Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  For all his intelligence, Voltaire’s mind was closed. He had little appreciation of traditional France, which survived happily in the provinces, where the year was still marked by the festivals of the Church, where great numbers of priests, canons, monks and nuns occupied large areas of every town and where during the quiet prosperity of the eighteenth century there was a new sense of ease and contentment. Joan’s adopted town of Orléans did well out of its close connection with the royal family and also its exploitation of international trade – its factories refined much of France’s valuable Caribbean sugar – and it fondly remembered Joan.16

  CELEBRATING THE MAID OF ORLÉANS

  For centuries Orléans was devoted to Joan. As early as 1430 money was paid for candles to be lit to commemorate the lifting of the siege the year before; and from 1435, even while Joan’s memory was blackened by her condemnation as a sorceress and heretic, the Orléannais celebrated her goodness to them with songs, floats and lights. The habit lasted for centuries.

  One of the most extravagant of the early entertainments was the very first, staged at his own cost by Marshal Gilles de Rais in spring 1435; or so an archivist told an historian.17 The documents recording the events have vanished but the story is plausible, for that year de Rais sold off as much of his extensive property as he could. Only foolhardy expenditure can explain his behaviour, and nothing in the fifteenth century, except being ransomed, could cost as much as organising a pageant. The point of the liquidation of his assets seems to have been his determination to give the Orléannais an experience they would never forget.

  Le Mystère du Siège d’Orléans eventually became enormously long, with speaking parts for 140 people and walk-on parts for 500 extras. The venues for the action, as was common with a medieval mystery play, were dotted about the city, scenery was carved and decorated, costumes magnificent. No extant account tells how the citizens reacted to this show, but the Mystère du Siège d’Orléans was put on until about 1470, while it grew with each performance. No later production can have been quite like the first, but then Gilles de Rais could not sustain his moment of glory. Already the man who rode a Barbary horse covered in rich blue cloth (his ‘barbe bleu’) was being changed into the fairy-tale Bluebeard (‘barbe bleue’), who murdered many wives. The facts are more grotesque than the fiction. Gilles de Rais was already indulging his perverse taste for abusing and killing children that led to his death just twelve years after he was enthralled by the high-spirited girl with and for whom he had fought and in whose presence, briefly, his life had had some meaning.

  Gilles de Rais was forgotten: in their adopted city the memory of Joan and her family survived. Isabelle Romée, her mother, and Pierre, her brother, came to live there; and there the people heard that Joan’s trial for heresy was being reinvestigated and that its verdict had been nullified. Once this process had been completed, Cardinal d’Estouteville encouraged participation in the celebrations of 8 May; and his practice was followed by other eminent ecclesiastics. When the Mystère was no longer played, new pageants took its place. From the time of Charles VIII (1483–98), grandson of Joan’s Charles VII, or of Louis XII (1498–1515), son of Joan’s Duke of Orléans, dates a motet honouring Joan sung at the Porte Dunoise (named after Dunois, Joan’s beloved Bastard):

  Noble cité de moult grant renomée . . .

  Rejouy toi à icelle journée,

  Peuple vaillant et très loyal français . . .

  A la doulce prière

  Vint la Pucelle bergière

  Qui pour nous guerroye . . .

  Chantez, o le clergé et messieurs les bourgeois18

  (‘Noble city of great fame,/rejoice on this day,/valiant and very loyal French people . . ./At the sweet prayer comes the Maid shep-herdess/who fights for us . . ./Sing, Clerics and citizens . . .’)

  Members of Joan’s family came to Orléans. Pierre, elevated as Pierre du Lys to the ranks of a gentleman entitled to bear arms, was welcomed in 1436; the city supported Joan’s mother between 1440 and 1458, the year she died; and on his marriage Pierre’s son received a handsome gift from the city. The family was favoured by Charles VII, by Charles d’Orléans, by Louis XI. In the annual procession to commemorate the relief of the city, Pierre’s son would walk behind a huge wax candle on which was carved a picture of his aunt. He died in 1502, but as late as 1550 he was still fondly remembered by one of his former domestics.

