The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  The skirmish on the Place des Pyramides foreshadowed the parliamentary debates of June. Right and Left faced off with acrimony in Parliament. Republicans who had been well disposed to Fabre’s proposal now shied away from it lest Patriots’ Day become a Catholic festival and, given the church’s genius for pageantry, eclipse July 14. It failed again.

  The belief shared by many of those Republicans that royalists, right-wing nationalists, and Catholics who argued away the church’s complicity in the death of their heroine were capable of shaping her to any purpose or bias was fortified several years later, during the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, shortly before Dreyfus’s first court-martial, Père Pie de Langogne, the future bishop of Corinth, improved his chances of elevation by exclaiming, “How twisted and Tartuffe-like, how cynical are these Jewish or Jew-tainted fulminations against the pathetic bishop of Beauvais! Spurned by the Church, Pierre Cauchon was actually the enemies’ own agent.” Joan was more insistently dragged into the campaign against Jews, and Freemasons became more prominent as the case for Dreyfus’s guilt began to unravel. Could an army of facts marshaled in his defense hold their ground against the mute testimony of a mythic figure? Cries of “Long live Joan of Arc! Down with the Jews!” were heard at May assemblies on the Place des Pyramides. The double exclamation was stamped on neighborhood walls and insinuated into the minds of worshippers attending solemn high mass on the anniversary of Joan’s victory over the English at Orléans. “Yesterday, while the Germans were celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Treaty of Frankfurt [ending the Franco-Prussian War], thousands thronged Notre Dame Cathedral to honor the liberator of the Fatherland,” Le Gaulois reported on May 8, 1896. “Père Monsabré ascended the pulpit at 4 o’clock. He declared that he had had a kind of vision while pondering the first lines of his sermon. He thought he saw the archangel Saint Michael showing him Joan in a suit of shining armor emblazoned with the word ‘Patriotism.’ ” The contrast between French victory at Orléans and German jubilation in Frankfurt rang consonant bells during the Dreyfus Affair, for mention of Frankfurt evoked not only the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine but the tentacular influence of the Rothschilds, who were inevitably stigmatized in the xenophobic press as “les banquiers de Francfort.” Suggesting that the forces arrayed against Joan combined Germans, diasporic Jews, and international capital would have been in character for Le Gaulois.

  On other occasions and wherever the opportunity presented itself, anti-Dreyfusards did more than insinuate. A case in point was Godefroy Cavaignac, a former minister of war, speaking at a banquet three weeks before the High Court of Appeals granted Dreyfus a new trial. Cavaignac defended the honor of the besmirched army and the integrity of the Republic against foreign financiers. “I am most anxious that democracies heed the danger posed by the unforeseen alliance between cosmopolitan finance and parties accustomed to fighting it,” he said.

  Foreign capital doesn’t repudiate its essence when it joins the fray [on Dreyfus’s side] so ardently, and it isn’t pledged to the cause of justice and truth just because it represents itself as being indifferent to material gain. By demonstrating the innocence of a condemned man, it means to prove that money is the master. And the day this will have been demonstrated, the day the golden calf reigns supreme over all other authorities, we may still have the material form and appearance of a republican regime, but the Republic will no longer have its life, its strength, its grandeur.

  La Croix reported that an investigative committee appointed by the czar had exposed a network of vastly rich Russian Jews pledging money to thwart the proper course of justice in Dreyfus’s retrial.

