Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint

by Donald Spoto

  “Her main concern is to ensure the survival of the faith.” This was not merely the poetic hyperbole of Christine de Pisan; it was implicit in everything Joan of Arc did. To modern ears that might seem quite a leap: how can the expulsion of the English and the survival of France be identified with preserving faith?

  At this point it is crucial to keep in mind that Joan’s goal of saving France was, she claimed, God’s own will. Referring constantly to divine guidance, she insisted that she did nothing but what was directed. If her spiritual experience may be trusted as valid, then she was right in her assertion that France was a sacred nation that had to be saved.

  As Siobhan Nash-Marshall has suggested in an important scholarly article, more than physical or psychological causes must be found if one is to challenge her claim and explore the notion of sacred nations. Some critics have insisted that Ménière’s disease (a condition affecting the ear or ears) or a neoplasm of the brain or frank psychosis was the cause of her voices and visions. But people with Ménière’s disease, with its attendant vertigo, impaired hearing and imbalance, cannot ride horses for days, nor can they leap into battle, climb ladders, and otherwise lead extremely active lives without interruption.

  As for a benign or malignant brain tumor, such a condition becomes progressively worse and brings with it alarming and debilitating symptoms, such as violent vomiting, loss of sight, irrational behavior, blindness, incapacitating headaches, and partial paralysis. Joan experienced none of these frightful signs, and her physical activity was interrupted only briefly by war wounds, not by any organic illness.

  Similarly, schizophrenia or other forms of grave mental illness simply do not appear in the life of this unlettered girl whose manner, convictions and logic were enough to convince a king to assign her to a critical job with soldiers. Had she seemed unbalanced, no responsible royal or noble would have allowed her to advise and to lead the very fighters, mercenaries and volunteers on whom they depended for their kingdom; nor would worldly men like Metz, Poulengy, Alençon, Dunois, La Hire and the rest have so readily trusted and attached themselves to her. Men liked and admired her; they did not hold her in suspicion.

  Nor did Joan give any indications of being a disturbed girl: she spoke calmly, with logic and unshakable faith. She argued with educated councilors and learned churchmen, and her responses showed only a natural cleverness, a quick and rational mind, a healthy self-confidence, a keen sense of humor and a strong sense of the realities of what had happened, was happening and might happen. Her actions with others, in other words, reveal a young woman who did not live in a world of fantasy or illusion.

  Perhaps most important, we must keep in mind that Joan had no training in such things as court procedures, military maneuvers, battle horsemanship, weaponry or the fine points of theological or legal disputes. That she acquitted herself so brilliantly in these areas may not be credited to Ménière’s disease, a brain tumor or an unbalanced mind.

  Among the hundreds of witnesses to her achievements and the hundreds more who knew her during her lifetime, not a single person alluded to anything like physical, emotional or mental illness. The unanimous sense of those present was that she was a remarkably normal young woman who was able to achieve remarkably memorable deeds at the age of seventeen.

  Joan’s claim that God had France in His care because France was sacred to Him may not be merely a medieval trope, embarrassingly old-fashioned language that today we must expunge from our vocabularies. To claim that France is sacred does not imply that only France is sacred. Throughout history, men and women have arisen everywhere who testify to the sacredness of nations. Perhaps today more than ever, we are aware that the identity and integrity of nations are supremely significant for the human race—that the facile invasion of a sovereign state and genocide are abhorrent.

  In this regard, the entire Jewish-Christian faith tradition is based on the belief that God once summoned ordinary people and through them worked extraordinary deeds for His own purpose, which is to bring all peoples to Himself. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the prophets were but a few of those called to establish and save the nation of Israel. But Israel was brought into existence and later triumphed over its enemies not only for its own sake. This is made clear throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: God saved that nation so that all nations might be embraced. Israel was to be “a light to the gentiles,” as both Old and New Testaments reiterate. God chose the Israelites not to dominate or control but rather to serve others. The Christian Scriptures make the point more specific: the gentiles are not excluded from God’s embrace, for the light of Israel shines on the gentiles and shows the way into that embrace. All the peoples of the world are to be brought into the capacious light of the knowledge of God’s friendship. Nowhere is it implied that the nation of Israel, or any other nation, should cease to exist.

