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Saturday 13 December 2014

History's Craziest Assholes: Gilles de Rais.



No one likes an overachiever, but it's always a sight for sore eyes when an overachiever is disgraced and publicly executed for their crimes in the most violent manner conceivable. Aye, it's always the ones that don the paladin's shield that turn out to be the very worst of humanity, because true evil always masquerades as shimmering piety. It's a sorry state of affairs when we send young men and women off to seminaries and nunneries, isolate them until those nasty brain chemicals stop ordering them to drink and fuck, and then we expect them to be perfectly sensitive and benign human beings when we nudge our children into their confession boxes. I'm not saying that we necessarily make these people, but you can't stop a fire when it's assumed there'll be no need for detectors. 

Born in 1404 with a mouth full of silver spoon and over 22 castles spread out around Western France, Gilles de Rais was destined for high society. The death of his parents in 1415 left him and his brother in the care of their opportunistic grandfather, Jean de Craon, and it is under his roof that the seeds of bitterness may well have been sewn.

Despite spending much of his young life under the wing of an artful money-grabber, Gilles' early adulthood would see him go on to do many noble things in the eyes of the French military and church. His military career lasted from 1427 to 1435 and enclosed some of the most important moments in French history as he battled alongside the House of Valois and Joan of Arc, the legendary warrior that took orders directly from god (we might get to her at some point).

Having spent a generous portion of a decade fighting valiantly, garnering land and respect, and generally making a name for himself on the tongues of clerics and noblefolk, Gilles de Rais put the sword down in 1435 and retired to his wealth, spending the rest of his days traveling from one castle to another with his wonderful family and goblet full of mulled wine.

Plot twist, actually, he started torturing people to death instead.

You see, you don't spend eight years on a battlefield, slashing, hacking, impaling, and feasting greedily on the blood of your enemies and expect to simply mellow out and nuzzle back into the nest of society. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, and Gilles still had weapons, a hideously sick mind, and enough money to do whatever the fuck he wanted. And in stark contrast to his career as a god-fearing knight, what Gilles wanted was demonic ritual and the blood of innocent children.

It was never clarified when Gilles snapped or what exactly caused him to, it may have been any number of themes that ran through his lifetime, but when the last fibers of reason and empathy were fractured, Gilles turned into a monster. However, though his operations went on for years, it wasn't until Gilles crossed the church that investigations were opened up on him. It wasn't until Gilles kidnapped a priest that the full extent of his corruption was unearthed. 

In a confession to the court, Gilles admitted to the kidnap, torture, sodomy and murder of between 80 - 200 children (he couldn't even remember, let that sink in.) between the ages of six and eighteen. He stated rather pathetically that his years of sadistic torture and murder was basically the grim result of the amount of mulled wine he'd been pouring down his neck. The horrific nature of his crimes and the ritualistic manner in which he raped and murdered the children was detailed in his confession, a deranged checklist that included hanging, blood sacrifice, fear-mining, post-dismemberment sexual assault, and furnishing his quarters with the heads of children he liked the most.

In the end, everyone close to him, including those that accompanied him in his orgiastic butchery, testified against Gilles in a court held by both the church and state, and Gilles was sentenced to be hanged and burned only a month after his 35th birthday. In a bizarre move that sounds more like a morbid joke, he was buried in a church cemetery in his home of Nantes.










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