  With devotion to Joan and her family Orléans coupled devotion to the king and the royal family, and the kings of France reciprocated this love. Francis I came there in 1515 and from his reign dates the curious custom of having Joan’s role played by a virginal boy, the Puceau, a practice that lasted until 1912. Other changes caused problems. The citizens asked for a ruling from the next king, Henry II: could a bishop with a beard preside? The answer was yes. Three years later Henry was dead, killed in a tournament by a Huguenot nobleman, and so his three weakly sons became kings in turn. The lack of a decisive king left the way open to those powerful enough exploit the growth of religious dissent. Jean Calvin, the leading French Protestant, had studied in Orléans before taking refuge in Geneva; and nearby Saumur, now famous for its light wines, became a centre of Huguenot theology. The Loire valley was full of Huguenots, whose leaders, once religious war broke out, tried to take it from the king.

  In 1568 the fiery Prince de Condé, uncle of the future Henry IV, made Orléans a Protestant base; and his troops set about attacking the cathedral. Condé intended it for Protestant worship (un beau temple calviniste plutôt qu’une ruine papiste)19 but could not prevent his men blowing up the central tower and much of the nave. Meanwhile, city magistrates took to plundering Catholic property and to having Catholics hanged. Four years later Catholics exacted revenge after the marriage of Henry, then the new King of Navarre, to his royal cousin. Instead of the intended religious reconciliation, the queen mother’s botched assassination of one leading Protestant led to a general massacre of Protestants throughout France. In the bloodshed Joan was forgotten; and not until after 1589, when Henry of Navarre as a beneficiary of the Salic Law became King Henry IV, could the Orléannais celebrate their heroine again.

  For the next two centuries Orléans enjoyed royal and ducal favour. In 1601 Henry IV spent April in the city. The restoration of the cathedral by his grandson Louis XIV confirmed the strong bond between Orléans and France’s kings. Joan’s feast was still being celebrated in 1650. A hundred years or so later, work on the cathedral was virtually finished in a second lengthy reign, that of Louis XV, and, as Orléans cathedral recovered, so did devotion to the Maid.

  From the time of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, Duke d’Orléans, one duke of Orléans placidly succeeded another; and the commemoration of Joan continued under the joint patronage of city and duke. On one occasion the Puceau was splendidly arrayed in sixteenth-century costume in the city’s gold and red colours, with a scarlet hat on his head sporting two plumes. Late in the century the old bridge, where Les Tourelles had been sited, was replaced by the Pont Royal; and in rue Royale leading off it there was soon a new bronze monument to Joan. In 1786 the Puceau, chosen as always by the city council, was joined by a girl, la Rosière, the ‘rose’ of her village, chosen for her outstanding virtue. This role was invented by the duke and duchess, who declared that they wished to mark the feast of 8 May by the marriage of a poor, virtuous girl from the city, to whom they offered a dowry of 1,200 livres.

  On 14 July 1789 a mob in Paris sacked the Bastille; and in 1792 France was declared a republic. In the steady downfall of Louis XVI (1774–92) the Duke of Orléans, Philippe ‘Egalité’ took the principle of equality so far as to vote for the execution of his distant cousin ‘Louis Capet’, the former king, perhaps hoping to be king himself; but in April 1793 he was arrested, imprisoned and guillotined. The feast in Orléans stopped.

  The French Revolution swept away its royal family in the year that it swept away the cult of Joan; and soon French armies were marching all over Europe in or
der to sweep away the old order wherever it survived in neighbouring countries. As revolutionary France took on all the unregenerate monarchies of Europe, the bronze monument to Joan in Orléans was melted down to be a cannon, since Joan of Arc seemed tied irrevocably to France’s past. No one expected that the Maid of Orléans could belong to France’s future; a modern scholar has even claimed that ‘Joan of Arc was the creation of nineteenth-century historians.’20

  TWENTY-ONE

  Reviving Joan

  ROMANTIC AND REVOLUTIONARY JOAN

  Voltaire died in Paris in 1778, less than a decade before the collapse of the French Ancien Régime. As France moved with a seemingly inexorable logic towards a revolution in the affairs of State and Church, abolishing privilege in favour of unitary social order, Voltaire was regarded as a luminary of the age. He would have hated this description. The very thought of heroism would have alarmed him, but heroism was the order of the day.

  Joan had been a medieval, Catholic, royalist heroine. The new heroine of revolutionary France was the classical, half-naked Marianne. Joan found admirers in the land of the old enemy, England, and in Weimar, arguably the seat of the most civilised court in Europe.

  The age of revolution was also the age when the movement called Romanticism began. Young writers became fascinated by the medieval past. One of Joan’s first advocates was the Englishman Robert Southey, now the least known of the Lake poets. At this stage Southey, not yet Wordsworth, was close to Coleridge. With Coleridge Southey had planned to apply the principles of ‘Pantisocracy’ in a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna river in New England. Coleridge married Southey’s wife’s sister; and he cooperated with Southey in the production of a poem about Joan.

