Did Bluebeard Really Exist? The Fairy Tale, Gilles de Rais and Landru Separated with Method

A young bride, a fabulously rich husband with an unsettlingly blue beard, a bunch of keys and a single prohibition: do not open the little room at the end of the corridor. She disobeys, finds the bodies of the previous wives, and the key falls into the blood. The stain will not come off.

Bluebeard is one of the darkest fairy tales in the European tradition. And it carries a question I am often asked: did he really exist? As with Dracula, the answer requires carefully separating the layers. Bluebeard's name has been attached to at least three very different real figures: a sixth-century Breton king, a Marshal of France tried in 1440 and a serial killer guillotined in 1922.

I apply the same method I use for historical cases and in my work as an investigator: for every claim, who makes it, when, and on what evidence.

A note on method. The medieval sources on Conomor and Gilles de Rais are scarce, late or produced by those with an interest in condemning. Several dates and figures are debated by historians, and I flag this case by case. If new research changes the picture, I will update the article.

Part one: the fairy tale

Perrault, 1697

La Barbe bleue was published in Paris in 1697 by Claude Barbin, in the collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités, the same as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Puss in Boots. The book appeared under the name of Pierre Darmancour, the nineteen-year-old son of Charles Perrault, but scholars now almost certainly attribute the tales to the father. The title by which the collection is best known, Tales of Mother Goose, already appeared in the 1695 manuscript.

The plot is well known, but some details of the original text deserve attention:

• The enchanted key. When the bride drops it in the blood, she tries to clean it, but "the key was enchanted and there was no way to clean it completely". It is the evidence that betrays her disobedience: a clue that cannot be erased.
• Sister Anne. As Bluebeard is about to kill her, the bride asks her sister to climb the tower: "Anne, sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?" And she replies: "I see nothing but the sun making dust and the grass growing green." It is one of the most famous refrains in French literature.
• The rescuers. At the last moment the bride's brothers arrive, "one a dragoon and the other a musketeer", and kill Bluebeard.
• The ending. The widow inherits her husband's wealth, settles her family and remarries an honest man.

The two morals

Perrault closes the tale with two morals, and the second is surprisingly ironic.

The first condemns curiosity: it is, "with all due respect to the fair sex, a very slight pleasure: as soon as you take it, it ceases to exist, and it always costs too much".

The second distances itself from the story: anyone with common sense understands that it is "a tale of times past"; there are no longer husbands so terrible, who demand the impossible, and nowadays, "whatever the colour of his beard", it is hard to tell which of the two spouses is master.

Modern readings have reversed the perspective: rather than a lesson about female curiosity, Bluebeard has been read as a story about domestic violence, control and secrecy within a couple.

A tale with many sisters

Bluebeard is not an isolated case. Folklorists classify fairy tales by type, and Bluebeard has given its name to a specific one: type 312, "Bluebeard" or "the maiden-killer". It has close relatives:

• Type 311, in which the heroine saves herself and frees her sisters, as in the Brothers Grimm's Fitcher's Bird (Fitchers Vogel);
• Type 955, The Robber Bridegroom, also collected by the Grimms.

The Brothers Grimm included a version of Blaubart in the first edition of their tales, in 1812, but removed it from later editions: according to a widely held interpretation, because it was too close to Perrault's French version.

Part two: Conomor the Cursed, the sixth-century Bluebeard

The first real candidate is the oldest and the closest to the plot.

Conomor was a Breton lord of the sixth century, active around 540. He is not an invented figure: the historian Gregory of Tours, in the History of the Franks, mentions him around 546 and perhaps again in 560. He also appears in some lives of Breton saints from later centuries.

The legend, however, is much later. According to the tradition linked to Saint Tryphine, Conomor had already killed three wives. A prophecy had foretold that he would be killed by his son, and so he killed every wife who became pregnant. He married Tryphine, daughter of another Breton lord; she discovered the remains of the previous wives, whose spirits warned her of the danger. Conomor beheaded her, but Saint Gildas brought her back to life.

