What we know of Gilles’ father or, generally, of his family members is vague; it is the same with representatives of the family of Rais, of which he was the heir and which died out in 1407 in the person of Jeanne Chabot, called La Sage. The only persons of whom we do know individual details are Pierre and Jean de Craon, Gilles’ maternal great-grandfather and grandfather. We will speak of them, but first we ought to depict the world of the relatives of this bloody man who, during years of anguish, waited for the moment to throw himself on children, violate them, and cut their throats.
All of Gilles’ near relations are powerful feudal lords, proprietors of vast rural estates, dominated by massive fortresses. Each of them possesses many, occasionally a great number, of these high positions, which wield violent power in fear and horror. A power in some way religious even. (The sovereign power of the King is supernatural in part, the power of a great lord resembles it, is the reflection of it.) Indeed, these feudal lords are not clearly conscious of the situation by which they profit, living in search of glory, but in comfortable luxury (if they do not have material comfort, a most genuine comfort is afforded them by the number of servants). Charity, religious terror, ambition, vain pleasures, and sordid interests share an opulent and fragile life, a life that at each moment death can terminate conclusively. In this world of great lords — who laugh, who chase and make war, who never stop thinking of the enemy, of the rival, but who rarely get bored and never work — nobody escapes for long the thought of a grimacing Devil, ruling over the eternal terror of Hell. Our life today, which is thought reasonable, is in part a fabric of contradictions. But unreservedly a great lord at the beginning of the 15th century, far from striving for reason, lived in a contradictory chaos of calculation, violence, good humor, bloody disorder, mortal anguish, and the absence of anxiety …
Speaking of Gilles de Rais’ crimes, we alluded at first to the archaism of his character; we will see that this archaism stands out in many ways.
Gilles de Rais belongs primarily to his time. He is one of those unreasonable feudal lords, with whom he shares the pleasures of egoism, laziness, and disorder. He lives in the same way, in those heavy and luxurious fortresses, among the men-at-arms in his service, and in contempt of the rest of the world.
In all respects, his education identifies him with the whole of these mediocre and prestigious men. If he has military capabilities, it is in the degree to which he has been broken in by violent exercises; but of the art of war, he could have received the rudiments only (one did not train warriors back then; one possibility alone presented itself: life among those who had the experience of war). The family riches determined that Gilles would have two ecclesiastic tutors, who doubtless taught him how to read and write easily; he knew Latin, which he must have also spoken, but nothing proves that he had a true education. Some manuscripts, which are perhaps most likely handed down from him, do not suggest that he dedicated a significant part of his life to them.
Gilles de Rais, on the whole, is lost in the feudal masses of the time. But he is opposed in one respect (relating to his archaic character) to the one who received the charge of his education: his grandfather. As we have said, we know more about the life of this grandfather, Jean de Craon, than about any of his other relatives.
Gilles’ mother, Marie de Craon, and father, Guy de Laval, died young, and one after the other in the course of 1415. Guy de Laval fears that, his own ancestors having disappeared, the tutelage of his children will fall to the maternal grandfather, whom he must not be on good terms with, or whose immorality he evidently fears. He wants to prevent what he justly holds to be disastrous. Notwithstanding how carefully he might have formulated them, his last will and testament had no effect. Gilles, at eleven years old, passes into the hands of this grandfather to whom, in certain regards, he is identical; to whom, at the same time, he is the opposite.
The Maternal Grandfather: Jean de Craon
We have just alluded to Jean de Craon’s immorality. This very great lord is in fact devoid of scruples: he is brutal, he is greedy; his methods depend on banditry. But he is to no extent anachronistic; his faults are not opposed to the character traits of his time. On the contrary, they accentuate them. Being a great lord, that he would have the outlook and the habits of a freebooter would not surprise anybody. What is more, he is precisely representative of feudal society in a period when the bourgeois ideal of management of interests and exploitation of goods prevails over the attention to traditional virtues bound to the notion of feudal honor. There is nothing romantic about the banditry of a Jean de Craons.
His fortune is considerable. Except for the ducal family, his is the richest feudatory in Anjou. But one preoccupation dominates him: to augment his riches. He constructs intrigues that involve him in the great politics of his day; he is avaricious and no profit is negligible to him. He regularly resides in a castle dominating the Loire, at Champtocé, an important garrison and the military key to neighboring Brittany. He exercises a right of toll on the ferrymen’s commerce, but he uses violent means beyond the recognized rights; the ferrymen take him to court and the Parliament of Paris convicts him.
We do not know whether he possesses the known courtliness and seductiveness of his father, better known than himself, one of the relatives of the Duke of Orléans whom Jean sans Peur had assassinated. It is possible; but from him he gets the sense and taste for politics. The father passes for having paid the greatest attention to honor. It is possible that above all honor indicates a fastidious sense of feudal decorum. But if the son resembles him in this regard, it is to the degree that occasionally the most double-dealing of gangsters has a sense for the rules in his neighborhood. If one puts aside a totally exterior respectability, Jean de Craon has the outlook and the facility, if one likes, of a purse snatcher. He is responsible for Gilles; he has the charge of his education but he mocks it. He leaves his grandson free, in his own manner, to do all the evil he pleases. If the grandfather intervenes, it is to set an example; he instructs him to feel above the law.
