Gilles de Rais was one of the richest lords in western France and a Marshal of France at about 25. He fought in the army that relieved Orléans with Joan of Arc in 1429 and stood among the lords at the coronation of Charles VII at Reims that summer. Eleven years later, in October 1440, he stood trial at Nantes before two courts at once. A church court tried him for heresy, the invocation of demons and sodomy. The secular court of the duke of Brittany tried him for the murder of children. He confessed, and on October 26, 1440, he was hanged and burned outside the city with two of his servants.
The case rests on an unusually full written record: the bishop's inquiry, the church indictment, the statements of parents who had lost children, and the confessions of Gilles and his servants. That record has been printed, translated and argued over since the nineteenth century. Most historians who have studied it accept that he was guilty of the killings. A minority of writers have argued that he was the victim of a political plot, and in 1992 an unofficial panel in Paris declared him not guilty. His name has also long been attached, rightly or wrongly, to the fairy-tale villain Bluebeard.
Gilles was born in 1404 or soon after, at the castle of Champtocé on the Loire, in Anjou, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, which gives September or October 1404. Douglas O. Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law gives September 10, 1404. The American scholar Thomas Wilson, writing in 1899, thought he was born in the autumn of 1404, probably at Machecoul. The historian Matei Cazacu has argued for a later date, September 1, 1405, the feast of Saint Giles, according to a 2016 study by Beata Kędzia-Klebeko of the University of Szczecin.
His father, Guy de Laval, had taken the name and arms of the house of Rais. His mother was Marie de Craon. Wilson dates their marriage to February 5, 1404. Through these two families Gilles stood to inherit lands scattered across six or seven provinces. Kędzia-Klebeko, citing the historian Arthur Bourdeaut, lists 25 lordships in Brittany (most of them the barony of Rais), 21 in Poitou, 9 in Anjou, 4 in Maine and Aunis, 2 in Touraine and 1 in Guyenne.
His mother died in about 1414 or 1415, probably after the birth of his younger brother, René. His father died in 1415; Wilson gives the date as October 31, while Linder says September. Guy de Laval's will named a guardian for the boys, but their maternal grandfather, Jean de Craon, took them in himself, against its terms, according to the psychoanalyst Nicolas Brémaud's 2007 study of the case in the journal L'en-je lacanien and Linder's account. Both describe the education the boys then received as poor. Linder writes that Craon taught the boy extortion and banditry by example. Kędzia-Klebeko names Gilles's early tutors as Georges Boussac and Michel de Fontenay.
Craon arranged two early betrothals for his grandson, Wilson writes: to Jeanne Paynel in 1417 and to Béatrice de Rohan in 1418. Both girls died. Gilles then married his cousin Catherine de Thouars, an heiress whose lands included Tiffauges. Britannica and Wilson date the marriage to 1420, Wilson to November 30 of that year. Linder and Brémaud give 1422. The couple had one daughter, Marie.
Gilles was in the field young. Britannica says he first fought in 1420, in the war over the succession to the duchy of Brittany, and Wilson places him in the campaign that freed Duke John V from his captors at Champtoceaux. According to Linder, he took control of his own estates at about 20, in 1424. Wilson records his first service to the king of France in 1425. In 1427, Britannica and Linder write, he entered the service of the house of Anjou against the English, and Wilson says he took the strongholds of Rainefort and Malicorne and fought at Montargis.
In 1429 Gilles joined the army that went to the relief of Orléans, where Joan of Arc had arrived to raise the English siege. Britannica describes him as part of Joan's guard and says he fought at her side. Linder places him with her at Orléans, at Reims and in the failed assault on Paris that autumn. He attended the coronation of Charles VII in Reims cathedral, and the king made him a Marshal of France. Britannica places the appointment after the coronation; Wilson noted that the sources then known dated it to June, July or September 1429. Cazacu, as cited by Kędzia-Klebeko, writes that the king also allowed him to add the royal fleurs-de-lis to his coat of arms, an honor he shared only with Joan.