  Dreyfus’s pardon and ultimate exoneration did not end the war against subversive opinion, much less diminish Joan’s stature. In 1904, implacable zealots found another villain in the person of Amédée Thalamas, a history professor at the Lycée Condorcet.7 What Thalamas taught, or a parodic version of it, was reported to the monarchist deputy Georges Berry, who notified the minister of public instruction, Pierre Chaumié, who flinched. Thalamas was said to have cast doubt on the role of divine intercession at the Battle of Orléans and proposed to analyze England’s politics in their fifteenth-century context rather than portray them as an expression of transcendent evil. This complaint (even discounting the contention of students or colleagues that he had called Joan a slut) sufficed to provoke demonstrations, parliamentary outrage, a duel, a press campaign, and, finally, a public reprimand from Chaumié. Physically thrashed by the “Camelots du Roi”—cane-wielding ruffians pledged to Charles Maurras’s reactionary movement L’Action Française, who hawked its newspaper—Thalamas was transferred to another school.8 The left-wing majority criticized Chaumié for giving way to the Right, but the minister made no excuses. “[He] replied that the professor unquestionably showed lack of tact,” according to the Montreal Gazette. “It was not advisable … to address the boys with the same freedom as adult students. The punishment of the offender, he said further, would remind the professor of the necessity of respecting public opinion. The minister concluded with a eulogy of Joan of Arc and a promise to maintain the political neutrality of the schools.”

  Thalamas was an obvious stand-in for Dreyfus. And his alleged indiscretion was largely an excuse to stage once again the mystery play featuring Jewry and the virgin warrior as eternal antagonists. When royalists summoned by Charles Maurras held a rally for Joan of Arc on December 15, 1904, Édouard Drumont, who could not attend, alluded only to Dreyfus in his letter of apology. “You know my ideas and those of my friends,” wrote Drumont, France’s preeminent anti-Semite. “You also know by what name we call the Enemy in our midst, who has replaced the English invader of the fifteenth century and who hopes to subjugate us with the corrupting power of gold, as the brutal English hoped to do so at swordpoint. This Enemy is the Jew and the Freemason. I don’t want to belabor the point today, I simply want to join you in shouting: ‘Long live France! Glory to Joan of Arc!’ ” The letter was read aloud. Celebrants echoed his exclamations and added two more: “Down with the Jews! Down with the Freemasons!”

  Dignitaries paying homage to Joan of Arc at her statue on the Place des Pyramides in Paris, July 14, 1912.

  The battle raged on at Joan’s statue. Masons laid wreaths bearing the inscription “To Joan of Arc, who was burned by priests,” and Catholics countered with “To Joan of Arc, whom the Catholic Church has the courage to honor despite the error of the bishops.”

  In December 1908, three years after the liberal Assembly voted to separate church and state, two years after Dreyfus’s guilty verdict was quashed by a Court of Appeal, and the same year Émile Zola’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon, Pius X beatified Joan, along with seventeenth-century French missionaries killed in China. It gave him particular pleasure, he declared, that thirty-six men and one woman whose lives testified to the power of divine intercession came from a country that had denied its inherent Catholicism. Hopeful that a divine hand would one day guide home the prodigal “first daughter of the Church,” he exhorted French prelates at the ceremony to remember what he called Joan’s last words: “Long live Christ and the King of France.” Pius added “the King of France.” Witnesses to the burning had heard her appeal only to Jesus.

  Pius’s exhortation did not help Barrès, Maurras, or the like-minded patriots bent on instituting an official Joan of Arc day. In 1912, with Premier Poincaré favoring the idea, a legislative committee recommended that the Assembly act upon it, but to no avail. War broke out two years later and, according to Catholic papers, inspired pilgrimages of supplication to Joan’s iconic landmarks. In December 1914, soon after the remarkable feat of French troops supported by reserves urgently driven to the front in six hundred requisitioned taxicabs beating back a massive German army forty miles from Paris, Maurice Barrès reintroduced Joseph Fabre’s thirty-year-old bill. It was the ideal moment to celebrate Joan of Arc’s miracle.9 “Yesterday we seemed capable of admiring it and commenting upon it, but not of renewi
ng it,” he declared in the Chamber of Deputies.

  Today, the treasures of the race appear. There is a gushing forth of underground springs, a flowering of the noblest virtues, a spreading of wings. Joan of Arc is eternal. The virgin of Orléans, the Phoenix of the Gauls, rises from the ashes. Let us seize the moment. All circumstances have combined to make it a sacred moment. Our very alliances are propitious.

  With some historical revisionism of the sort Catholics practiced on the subject of Joan’s burning, Barrès arranged to have her take a fraternal view of the English.