We will see that it is not here that the young man is opposed to the old!
Later (pp. 73-74) we find the account of an act of banditry in which the grandfather involves Gilles at the age of sixteen.
It is a question of extortion by which a great lady, a relative, is abducted, imprisoned, and menaced with being put in a sack and drowned like a cat in the Loire. Three men, who come to reclaim her, are thrown into a dungeon, and one of them dies as a result of his stay there. Faced with Gilles and his grandfather, it is possible to imagine the brutalities of the Nazis …
The Grandfather and the Grandson
But one difference quickly appears between the grandson and the grandfather. The latter, astute, manages his interests skillfully. The former occasionally profits by the calculations of the latter, but he does not calculate for himself. If Gilles is in agreement with the principle of reason which always, in an act, looks to the end result, that supposes another who guides and counsels him. He never acts on his own in the capacity of a shrewd man. Capable of base cruelties, he is incapable of calculation. Whatever reflection entered into his acts came from the intervention of another.
Jean de Craon does not hesitate in the face of crime, but what attracts him to crime is the result. He has no other concern but advantage. With Gilles it is different. The grandfather dead, he continues the crimes into which the old feudal lord initiated him. He will go even further, much further than the initiator, but only in response to his obsession, to his delirium. He acts feverishly. With Craon’s death, he enters into the hallucinatory series of child murders. Occasionally going beyond the demands of his passion, he also surrenders himself to unprofitable, scandalous acts of violence. But he never knows how to put immorality to his advantage. If he is cruel and unscrupulous, he forgets to attend to his interests, and ignores or neglects them.
In this respect, the opposition between the grandfather and the grandson is most profound. It is perfect. Finally,
the grandfather attempts to instill in Gilles an ambition conforming to his views. The rapacious old man imagines this impetuous young man, who will back down from nothing, becoming an influential man in the realm, augmenting the immense fortune that he is about to leave him. He will counsel him, he will set him on his way. Indeed, under these circumstances, Gilles’ courage and impetuosity will take him to the very top of the heap. In 1429, at twenty-five years old, glorious Marshal of France, companion of Joan of Arc, and liberator of Orléans — these things foretell, it seems, an incomparable destiny. But the success is fragile; it is the annunciation, the beginning of ruin; it introduces the incomparable disaster. What the old man sordidly would have turned to profit Gilles turns to delirium, to disorder. He has in himself a delirium and inordinateness that places him at the antipodes of this insensitive old man and his rational deceit. After the death of his grandfather, he lapses into incredible expenditures that in a matter of years will drain one of the largest fortunes of a period when, the difference between rich and poor being greater, the riches possessed were worth more than today. From the beginning, Gilles de Rais’ opulence is such that the greatest lords and the King were not equal to it. As Marshal of France he receives considerable wages; however, to him this post is above all — such is his propensity — the occasion for excessive expenditures. The need to shine makes his head swim: he cannot resist the possibility of dazzling spectators; he has to astound others through incomparable splendor. Others would have turned the glory that he originally had to their fortune’s advantage. It succeeds, on the contrary, in driving him to his ruin; it plunges him into a state of increased extravagance. At all costs, he must dazzle others; but it is he himself, ahead of the others, that he dazzles. The impulse, which is not so rare, attains a sickly frenzy in Gilles. Gilles de Rais is not only the monstrous criminal, he is the mad prodigal: extravagance is like drunkenness. Jean de Craon had thought that by his becoming a man of the first rank he would know how to sober up, but the status he achieved actually served to intoxicate him more; he gave way without measure to his need to astonish through magnificent fairytale expenditures.
The conflict between the grandfather and the grandson first breaks out in 1424, when at the age of twenty Gilles demands the administration of all of his assets. The grandfather immediately reacts. It results in a violent tension between the two men.
Yet Craon cannot maintain a firm stand. How could this harsh grandfather, however indifferent, persist? He lost his only son in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. And if he had hoped, by marrying again, that his wife would give him a direct heir, he must have finally gotten used to the idea that this grandson, with whom he was on bad terms, would inherit his great fortune.
He assumed responsibility for Gilles after the death of his father, the same year as the death of his son; he gave him a disastrous education. Not only did he give him his own bad example, but he foolishly abandoned him to the idleness and mayhem of childhood.
We know from the declarations of Gilles himself at the trial what characterized, from his eleventh year, this savage and violent childhood. Apparently the two clergymen, who had instructed him up to this point, quit. We know very little of his relationship with this pair. But twenty years later, in 1436, he has one of them, Michel de Fontenay, arrested; he has him thrown into prison (pp. 98-99), and we know what prison meant then …
His studies terminated, left to himself, a frightful development began. “On account of the bad management he had received in his childhood, when, unbridled, he applied himself to whatever pleased him, and pleased himself with every illicit act …” Such are Gilles’ own words, which the scribe took down.
