Joan of Arc

French warrior and martyr

• Born: c. 1412
• Birthplace: Domrémy, France
• Died: May 30, 1431
• Place of death: Rouen, France

Joan’s military victories initiated the withdrawal of English troops from France to end the Hundred Years’ War, and she made possible the coronation of Charles VII at Reims. As a martyr to her vision and mission, she had as much influence after her death as in her lifetime.

Early Life

Usually identified with the province of Lorraine, Joan of Arc grew up a daughter of France in Domrémy, a village divided between the king’s territory and that of the dukes of Bar and Lorraine. Bells from the church next to her home sounded the events of her youth. Her father, Jacques, was a peasant farmer and respected citizen. Joan learned piety from her mother, Isabelle Romée, as part of a large family. She took special pride in spinning and sewing; she never learned to read or write. By custom, she would have assumed her mother’s surname, but in her public career she was called the Maid of Orléans, or Joan the Maid (with the double sense of virgin and servant).

Joan was born into the violence of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). Henry V, king of England, had gained control of most of northern France and, with the aid of the French duke of Burgundy, claimed the crown from the insane Charles VI. The heir to the throne, Charles VII or the dauphin, as he was called was young and apparently believed that his cause was hopeless. Five years after his father’s death, he was still uncrowned, and Reims, the traditional coronation site, was deep in English territory. Domrémy, on the frontier, was exposed to all the depredations of the war and was pillaged on at least one occasion during Joan’s childhood.

Joan began to hear voices and believed she received visits by the patron saints of France, Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, when she was thirteen or fourteen years old. She claimed that she heard and saw the saints, who became her companions and directed her every step. Initially, she took the voices as calling her to a holy life, and she pledged her virginity and piety. Later she came to believe that it was her mission to deliver France from the English.

Paintings and medals were made of Joan, but no genuine portrait has been identified; a contemporary sketch survives by a man who never saw her. Three carved limestone heads in helmets (now in Boston, Loudun, and Orléans) may represent near-contemporary portraits. They show a generous nose and mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. She had a ruddy complexion; black hair in a documentary seal (now lost) indicated her coloring. Sturdy enough to wear armor and live a soldier’s life, she had a gentle voice. She wore a red frieze dress when she left Domrémy; when she approached the dauphin at Chinon, she wore men’s clothing: black woolen doublet and laced leggings, cap, cape, and boots. She wore her hair short like a man’, or a nun’, cut above the ears in the “pudding basin” style that facilitated wearing a helmet and discouraged lustful thoughts. Later, the dauphin provided her with armor and money for fashionable clothing. The gold-embroidered red costume in which she was finally captured may have been made from cloth sent to her by the captive duke of Orléans.

Life’s Work

In 1428, Joan attempted to gain support from Robert de Baudricourt, the royal governor of Vaucouleurs. (The pregnancy of a kinswoman living two miles from Vaucouleurs provided Joan with a pretext to leave home.) Baudricourt, after rejecting her twice as the voice had predicted became caught up in Joan’s mission. The English had besieged Orléans, as she had told him they would, and he, similarly besieged, had to agree to surrender his castle unless the dauphin came to his aid by a specified date. Before sending Joan to the dauphin, he had her examined and exorcised.

Charles agreed to the interview with Joan in desperation. Orléans, besieged since October of 1428, had great strategic importance; its fall would shake the loyalty of his remaining supporters and the readiness of his cities to provide money. Joan’s appearance at court on February 25, 1429, after traveling through enemy territory for eleven days, brought fresh hope. She identified the dauphin at once in the crowded room, and she gave him some sign, “the king’s secret,” which confirmed her mission but whose nature is still debated. A second exhaustive investigation of Joan occurred at Poitiers, where her piety and simplicity impressed everyone. Charles established a household for her. She had a standard made and adopted an ancient sword, which was discovered, through her directions, buried in the church of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois.

