Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  It was hard to deny the truth of the case so outlined. The articles said nothing about matters that the first trial had raised: was it permissible for a woman to act a man’s role; how far should a Catholic trust in private revelations; would God have sent a virgin soldier to fulfil a political plan; did God hate the English and the Burgundians? Those interrogated in the 1450s could not say much about Joan’s intimate experiences, they were relaxed about her wearing of men’s clothes and her months of fighting and by 1450 it must have seemed true, as it had not seemed twenty years before, that God intended Charles VII to be King of France and Henry VI to return to England.

  On 18 June, Jean d’Arc and the Promoter, Chapitault, acting for the plaintiffs, appeared at the palace of the Bishop of Paris, and asked for a day to be fixed for the end of the case. The date was set for 1 July 1456, and notices were posted on the doors of Rouen Cathedral. On the following day it was announced that the final sentence should be delivered on Wednesday 7 July, and at eight o’clock that morning the rehabilitation was read by the archbishop. A procession and sermon was organised in place St-Ouen, and on 8 July a second sermon was preached in place du Vieux-Marché, where a cross was raised to perpetuate the memory of Joan’s death. This cross was later replaced by a fountain, with a statue of Joan under an arcade surmounted by a cross. In 1756, in the tercentenary year of the rehabilitation, a new fountain was erected that remains there today.

  What is striking about the processes of rehabilitation – or, technically, the nullification – from their beginnings in 1450 to their conclusion in 1456 is that they showed none of the signs of haste that had been characteristic of the process of condemnation. Not all the previous difficulties were solved: by the 1450s, the key witnesses of the 1431 trial had died. Cauchon had a heart attack while being bled, Nicolas Midi died a leper, Estivet died in a sewer; others, like de Courcelles, were anxious to excuse themselves or to blame those who could not answer back and no one was going to say that the Anglo-Burgundian case had raised objections to Joan’s cause and conduct that were not always easy to contradict. And yet, from the start of the royal inquiry to the end of the papal inquiries, the witnesses speak with a freedom and liveliness that burst through the constraints of legal evidence. Attending to them, a student will find it hard to maintain that Joan was justly condemned. Accounts of her life that end with her death have missed out many of the most dramatic scenes in the drama of her story: the tales that in 1431 could not be told, the recollections of ageing men (and some ageing women) who had known her well. Some depositions may exaggerate, and, as only in some cases can their reliability be checked, the reader may not be sure which details to accept; but in the round and taken together they portray a Maid very unlike the Maid whom her judges had seen in 1431.

  By 7 July 1456, when the court issued its decision, there could be no doubt what the decision would be. In the name of the Holy Trinity, acting on the authority of St Peter and his apostolic successors over the Church, the Archbishop of Reims, the Bishops of Paris and Coutances and the Dominican Jean Bréhal, professor of theology and one of the two inquisitors of France – all four judges being specially delegated representatives of the reigning pope – solemnly pronounced their sentence on the case brought by widow Isabelle Romée, mother, Pierre and Jean d’Arc, natural and legal brothers, of the deceased Joan of Arc, of good memory, commonly called the Maid, in the case brought against Cauchon the Bishop of Beauvais, Jean Lemaître, then vice-inquisitor of the diocese of Beauvais, and Jean d’Estivet, the Promoter. In the pompous terms beloved by lawyers anywhere and by churchmen everywhere, archbishop, bishops and Inquisitor declared the sentence on Joan was unsafe. They called the twelve articles ‘iniquitous, false, prepared without reference to Joan’s confessions in a lying manner’, they thought with St Paul that private revelations should be referred to God alone and that the accusations against her were false in fact as well as in law, and so the case against her should be annulled. After a general procession and a public sermon, their decision was published in the square of St-Ouen, and again on the following day in place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan had died.

  It has been urged that this decision, like the decision it reversed, was a political decision; and clearly Charles VII was exonerated for having believed in Joan’s mission. His critics have excoriated him for not having tried to secure her release in 1431, but it is hard to see what he could have done then. He could do something only after Rouen had fallen to him and his servants could study the documents of the original trial; he could not have saved her life, but he could save her reputation. By 1450 it paid him to do so, but it became obvious that even if her first trial had been a political trial, in form it had been an ecclesiastical trial. Although he had worked hard to restrict papal control of the French Church, only a pope could override the original tribunal. In the end it needed a change of papacy to bring the final stage to a close. Pope Calixtus III, elected in 1455, tactfully appointed the Archbishop of Reims, the superior of the Bishop of Beauvais, a neighbouring Norman bishop, an inquisitor-theologian and finally the Bishop of Paris, since Parisian clerics had been all too willing to side with the Anglo-Burgundians against both Rome and the Valois King of France. The idea was to make the new judges credible representatives of the French Church. The judges’ verdict pleased the French King, but was not therefore unjust. It pleased Joan’s family, but did not decide if she was a saint.

