The Trial of Gilles de Rais

The case

On 18 September 1440 a woman named Péronne Loessart came before commissioners of the Duke of Brittany at Nantes to explain how she had lost her ten-year-old son. A member of the household of Gilles de Rais, one of the greatest lords in the region, had offered to take the boy into service as a page. She had let him go. She had not seen him since. Over the following weeks dozens of parents, neighbours and relatives gave statements of the same kind: boys who went to beg for alms at one of the baron's castles, or were placed with his servants, or were last seen near his residences, and never came home.

The man they were describing had been, eleven years earlier, a national hero. Born around 1405 at Champtocé in Anjou, heir to several great families of western France, Gilles de Rais held lands across Brittany, Anjou and Poitou. He fought for Charles VII in the Hundred Years' War, rode with Joan of Arc to relieve Orléans in 1429, and that summer was made Marshal of France. In the 1430s he withdrew from soldiering and spent heavily on his retinue, his household and display. His family complained that he was wasting the inheritance, and in 1435 the king forbade further sales of his lands.

What brought him down was not the children. In May 1440, quarrelling over the sale of a castle at Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte, he burst armed into the parish church during Mass, threatened the cleric Jean Le Ferron and imprisoned him. Le Ferron was a tonsured churchman and the brother of a ducal official, and the act offended both the Church and the Duke of Brittany, John V. Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes and the duke's chancellor, opened an inquiry into the rumours about Gilles, and the duke's judge began a parallel secular investigation.

Gilles was arrested at his castle of Machecoul on 15 September 1440 and taken to Nantes. Two of his servants, Henriet Griart and Étienne Corrillaut, called Poitou, were arrested with him, along with an Italian cleric, François Prelati, whom he had employed to conjure spirits and make gold, and a priest who had recruited Prelati. Two cousins said to have been involved had already fled.

He faced two courts. Before the bishop and the inquisitor of the faith, the charges were heresy, invoking demons, sodomy and the murder of children. Before the duke's court, they were murder. At first Gilles denied everything and rejected the court's authority. Then he submitted. The court authorised torture, and he asked instead to confess. On 21 and 22 October he described abducting, abusing and killing boys over several years, beginning around 1432, with the help of his servants. His servants' confessions had already given similar accounts.

The church court's sentence put the number of victims at one hundred and forty or more. The secular court spoke only of several small children. On 25 October he was condemned to death. The next morning, 26 October 1440, he was hanged on the meadow of Biesse by the Loire alongside Henriet and Poitou. At his own request he died first. His body was taken down before the fire could consume it and buried in the Carmelite church at Nantes.

Doubt has followed the verdict ever since. The trial was conducted under inquisitorial procedure, with torture threatened, confessions recorded in formulaic Latin by notaries, and judges with political and financial interests in his ruin; the duke had already acquired some of his lands. Some writers, from Voltaire to twentieth-century campaigners, have suggested he was framed. Most professional historians disagree. They point to the parents' testimony, gathered before any confession, which records children going missing over years around his homes, and to passages in the servants' confessions that have no model in the standard questions of the period.