Joan was captured at Compiègne in May 1430 and burned at Rouen on May 30, 1431. Wilson found no evidence that Gilles was anywhere near her in that period. In 1432, Linder writes, Gilles helped lift the siege of Lagny. His grandfather died on November 15, 1432, a date Brémaud treats as a turning point. Gilles made a last military expedition in 1434, according to Linder, and then lost interest in campaigning and withdrew to his lands.
Gilles kept a household grander than the king's, Britannica says. He paid for a large staff of servants, heralds and priests, and he spent heavily on his castles, on music and on public spectacle. He founded a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents in 1433, according to a Britannica article on the case, and staffed it with a boys' choir he chose himself. The historian Laurent Guitton, in a 2024 study, describes it as a collegiate church with a choir of 25 to 30 singers, recruited at great expense, one of them from Poitiers. Linder writes that he also kept a guard of about 200 men-at-arms.
His best-known extravagance was a play. Britannica notes that he paid for The Mystery of the Siege of Orléans, a dramatic retelling of the 1429 campaign in which he himself appeared as a character. Wilson describes a stay at Orléans from September 1434 to August 1435 that cost him about 80,000 gold crowns, and a later performance of a mystery play on the Place Notre-Dame in Nantes on May 21, 1439.
The money ran out. Wilson writes that Gilles sold or mortgaged lands worth about 200,000 crowns in roughly eight years. Alarmed for their inheritance, his family turned to the king. In July 1435, Britannica says, they obtained a royal decree that forbade him to sell or mortgage his remaining lands. Linder names his brother and a cousin as the petitioners. Kędzia-Klebeko, citing royal letters, writes that he was declared a public spendthrift (prodigue notoire) and that the letters listed 41 castles lost within six years. The duke of Brittany, John V, refused to register or publish the king's decree in his duchy, Wilson notes.
In 1436, according to Linder, Gilles imprisoned his former tutor, the priest Michel de Fontenay. In 1438, Guitton writes, he fought a private war against Jean de Belleville, with a garrison of more than 300 horses at Tiffauges. In the same year he sold Champtocé.
After the 1435 decree, Britannica says, Gilles turned to alchemy in the hope of restoring his fortune, and then to attempts to summon the devil, seeking knowledge, power and riches. His household priest, Eustache Blanchet, went to Italy to find practitioners, and in Florence he met François Prelati, a young cleric from Tuscany who claimed to be able to call up spirits. Wilson dates their meeting to 1436; in his confession of October 1440 Gilles said Prelati had come from Florence about a year and a half earlier. Linder gives Prelati's age as 22. The 2016 Kędzia-Klebeko study says Gilles's cousin and captain, Gilles de Sillé, sent Blanchet to look.
The two men worked in a laboratory in the tower at Tiffauges, Wilson writes. Linder counts ten to twelve attempts to summon a demon, the most important at Tiffauges in the summer of 1439, at which Gilles offered a written pact. In his confession, as published by Georges Bataille, Gilles said he had been present at three invocations and that no demon had ever appeared to him. A Belgian newspaper account names the spirit Prelati claimed to summon as Barron.
From about 1432, children began to go missing in the country around Gilles's castles and in Nantes. The best modern guide to what the witnesses actually reported is Guitton's study, published in 2024 in the Bulletin of the archaeological and historical society of Nantes and Loire-Atlantique. Working through the bishop's inquiry and the ducal depositions, he identifies 36 missing boys from 32 families. All were boys. Their ages are known for 29 of them and run from 7 to 20; 16 were between 7 and 10, and 12 were adolescents, many of them about 12. Thirteen families lived in Nantes and its suburbs, four in the Loire valley and fifteen in the pays de Retz, eight of them in Machecoul. A few of the disappearances date from about 1432 and 1433, and most from 1438 to 1440.
