At the end of the 17th century, the French writer Charles Perrault published his work Tales of Mama Oca, a compendium of popular stories and narratives inspired by legends or real characters. One of the best known is Bluebeard, starring a terrifying murderer of women whom he locked up and killed in his castle. The real character who inspired it is none other than Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), with the difference that his victims were children and not women. Marshal of France and warrior alongside Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais hid a secret life: that of a serial killer of boys whom he locked up and tortured in his castle.
The writer and journalist Juan Antonio Cebrián, author of a book about the character entitled El mariscal de las tinieblas, talks about how hard it was to be a child in the European Middle Ages, when many of them were doomed to forced labor and barely had enough to eat. . Gilles de Rais deceived them and lured them to his castle by offering them work, protected by his fortune as a grandee of France. In the Rais region, the outrages of the Marshal, as he is still known, are still remembered.
Some French historians try to restore his memory by appealing to the role he played in the Hundred Years War, but it is very difficult to erase his stigma as a murderer. Today, both Bluebeard and the real Gilles de Rais would have been considered psychopaths, serial killers, or psycho-killers.