his thesis at the Poitiers Faculty of Letters in December 1885. As a member of the board, historian Jules Flammermont rejected the idea that Rais is the originator of the Bluebeard legend, arguing as well that Bossard failed to prove the antiquity of this legendary confusion, which was reported only in the early 19th century. Lastly, Flammermont asserted that Bossard had merely unearthed popular legends from the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle.

Drawing on the works of scholars Marc Soriano and Ute Heidmann, Vincent Petitjean also objects that the folktale is "an ungrateful object of study, since it is impossible to know the state of a version at a given moment, due to the narrative dynamics that make it elaborate as it is transmitted". As a result, we do not know the exact content of the oral and popular narrative from which Perrault's tale originally drew its inspiration, and which sets down in writing a perennial version. As scholar Roger Zuber explains, Mother Goose Tales is a literary work in its own right, which maintains a complex intertextual dialogue with multiple sources (Virgil, Apuleius, Paul Scarron). Therefore, Perrault's work cannot be linked arbitrarily to evanescent oral traditions, which are by their very nature incapable of clarifying the debate. For Roger Zuber, it is literature (the tale written by Perrault) that ends up making its mark on folklore, and not the other way round. Not free from approximations, Bossard's thesis is henceforth weakened in the eyes of Vincent Petitjean: "Was the story of Bluebeard that people told each other the same in Bossard's time as in Perrault's, the same in Perrault's time as it was when Gilles died?" This question is all the more important because a veritable literary explosion took hold of the folkloric tales (including "Bluebeard") from the second half of the 19th century onwards, offering a host of rewritten versions.

Bossard's thesis popularized the connection between Rais and the mythical wife-murderer, but from the second half of the 20th century onwards, successive editions of Mother Goose Tales no longer seemed to rely on it, abandoning a vain "quest for origins". However, Matei Cazacu supports and updates some of Abbot Bossard's conclusions, by highlighting the cartographic concordance between three types of data: "the geographical distribution of Gilles de Rais' properties in Brittany, Vendée, Poitou, Anjou and Maine; the localities from which children had disappeared and which are mentioned in the 1440 trials; the localities where the Bluebeard tale has been recorded by folklorists." In specific regions identifying the marshal of France with the bluish bearded murderer, a mythical character with no precise identity or temporal anchorage, the ruins of Rais' fortresses "have contributed, by their mere existence, to the fixation of the stories on a material support, a veritable site of memory". Today, the castles of Machecoul and Tiffauges are still commonly associated with Bluebeard in tourist signs.

Besides, it's difficult to pass down the memory of child sexual abuse (a taboo subject) from one generation to another, according to Matei Cazacu. This would explain why there are no examples of this kind of abuse in folklore, where the child remains a prime example of an "asexual being", despite the many folktales depicting children variously killed and devoured. The collective memory would consequently be operating a "shift in meaning" from generation to generation, finally integrating the historical figure of Rais into the "known category" of the murderer of women, an archetype personified in this case by a horrible "virile (bearded) seducer", Bluebeard.

Nevertheless, to medievalist, the case of Gilles de Rais does not fall within the mythification process analyzed by French philologist and religious studies scholar Georges Dumézil. According to the latter, a myth can become a story (such as an Indo-European deity's transfiguration into Horatius Cocles, in accordance with Roman historiography) but Bouzy observes that the haphazard assimilation of Rais to Bluebeard reverses the aforementioned process. Moreover, Bouzy deems the wife-murderer and his forbidden chamber to be "a simple rewriting of the myth of Pandora and her famous box", while Rais, sadistic killer and rapist of dozens of children, cannot be "an avatar of the bland Bluebeard".

Literature
During the 15th century, Gilles de Rais appears in the mystery play entitled Mystère du siège d'Orléans (c. 1450–1500) as a captain devoted to Joan of Arc's cause. In "Le Temple de Boccace" (c. 1465), a poem written mainly in prose, Flemish historiographer Georges Chastellain evokes the hanged corpse of a "sad and unfortunate knight", delivered to the flames and surrounded by a ghostly cloud of vindictive children. Rais then underwent a long eclipse in cultural representations.

Medieval chronicles do not generally dwell on his existence, nor do regional historians of the modern era. During the Ancien Régime, classicism did not focus on this type of character, while peddler literature, despite its fondness for edifying true crime stories, does not broach the subject of the hanged marshal. In the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire mentioned Rais briefly, presenting him as a victim of superstition and religious fanaticism. Later, the Marquis de Sade referenced Rais succinctly as an example of a "master libertine" and "instrument of the laws of nature" in Philosophy in the Bedroom and Juliette.