On April 29, 1429, Joan and an expedition, believing they were on a supply mission, arrived upstream of Orléans. Joan addressed the English commander, calling on him to retreat. She turned rough French soldiers into Crusaders, conducting daily assemblies for prayer and insisting that they rid themselves of camp followers and go to confession. When a party bringing supplies to the city on the opposite bank found the wind blowing against them, she predicted the sudden change of wind that permitted the boats to cross. Nonplussed Englishmen allowed another shipment led by priests to pass without firing on it; they explained their lack of action as the result of bewitchment. Within the city, Joan’s inspired leadership encouraged the troops to follow her famous standard and her ringing cry, “In God’s name, charge boldly!” On May 7, though seriously wounded as she had predicted, she rallied the troops to victory at the Tourelles fortification, after the French captains had given up hope. The next day, the English withdrew from Orléans.

In little more than a week, with much plunder and killing of prisoners, the French drove their enemies from the remaining Loire strongholds of Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency. Though Joan took part in these actions, her principal influence remained her extraordinary attraction and rallying of forces; she later said that she had killed no one. The troops of Arthur de Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany, who now joined the dauphin, counted decisively in another victory at Patay on June 17.

Charles’s coronation on July 17 at Reims, deep in enemy territory, clearly shows Joan’s influence. Counselors and captains advised Charles to take advantage of his victories and move against Normandy. Joan persuaded him instead to travel to Reims, and city after city yielded to siege or simply opened its gates to the dauphin: Auxerre, Troyes, Châlons, and Reims itself. The stunned English regent, the duke of Bedford, offered no resistance.

After the coronation, Joan’s single-minded drive to take Paris and gain the release of the duke of Orléans conflicted with a royal policy of caution and diplomacy based on the expectation that Burgundy, too, would rally peacefully to Charles. Charles ennobled Joan and her family and provided her with attendants and money, but she was too popular to permit her return to Domrémy. Her voices warned that she had little time. By September 8, when the assault on Paris finally began, the English had regained their aplomb. Joan, again wounded, unsuccessfully urged an evening attack. Charles’s orders the next day forbade an attack, though the baron of Montmorency and his men came out of the city to join the royal army, and on September 13, Charles withdrew his troops.

Joan now joined in a holding action to prevent the English forces from using the extended truce to retake their lost positions. Her men took Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, but lack of supplies forced her to abandon La Charité. In the spring of 1430, she led volunteers to stiffen the resistance of Compiègne against the Burgundians, contrary to the royal policy of pacification. That helps to explain Charles’s failure to negotiate her release after her capture at Compiègne on May 23 an event also predicted by her voices. The Burgundians sold her to the English authorities.

Joan’s trial, which ran from January 9 through May 30, 1431, tested her faith and gave her a final opportunity to uphold the French cause. Her death was a foregone conclusion; the English reserved their right to retry her if the Church exonerated her. Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais took the lead, realizing that a church trial, by proving her a witch, would turn her victories to Anglo-Burgundian advantage. Indeed, her captors may have believed her a camp trollop and sorceress until a physical examination by the duchess of Bedford, the sister of Philip of Burgundy, proved Joan’s virginity. That made it clear that she had not had carnal relations with Satan, a sure sign of sorcery.

After twice attempting to escape (for which her voices blamed her), she stood trial in Rouen. The two earlier investigations and Joan’s impeccable behavior obliged Cauchon to falsify evidence and maneuver her into self-incrimination. She showed great perspicacity her voices told her to answer boldly. Cauchon finally reduced the seventy-two points on which she had been examined to twelve edited points, on which her judges and the faculty of the University of Paris condemned her.

Seriously ill and threatened by her examiners, Joan apparently signed a recantation that temporarily spared her life. Cauchon claimed that she had renounced her voices; some historians claim forgery, admission to lesser charges, or some code by which she indicated denial. In any case, she returned to woman’s clothing as ordered and to her cell. She was later found wearing men’s clothing (perhaps partly to protect herself from her guards). When questioned, Joan replied that her voices had rebuked her for her change of heart. On May 29, the judges agreed unanimously to give Joan over to the English authorities. She received Communion on the morning of May 30 and was burned as a heretic.