The families were artisans, shopkeepers, small traders, peasants, servants and beggars. Their children went to school, were apprenticed, minded animals or begged. Machecoul castle was known for giving alms, Guitton writes, and children came from the surrounding villages to ask for food at its gate. Others hoped to be taken on as pages by men-at-arms. Linder writes that many were last seen at the gates of Gilles's castles, where his servants or cousins took them in, and that parents who asked after them were told not to worry.
One mother's statement, taken down by the ducal commissioner Jean de Touscheronde on September 18, 1440, shows how the trial record presents these losses. Péronne Loessart, of La Roche-Bernard, told him that around September 1438 a servant of Gilles called Poitou asked to take her 10-year-old son, a schoolboy, into service, promising him clothes, schooling and money. The boy rode away the next day with Poitou and Gilles. She was later told he was at Tiffauges or at Pouzauges, and then that he had drowned at Nantes. A neighbor, Jean Colin, later saw the pony that Poitou had bought for the boy being ridden by someone else. She never saw her son again.
Britannica's article on the case adds that witnesses at the trial said they had seen his servants disposing of the bodies of dozens of children at one of his castles in 1437.
What brought Gilles down was a quarrel over property. Short of money, he had sold his castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte to Geoffroy Le Ferron, the treasurer of Brittany. He then changed his mind. At Pentecost 1440, according to a 2025 account in the Belgian daily La Libre, he and his men seized the castle and burst into the church during Mass. They took Geoffroy's brother, Jean Le Ferron, a cleric protected by church immunity, carried him off to the castle and put him in irons, Linder writes.
The attack offended two powers at once. Seizing a cleric in church violated the immunity of the church in the diocese of Nantes, whose bishop was Jean de Malestroit. Laying hands on the duke's treasurer's family and property defied John V himself. Britannica's article on the case says Gilles was arrested only after he kidnapped a priest in a dispute that had nothing to do with the murders.
In July 1440 Bishop Malestroit ordered an inquiry. Guitton writes that the bishop had first heard rumors about Gilles during a pastoral visit through his diocese, and that the duchy had opened its own inquiry into the disappearances. Parents came forward with testimony or gave depositions. On July 29, 1440 (Wilson gives July 30), the bishop published letters declaring that Gilles was publicly reputed to have killed many children and to have invoked demons and made a pact with them. Wilson notes that the document seems never to have been served on Gilles himself.
On September 13 the bishop issued a citation summoning him to appear before the church court on September 19, Wilson writes. The notary Robert Guillaumet carried it to Machecoul, escorted by Jean Labbé and a troop of the duke's soldiers. On September 15, 1440, Gilles surrendered his sword to Labbé and was taken to Nantes. With him went Prelati, Blanchet and two of his servants, Henriet Griart and Étienne Corrillaut, known as Poitou, according to Linder. A woman named Perrine Martin, called La Meffraye, whom witnesses accused of leading children to Machecoul, was also held. The indictment later named other members of the household, including Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville, as accomplices. No trial of either man in 1440 was reported.
Gilles faced two proceedings at the same time, in different buildings, with different judges. The church court sat under Bishop Malestroit with a Dominican friar, Jean Blouyn, as vice-inquisitor for heresy; it tried the charges of heresy, the invocation of demons, sodomy and the violation of church immunity. The secular court of the duke of Brittany tried the killings and the violence at Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte. Linder notes that some of the secular court's records were later lost in a fire. The surviving documents were written in Latin, and the review of a 2021 collection of essays in Acta fabula describes them as fragmentary and sometimes contradictory.
On September 18 Touscheronde opened the secular inquest, and witnesses knelt and swore to tell the truth, Linder writes. Guitton describes the sequence in detail. On September 28 the bishop heard seven families from Nantes in the presence of the inquisitor; most of them testified again in October before the secular court. Between September 28 and October 2, Touscheronde took fifteen more statements along the Loire and at Machecoul. Guitton notes that mothers spoke far more often than fathers, 18 to 8, and that the notaries shaped the testimony as they wrote it down. Cazacu, as cited by Kędzia-Klebeko, counts 82 people who gave evidence in the inquiries between September 18 and October 8.