The case of Gilles de Rais began to be discussed more frequently in the 19th century. Folk tales recorded his transfiguration into Bluebeard. What's more, Romantic literature provided then a fitting backdrop for the evocation of Rais' criminal life, in the literary continuity of the nefarious brigand lords depicted in Gothic fiction. Simultaneously, anti-nobility polemics (inherent to the French political landscape in this time) gave rise to tales with historical pretensions, populated by feudal lords who abuse their seigneurial rights by committing pillage, kidnapping and raping unfortunate victims locked in dreadful dungeons. All this horror imagery foreshadowed fictions centered on Rais as an "evil lord".

Since then, literature has successively presented various Rais' facets, from the bluish bearded lord portrayed in minor works by writers fond of the medieval clichés of 19th-century dark romanticism, to the double being (wild beast and "decadent aesthete") portrayed in 1891 in Joris-Karl Huysmans' fin de siècle novel Là-bas (where the protagonist Durtal conducts intensive research into this historical figure), to the "sacred monster" in Georges Bataille's 1959 essay, and the ambivalent ogre in Michel Tournier's novels. However, Rais is not yet a literary myth, as he remains "a bit like Bluebeard's victims: hidden in a dark, morbid, forbidden chamber, and visited from time to time by a daring and curious author", according to Vincent Petitjean, French doctor in comparative literature.

Bande dessinée and manga
Gilles de Rais is a central character in the French comic series Jhen Roque by Jacques Martin and. He appears as "handsome and elegant", sporting a black beard that contrasts with red hair "in keeping with the evocative medieval symbolism of the Devil".

On another note, French comics artist Paul Gillon produced Jehanne (1993–1997), an erotic comic book depicting sexual relationships between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais.

In Shirayuri no kishi, a manga published in 1975, Suzue Miuchi introduces two characters inspired respectively by Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. Eager to fight the English enemy, the heroine Jannu goes to see King Charles VII, but an evil royal advisor assigns her an impossible task: to obtain financial help from the dark lord Jiru do Re. Nicknamed Shinigami, the reclusive Jiru resides in a castle populated by wax figures, in reality the embalmed corpses of his relatives. To complete this gothic imagery, the mangaka surrounds the fortress with a cemetery. Jiru devotes himself to alchemical research, with the aim of making gold and becoming the richest man in the world. Following the pattern of Beauty and the Beast, Jannu miraculously convinces Jiru do Re to turn to "good magic" by devoting himself to war against the English, in the name of God and the King.

In Kouta Hirano's manga series Drifters, Rais is reincarnated as a colossal, indestructible warrior alongside other historical figures brought back to life in an occult war orchestrated by the shadowy Black King. Following an interpretation repeated in other mangas, Rais committed his murders so that he could join Joan of Arc in hell. He assists the Maid resurrected as a vindictive pyromaniac who wishes to reduce the world to ashes.

Films about Joan of Arc
Gilles de Rais appears mainly in cinema as Joan of Arc's comrade-in-arms, in a number of biopics dedicated to the Maid of Orleans. Scholar Vincent Petitjean notes that "the cinematic treatment of Gilles makes him a shadow in two ways. Firstly, he is Joan's shadow, as it is through her that he is brought to light, and secondly, he is the shadow of himself, the monstrosity to come already enveloping him."


 * French novelist, playwright and actor Philippe Hériat played the part in Marco de Gastyne's Saint Joan the Maid in 1929. The character plays an important role, personifying all the brutish soldiers that Joan of Arc (Simone Genevois) must unite under her banner. According to the review published at the time in Cinémagazine, Hériat's performance was "remarkable for its truth, intelligence and psychological subtlety. If his Gilles de Rais sums up all the vices of an era, he also has its faith."
 * Henry Brandon played the part in Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc in 1948. Accustomed to playing villains (such as the diabolical Fu Manchu), the actor sports a jet-black goatee and wears plate armor and a helmet over a camail. He manages to portray an eerie knight in the close-ups he is sparingly given, but his character remains mute throughout the film. Rais just listens to La Hire (Ward Bond) when the latter, initially suspicious of Joan of Arc (Ingrid Bergman), launches into a verbal joust with her. During the climactic battle in Orleans, Rais disappears from the screen. He appears one last time, cheering on King Charles VII of France (José Ferrer) during his coronation.
 * David Oxley played the part in Otto Preminger's 1957 film version of Shaw's play, Saint Joan.
 * Bruno Wolkowitch played the part in Jacques Rivette's Joan the Maid in 1994.
 * Vincent Cassel played the part in Luc Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc in 1999. "Besson completely and deliberately obscured the dark, tortured, monstrous side of Gilles de Rais", explains actor Pascal Greggory, who plays the Duke of Alençon in the film. Costume designer Catherine Leterrier designed "a very elegant black suit of armor" to reflect Rais' "character and history", in particular "his disturbing side".
 * Director Bruno Dumont hired a non-professional actor named Julien Manier to play Gilles de Rais in his film Joan of Arc (2019), an adaptation of Charles Péguy's play Jeanne d'Arc (1897). Manier, said Dumont, is "a young guy from Saint-Omer, gothic [...] fragile, with a weak voice and at the same time a very strong face, very hard and very impressive. And I like this contradiction". Far from an imposing man with a devilish beard, the actor plays a juvenile, frail baron who preaches looting to the soldiers to give them heart and soul. An expression of Péguy's pessimism, Rais' brutal, cynical rhetoric clashes with Joan of Arc's sense of honor and divine love. He who says such things can only be "the last of men", replies the Maid.