Significance

Mystics with political messages abounded in Joan’s world, but none had Joan’s impact on politics. Widespread celebration in 1436 of Claude des Armoises, claiming to be Joan escaped from the flames, demonstrated her continuing popularity. Orléans preserved Joan’s cult, and Domrémy became a national shrine. A surge of interest beginning in the nineteenth century with Napoleon has made Joan one of the most written-about persons in history, but efforts to analyze her in secular terms reaffirm the continuing mystery of her inspiration.

Many people in the huge crowd that witnessed Joan’s death believed in her martyrdom and reported miracles. English insistence on complete destruction of her body, with her ashes thrown into the Seine River, underscored the point. When he took Rouen and the trial records in 1450, Charles VII ordered her case reopened, but only briefly. Too many influential living persons were implicated in Joan’s condemnation, and a reversal of the verdict would also support papal claims to jurisdiction in France. A papal legate, Guillaume d’Estouteville, later encouraged Joan’s aged mother to appeal to the pope, which brought about rehabilitation proceedings and the declaration of her innocence in 1456. Even then, the revised verdict merely revoked the earlier decision on procedural grounds without endorsing Joan’s mission or condemning her judges. Joan was canonized by Pope Benedict XV on May 16, 1920, and France honors her with a festival day on the second Sunday of May.

Bibliography

Elliott, Dyan. “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc.” American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (February, 2002). Argues that the work of the French theologian Jean de Gerson (1363-1429) attempted to use clerical control to “contain” female spirituality, including the spirituality of Joan.

Fabre, Lucien. Joan of Arc. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954. An account that reflects the French and Catholic positions on Joan’s life. The author bases conclusions about the various puzzles on documents and provides a guide to the vast literature.

Guillemin, Henri. The True History of Joan “of Arc.” Translated by William Oxferry. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972. An example of the tradition believing that Joan did not die in 1431. One of the many variations in this tradition makes her the sister of Charles VII.

Hanawalt, Barbara A., and Susan Noakes. “Trial Transcript, Romance, Propaganda: Joan of Arc and the French Body Politic.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December, 1996). An examination of the political narrative and metaphor surrounding Joan’s “restoring” the “wholeness” both of the dauphin’s body and the body politic of France.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Joan of Arc. London: Allen Lane, 1976. The necessary counterbalance to Fabre’s biography. An objective and scholarly accounting, but it treats Joan’s voices as hallucinations.

Pernoud, Régine. Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses. Translated by Edward Hyams. 1966. Reprint. Lanham, Md.: Scarborough House, 1994. A work of great integrity and judgment by the former director of the Centre Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans, who culled documents of Joan’s own times for this extremely useful book.

Pernoud, Régine. The Retrial of Joan of Arc: The Evidence of the Trial for Her Rehabilitation, 1450-1456. Translated by J. M. Cohen. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Though incomplete, this text includes the essential 1455-1456 testimony by 144 persons who knew Joan at various stages of her life, making her life one of the best-documented of her century. Intended to counteract the earlier trial, it proves something of a whitewash, but it also gives a valid picture of what Joan meant to the French people.

Sackville-West, Vita. Saint Joan of Arc. New York: Grove Press, 2001. A biographical account of Joan, first published in 1936, including discussion of the history of France during the reign of Charles VII.

Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. The author ranges through the centuries and provides a hard look at how little is known about Joan’s appearance and image as a hero.

Wheeler, Bonnie, and Charles T. Wood, eds. Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc. New York: Garland, 1999. A collection of essays ranging from topics such as Joan’s military leadership of men, her gender expression, her interrogation at trial, errors in histories of Joan, comparisons with Christine de Pizan, and more.