The similarities with Bluebeard are obvious: the murdered wives, the discovery of their remains, the heroine's flight. The story of Saint Tryphine is still depicted today in the chapel of Sainte-Tréphine in Pontivy, Brittany, whose vault, painted in 1701, shows the life of the saint in eight medallions.

Assessment. Conomor is a historical figure, but his marital crimes belong to a hagiographic legend written centuries later. He is a possible ancestor of the fairy tale, not proof that Bluebeard existed.

Part three: Gilles de Rais, the Marshal on trial

A war hero

Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, Baron de Rais, was born at Champtocé, in Anjou, on a date debated between 1396 and 1406; many historians place it around 1404–1405. Orphaned very young, he was raised by his grandfather and inherited one of the richest estates in western France, with castles such as Machecoul, Tiffauges and Champtocé.

He had only one wife: Catherine de Thouars, whom he abducted in order to marry her. The marriage contract was signed on 30 November 1420; the Church annulled the union for consanguinity, and the religious wedding took place on 26 June 1422. Catherine outlived him.

Gilles fought alongside Joan of Arc at the relief of Orléans in 1429, and on 17 July of that year, the day of Charles VII's coronation at Reims, he was made Marshal of France. He was about twenty-five.

The downfall

In the following years Gilles squandered his fortune on lavish spending: a private chapel with dozens of clerics, theatrical productions, a princely court. To recover, he turned to alchemy and the invocation of demons: in 1438 he brought from Florence a Tuscan cleric, François Prelati, who promised to find gold.

The turning point was an apparently minor act of violence. In May 1440, on Whit Sunday, Gilles burst armed into the church of Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte, interrupted Mass and seized a cleric, in order to take back a castle he had sold. It was an attack on the Church and on the authority of the Duke of Brittany. On 15 September 1440 he was arrested at his castle of Machecoul.

The two trials at Nantes

In autumn 1440 Gilles was tried at Nantes by two courts:

At first Gilles refused to answer; then, threatened with excommunication, he pleaded not guilty. On 21 October 1440, faced with the threat of torture, he confessed. The torture session was cancelled. On 26 October he was hanged and his body partially burned, together with two servants convicted as accomplices, Henriet Griart and Étienne Corillaut, known as Poitou.

Guilty? The file through an investigator's eyes

Most historians believe Gilles de Rais was guilty. But an investigator must also list the weak points of the file:

Medieval historians tend towards a middle position: the figures are probably inflated and the inquisitorial procedure must be read critically, but Gilles probably did kill children. The trial records were published in 1959 in a volume edited by the writer Georges Bataille, with a translation from the Latin by Pierre Klossowski.

The 1992 "rehabilitation"

In 1992 the writer Gilbert Prouteau, to coincide with the publication of a book of his about Gilles, organised an "arbitration tribunal" made up of politicians, lawyers and writers, but no historians, which "acquitted" Gilles de Rais. It had no legal value, and according to several accounts Prouteau himself regarded it as little more than a provocation. It is a textbook case of historical sensationalism: a media event mistaken for a review of the trial.

Part four: how Gilles de Rais became Bluebeard

If Gilles killed children rather than wives, and was married only once, why did he become "Bluebeard"?

The identification does not go back to Perrault. There is no evidence that Perrault had Gilles de Rais in mind when he wrote the tale. According to historians' reconstructions, the overlap spread from the early nineteenth century, probably because both figures were linked to the same regions of western France, between Brittany and the Vendée, and because both evoked a cruel lord shut away in a castle.

The decisive step came with a book: Gilles de Rais, maréchal de France, dit Barbe-Bleue ("known as Bluebeard"), by the Abbé Eugène Bossard, published in 1885 or 1886 (sources disagree). The title enshrined the identification. But as early as 1926 the historian Émile Gabory published a book on Gilles in which he described him as "wrongly called Bluebeard".

Assessment. It is the same mechanism I described for Dracula: a real historical figure and a literary character are fused by a book and then by popular tradition, until they seem to be the same person.

Part five: Landru, the "Bluebeard of Gambais"

If Gilles de Rais is a Bluebeard by association, Henri Désiré Landru is one by nickname: he is the only one of the three to whom the name was given by the press of his own time, precisely because he killed women he had seduced with promises of marriage.

