Joan of Arc

by Regine Pernoud

  A series of particularly moving interrogatories was that which took place at Domremy and Vaucouleurs. The sessions began on January 28, 1456, in the presbytery of the little church at Domremy. As is still the custom of Officiality courts to-day, local worthies had been designated to compose the court, and given the list of questions to be asked. In this case the substitute pontifical commissioners were the dean of the church of Notre Dame of Vaucouleurs, Master Reginald Chichery; and a canon of Toul cathedral, Wautrin Thierry. But, of course, the promoter Simon Chapitault had come from Paris to be present. The sessions ended on February 11th after, in default of Baudricourt who was dead, Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy, the knights who had escorted Joan, had been heard. On February 16th sessions were resumed in Rouen and two inquiries were ordered, one at Orleans and the other in Paris where depositions had already been taken between January 10th and 15th: these included those of Thomas de Courcelles and of Cauchon’s devoted friend Jean de Mailly, Bishop of Noyon.

  In Orleans as in Domremy, popular feeling was manifest: numerous were the ordinary, the “little” people who passed before the commissioners between February 22nd and March 16th, 1456; and in their evidence is apparent that enthusiasm for the heroine which also marks the depositions, taken in Paris on May 12th, of great noblemen like Dunois and Alençon.

  One witness of the first importance, Jean d’Aulon, Joan’s faithful intendant, would have been left out if the archbishop of Rheims had not written to ask him at least to send his deposition in writing. Jean d’Aulon had become seneschal of Beaucaire; rather than fetch him to Paris he was invited to say what he knew before the Lyon Officiality. His deposition was forwarded in French whereas all the others were translated into Latin by the clerks as they wrote. It was the last in date, May 20, 1456, and meanwhile hearings had been resumed in Rouen on May 10th to finish on the 14th.

  On May 30th a new hearing opened, but this was simply a formality: contradictors—people who might wish to speak against the rehabilitation—were called upon to appear. None did; and on June 2nd the evidence collected in the course of the enquiries was declared officially accepted by the court. At last, on June 10th, after a final assignation, all the documents in the case were placed in the hands of the Inquisitor Jean Bréhal, who, having returned to Paris, drew up that over-all summary of the case which is known as the Recollectio. Point by point the charges brought against Joan twenty-five years before were refuted from the evidence in hand, by a detailed and careful comparison between the answers Joan had given in the first trial, and the material obtained during the enquiries connected with the new trial. The work was very thoroughly done and thereafter nothing was left of the heresy charge.

  During the month of June the Commissioners devoted themselves to a study of all the documents and of the Recollectio. Once again, on the 24th of the month, notices were fixed to the doors of all the churches in Rouen calling upon objectors to the rehabilitation to come forward and say what they knew; but nobody came forward. On July 2nd, in solemn session, the promoter, Simon Chapitault, then Guillaume Prevosteau on behalf of Joan’s family, appeared to implore the judges to pronounce, in the name of the Holy See, Joan’s rehabilitation.

  On July 7, 1456, at nine o’clock in the morning, the three pontifical commissioners took their places in the great hall of the archiepiscopal palace of Rouen; with them were the Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishop of Paris, the Bishop of Coutances, and the Inquisitor Jean Bréhal. Prominent among the crowd in the body of the court, seated on the front bench, was the promoter Simon Chapitault; and, standing at the bar of the court, Jean d’Arc, who was called Petit-Jean and also Jean du Lys, beside him being his advocate Pierre Maugier and the procurator Guillaume Prevosteau. Among those present was one who had supported Joan in her last moments, Martin Ladvenu; but Isambart de la Pierre was not there, he had died.

  A solemn ceremony; but, as has been pointed out, a wholly juridical one. After the customary preliminaries and formalities, the Archbishop of Rheims, acting as president of the court, read aloud the following document:

  “In consideration of the request of the d’Arc family against the Bishop of Beauvais, the promoter of criminal proceedings, and the inquisitor of Rouen . . . in consideration of the informations . . . and juridical consultations . . . in consideration of the facts, in consideration of the defamatory (or dishonourable) articles. . . . We, in session of our court and having God only before our eyes, say, pronounce, decree and declare that the said trial and sentence (of condemnation) being tainted with fraud (dolus malus), calumny, iniquity, contradiction and manifest errors of fact and of law, including the abjuration, execution and all their consequences, to have been and to be null, invalid, worthless, without effect and annihilated. . . . We break and annul them and declare that they must be destroyed (lit. lacerated). . . . In consideration of Joan’s appeal to the Holy See . . . in consideration of the threats of torture . . . We proclaim that Joan did not contract any taint of infamy and that she shall be and is washed clean of such and, if need be, we wash her clean of such absolutely. . . .”

  One of the original copies of the articles of accusation was then symbolically torn-up (“lacerated”); the whole court and assembly then moved to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen where the “abjuration” had taken place, and the verdict just given was repeated. On the following day this was done yet again, this time at the Old Market, where there also took place a solemn preaching and the erection of a cross “in perpetual memory and that prayer for the salvation of her soul and those of the other dead be here offered up”.