  Because no single person or group represents everything it means to be human, it is the variety of people within a nation that gives it an irreplaceable, unique character—its “national personality.” As with individuals, so with nations: it is the diversity of peoples that furthers the process of the world. Although many nations have tried, none may set itself up as the only or the predominant nation, forcing its culture, ideology, religion or political agenda on any other nation. For Joan of Arc, this was precisely what England was trying to do through its nobles, armies and war machinery. France deserved its identity and, as a symbol of its people, the king.

  FOUR DAYS AFTER the coronation, Charles embarked on a royal tour, presenting himself to his people and receiving their formal acts of loyalty and submission. Never a decisive man in military matters, he temporized by listening to men who disliked Joan, while she and Alençon urged him to capitalize on the recent victories as well as the prestige afforded by coronation. The English had lost both numbers and morale, and Joan and her partners insisted that now was the time to recapture Paris and reunite the French people; otherwise recent triumphs could be reduced to insignificance.

  But Charles preferred to bide his time, waiting for Philip of Burgundy to turn over Paris peacefully. The coronation had no transforming effect on the king’s self-awareness, for although Paris was now his city, he was hesitant to take it. Instead of advancing on Paris, the royal entourage headed northwest to Corbeny, then south to Soissons, Château-Thierry, Monmirail and Provins.

  Charles’s optimism was in vain. The truce Philip proposed was merely a pretext to seal off as much of Paris as possible so that it would not fall to the king. This Joan suspected, as she wrote in a letter dictated from Provins to the people of Reims on August 5:

  My dear friends in Reims, Joan the Maid greets you and asks that you have no concerns about the good cause she pursued on behalf of the royal house. I promise that I will never abandon you as long as I live. It’s true that the king has made a fifteen-day truce with the Duke of Burgundy, who is then supposed to turn over Paris peacefully. But don’t be surprised if I don’t enter Paris so quickly. I really don’t like truces made like this, and I don’t know if I can support them—but if I do so, it will only be to protect the king’s honor. I shall maintain the king’s army so as to be ready if the Burgundians aren’t true to their word. So my dear friends, do not worry so long as I live, but keep good watch and defend [Reims], and let me know if any traitors seek to harm you. Let me have some news of you. I commend you to God—may He protect you.

  Joan was unaware that the Duke of Bedford, in particular, was moving to support Philip’s betrayal of the truce because he sought an end to the meddlesome Maid who had sabotaged English supremacy. Bedford and Philip, often hostile to each other, were united on the matter of Joan. Their diplomatic entente was helped by the fact that Bedford had married Philip’s sister.

  Bedford maneuvered quickly: he summoned to his side a number of soldiers who had been sent to fight heretics in Bohemia, thus in effect turning his campaign into a crusade, a sacred venture against heretics. Their target, Bedford wrote to the king of France i
n a tone astonishingly disrespectful, was Joan herself—a heretic and, because she beguiled and corrupted the goals of good Christian men, a witch. “You seduce and abuse the ignorant and rely on the assistance of the superstitious and reprobate, and even of that deranged and infamous woman who goes about in men’s clothes and is of dissolute conduct.”

  There was no evidence for heresy, but Bedford was certain that he and his Burgundian bishops could contrive a rationale for condemning her if she could be captured and put on trial. Those goals seemed achievable, and then it would be a short route to her execution, the complete demolition of French morale, the defeat of Charles VII, and—voilà!—the eight-year-old Henry VI of England would also become king of France.

  At the same time, Georges de la Trémoïlle was making every effort to poison Charles against Joan, and in his perfidy he exploited Charles’s wife and mother-in-law. Of Joan, la Trémoïlle wrote to them, “She leaves no doubt that she will bring Paris under her control”—not the control of France, not that of the king, but her control.