Gilles first appeared before the church court on September 19. On October 13, at the castle of La Tour Neuve, the prosecutor read the full indictment of 49 articles. It accused him of heresy, apostasy and idolatry; of invoking evil spirits and making a pact with them for knowledge, power and wealth; of sorcery; of crimes against children; and of violating the immunity of the church. Article 27 charged that he had killed "one hundred and forty, or more, children, boys and girls." Guitton notes that the indictment spread this figure over fourteen years.
Gilles refused to recognize the court. He said he would rather be hanged by a rope than answer such judges, Linder writes, and they excommunicated him. Two days later he changed course. He accepted their authority, admitted he had acted wrongly, asked their forgiveness and was absolved of the excommunication. He then admitted only to minor matters.
The church court heard its witnesses over about four days, Linder writes. They included the two servants Henriet and Poitou, the conjuror Prelati, the priest Blanchet and Perrine Martin. Linder describes their accounts as among the hardest testimony in the record of any trial, and he does not repeat them.
The servants' statements are the most damaging part of the record. Henriet said the remains of 36 children had been taken from a tower at Champtocé before the castle was sold in 1438, moved to Machecoul and burned. Poitou put that number at 46. Linder gives about forty. Both men described further killings at Machecoul and at the Hôtel de la Suze, Gilles's house in Nantes, and both named other members of the household. The confessions as published by Bataille are dated October 23, before the secular court; Guitton dates the servants' confessions to October 17. Guitton reads them with caution: they are so alike in detail that he suspects the judges imposed a questionnaire, and he thinks they were probably obtained under torture.
When the testimony ended on October 20, Gilles was asked whether he had anything to say, and he said no. The prosecutor then reminded the court that it had the power to apply torture "to shed light and more thoroughly scrutinize the truth," Linder writes. The threat worked. Gilles agreed to confess rather than face it.
Gilles confessed first outside the courtroom, on October 21, according to Brémaud, in his room at the castle. The record names those present as the bishop of Saint-Brieuc, Pierre de L'Hôpital, Touscheronde and the notary Jean Petit, among others. On October 22 he repeated and enlarged the confession in open court before Bishop Malestroit, Blouyn and the prosecutor Guillaume Chapeillon. Brémaud writes that he wept.
He said the crimes began in his youth, at Champtocé, around the time of his grandfather's death. He named Champtocé, Machecoul, the Hôtel de la Suze, Tiffauges, Bourgneuf-en-Rais, Vannes and other places. He said he could not determine the number of children with certainty, and called it many. He implicated Sillé, Briqueville, Henriet, Poitou and others. He blamed his crimes on a lax upbringing, on idleness and on rich food and drink, and he urged parents to bring up their children strictly. He asked that his confession be published in the common language, so that people who did not read Latin could understand it.
The confession is the center of every later argument about the case. It was given after a threat of torture, but not under torture itself. Britannica notes that skeptics point to the threat; Linder, who accepts his guilt, regards the final confession as sincere.
The prosecutor asked for final sentences on October 25. The church court issued two that day, both under the name of Jean, bishop of Nantes. The first, with Blouyn as vice-inquisitor, found Gilles guilty of apostasy and the invocation of demons. The second found him guilty of sodomy on children of both sexes. Each declared him excommunicated. In the translated text published by Linder, neither sentence gives a number of victims. Gilles asked to be received back into the church, made a full confession to a friar and was readmitted.
