Gilles de Rais: The Marshal of France Who Fought Beside Joan of Arc and Became the Original Bluebeard

Gilles de Rais was one of the most celebrated military commanders in France, a Marshal of France who fought alongside Joan of Arc in the campaigns that turned the Hundred Years War, who was present at the relief of Orléans in 1429 and at the coronation of Charles VII at Reims, who was by any measure one of the most powerful and distinguished men in the kingdom. He was also, according to the trial that ended his life in 1440, a serial killer of children on a scale that made him one of the most prolific in recorded history, a practitioner of black magic, and a man who had spent a decade using his vast wealth to satisfy compulsions that the trial records describe in explicit and horrifying detail.

The case of Gilles de Rais is one of the most discussed in the history of crime and folklore because it sits at the intersection of several deeply contested questions: the reliability of confessions obtained under the threat of torture and excommunication, the political motivations of the Church officials who prosecuted him, the relationship between the historical case and the Bluebeard fairy tale that emerged in the same region of France a century and a half later, and whether Gilles de Rais was guilty of what he confessed to, guilty of less, or the victim of a politically motivated prosecution.

The Rise of Gilles de Rais

Gilles was born around 1405 into one of the most powerful noble families in western France, inheriting vast estates in Brittany and Anjou. His military career was genuinely distinguished: he fought in multiple campaigns against the English and their Burgundian allies, and his connection with Joan of Arc during the Loire campaign of 1429 placed him at the centre of the most significant French military recovery of the war. Charles VII rewarded him with the title Marshal of France, one of the highest military honours available.

After Joan’s capture and execution in 1431, Gilles withdrew from military life and spent the following years dissipating his fortune on an extraordinary scale. He maintained a private chapel with a choir of forty voices. He staged theatrical performances about his own military campaigns. He employed hundreds of servants and retainers. By the late 1430s his financial position was catastrophic and he had begun selling off his estates, sometimes illegally, which brought him into conflict with both his family and the Duke of Brittany.

The Trial

The arrest of Gilles de Rais in 1440 followed a confrontation with Church officials at a castle he had illegally sold and then seized back by force. The Bishop of Nantes and the Inquisitor of France pursued charges of heresy and sodomy, and during the investigation the accusations expanded to include the abduction, murder, and sexual abuse of children on a massive scale over a period of approximately eight years.

Gilles initially refused to recognise the court’s authority, but after being threatened with excommunication he capitulated and confessed in considerable detail over several sessions. The confession described practices of satanic invocation, the murder of children in his castles, and a sustained pattern of behaviour that the trial records present as both systematic and escalating. He was convicted, excommunicated, and then absolved by the Church after expressing contrition. He was hanged and his body burned on the 26th of October 1440, alongside two of his accomplices.

Gilles de Rais and Bluebeard

The connection between Gilles de Rais and Charles Perrault’s fairy tale Bluebeard, published in 1697, has been proposed and disputed by scholars for over a century. Perrault’s Bluebeard is a wealthy nobleman who kills his wives for looking into a forbidden room, and his castle is in the same region of western France where Gilles de Rais committed his alleged crimes. The geographic coincidence, the themes of forbidden knowledge and the discovery of hidden atrocities, and the timing suggest a possible folkloric connection.

However, the specific details of the Bluebeard story, with its focus on wives and a forbidden room rather than on children and black magic, are different enough from the Gilles de Rais case that most scholars treat the connection as uncertain rather than established. The real Bluebeard connection in the tradition is to the figure of the murderous husband rather than to the child-killer, and Gilles de Rais was not primarily accused of killing wives.

For more on the folklore of France, the Les Fées article covers the literary fairy tradition in which Perrault’s Bluebeard sits. The Korrigans article covers the fairy folk of Brittany where Gilles de Rais held his castles. The France folklore hub page has every article in the cluster.