  As she had said, Joan feared only treason, and now she sensed the proximate reality of it. Most poignant of all, her voices seemed no longer to provide clear direction as to her future activities with the king, and this she took to mean that her military career was drawing to a close.

  SEVEN

  A Leap of Faith

  (August 1429–December 1430)

  By the time the royal expedition arrived at Crépy-en-Valois on Thursday, August 11, Joan sensed that forces both English and French were seeking her disgrace and demise. She had won the king’s approval; she had earned the loyalty and respect of noblemen and battle leaders; and she had won the admiration and affection of soldiers and ordinary citizens. How could such enmity on the part of a few so suddenly become so potent?

  The French too had their cunning and formidable men, such as la Trémoïlle, the king’s chamberlain and his chief negotiator with Burgundy, to whom Charles owed vast sums of money and whose counsel, therefore, he could not reject outright. La Trémoïlle’s scheme, which he recommended daily to the king, was to maintain a truce between French and Burgundian troops and then hire foreign soldiers to battle the English. There was no place in la Trémoïlle’s plan for the likes of Joan, who rightly distrusted the idea of a truce and recommended acting at once to retake Paris for the anointed king. The chamberlain wanted her dismissed and sent home, but the king was not ready to do so; she was an asset, at least in what passed for his public relations, and he wanted to keep her a while longer. It is unclear whether Charles knew that la Trémoïlle was sowing the seeds of suspicion about Joan among those at court as well as with the queen and her mother.

  In addition, those who proclaimed themselves friends of the king were furtively making deals with both the Burgundians and the English, for they realized that alliance with England, even now, would offer them large financial advantages. The coffers of Charles VII were virtually empty, but the situation across the channel was quite different. These conspirators also felt that England would eventually prevail, and they wanted to be on the winning side. Their traitorous collaboration represented the most perfidious era in French history until the Nazi occupation and the Vichy government, to which this period bears several unfortunate similarities.

  Joan was rigorously unique—not a queen, a mother, an aristocrat, a nun, or an intellectual but a woman of action and profound religious faith, convinced that God willed the integrity of her country. In other words, her clarity and simplicity put to shame all the wily, selfish politicians and conniving churchmen doing business with them, who finally decided that she had outlived her usefulness and had to go.

  The faculty of the University of Paris was also involved. Theologians, philosophers, and clergy in the capital were impatient to eradicate Joan’s influence and to have her silenced. A number of professors signed a letter to none other than the pope, in which they charged Joan with rank heresy; their primary accusation was that she claimed to know the future. Such academic involvement was not as surprising as it may seem today, for the University of Paris presented itself to the world as the intellectual guardian of orthodoxy, standing ready to condemn anyone who spoke or acted in God’s name without seeking its approval. In addition, the university faculty championed the Treaty of Troyes and endorsed an English king on the throne of France as the shortest route to peace. Their position was virtually a legal judgment, and it carried great weight all over France: according to these august men, Joan of Arc was a dangerous charlatan.

  BEFORE THE SUMMER of 1429 was over, the representatives of Philip of Burgundy were quietly negotiating with the Duke of Bedford about a hypothetical price to be paid for handing over Joan of Arc if she could be captured. There was something almost fateful about her, the English decided, something that seemed to be the devil’s own work. She must be a witch to have accomplished so much, to have secured such loyalty from troops—and witches must be eliminated from the world. Precisely at this point in the fifteenth century, belief in witchcraft reached a pitch of frenzy hitherto unknown: religious folk were terrified of those considered witches, and clergymen were hunting down countless innocent women in the belief that they consorted with or were tools of demonic powers.

  A great deal had to be demonstrated, however. And Joan could not be put on trial and executed by an English court merely for succeeding in battle and routing English plans. She would have to be condemned by an ecclesiastical court for reasons of witchcraft and heresy; alas, an ecclesiastical court favorable to England and ready to accept cash and favors for the deed would be readily available.