The method

Landru was born in Paris on 12 April 1869. He was a swindler with several previous convictions. During the First World War, when France was full of widows and women on their own, he began placing matrimonial advertisements posing as a well-off widower. He used more than ninety false names.

His scheme was always the same: he courted the woman, got her to sign a power of attorney over her accounts, took her to a villa outside Paris and made her disappear, then sold or kept her belongings. There were two villas: first at Vernouillet, then, from December 1915, the Villa Tric at Gambais.

The investigation and the arrest

The case grew out of the searches by the missing women's families. On 11 April 1919 a friend of the sister of one of the victims recognised him by chance in the rue de Rivoli, in Paris. The next day, 12 April 1919, his fiftieth birthday, Inspector Jules Belin arrested him at 76 rue de Rochechouart, where he was living under the name "Lucien Guillet".

The evidence: a notebook, some tickets and a stove

The bodies were never found. Landru was convicted on a combination of circumstantial evidence, and that is why the case is still studied today:

• The black notebook. Landru recorded everything: the names of 283 women he had contacted, appointments, expenses. Among the entries were the eleven names of the victims.
• The train tickets. For every trip to Gambais, Landru recorded buying a return ticket for himself and a single ticket for the woman. At his trial he explained that buying a return ticket for a fiancée would have been tactless.
• The stove. On 29 April 1919 a search of the villa at Gambais found fragments of calcined bone in the oven. The prosecution's theory was that he had burned the bodies.
• The victims' belongings, documents, furniture and clothes, found in his possession or sold by him.

Trial and execution

The trial opened on 7 November 1921 before the Seine-et-Oise Assize Court, in Versailles. Landru was defended by one of the most celebrated French lawyers, Vincent de Moro-Giafferi. He was convicted on 30 November 1921 of the murder of ten women and André Cuchet, the seventeen-year-old son of one of them.

He was guillotined on 25 February 1922 outside the prison in Versailles by the executioner Anatole Deibler. He never confessed. Years later a drawing of the Gambais stove emerged, which Landru had given to one of his lawyers, with a note on the back that some interpret as a confession; sources disagree on when it was made public.

Assessment as an investigator. The Landru case is a textbook example of documentary evidence. No witness saw a murder and no body was found, but the combination of a notebook in his own handwriting, single tickets, stolen belongings and burnt remains built a picture the jury found sufficient. It is exactly the kind of reasoning I use in my investigations: documented facts, lined up in order, tell what nobody confesses.

Part six: the other "Bluebeards"

The press has given the nickname to other killers of wives too. The best-known case is that of Johann Otto Hoch, the "Stockyard Bluebeard" of Chicago, who between 1890 and 1905 married dozens of women, many of whom died of poisoning. He was arrested in New York in 1905 with a pen filled with arsenic and hanged in Chicago on 23 February 1906.

Part seven: Bluebeard in the arts

The tale has enjoyed enormous success, and every era has reinterpreted it in its own way:

The file in summary

What Bluebeard teaches investigators

It is the method I apply in my investigations and historical research: separating the fairy tale from the facts, and the facts from their interpretations. And sometimes, as in the Landru case, discovering that the decisive evidence is a small black notebook forgotten in a drawer. If you are interested in this kind of reconstruction, you will also find it applied to Jack the Ripper and to Hitler's death, another case in which the body was never really shown.

Main sources: Charles Perrault, La Barbe bleue (1697), original text and Robert Samber's English translation (1729); Wikipedia entries in Italian, French and English on Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, Conomor, Saint Tryphine and Henri Désiré Landru, with their sources; Encyclopaedia Britannica on Gilles de Rais; Georges Bataille, Le Procès de Gilles de Rais (1959); HistoryExtra and Famous Trials on the trial and the 1992 "rehabilitation"; French Ministry of Justice, page on the Landru trial; French Ministry of Culture, record of the chapel of Sainte-Tréphine in Pontivy; Crime Magazine on Johann Otto Hoch.