On Tuesday of Easter Week in 1314, King Philip IV the Fair received word from an unknown source that two of his three daughters-in-law had been carrying on love affairs with two brother knights.
The third daughter-in-law, although not accused of adultery, was alleged to have been an accomplice.1 The reaction of the king, installed at that moment at the Cistercian convent of Maubuisson in Pontoise, was brutal.
The presumed lovers, Philip and Gautier of Aunay, were skinned and castrated by order of the king on Friday of that same Easter week; immediately afterwards they were dragged to a gallows in Pontoise newly erected for them, hanged and quartered. Marguerite, daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, and Blanche, daughter of the Count of Burgundy, were transported to the Chateau Gaillard in Normandy and left to die. Jeanne, sister of Blanche, was imprisoned in the Chateau of Dourdan, but she was exonerated after the king’s death.The culpability of the actors in the Affaire de la Tour de Nesle, as the incident is popularly known,[5] [6] has, until recently, almost always been taken for granted. After all, many assume, the king would not have moved so violently against his own family unless their guilt had been proven beyond dispute. And, as historians point out, some chronicles claim that the brothers of Aunay confessed to their crimes, and a few sources describe Marguerite’s tearful confession, even if Blanche never admitted guilt and Jeanne was exonerated.[7] And yet, the chronicle narratives of the incident demand reflection, despite their seeming transparency. Psychologists show that people not infrequently confess to crimes that they did not commit,[8] [9] and, in addition, historians, like everyone else, are innately biased in favor of witnesses. This is how Julien Thery explains the widespread belief that the Templars must have been guilty of at least some of the less absurd crimes with which they were charged: a witness “always inspires spontaneous agreement in the listener, at least initially, because ‘belief is the ordinary state of a man’s mind’ and ‘to produce disbelief requires some particular assignable consideration....’ ”5 We tend, in other words, to assume that people do not just make things up. In addition to these human factors, the crime is surely too symmetrical to be true: three Burgundian princesses married to the king’s three sons, involved with two brother knights of Aunay in a scandal that threatened to extinguish the Capetian line in one blow? Finally, the long tradition of queens and princesses falsely charged with adultery cautions against accepting any such accusation at face value. In this essay, I revisit the texts reporting the Affaire de la Tour de Nesle. Although I have not changed the basic position that I laid out in two earlier essays, thanks to E.A.R. Brown’s most recent articles and Gaelle Audeon’s monograph on the incident, I am able to add significant nuance to my original argument. In what follows I focus more closely on the primary sources bearing the story of the princesses than I have in previous essays. True, the question of guilt must remain open. We are often not sure whether those convicted of crimes in our own day actually committed them; how can we pronounce with any certainty on a crime that occurred eight hundred years ago? Still, I argue in what follows that representations of the Affaire de la Tour de Nesle in two key chronicles, the Grandes chroniques de France and the Chronique metrique look too much like what Rene Girard has called scapegoat or persecution texts to be accepted uncritically as factual.[10] If I am right, Philip IV, feeling his moral authority slip in the last few years of his life and eager to recuperate his rectitude, seized the opportunity to strike out against his daughters-in-law when someone suggested to him that they had dishonored his lineage. Chroniclers, believing in the guilt of the young women, dutifully repeated the king’s version of the incident, creating persecution texts.