The secular court met at the fortress of Le Bouffay in Nantes. There Gilles confessed again and added a few details, Linder writes, and the court sentenced him to be hanged and burned at eleven o'clock the next morning. Henriet and Poitou were to die with him. Brémaud writes that Gilles asked to be spared burning while his body was still whole, and asked for a procession and for burial in the Carmelite church of Nantes; these requests were granted. Gilles had also written to his cousin the duke of Brittany in early October, admitting his sins and asking to be allowed to retire to a monastery, according to a caption on the Famous Trials site. That request was not granted.
On the morning of October 26, 1440, Gilles, Henriet and Poitou were led out of the Tour Neuve to a meadow across the Loire, overlooking Nantes, with a large crowd singing and praying behind them, Linder writes. Three gibbets stood over three pyres, with Gilles's in the middle and highest. He knelt and asked the crowd's forgiveness. He told his two servants that all three of them had sinned, and that they would see God in heaven once their souls left their bodies.
Gilles was hanged above the fire. La Libre contrasts his death with Joan of Arc's at Rouen: she was burned without first being strangled. Before his body burned, four women "of high rank" took it from the pyre and placed it in a coffin, and it was buried in the church of Notre-Dame-du-Carmel in Nantes. Henriet and Poitou were hanged and their bodies burned.
Britannica records that his repentance was acclaimed at the time as an example of Christian penitence. A three-day fast was kept after his death, and for more than a century, the same source says, parents around Nantes marked the anniversary of the execution by whipping their children, apparently to impress on them the gravity of the sins he had repented.
Henriet Griart and Poitou were executed with their master. The reports give no court outcome for Perrine Martin, Gilles de Sillé or Roger de Briqueville, and do not say what the courts of 1440 did with François Prelati or Eustache Blanchet.
The figures attached to the case come from different kinds of evidence, and they should not be confused.
The trial record. The church indictment of October 13, 1440, alleged 140 or more children killed, boys and girls (article 27). Guitton regards this figure as unreliable, and he describes the secular prosecutor's language about children taken in great numbers as impressionistic. The depositions of parents and neighbors concern far fewer children: 36 boys from 32 families in Guitton's count, and nearly 45 in an earlier count by the historian Jacques Chiffoleau, a difference Guitton says he cannot explain.
The confessions. Gilles said he could not state the number. His servants gave figures for particular places, such as the 36 or 46 sets of remains they said were moved from Champtocé.
Later estimates. Linder writes that the number is uncertain and that estimates run as high as 200; BBC Mundo gave a range of 80 to 200 minors, mostly boys; Kędzia-Klebeko gives 140 to 300; Brémaud thought several hundred probable and noted that 800 is sometimes cited; an EBSCO reference article gives figures from 140 up to 800. These higher figures are not counts from the record. BBC History Revealed notes that many medievalists who accept his guilt think the number may be greatly exaggerated.
The trial did not end the struggle over his lands. Britannica notes that skeptics cite the duke of Brittany's financial interest in his downfall, and Linder lists among the revisionist arguments the claim that Duke John V and Bishop Malestroit gained property from the conviction. Gilles's widow, his daughter Marie and his brother René survived him.
Writers have questioned the verdict for about a century. Linder traces the modern case for innocence to the scholar Salomon Reinach and the writer Fernand Fleuret, who, he writes, were influenced by the Dreyfus affair to look again at famous French trials. In 1921 Fleuret and Louis Perceau published an edition of the church trial under the pseudonym Ludovico Hernandez, with an essay arguing for Gilles's rehabilitation, according to the 2010 study by Michał Mrozowicki of the University of Gdańsk. Linder adds the anthropologist Margaret Murray and the occultist Aleister Crowley, neither of them historians, to the early doubters. Later defenses include Jean-Pierre Bayard's Plaidoyer pour Gilles de Rais (1992) and Margot K. Juby's The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais (2018).
The arguments run along a few lines. There was no physical evidence in the modern sense. The confessions came after a threat of torture. The duke and the bishop had much to gain. The church trial was a heresy prosecution with its own logic, and the charges of sorcery may have served, as in Joan of Arc's case, to cover a political motive.
