Our Dark Side (4 page)

Born in 1404, Gilles de Rais belonged, on his father's side, to the illustrious house of Laval-Montmorency and, on his mother's side, to one of the richest families in the kingdom. But the world in which he lived – the world of the One Hundred Years War – was plagued with looters. The heirs to the chivalry of old had turned predator and had developed a taste for murder and cruelty. Under the reign of the mad king Charles VI, the rivalry between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians worked to the advantage of the English. Control over Paris and the king passed from the Armagnacs to the Burgundians and back again, but the authority of the monarchy was never re-established.

When the king died in 1422, five years after the defeat of Agincourt, two heirs were in a position to succeed him. Henri VI, son of Henri V, was English, still a child and supported by the Burgundians. The Dauphin Charles VII was French but had been disinherited by the Treaty of Troyes (1420) and had taken refuge in Bourges. In the hands of his enemies, the legitimate heir to the throne of France was, in the circumstance, a king in name only until such time as he was crowned and won back his kingdom.

Brought up by his maternal grandfather Jean de Craon, who was a very rich but miserly and debauched feudal lord, Gilles de Rais was initiated into crime at the age of fourteen by his savage teacher, who had wept greatly when his only son fell at Agincourt. At the age of sixteen, Gilles married Catherine de Tours, the granddaughter of his grandfather's second wife, but that did not prevent him from taking his page as his lover; he too was to become a child-murderer. ‘Faced with Gilles and his grandfather', writes Bataille (2004: 27), ‘it is possible to imagine the brutalities of the Nazis …'

In 1424, Gilles seized his hateful grandfather's immense fortune. His only thought was to squander it on extravagant drunken feasts. His excesses destroyed the wealth the old lord had amassed through cynical calculations and premeditated acts of brutality. The avarice of the grandfather gave way to the prodigality of the grandson. But despite that inversion, the delight in evil was perpetuated: both predators shared the same passion for blood, and both defied the laws of men.

Anxious to promote his own interests at the court of Charles VII and well aware that Gilles's rage had to be channelled, Craon encouraged his grandson to take up the career of arms. Contrary to all expectations, the young man, inspired by a heroic ideal that allowed him to transcend himself, proved to be a brilliant commander and abandoned crime to serve someone who was his complete antithesis: Joan of Arc.

Under the orders of a virgin who was guided by her voices and wore men's clothes, he felt the awakening of a patriotic feeling based upon a desire to restore the holy uniqueness of the monarchical principle. Joan was the embodiment of that desire, which went against the principles of his grandfather and a criminal nobility that had abandoned the people and ceased to champion the principle of sovereignty, and was satisfied with acts of violence and pillage. Together with the other lords, Gilles fought so bravely at Orléans, Les Tourelles, Jargeau and then Patay that he was hailed as ‘a very valiant knight of arms' (Bataille 2004: 72).

On 17 July 1429, he brought the phial containing the Holy Chrism, without which Charles could not receive royal unction, back from the Abbaye de Saint-Remi. And then, at Joan's side, he wept at the coronation in Reims. On that day, which was the most glorious in his appalling life, he was appointed Marshal of France. A few months later, he laid siege to Paris at the request of the Maid, who admired his bravery: ‘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 that day. Evidently Gilles is a superb leader in battle. He belongs to that class of man thrust forward by the delirium of battle. If Joan of Arc wanted him by her side at the decisive moment, it is because she knows this' (Bataille 2004: 30).

There are no grounds for believing that there were any ties of friendship between Gilles and Joan.
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And yet when the ideal that the servant of God had so gloriously embodied on the battlefield collapsed before his eyes, he began to trample the emblems of his own glory underfoot, went on more looting expeditions, and once more squandered his fortune. He appeared to be indifferent to the fate of the Maid.