The scribe specifies: “He perpetrated many high and enormous crimes … , since the beginning of his youth, against God and His commandments … ”
Morality, to tell the truth, was not Jean de Craon’s business. Evidently the grandfather’s avarice alone was at the bottom of one disagreement, which the grandson’s impetuosity was necessarily fated to overcome.
Finally this grandfather introduces the young black sheep to the court. In 1425, Gilles is with Craon at the interview in Saumur where Charles VII and the Duke of Brittany, Jean V, consider an accord. The accord cannot resolve for long the difficulties that oppose the France of the “King of Bourges” to Brittany, which is divided between fear of an English invasion and the will to avoid French domination.
However, in 1427 an exceptional occasion presents itself. Jean de Craon receives the lieutenant generalship of the duchy of Anjou from his suzerain, Yolande d’Aragon, Charles VII’s mother-in-law. She intends to be the mother of a true queen; this is why she has the interests of her son-in-law at heart. From time to time she overcomes the inaction of this erratic king. At court two years later she will effectively support Joan of Arc. In 1427 she takes the initiative in a limited, but judicious, action. The struggle against the English will resume in her domains. She comes to terms with Craon, her most powerful vassal, who will take charge of operations. But Craon is old, probably in his sixties. He cannot take part in the campaign. Whereas experienced captains lead the royal contingents, Gilles, at twenty-three years old, is placed at the head of an Angevin army. However, he is not alone. Jean de Craon entrusts him to a kind of mentor: Guillaume de La Jumellière, an Angevin lord, who appears under the name of Monsignor Martigné in Gilles’ records. Gilles’ military knowledge is limited; not so that of La Jumellière, apparently the only advisor in his hire who is what you would call respectable (the others unscrupulously live at the expense of his naïveté). Under these circumstances, Jean de Craon also facilitates for Gilles a certain disposition of his personal fortune; from the start, the future Marshal of France astonishes people by the number of spies he employs and the wages they receive.
As Gilles’ good luck would have it, this prudently conducted campaign is an undeniable success. Charles VII’s men seize many fortresses from the English. But Gilles does not distinguish himself simply by the abundance of his monetary resources. It is probable that from then on he gives proof of great courage, and that he shows when attacking a warlike fury, the memory of which lasts after his death. It is doubtless that this fury merited his being summoned by Joan of Arc, determined to force the outcome below the walls of Paris. In addition to the Duke of Alençon, Joan of Arc wants this young man, who harbors all the fury and violence of crime, beside her at this time. We mustn’t forget that if a quarrel had not gone through her shoulder, the outcome that the Maid was hoping for would have been possible on this day. Evidently Gilles is a superb leader in battle. He belongs to that class of men thrust forward by the delirium of battle. If Joan of Arc wants him by her side at the decisive moment, it is because she knows this.
Georges de La Trémoille and Gilles de Rais
But this impetuosity could never have been of service if it had not initially entered into the kind of calculations of which Gilles is not capable. If the grandfather had not put the grandson in touch with Georges de La Trémoille, their relative — if he had not become an intimate of this schemer — the madcap would never have seized the primary role in history that, in a lightning flash, he grasped.
On the occasion of Joan of Arc’s arrival at Chinon, Gilles de Rais enters into calculations of great political consequence. He doubtless knows nothing of these calculations but he serves them and, in serving them, they give him what he did not have a chance of attaining by himself: an effectiveness. In April 1429 he binds himself by oath to the charlatan La Trémoille, who, having become Charles VII’s favorite, is practically the Prime Minister. La Trémoille needs a man whose will is his own; he needs a blind and sumptuous armor for his army, the commanding appearance — and, when the moment comes, the valor — which corresponds to his interests.
La Trémoille, this cunning man, has many reasons for deciding upon Gilles de Rais. Kinship, first of all (I have already mentioned the family tie with the Craons). But most of all La Trémoille fears the influence of anyone other than
himself on the King. He could have thought at first of Joan of Arc, but a woman cannot play a political role herself. That is not the case with a man of war who, benefiting from possible successes, would thereafter have access to the King. The choice by a man as calculating and prudent as La Trémoille ought therefore to fall on a man who was able militarily, but who at least must be incapable politically.
La Trémoille apparently did not hesitate. He knew what Gilles de Rais was all about from the start: Craon, the grandfather, was unscrupulous but cunning ; Rais, the grandson, had no more scruples than the first, but when it came to ruses, calculations and intrigues, he was destitute; these things were beyond him. We do not know what La Trémoille thought of Gilles on the occasion of their first ties. But in 1435, after his disgrace, the rake is seen to reproach himself for having taken advantage of the Marshal’s credulity (the two “friends” had the same financial affairs back then).
Abbot Bourdeaut specifies that it became “evident that La Trémoille was taking advantage of the credulity and mad extravagance of his cousin.” La Trémoille must have always taken him for a fool; he finally expresses his opinion in an arresting form, the reproach couched as a joke. He responds without hesitation with this enormity: “It is good,” La Trémoille affirms, “to encourage him to be bad”!5 Today these words leave us breathless, but how could this mediocre statesman, this cunning man, have imagined an opposition between foolishness and goodness — and between wickedness and intelligence? He apparently did not know Rais’ hysterical cruelty until much later.