The best-known challenge came in 1992. The writer Gilbert Prouteau had been commissioned by the Breton tourist board to write a biography, Atlas Obscura reported in 2017; his book, Gilles de Rais ou la Gueule du Loup, argued instead that Gilles was innocent, and he called for a retrial. A panel convened that year in a gilded hall of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, the seat of the French Senate, BBC Mundo reported in 2019. It was presided over by the lawyer Henri Juramy. The former justice minister Michel Crépeau argued that the sorcery charge masked a political motive, as it had in the case of Joan of Arc. The panel reviewed the record kept by Bishop Malestroit, heard arguments that the evidence was circumstantial, and declared Gilles not guilty. Juramy asked President François Mitterrand to restore what he called the historical truth.
The panel had no legal standing, and its finding changed nothing in law. Atlas Obscura's description of it as a session of the Court of Cassation, France's highest appeals court, is wrong. EBSCO's reference article describes it as an unofficial retrial by enthusiasts and skeptics that some critics called a publicity stunt for a book. Linder and History Revealed both report that its participants did not study the primary documents closely, that the defense relied on invented evidence, and that Prouteau himself later called the event "an absolute joke." The review in Acta fabula calls the acquittal morally doubtful.
Most historians who have studied the record still believe that Gilles killed children, Britannica says. Linder, a law professor whose Famous Trials site publishes the trial documents in translation, sets out the case in detail. He argues that the absence of physical evidence was normal for a trial in 1440, when sworn testimony carried the weight; that the testimony of parents and neighbors, of the two servants, of Prelati and of Blanchet points the same way; and that Gilles confessed three times. On the motive of the duke and bishop, he quotes John Adams: facts are stubborn things. He adds that the sorcery and sodomy charges do not explain what happened to the missing children.
Some scholars are more cautious. Guitton, who has studied the depositions more closely than most, does not give a verdict. He sets out other explanations that families and contemporaries offered for some of the losses: armed bands in a frontier region, a rumor in 1432 of children kidnapped for ransom, runaways, enlistment and accidents. Nine of his 32 families gave no explanation at all. He doubts that choirboys in Gilles's chapel, including the sons of a man named Jean Briand, could have lived among such crimes without ever telling their families, and he concludes that the fate of the missing boys will probably never be known. The American medievalist John D. Hosler of Morgan State University told Atlas Obscura in 2017 that he thought Gilles's guilt was much doubted by historians and that the case looked highly suspicious to him. History Revealed sums up the majority view: the volume of testimony is damning, even if the count may be inflated.
Charles Perrault published "La Barbe bleue" in his Contes de ma mère l'Oye in 1697. In the tale a rich nobleman forbids his new wife to open one room of his castle; she finds the bodies of his earlier wives there, and her brothers save her. Britannica's entry on the tale says Perrault's version probably came from Brittany and may draw on two real figures, Gilles de Rais and Comorre the Cursed, a sixth-century Breton chief. Bluebeard killed his wives, not children.
The identification of Gilles with Bluebeard was spread in the nineteenth century. The Acta fabula review names Charles Mourain de Sourdeval, writing from 1845, and the priest Eugène Bossard, whose 1886 biography carried the title Gilles de Rais, maréchal de France, dit Barbe-Bleue. Wilson wrote in 1899 that Breton folk tradition already linked the two. Cazacu has argued that Perrault knew the trial record, which circulated in manuscript copies from the sixteenth century onward, and that the opening words of the tale echo the Breton historians d'Argentré (1582) and Du Paz, Kędzia-Klebeko writes. Linder, by contrast, writes that Gilles was not Bluebeard and did not inspire the legend, and that the question is irrelevant to his guilt. The castle of Tiffauges is still known locally as Bluebeard's castle, BBC Mundo noted, and it draws visitors to the region.