Found guilty of the perverse crime of dressing as a man
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and denounced as a relapsed heretic, an apostate and an idolater, Joan was accused of being in league with the Devil, despite her virginity. The voices she heard, said the ecclesiastical court, did not come from the visible God, but from the dark angel, from an obscure and occult god. Her executioner Bishop Cauchon was present when she was tortured and hoped that she would recant. All his hopes were in vain, and Joan entrusted her soul to God in the midst of the flames. Twenty years later, Charles VII, who had abandoned Joan but who had, thanks to her, succeeded in restoring the power of the French monarchy, launched an inquiry. Rehabilitated on 7 July 1456, Joan was canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.
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After the death of his grandfather in November 1432, Gilles de Rais lapsed back into his life of crime at Champtocé, Tiffauges and Machecoul. Surrounded by servants who acted as his pimps, he confined young children who had been kidnapped from peasant families, and subjected them to the worst forms of torture. He dismembered their corpses, tore out their organs, and especially their hearts, and tried to sodomize them as they died. At the height of his fury, he often seized hold of his erect member and rubbed it against their mutilated bellies. He then fell into a sort of delirium at the moment of ejaculation. Because of his obsession with aesthetics and theatrical perfection, he chose the most beautiful children – preferably boys – claimed that he would save them and blamed his servants for what had happened to them. That is how he got them to behave as he wished. Both seduced and seductive, the children thanked him without realizing that they excited him greatly. At the height of his madness, he split open their skulls and fell into a trance, invoking the Devil or transforming himself into a wretched object that was stained with blood, sperm and bits of food.
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All the butchery of war seemed to have been displaced into the closed environment of a fortress that was no more than a repository for all the glory he had won at Joan's side. The death of his grandfather had abolished all the boundaries of the Law he had already transgressed: ‘There was no longer anything to bridle the rage that tormented him. Only crime, that negation of every bridle, was to give him the unlimited sovereignty that the old man had possessed in Gilles' adolescent eyes. Gilles was the rival of the man who raised him, whom he followed – and admired – and who was now dead, who had surpassed him in life. He was going to surpass him in turn. He would surpass him in crime' (Bataille 2004: 84).

Even at his most abject, Gilles still remembered Joan. And, being fascinated by the art of exhibition – games, practical jokes, the theatre, mysteries and feasts – he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the relief of Orléans. He therefore spent a fortune on organizing celebrations to honour her name. Four years later, or at a time when he was murdering more and more children, he took as a servant a girl who looked just like the Maid in the belief that she was the real Joan.
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For a few more years, he continued to organize lavish ceremonies in the Chapel of the Innocent, where a choir of young children sang the glories of Jesus, but he also tried to call up the Devil under the influence of François Pelati, an insolent and corrupt seducer from Florence who had convinced him that, if he killed yet more children and worked black powder around his neck, he would be able to summon the forces of evil. But the Devil never visited the Marshal.

In November 1439, Charles VII issued a great ordinance designed to ‘substitute a regular army based on discipline and military hierarchy for the bands of brigands commanded by lords or capitals who are themselves brigand chiefs'. The ordinance was, writes Bataille (2004: 117) ‘dictated by reason [and] marks the birth of a modern world … where the unrestrained violence of a Gilles de Rais will find no place'. It signalled the restoration of royal sovereignty, and the end of the One Hundred Years War.

The following year, the rumour of his crimes became stronger, and Gilles de Rais was summoned before the ecclesiastical tribunal of Nantes, and then by the secular court of Nantes, with Michel de l'Hôpital presiding. Having first denied all the crimes of which he was accused – the murder of children and sodomy, the invocation of demons, and the violation of ecclesiastical privilege
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– Gilles confessed, insisting that he had committed his crimes ‘according to his own imagination, without anyone's council, and following his own feelings, solely for his pleasure and carnal delight' (Bataille 2004: 135). He asked that his confessions be published in French for those ‘who do not know Latin' (136), and urged ‘the strictness of father and mothers, and the friends of all children' (135). He exhorted his judge not to consume mulled wine, spices and stimulants. Having begged God's forgiveness, he finally asked the people he had caused so much suffering to sing hymns as they walked in procession to his place of execution.

Having first been excommunicated, Gilles de Rais was welcomed back into the bosom of the Church, and then hanged and burned. Before his body was reduced to ashes, it was taken from the flames of the pyre and buried by ladies of noble lineage.

