Perversion the Social Relation

152 James Penneyaudience to forgive Gilles or, more precisely perhaps, to posit a transferentialconvergence between the criminal's paradoxical "innocent guilt"and its own. It is here where we may discern a disturbing sympathy betweenGilles's perversion and the trial audience's hysterical identificationwith him. The moral authority with which the audience endowedGilles enabled an identification whose underlying trauma was neverthelesskept at bay by the apparently self-evident fact that its guilt could notpossibly be as extreme as that of the murderer before it. By attendingthe spectacle of Gilles's trial, the audience vicariously experienced thecleansing expiation of Gilles's confession from the safe distance of thegulf between its ordinary crimes and failures and the unthinkable transgressionsof the great feudal lord. The trial of Gilles de Rais acquired acalming, seductive, reassuring effect precisely by virtue of its shockingmorbidity. By participating in the strange pardon of Gilles de Rais, theaudience forgave itself for its own complicity in the most atrocious socialcrimes, for its disavowed participation in the cruelty and violence oflate medieval French culture. It is also clear that the church authoritiesbecame aware of this complicity at the earliest stages of the trial, and itis undoubtedly for this reason that Gilles's scandalous confession wasallowed to proceed in such an unbridled way. The trial audience's fascinationwith Gilles discouraged any critical effort to uncover the church'smanipulation of it. Witnessing the symbiotic interaction of Gilles's perversionwith the public's hysterical identification, the church steppedin to secure the spoils derived from its manipulation of the spectacleof Gilles's self-destruction, confident that the creation of a cult aroundGilles would prevent any critical scrutiny of its actions.Indeed, there is ample evidence in support of the claim that the politicalelites of Brittany and the Vendée, as well as the authorities of the Inquisition,wanted Gilles dead at least in part for self-interested economicreasons, and that the church benefited enormously from the manner inwhich the public's desire to be seduced by Gilles occluded the moredisturbing political motivations for the trial. More specifically, duringthe last five or six years of his life, Gilles's outrageous expenditures hadbrought him near ruin, and it was with increasing desperation that heturned for assistance to the counsel of alchemists and the liquidation ofhis property. It appears eminently plausible to think that the ecclesiasticaland political authorities—in particular Jean V de Montfort, duke of