The earliest chronicle accounts present him chiefly as a heretic and sorcerer; the review in Acta fabula notes that Enguerrand de Monstrelet, writing a few years after the execution, described him that way. Later writers recast him according to the concerns of their own time. J.-K. Huysmans made him a central figure of his novel Là-bas (1891), and Michel Tournier drew on him in Le Roi des Aulnes (1970). Georges Bataille's edition of the documents, Le Procès de Gilles de Rais, translated into English by Richard Robinson, is the printed text of the trial most often cited by scholars. The castles linked to his name, among them Tiffauges, Machecoul and Champtocé, were built before his lifetime and rebuilt after it, the Acta fabula review notes, and archaeologists say they have little direct connection to him.
Proven by the courts of 1440: the secular court sentenced him to death for the murder of children; the church court found him guilty of apostasy, the invocation of demons and sodomy. No appeal was possible, and none was made.
Disputed: whether he was guilty in fact. The majority of historians say he was. A minority of writers, from Reinach and Fleuret in the 1920s to Juby in 2018, say he was framed for his lands. The 1992 Paris panel had no legal force.
Not fixed by the record: the number of children. The indictment's 140 is an accusation, not a count. The depositions concern about 36 to 45 missing boys. Higher figures are later estimates.
Uncertain: how far the servants' confessions were coerced (Guitton thinks probably by torture); whether Gilles's own confession was freely given (it followed a threat of torture, but torture was not applied to him); his date of birth (1404 or 1405); the date of his marriage (1420 or 1422); and when Prelati arrived (1436 or about 1439).
Not established: that he was the model for Bluebeard.
1404 or 1405: Gilles is born, probably at Champtocé, to Guy de Laval and Marie de Craon.
About 1414 to 1415: his mother dies; his father dies in 1415; his grandfather Jean de Craon takes charge of him and his brother René.
1417 and 1418: two betrothals end with the deaths of the brides-to-be.
1420 (or 1422): marries Catherine de Thouars.
1420: fights in the Breton succession war.
1427: enters the service of the house of Anjou against the English.
1429: fights in the campaign of Joan of Arc at Orléans; attends the coronation at Reims; made Marshal of France.
1430 to 1431: Joan is captured and executed.
1432: helps lift the siege of Lagny; his grandfather dies on November 15.
About 1432 to 1433: the earliest disappearances of children recorded in the depositions.
1433: founds the chapel of the Holy Innocents.
1434 to 1435: spends heavily at Orléans and on the Mystery of the Siege of Orléans.
July 1435: a royal decree forbids him to sell or mortgage his lands.
1436: Blanchet meets Prelati in Florence (Wilson's date).
1438: sells Champtocé; most of the recorded disappearances fall between now and 1440.
Summer 1439: the invocation at Tiffauges.
Pentecost 1440: seizes Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte and the cleric Jean Le Ferron.
July 29, 1440: Bishop Malestroit publishes the results of his inquiry.
September 13, 1440: citation to appear before the church court.
September 15, 1440: arrested at Machecoul.
September 18 to October 8, 1440: witness inquiries.
September 19, 1440: first appearance before the church court.
October 13, 1440: the 49-article indictment is read; he refuses to answer and is excommunicated.
October 15, 1440: accepts the court's authority.
October 20, 1440: testimony closes; he is threatened with torture.
October 21 and 22, 1440: confesses, first privately, then in court.
October 25, 1440: sentenced by both courts.
October 26, 1440: hanged and burned at Nantes with Henriet Griart and Poitou; buried in the Carmelite church.
1697: Perrault publishes "La Barbe bleue."
1845 onward: writers link Gilles with Bluebeard.
1886: Bossard's biography, "dit Barbe-Bleue," is published.
1921: Fleuret and Perceau publish the trial with an essay arguing for rehabilitation.
1992: an unofficial panel at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris declares him not guilty.
2024: Guitton's study counts 36 missing boys from 32 families in the depositions.