  Joan read the prevailing winds, believed that her task for France was complete, and wanted to go home. “I wish it were God’s will for me to go away now,” she said to Dunois in August, “and to lay down my armor and return to serving my parents by looking after the flocks with my sister and brothers, who would be so happy to have me at home.” Poignantly, Joan spoke of her “sister and brothers” and life at home as it had been before her brothers joined her in battle and her sister died.

  Although she had spent only five months in royal circles and two months in the thick of warfare, she understood that now her real troubles would begin, and she longed to avoid them. In Reims, her farewell to her family as they returned to Domrémy must have been difficult for them all; now more than ever, she missed life at home. Disillusionment followed disappointment from the summer of 1429 to the spring of 1430, for Joan had made it possible for Charles to be anointed king, and now he was the most acute source of her regret. Not that she would have reversed the coronation, and not that she lamented any moment of battle, but Charles preferred not to face the unpleasant realities at hand, and Joan preferred to confront them promptly.

  Apparently she was of two minds. On the one hand, she became ever more anguished and depressed over the apathy of the king and the foolish and often treacherous counsel he heeded—hence her wish to return to Domrémy. But on the other hand, she saw how much might be done, with proper troops, to effect a rapid departure of the English from French soil. Most of all, she grew angry and impatient at the king’s inclination to grasp at every diplomatic straw thrown at him by the wily Philip of Burgundy.

  Charles still hoped that Philip would simply surrender Paris to him. Reluctantly, however, he provided some troops to attend Joan and Alençon in an attempt to recapture the city on September 8. “The Maid took her standard in hand,” according to Perceval de Cagny, the duke’s squire and chronicler,

  and the assault was hard and long, lasting from about two in the afternoon until nightfall. After the sun had set, the Maid was hit by a crossbow bolt in her thigh. After she had been hit, she insisted even more strenuously that everyone should approach the walls so that the place would be taken. But because it was night and she was wounded and the men-at-arms were weary from the daylong assault, Gaucourt and others came to the Maid and, against her will, carried her away. And so the assault ended.

  Joan agreed to tak
e but one night’s rest, and then she told the astonished Alençon that she was ready to resume with another plan of attack the following day. The troops rallied, but then messengers from the king arrived, ordering Joan and the duke to meet him at Saint-Denis. The king ordered the army to abandon the attack on Paris, and he went back to Gien, in the Loire Valley; there he formally disbanded his troops and announced that henceforth he would pursue only a reconciliation with Philip—an expectation that everyone but the king knew was both futile and dangerous.

  After her meeting with the king at Saint-Denis, Joan went to the chapel royal, where she left her armor and sword—the traditional gesture of thanksgiving for surviving a recent war wound. But it is also the sign by which a soldier acknowledges that the battles are over, the race run. Joan had effected Charles’s coronation, and now he was her king; she may well have thought that with the formal disbanding of the royal army she would henceforth be without purpose to the man she had brought to the throne, and therefore to the country.

  Because he was a nobleman, Jean d’Alençon did not require the king’s permission to raise troops and go to battle—which is just what he proposed that autumn when he invited Joan to accompany him on a campaign to Normandy, which was Burgundian territory. But Charles was persuaded by la Trémoïlle not to permit this, in order to avoid provoking the Burgundians while negotiations continued on yet another truce with Philip (despite the fact that he had failed to yield Paris after the first truce). “The Maid remained much annoyed at the king,” wrote Alençon’s chronicler.

  That situation was aggravated by Charles’s decision to prevent any further possible undertakings between the Maid and the duke; this he accomplished by a formal instruction that Joan and Alençon were never to meet again. No doubt he envied their accomplishments, which highlighted his own inefficiency and weakness. By severing this friendship, the king also ensured that any troops under their separate commands would be weakened. This, of course, was exactly what men like la Trémoïlle wanted, for Charles had neither the inclination nor the talent for military strategy. And so the Maid and her “fair duke,” good friends and comrades-in-arms, were never reunited.