  The Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc was celebrated in many towns throughout France, among them being, needless to say, Orleans, where, on July 27th, celebrations were presided over by Jean Bréhal and Guillaume Bouillé. The municipality spread itself and gave them a grand banquet for which were purchased “ten pints and chopines of wine . . . twelve chickens, two rabbits, twelve pigeons, two leverets . . . etc.” And it is pleasant to imagine Isabelle Romée in the midst of that friendly crowd: long dishonoured by the taint of infamy which the enemy had succeeded in inflicting upon her, the true countenance of her daughter had at last been restored to her: she was free to die now. And tradition has it that she died in the little village of Sandillon, near Orleans, on November 28, 1458.

  COMMENTARY

  It has often been regretted that Joan, a girl full of life and sap, should be known to us only and paradoxically in lawyer’s jargon. We confess that we do not share this regret. In a case which is so very out of the ordinary—for everything from herself to the least detail of her history is exceptional—it is well, on the contrary, that the documents which are our sources should be as strictly factual as possible; that is why it seems to us that even contemporary chronicles should give way to the records of the trials; and why we hope against hope that one day the first “trial”—her examination at Poitiers—will turn up. The dryness of juridical forms and the bareness of the direct evidence unadorned by literary graces, all recorded on the pages of a register, each page authenticated by the notary’s signature—all this is, for the historian and his reader, a sort of retrospective guarantee. No historian could possibly have the same measure of confidence in a chronicle—in which the facts are invariably seen through the deforming prism of the author’s ideas, temperament and point of view—as he can have in a sworn affidavit.

  And this point is brought out in all its importance in the actual scene of the Rehabilitation: it was Father Doncoeur who first drew attention to absence of feeling, the true legal dryness, of that ceremony. Not one act or word but was a juridical act or a juridical word. You may study the judgment in vain for a single term which even suggests praise. Certain commissioners were appointed to answer a question: Was Joan, or was she not, a heretic? They answer: No. And that is all. The verdict is negative: the Church confines itself to disavowing a judgment formerly handed down by an ecclesiastical court of judges who judged ill. Certain historians have tried to see in this rehabili
tation scene the beginning of the Joan of Arc “legend”, by which she is supposed to have been artificially aggrandized and prepared for the admiration of the mob. All this proves is that they never bothered to read the documents. Whereas, if one does go to the actual documents, being in the habit of hearing Joan made the subject of extravagant panygyric pronounced by politicians as well as prelates, one is curiously disappointed. One seeks for the moment of feeling and fails to discover it. Only at the very beginning of the proceedings do we find a moment of feeling in the record, on the day when Isabelle Romée made her petition in Notre-Dame; but that derived from the drama inherent in the old countrywoman’s cry for justice, and had no place in the trial itself.

  We thought it as well to report one by one the stages of Joan’s rehabilitation because, dry though the reading must be, it is necessary to an understanding of the care and earnestness with which the business was conducted. Too often, as we have said, even historians have failed to recognize this. It is well worth while taking the trouble to realise that, taking account of the first royal enquiry set on foot to “learn the truth” about Joan’s condemnation, the proceedings were spread over seven years, that they involved the setting up of a royal commission and an ecclesiastical court, that two popes took a hand in it, that one hundred and fifteen witnesses were called to give evidence, some of them as many as four times. A bogus trial on that scale is simply not conceivable.

  We have seen how the court of rehabilitation heard evidence in most of the towns where Joan had lived, including the places where she had spent her childhood, those where her prowess were performed, and the places of her agony and death. The procedure on these occasions was exactly the same as for any other trial: there was a clerk who kept a minute of what was said and done as the evidence was heard, his notes were put into Latin, and the record of each session drawn up. Three copies of all these notes were re-copied into registers—three copies of the whole dossier in fact—each page bearing the signature of both the notaries present at all the hearings, Denis Lecomte and François Ferrebouc. These registers were enormous, for apart from the record of the trial itself which was held in 1455–56, comprising records of sessions, questions asked of witnesses and their depositions, the notaries also copied all procedural papers into these files, for example counsels’ opinions from jurists and all the canonical enquiry conducted by Cardinal d’Estouteville in 1452. Some idea of the sheer bulk of the whole can be gathered from the fact that the two volumes of Quicherat’s edition comprise 855 pages of small, close print; but he did not include all the counsels’ opinions (consultations juridiques) and theological opinions which make another two fat volumes in Lanéry d’Arc’s edition of 1889; and he also left out all Bréhal’s work, the Summarium and the Recollectio, which were published in 1893 by Fathers Belon and Balme. To all this must be added the fact that the MSS. of the rehabilitation proceedings do not include the first, royal enquiry, nor the memorandum drawn up by Guillaume Bouillé, which was recopied separately. (The so-called De Soubise MS., No. 1613 in the Bibliothèque of the town of Orleans; and the Urfé MSS. in Bib. Nat. fonds latin 8838.)

  The three authenticated copies of the rehabilitation proceedings have been preserved intact. Two are in the Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds latin in 17013 and 5970. The third copy is, oddly enough, in England, at the British Museum, MS. Stowe 84.