After an interval of nine years, this noble-born killer therefore had a much fairer trial than the humble servant of God whose ghost had haunted his life. Indeed, as Gilles de Rais's first biographer Abbé Broissart remarked, the second trial was in a sense an inverted image of the first: ‘Together they compose the two most celebrated trials of the Middle Ages and perhaps also of modern times.' He adds that Gilles's trial was ‘in all things the polar opposite of Joan of Arc's' (cited Bataille 2004: 9).

During the first trial, the cause of the good had been trampled underfoot and accused of crime and heresy. In the second, in contrast, the cause of evil was metamorphosed into an offering to God through the grace of confession and repentance.

It has to be said that, in his attempts to explain his dark side to his judges, the criminal evoked neither demonic possession nor natural causality, neither possession nor bestial instincts. He simply made a scathing attack on the education he had received as a child, and blamed the hated figure of his grandfather for his fall from grace. And when his judges wanted to know why he had indulged in such crimes, and with what intention, he indignantly replied: ‘Alas! Monsignor, you torment yourself and me along with you' (Bataille 2004: 193).

No torment, no psychological causes, no interiority, no intentionality and no explanation: none of the considerations that nineteenth-century sexology and criminology would so delight in. Gilles describes himself solely as the offspring of a teacher who had, from childhood onwards, turned him into an abject being who wallowed in vice.

Jean de Craon appeared to Gilles to bear sole responsibility for his descent into a murderous madness, and he warned future generations to be extremely vigilant. And yet the crimes committed by the grandfather were as nothing, compared with those committed by the grandson. The old lord was no more than a representative of an archaic and brutal world of warriors. He transgressed the Law only to the extent that he claimed to be the embodiment of the Law of his lineage.

And it was in order to destroy a figure that he hated so much that Gilles perverted not only the order of the Law, but the very order of the Law of crime. By committing sexual crimes – or in other words perverse or ‘unnatural' crimes, or useless crimes committed purely for pleasure
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– that were not intended to destroy an enemy or eliminate an adversary, but to annihilate the human element in man, he became the agent of his own extermination. The sight of young children being sodomized, having their throats cut and being sacrificed simply reminded him of his own status as a child who had been perverted by the law of crime but who aspired to grace. The sacred monster was ‘a child', says Bataille (2004: 32), or in other words the most perverse and tragic of criminals.

Observations of the excesses of the mystics or the flagellants, and attempts to explain how perverse crimes were so designated, raised, until the end of the classical age, the question of whether the existence of our dark side had to do with a divine order that was imposed upon men – who have fallen but can receive grace – or whether, on the contrary, it was the product of a culture and an education.

With the coming of the Enlightenment, the reference to a divine order gave way to the idea that the whole world obeyed the laws of nature, and that man could break free of the old tutelage of faith, religion, belief, the supernatural and absolute monarchies, and therefore from the dark practices that had been associated with it for the salvation of the soul: flagellation, tortures, punishments, penitence and so on.

As a result, investigations into the origins of our dark side took a different direction. Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot and the libertines, in particular, never stopped debating whether it is the expression of man's barbaric nature. Is it this that makes men different from animals, and must it by corrected by progress and civilization? Is it the product of a bad education that has perverted the goodness of human nature? Or does it have to be understood as a sign that we have (inevitably) lost all our innocence? If that is the case, it is nothing more than the sensual expression of a great desire to let the body enjoy itself in accordance with the principle of a natural order that has at last regained its subversive power.

The reader will have recognized the latter hypothesis as the option taken by Sade: providing our dark side with a natural basis and at the same time departing from the ideal of the libertines, who pursued the pleasures of the body at risk of losing their souls. It is because he invented a world of pure sexual transparency that the Marquis can be regarded both as the West's most flamboyant representative of perverse discourse, and as the founder of the modern notion of perversion. While he remained a man of the Enlightenment to the extent that he rejected God's protection and chose individual freedom, he distorted the Enlightenment Project to such a degree that he turned it into its antithesis: a new disciplinary order which knew no limits and had no hidden side.