On television, Benoît Brione played the part in Catherine, a French television series directed by Marion Sarraut, based on Juliette Benzoni's Catherine, a series of historical romance novels. Thereafter, Vincent Gauthier played the part in Jeanne d'Arc, le pouvoir et l'innocence, a French television series directed by Pierre Badel, adapted from the eponymous novel by Pierre Moinot.

Abandoned film projects
In 1970, Pier Paolo Pasolini was scouting out locations in the Loire Valley for the production of The Decameron. Invited to a debate with students at the University of Tours, he was given a book by anthropologist Franco Cagnetta on Gilles de Rais. The Italian filmmaker "thought about [a movie] seriously for a few weeks" but he gave up, "caught up in the Trilogy of Life". Pasolini specifies that he wanted to portray a jovial sexuality as "compensation for repression" and not to make a "cruel" film, as would later be the case in Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, where sexual intercourse, depicted as "obligatory and ugly", now represents "the reduction of the body to a thing."

After shooting The Phantom of Liberty (1974), Luis Buñuel worked with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière on a contemporary transposition of Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel Là-bas. Gérard Depardieu agreed to play Gilles de Rais during the film's medieval sequences. However, the director – already elderly at the time – abandoned the project, anticipating the demanding nature of the shooting, which would require imposing historical reconstructions. According to Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel also considered the time for scandals to be over. For example, the filmmaker could "neither take [the presence of the Devil] seriously, nor resolutely mock it", deeming the modern black mass sequence perpetrated by Canon Docre "superfluous and easy".

Films loosely based on Gilles de Rais' story
A familiar figure in Spanish horror films, Paul Naschy plays a knight loosely inspired by Gilles de Rais' occult life and downfall in three movies: Horror Rises from the Tomb (1972), El Mariscal del Infierno (1974) and Panic Beats (1983). The Spanish actor considers these variations on the same character (successively named Alaric de Marnac and Gilles de Lancré) to be his most "totemic" creation.

In 1986, the Spanish director Agusti Villaronga directed the film Tras el cristal. To create the character of Klaus, a former Nazi torturer, pedophile and child executioner, Villaronga claims to have been inspired by Georges Bataille's book on Gilles de Rais.

Anime
Gilles de Rais acquires the bulging physiognomy of the supernatural character "Caster" in the anime Fate/Zero, adaptation of the eponymous Japanese light novel, which recounts a contemporary war between magicians vying for the Holy Grail through their "Servants", the reincarnated souls of various historical or mythical figures. After Joan of Arc's execution in 1431, Gilles de Rais turned his back on the Church, throwing himself wholeheartedly into occultism and murderous depravities for eight long years. He ended up on the scaffold at the instigation of his enemies driven by greed rather than any concern for justice. A few centuries later, a young Japanese serial killer named Ryūnosuke Uryū fortuitously summons the spirit of Gilles de Rais as a "Caster"-class Servant, a kind of magic-mastered figure. Calling himself "Bluebeard", Rais continues his crimes under the admiring gaze of his mortal master, with whom he establishes a relationship of friendship and trust, while remaining haunted by the memory of Joan of Arc. As an outsider to the Holy Grail War, Caster is fascinated by the Servant Saber, a female incarnation of King Arthur, in whom he wrongly believes he recognizes the Maid of Orleans.

Alternative versions of Rais' character as a sorcerer evolving in a fantasy world appear in anime such as Rage of Bahamut and Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight, in which the protagonist Montmorency-Laval endows the young peasant girl Joan with supernatural powers, granting her the philosopher's stone.

Music

 * Zurich-based avant-garde extreme metal band Celtic Frost recorded a song about Gilles de Rais called "Into the crypts of Rays" on their 1984 extended play album Morbid Tales.
 * Cradle of Filth's album Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder is centered on the life of Gilles de Rais.
 * La Passion de Gilles, opera (French libretto), 1983, music: Philippe Boesmans, libretto: Pierre Mertens based on his 1982 play (same title).

Games

 * In Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness and Castlevania 64 Giles de Rais (also referred to as simply Dracula's Servant) is an immortal vampire and loyal follower of Dracula. In the latter, he disguises himself as Dracula in order to trick those who oppose his Master.