  Yesterday, in his magnificent tribute to the glory of France, Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet laureate, sang: “Yoked in knowledge and remorse, now we come to rest, / Laughing at old villainies that Time has turned to jest; / Pardoning old necessities no pardon can efface— / That undying sin we shared in Rouen market-place.” But there is more: Joan of Arc wanted us to be able to collaborate. We must remember today that the generous young girl’s dream was that French and English ride together in defense of Christianity once France had been delivered and peace restored.… The warrior virgin, even as she shows us how to repel the invader, shows the universe the heroic and benevolent face of French valor.

  On May 16, 1915, one of the largest crowds ever to gather on the Place des Pyramides honored Joan of Arc. Floral tributes piled high around her statue, including a very conspicuous one from the English delegation. Le Temps declared that the centuries had long since worn away pride and rancor: “At the feet of Joan of Arc, who is adored wherever dream governs movement, we can in good faith call the English our brothers.” In an article published the following day, Barrès quoted Joan’s lines in Henry VI to demonstrate that even Shakespeare, no lover of the French, acknowledged her nobility. Barrès had been moved by the sight of a “supernatural” or “superhuman” spirit animating the multitude on the Place des Pyramides. “Once again Joan is winning the battle which, in her lifetime and since her death, she has had to wage against artful men bent on impeding her eternal mission.”

  France’s Pyrrhic victory in 1918 set the stage for the divine and civil consummation that Joan’s various advocates had long been urging upon church and state. The wartime truce had not yet succumbed to party politics when, on April 14, 1920, Barrès proposed one more time that the Assembly give Joan of Arc her day. She was, he said, a heroine compatible with every piety and temperament. Thus, royalists had her to thank for consecrating the son of Saint Louis according to Gallican rites at Reims; Catholics could pray to the martyr; scorners of the supernatural would have found a bantering, down-to-earth country girl inside the mystic; and Socialists could look upon the Joan who proclaimed that she had been sent by God to console the abject as a kindred spirit. In short, she enshrined the ideal of the Union Sacrée.

  Some political observers thought that the Vatican, with which France had broken diplomatic relations fifteen years earlier, seriously compromised the bill’s chances of passage by canonizing Joan on May 16.10 More than fifteen thousand French pilgrims crowded Saint Peter’s Basilica, where panels illustrated miracles with which the new saint was credited. A trainload of legislators came from Paris. Sixty-nine French bishops and six cardinals attended. A former minister of foreign affairs, Gabriel Hanotaux, represented France as ambassador extraordinary. Pope Benedict XV made May 30 Joan’s feast day.

  Despite the resistance of anticlericals who feared that Joan’s sanctification would tell against the best interests of the Republic, the Assembly agreed upon a secular holiday in her honor, the “fête de la patrie,” to be celebrated on the Sunday after the first Tuesday in May.

  The first such celebration was grandly staged in Orléans and in Paris at the Place des Pyramides. Detachments of the Paris garrison lined the Rue de Rivoli, holding back a large crowd. Generals and high government officials assembled around the gilded statue. Tricolor flags flapped in a stiff wind. A flourish of trumpets and a rendition of “La Marseillaise” announced the minister of the interior, Pierre Marraud, who evoked (in a speech sadly reminiscent of the subprefect’s in Madame Bovary) the high, traditional virtues being commemorated under the aegis of a luminous Frenchwoman. “Alas, how many Frenchmen suffered a glorious martyrdom in sacrificing their lives for their country! But not in vain were all our national energies harnessed during the ordeal. Not in vain did a single thought guide our concordant wills during those four years. Now we share an abundance of joys and griefs: the beneficent, sweet union can bear fruit. France is instinctively waiting for the occasion and the signal.” The signal was thereupon given for an interminable parade of soldiers, bemedaled veterans, the halt and the lame, youth groups, patriotic leagues. Great care had been taken throughout to avoid offending the susceptibilities of the English. Joan, said the minister, would have loved them “just as we all do now.”

