Trial of Gilles De Rais by George Bataille

must make war.
    War itself has the privilege of being a game. It is not, like others, a reasonable activity; it has no other meaning than the anticipated result. War indeed can be seen from the angle of utility: a city or a country can be attacked and must be defended. But without the turbulence of countries or cities which assail their neighbors without necessity, men could avoid war. War is, from the start, the effect of a turbulence, even if it is true that it is occasionally the inevitable result of the impoverishment of a region whose inhabitants must seek the means to survive elsewhere.
    Most often, those who take the initiative of war were led to it by an exuberant, explosive impulse. That is why war for so long was able to have the feeling of a game; a terrifying game, but a game.
    In Gilles de Rais’ time, war is always the game of lords. If this game devastates populations, it exalts the privileged class. It has for the privileged class the ultimate meaning that work could never have for the poor folk. The interest of work is subordinated to its result; the interest of war is nothing but war. It is war itself which fascinates and which terrifies. Those who are like Gilles de Rais, who live in the expectation of these terrible battles leaving death, cries of horror, and suffering behind them, know nothing else that gives them this violent excitement. Present generations no longer know practically anything about the exaltation, even though death was the basis of it, that formerly was the least ridiculous meaning and aim of war, a fact that is likely to abandon us to a feeling of our powerlessness in the world. Are we not blinded at the very moment when the mad truth of another time is hidden from us?
    Faced with as vain a question, what can we do, if not hide?
    But we must continue the paradoxical quest, as given in the questions that his life and the world of his time posed for Gilles de Rais …

The Tragedy of the Nobility
     
    The fact that Gilles de Rais lived in a world of war linked to privilege does not prevent us from seeing that the world was changing at this time. In Gilles’ eyes, war was truly a game. But this manner of seeing is less and less truthful, to the extent that it ceased to be even that of the majority of the privileged class. More and more, war is then a general misfortune; it is, at the same time, the work of many people. The general situation deteriorates and becomes more complex; misfortune reaches even the privileged class, who are less and less eager for war, and for play, who finally see that the moment has come to give way to the problems of reason. At this time, the technical and financial means of war involve such machinery that personal impetuosity and exaltation are limited. The heavy cavalry, essentially those arms that made war a luxurious game, succeeded during Gilles de Rais’ lifetime in losing a great part of its importance to the advantage of infantry and archers, arrows and pikes. Likewise, armed bands and pillagers take the upper hand over prestigious combats of costumed horses and knights; the need follows to substitute regular and hierarchical armies for companies of old hands without discipline. Only hierarchy and discipline could maintain part of the place that the privileged class had in war.
    Indeed, something subsists of the game that war is in its essence. In a strict sense, something subsists of it in our day. But discipline, strict orders, and scientific command stamp war with an essentially rational character, which has caused us to forget — in the fundamental debate between game and reason — that it has been very recently, and as a secondary consequence, that war moved to distinguish itself from individual impetuosity and violence, which had been the truth and heart of war, to the advantage of cold reason.
    Things evolve slowly: one does not arrive right away at this enormous build-up of modern arms that has ultimately suffocated the violent spirit of play