Tea at Trianon: Have You Heard of Gilles de Rais?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 17, 2025

Have You Heard of Gilles de Rais?

The original Bluebeard. From Matt Lewis at Made by History:

Gilles de Rais might not be a very familiar name, but if you do know it, you’ll be aware of the terrible associations it carries. If you don’t know it yet, prepare to be shocked. He’s a confessed serial killer of children whose victims might number in the hundreds.
A reasonably significant nobleman and an accomplished knight, he might have been remembered as one of the most significant companions of Joan of Arc at the pinnacle of her achievements. Instead, when he died aged around 35 in 1440, he was doomed to be only begrudgingly recalled as one of medieval France’s greatest criminal monsters, and perhaps the first well-recorded serial killer. Is he all that history has cast him as? (Read more.)