  While Pierre Marraud rejoiced in the beneficent union born of war and the bishop of Verdun sang the praises of Joan to a nave full of civil and military eminences at Notre Dame Cathedral,11 an enormous demonstration was building just beyond the city wall (for Paris still had a wall and custom gates). Workers in their thousands gathered on the slopes of the Chapeau Rouge outside Pré-Saint-Gervais to hear fuglemen denounce war, its profiteers, and the connivance of the “sword and the aspergillum.” Speakers reached back across a deep abyss to the memory of Jean Jaurès standing before a crowd on that same hill denouncing war in the summer of 1914. Revolution flared off their tongues, and red flags, of which there were a multitude, moved toward the fortifications. Hundreds of mounted police and foot guards confronted them at the Saint-Gervais gate. Demonstrators threw stones; the armed force charged with sidearms loaded, truncheons in hand, and bayonets fixed. “There was considerable disorder today in Paris and in other places during the celebration of the anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Orleans by Joan of Arc in 1429,” the New York Times reported on May 9. “Fourteen policemen and twenty-three Communists were wounded, and many arrests were made when Communists tried to enter the gates of Paris in protest against the celebration. There was hand-to-hand fighting between the demonstrators and mounted guards.… The disorder continued for several hours, during which time there was considerable shooting and the hurling of missiles from the walls of the fortifications.… Shouts of ‘Down with war’ were frequently heard.” According to L’Humanité, one person was killed and more than fifty wounded.

  Readers of other French newspapers might not have known that a demonstration with violent consequences had even taken place. It went unreported, or was summarily dismissed as the mischief of extramural delinquents. Paris’s “red belt” was not alone in violating the sacred union. A number of cities refused to bear the cost of a celebration. There were protest marches at Brest. The deputy mayor of Limoges led a red-flag parade of several thousand persons through the streets.

  But Joan of Arc’s colors, white and blue, flew almost everywhere. And American warships anchored off Cherbourg fired salutes in honor of the heroine. Writing his last article about her, a frail Maurice Barrès, who had only three more years to live, exhorted humanity, celebrating the triumph of civilization, to hold high Joan’s standard and to plant it at the Rhine. For Barrès, civilization, and humanity, had well-defined borders.

  As for Joan’s fate during the 1920s and ’30s, right-wing ideologues of various stripes clasped her to their collective bosom. “Our daughter of the fields was not a democrat,” declared Charles Maurras. “By bending to the natural order of the French kingdom, Joan judged that the supernatural purposes her voices conveyed from heaven were being fulfilled. In all earthly matters, she went straight to the essential thing, which was the prompt establishment of central authority and its swift recognition throughout the country. This national heroine was not the heroine of democracy.” Divorced from the Republic, she rose to greater prominence than ever under the Vichy regime, riding pillion with the octogenarian chief of a satellite state. Between 1941 and 1944, on every Joan of Arc Day, Pétain dutifully reviewed elemen
ts of the French Metropolitan Army at Vichy’s Monument to the Dead. He eulogized the “martyr to national unity,” proceeded in full uniform to the Église Saint-Louis for a solemn mass, and sat beside the papal nuncio. Joan’s cult took a fundamentalist turn. The archenemy was no longer Germany but England, once again.

  1Since 1866 Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, whose grand design was to forge a German empire in the heat of war, with Wilhelm of Prussia as its sovereign, had been carefully devising a casus belli against France. History abetted him when the Spanish throne fell vacant. Bismarck persuaded King Wilhelm’s relative Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern to present his candidacy, knowing full well that France could not allow itself to be pinned between two of that family. Leopold subsequently withdrew his bid at Wilhelm’s urging, but his gesture did not mollify France’s foreign miniser, the Duc de Gramont, who insisted that Leopold should never again be allowed to come forward. Wilhelm refused, and the matter might have rested there had Bismarck not made the refusal sound contemptuous by mischievously editing a telegram from Wilhelm to Napoleon III. Inflamed by the press, which generally denounced Prussia’s “slap in the face,” Frenchmen mobbed the streets of Paris. On July 14, 1870, an order to mobilize was issued.