Cultural depictions of Gilles de Rais refer to the representations of the 15th-century French nobleman, military commander, and convicted child murderer in literature, theatre, music, visual arts, and other cultural media.
A companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years' War and later associated with the folktale character Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais has inspired a wide range of portrayals from the late Middle Ages to the present day.
His image first appeared in medieval dramatic and literary texts, underwent a long period of relative obscurity, and was revived in the 19th century through Romantic and Gothic interpretations. Since then, he has appeared in numerous works of fiction, including novels, plays, operas, films, comic books, animation, musical compositions, and video games, with portrayals variously emphasizing his military career as a Marshal of France, his alleged crimes, his role alongside Joan of Arc, or his transformation into an embodiment of aristocratic cruelty and evil.
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 of Gilles Le Bouvier, 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 Gilles de 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 the Abbé .
In addition, Gilles de 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 Gilles de 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 Éloi Firmin Féron's oil on canvas, 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 Gilles de 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 Gilles de Rais bear little resemblance to the wife-killer depicted in the folk tale. Historian and archivist-paleographer Matei Cazacu, 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, Gilles de 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 Gilles de 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 Gilles de 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 . 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 . and Matei Cazacu himself, Gilles de Rais' life may have inspired, directly or indirectly, the writing of the tale.
Cazacu speculates that Perrault may have planted several clues in his text that could lead back to Gilles de 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 Gilles de 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 Gilles de 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 Gilles de Rais' servants removing the bones of their master's victims from ..
Nevertheless, the hypothesis that Gilles de Rais served as inspiration for Charles Perrault is refuted as too uncertain by Vincent Petitjean. This scholar discerns no reference, however veiled, to Gilles de Rais' story in the version put down on paper by Perrault.. It is not established that the latter knew Gilles de 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 Gilles de 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 pseudo-historical 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", Gilles de 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 Gilles de Rais' romanticized appearance 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 Gilles de Rais in Volume V of his Histoire de France (1841), a passage that enjoyed considerable literary influence. He did not then draw any connection with Bluebeard. However, a "new revised and expanded edition", published in the 1870s, asserted that "the story of the Breton Retz, much softened, provided the material for a tale; moreover (to preserve the honor of the family or the country?), his name was replaced by that of the English partisan Blue Barb.". The writer later wrote that he had "searched in vain for any trace" of this enigmatic Englishman.