Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, Baron de Rais, was born about September 1405 into one of the richest families in France. He fought through the last phase of the Hundred Years War, was made a Marshal of France at twenty-four, and rode with Joan of Arc at the relief of Orleans in 1429. He then spent the following decade dismantling one of the largest fortunes in the country on a private army, a chapel with its own choir, an enormous theatrical production of the siege of Orleans, and eventually alchemy and the attempted summoning of a demon called Barron to restore his money. He is one of the figures behind the Bluebeard legend.
In May 1440 he seized a priest during a dispute over a castle he had sold and dragged him out of a church, which put him in the jurisdiction of Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes. The bishop's subsequent investigation gathered testimony from families across the region whose children had gone missing over eight years around Machecoul, Tiffauges and Champtoce.
He was tried in September and October 1440 before an ecclesiastical court and a secular one. He refused to plead, was threatened with excommunication and then with torture, and then confessed at length: to abducting children, mostly boys aged six to eighteen, through his servants, to killing them, and to what he did before and after. His accomplices Poitou and Henriet confessed separately and in similar terms. Figures given at the trial ranged from eighty to two hundred. He was hanged and his body burned at Nantes on October 26, 1440, aged thirty-five.
The revisionist case is real and should be stated. The Duke of Brittany and the Bishop of Nantes both stood to gain his lands, he was in dispute with both, the confession came after the threat of excommunication, and a well-publicised mock retrial in France in 1992 concluded he would not be convicted today. Against that, the parents' testimony was voluminous, was gathered from people with nothing to gain, and matched the servants' accounts on details the court could not have supplied. Most historians accept the substance of the charges. Nobody should present the trial as if it met a modern standard of proof.