  For a more complete description of the different MSS. and their contents the reader should consult Pierre Champion’s Notice de Manuscrits des procès de rehabilitation, Paris, 1930. In order to read the original Latin text we still have nothing better than Quicherat’s edition and the two works, Lanéry d’Arc’s and that of Belon and Balme, already mentioned. But a new edition is in hand. And we already have a recent edition of the royal enquiry (enquête civile), published on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the rehabilitation. This is L’enquête ordonnée par Charles VII en 1450 et le codicille de Guillaume Bouillé (Paris, 1956, Librairie d’ Argences), by P. Doncoeur and Y. Lanhers. It is in a series entitled Documents et recherches relatifs à Jeanne la Pucelle which already comprised an edition of the Minute française des interrogatoires de Jeanne and an edition of L’instrument des sentences portés par Pierre Cauchon et Jean Lemaitre contre Jeanne la Pucelle.

  The methodical work of the Société de l’Histoire de France will soon provide us with a new edition of the rehabilitation proceedings. This will be of the original Latin text as explained above. But several French translations are available: Eugene O’Reilly, Les deux procès de condamnation, les enquêtes, et la sentence de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc. Paris 1868, 2 vols.

  Joseph Fabre, Procès de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc raconté et écrit d’après les textes officiels latins. Paris 1888. A second edition in 1912.

  Régine Pernoud, Vie et mort de Jeanne d’Arc, les témoignages du procès de réhabilitation, 1450–56. Paris, Hachette, 1953. This is a translation into French of depositions in the rehabilitation proceedings.

  Finally, an analysis of the trial with extracts from the evidence is to be found in a work published by the Club du meilleur livre in 1954. And a very complete study of the circumstances of the rehabilitation and the drafting of the record of the proceedings is available in a work published in 1956 under the auspices of the Comité national de Jeanne d’Arc, Mémorial du Ve centenaire de la réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, 1456–1956.

  Readers may like to be reminded here, by way of rounding off the story, that Joan was beatified on April 18, 1909, and canonised on May 9, 1920. July 10th, Joan’s Feast day, was declared a national holiday.

  A final word should be said touching the mistakes persisted in by the partisans of the theory that Joan was a bastard of the house of Orleans. Their method consists in setting aside the mass of the documents which destroy their theory while extracting from the same texts here a line and there a detail to which they give importance to the exclusion of everything else. Thus, for example, in the case of the rehabilitation proceedings they ignore all the depositions with a single exception. This, to put it mildly, is very curious, for it is difficult to see how, if the totality be false, one element in it could be more exact and truthful than all the rest.

  In this case the choice of detail upon which to make their case is doubly unfortunate, for it is only by retaining a mistranslation that this detail can be made to mean what they want it to mean. The point in question is from the deposition of the notary Guillaume Colles, called Boisguillaume, who, speaking of the examination into Joan’s virginity carried out at Rouen under the direction of the Duchess of Bedford, adds:

  “. . . et quod dux Bedfordie erat in quodam loco secreto ubi videbat eandem Johannem visitari.”

  The meaning of this is perfectly clear: “And that the Duke of Bedford was in a secret place where he saw Joan examined (more literally: “Joan to be examined (or visited)”). From this partisans of the bastardy theory contrive to deduce that the Duke of Bedford was in the habit of paying visits to Joan by means of an underground passage from his dwelling to the prison. In this connection we will quote from the article by Maitre Maurice Garçon to which we have already referred: “One stands astounded: loco secreto has never meant an underground passage; ubi is an adverb of place exclusive of movement which has not the meaning of either quo nor of unde; videbat is not solebat and visitari is a passive infinitive.”

  As it happens archaeology confirms the correct translation. For—the contrary has been maintained but without the production of a scintilla of evidence—Rouen Castle has twice been the object of very thorough archaeological investigation, diggings which have not revealed the existence of any such passage. An account of the results of these digs, which were carried out by F. Bouquet and subsequently by Commandant Quenedey, is in the latter’s book, La prison de Jeanne d’Arc à Rouen, Paris, 1923. (See also the proceedings of the Congrès archaeologique de Rouen, 1926.)

  One writer on the subject refers us to the Journal de Pierre Cusquel, according to which, he
tells us, Joan escaped from Rouen Castle. He will have to try again, for there is no such Journal. All we have of Cusquel are his depositions in the Trial of Rehabilitation; and in these he does not say that Joan escaped; he tells, three times, how she was burned.

  CONCLUSION*

  We have tried in this work to lay before the reader, as faithfully as possible, the case of Joan of Arc, letting the contemporary records speak for themselves after they had been duly checked and passed through the sieve of historical criticism, and to the actual words of which anyone is, nowadays, at liberty to refer, since translations are accessible and reliable. And we urge the interested reader to read those documents for himself because, limited by the dimensions of the present work, we have given only extracts from them. And while these suffice perhaps to enable the reader to follow Joan’s history, they are inadequate when it comes to the question of really getting to know her as she was. Everyone should at least have read the Trial of Condemnation, one of the most beautiful texts in the French language. It is shocking to reflect that at the present time nothing of this text is to be found in those “selected passages” of our literature which are offered to school-children.