  In c. 1461, the most notorious poet of the age, François Villon, born in the year the Maid died, added Joan’s name to the list of those whose passing he lamented: Thais, mistress to Alexander the Great, Héloïse, lover of the philosopher Peter Abélard, Queen Blanche of France and Dante’s Beatrice, and:

  Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,

  Qu’Englois brulerent à Rouan. . . .

  Mais où sont les neiges d’autan?2

  (‘And Joan, the good Lorrainer,

  whom the English burnt at Rouen . . . But where are last year’s snows?’)

  She was gone, and although Villon could not have known it, long after her death she would be more famous than she had ever been in a life so brutally curtailed.

  PART THREE

  The Cult of the Maid

  EIGHTEEN

  History, Legend and Myth

  The verdict of 1456 should have settled Joan’s reputation for good, but it did not. In contemporary England, which was soon exchanging the bitterness of defeat in a dynastic war overseas for the even more bitter experience of a dynastic war at home, there was no motive for anyone to study, let alone accept, the verdict. In France, apart from certain places associated with her life, such as Domremy and Orléans, there were not many signs of devotion to her memory. Joan belonged to history, she could become a figure of legend; only to a few was she a figure of myth.

  History, legend and myth are various ways of coming to terms with the past. In narrative sections of the Old Testament it is possible to discover each of these kinds of explanation. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel or Noah and his ark are properly myths. With the arrival of Abraham, the story moves on to legend. When exactly history begins is hard to establish. Some would say with Moses, others with David, others with the Babylonian captivity or the return of the Israelites to the Holy Land. What is worth noting is that some of the later figures in the narrative have been given mythic qualities: Moses is the man who gave Jews the Law, David the king who centred Israel on Jerusalem, Ezra the prophet who centred the lives of those returning from exile on the worship of the Temple and the observance of the law. These mythic qualities were later said to be incarnate in Jesus, as a new Moses, a new David and a new Ezra, lawgiver, king, priest and prophet. And in traditional Christian hagiography this or that characteristic of a figure in the Bible was thought to be evident in the life of a particular saint.

  This is all remote from the case of Joan. The chief primary sources in her case are a series of carefully drafted historical documents, those connected with the 1431 trial and the inquiri
es of the 1450s, but she also appears in narrative accounts of the period; and there are even records of some of her expenses. Legends became attached to her name and she was also treated as a myth, but once the history was known the legends faded away and the myths were seen as attempts to focus on the inner reality of a known life.

  If a myth is defined as an erroneous idea or a fictitious person, then Joan was not mythical in either of those senses. For a person of the fifteenth century some periods of her life are known in astonishing detail and the earliest records convey a vivid sense of a special person. Nor is Joan mythical in the sense that Adam and Eve are mythical: they stand for a collective reality, for all men and all women, whereas Joan was merely herself. In Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism, Marina Warner has explored her myth by analysing Joan in terms of certain received categories of female heroism. Warner would probably admit that Joan eludes all such attempts at definition; indeed, what people have found difficult to comprehend has been her uniqueness.

  But the techniques of ordinary biography do not elucidate all the available information about Joan. There is no easy way of making sense of what makes her unique – her voices. How can a biographer observe abnormal phenomena, when talk of phenomena is inaccurate, as the phenomena were not phenomenal? Joan remains elusive. She did not hear her voices in the way she heard the church bells that rang while she was listening to her voices, not did she see them in the way that she could see the priests who asked her to describe them. If she hallucinated, she did not have delusions in the same way as a schizophrenic or a thirsty man lost in the desert who sees a mirage of an oasis. The numinous quality in Joan puts her outside most classes of people, even spiritual people. Her judges, aware that she was unusual, put this distinctiveness down to the spirit of evil, but then they had not confronted the historic Joan, the girl who often prayed, went to confession and communion, was kind to her enemies – they did not want to know the Joan known to family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. For this reason, efforts to consider her in purely political terms break down – her mission was political in its implications, but the mission, she asserted, was given her by God. Her critics understandably did not and do not agree.

  Anyone who studies the story of Joan of Arc must be puzzled by three paradoxes. First, a girl tried and condemned in 1431 by a French Church court was rehabilitated indirectly by the nullification of that verdict by another French Church court in 1452–6, and then, after a much longer process, in 1920 canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church. Secondly, in that year this belatedly canonised saint was also declared by the Church to be the patroness of France and given a public holiday by the secular French State, while at the same time she was widely admired in the English-speaking world, where in her lifetime she would have found her most determined enemies. Thirdly, whereas in the fifteenth century she had divided opinion, by the early twentieth century there was virtual unanimity in assessing her heroism, her patriotism, her goodness, since Allied victory in the First World War seemed to have implied a need to recognise her.

  To those who realised how essential had been the contribution of women to the Allies’ triumph in 1918, Joan was suddenly modern.1 The English were Allies of the French; American soldiers fighting in Lorraine had paid their respects at Domremy; Allied propaganda made much of the German bombardment of Reims, where Joan had seen her king crowned,2 and a popular French biography of Joan, written for children and beautifully illustrated by its author, had been translated into English and published in both England and America.3 French and English speakers shared the conviction that Joan symbolised the values of freedom for which the victorious Allies believed they stood. Joan, a historical figure from the forgotten past, had become the subject of a modern myth.

  The myth of Joan essentially involves spiritual realities or a spiritual way of looking at everyday realities. If not an evil person, as the nullification trial records testify, she may have been a good person who was simply misled – a spiritual simpleton. The spiritual side of Joan is hard to make sense of, and yet it was the most important part of her. The key to her lies outside the confines of normal history.

  She was, however, a historical figure, not a legend. Famous people tend to attract those who find the mere truth boring. Some have maintained that Joan was in fact a member of the French royal family, that she did not really die at the stake in Rouen; and after her death at least one other woman claimed to be Joan of Arc. Such views do not merit serious discussion, for the numerous extant documents provide a firm basis for parts of her actual life and the whole of her actual death.

  NINETEEN

  Early Accounts, Partial Histories

  Pierre Champion, one of the greatest experts on Valois France, has shown how manuscripts of the nullification trials were carefully kept in the collections of the king and of the Duke of Orléans, who both had a stake in Joan’s good name. As for the documents of the 1431 trial, they were collated with great care after the event and deliberately diffused to as wide an audience as possible. The interrogations had been in French. The Rouen lawyer Guillaume Manchon and the Paris theologian Thomas de Courcelles were entrusted with the task of translating this French text into Latin, a task that gave de Courcelles the opportunity to remove his own name from the list of those who advocated torture. In the end there were no fewer than three official records of the documents, one for the Inquisitor, one for Cauchon, one for King Henry, and two other copies were made. This work of translation into Latin made the story of Joan’s trial available to the learned; and the fact that many more clerics could read Latin than French may be a reason why the whole French text does not survive.

  The documentation of the trials of 1431 and 1450–6 means that Joan as seen through the prism of legal inquiry can be better known than any other alleged heretic of her age, including even Gilles de Rais, her former companion, who was a great nobleman as well as a paedophile. The reason is that Joan’s case mattered to rival claimants for the kingdom of France. But no legal inquiry can reveal all sides of a person. Joan is also mentioned by chroniclers, and although not one until eighty years after her death focuses specifically on her, insights into her story can be gained from early accounts, even if inevitably they are partial histories and sometimes legendary.

  These early histories were not published collectively until they appeared in the fourth volume of the material on Joan collated by Jules-Etienne-Joseph Quicherat from manuscripts in the Bibliothèque royale, now the Bibliothèque nationale, in the 1840s. The accounts are partial, because they were written down without knowledge of other contemporary sources.

  Although an agitated English soldier who saw her die said he had burnt a saint, and although she may have been considered a saint by some who knew her well, such as her confessor Father Pasquerel, Joan was not written up as a saint. Anyone who reads the chronicles and commentaries of the day will notice, however, that she was a celebrity. Joan’s public career had been so short and so strange that it was impossible to ignore her; and the nature of her achievements forced observers to make decisions about her private life. Was she deluded? Was she inspired by God? Was she misled by the devil?

  The modern picture of a medieval chronicler is of an industrious monk bent over his parchment at his desk in the cloister. By the fifteenth century the time of such a man had passed. Most who wrote about Joan were gentlemen in the service of a king, a duke or a count, and wrote in French, English, German or Greek. A few clerics wrote for other clerics in medieval Latin. Some clerics wrote in the classical Latin that was fashionable in Italian cities. Manuscripts were illustrated by miniatures, new printed books by woodcuts, in both cases produced by professional lay craftsmen. In the fifteenth century, as in the nineteenth, the artwork rarely matches the literature about Joan in terms of quality – but then the writers had been set the more difficult challenge: how to come to terms with Joan. Artists could take refuge in fantasy, as in tales of the fierce prophetesses of the Old Testament, but they did not stray f
rom conventional depictions. In most representations Joan wears a dress and her hair hangs long and loose in the style appropriate to a virgin, albeit a sword-wielding, horse-riding virgin. The texts, however, show that in her haircut as in her costume, Joan cultivated a masculine appearance, and in such matters the texts are right.

  The texts are not all equally trustworthy: some depend on hearsay, some were composed later, and some conceal what the authors must have known. Joan may have been an astonishing person, but she was also an embarrassing one. She had embarrassed the king by insisting on the attack on Paris, by disappearing up the Loire and, worse, by coming back again, by trying to defend Compiègne, by inspiring his sacred coronation before being burnt as an enemy of the Church, heretic and sorceress. She embarrassed the Duke of Burgundy by being at a coronation in which he should have played a major role and yet the legitimacy of which, as from 1435, he had to admit. She embarrassed the English by outmanoeuvring them in 1430 and by predicting defeats that occurred in the 1440s and 1450s; and she embarrassed English patriots who went on claiming that their rulers were rightfully rulers of France.