  Traditionally, the writing of an epic was a task for middle or old age, but Southey wrote an epic poem before he was twenty. In six weeks he dashed off twelve cantos, the same number as in Virgil’s Aeneid, a friend then suggested revisions, so several lines and two cantos were cut. For the second canto Coleridge added 450 lines. Southey, the chief author, was rewriting when the manuscript was at the printers. In 1796 the poem was published in Bristol.

  In his preface Southey expatiated on the merits and defects of his Italian and Portuguese predecessors Ariosto, Tasso and Camões and he discussed Spenser, ‘the favourite of my childhood’, and ‘the singular excellence of Milton’, whom a whole troop of English poets had imitated during the eighteenth century. With easy fluency Southey used Milton’s curious inversions, lengthy constructions, Latinate diction and rolling blank verse. He troubled to do some research. He knew of Voltaire’s poem, while admitting he had not read it, and through Boileau he knew of Chapelain. He knew English views of Joan from Holinshed, Shakespeare’s main source, he knew Hume’s History of England and he quoted from Monstrelet and Rapin. As a young radical he willingly admitted Henry V’s cruelty at Agincourt, when the English king had ordered the killing of many prisoners by having their throats cut. He chose to side with his French heroine.

  Southey wrote quickly and can be read quickly. Dunois played a major part in his narrative, as most of his story focused on the relief of Orléans. He was less sure of touch in delineating Joan, who is made to declare, like a Lakeland peasant:

  In forest shade my infant years train’d up

  Knew not devotion’s forms. The chaunted mass,

  The silver altar and religious robe,

  The mystic wafer and the hallowed cup,

  Gods priest-created, are to me unknown.

  And

  For sins confest

  To holy priest and absolution given

  I knew them not; for ignorant of sin

  Why should I seek forgiveness?1

  Eventually, the English army’s defeat at Patay clears the way to Reims, where

  The Mission’d Maid

  Then placed on Charles’s brow the Crown of France.2

  And so the Maid

  Redeem’d her country. Ever may the ALL-JUST

  Give to the arms of FREEDOM such success.3

  Southey later became an anti-French Tory journalist, and from 1813 until his death in 1843 he was poet laureate. The one book of his readily available is the Life of Nelson (1813), his encomium on one of the most anti-French of English heroes.

  Meanwhile, in 1801 a version of Joan’s life was staged at Weimar by one of the most formidable of European Romantics, Friedrich von Schiller. Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orléans) was but one of many plays in which Schiller re-examined the past of many European countries. Schiller took pains to gain a sound knowledge of history; he probably first came across Joan in Hume’s History of England and he knew Shakespeare and Voltaire. Joan to him was a woman given a national destiny. Like Wilhelm Tell, she stood for liberty, but as he explained, he had ‘overcome the historical facts’. Schiller’s Joan was important in legend. As facts about her did not matter, he could decide what the facts should be. Without Voltaire’s wicked sense of humour, his story is full of love interest. Joan and her two sisters, called Margot and Louison, each have suitors, Dunois falls in love with Joan and she falls in love with an English knight, Lionel, whose life she spares, with the result that her failure to remain free of sexual feeling brings about her fall, a Romantic variant on the Shakespearean slur that she was a seductress. Historical dilemmas did not interest Schiller. In the prologue, Joan seizes a helmet, because she must fight, and she dies in battle, since that is her destiny.

  NAPOLEON’S JOAN

  Within ten years of the execution of Louis XVI, Joan’s fortunes revived in France. After the tumults of the 1790s the youthful General Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and as First Consul became Head of State of the French Republic. Since 1789 France had been divided chiefly by religion and royalism, and so Bonaparte planned to woo natural conservatives by offering them a sort of monarchy, and to woo Catholics by assuring them that they could practise their faith without the protection of a king.

  The Concordat Bonaparte signed with the pope in 1803 gave him some control over the French Church. Operating under the Concordat system, the Bishop of Orléans wrote to the Minister of the Interior, Chaptal, to beg permission to revive the festival of Joan of Arc. Chaptal consulted Napoleon, who, with his eagle eye for propaganda, responded in the official paper, Le Moniteur:

  The deliberation of the city council is very pleasing to me. The illustrious Joan of Arc has proved that there is no miracle that French genius cannot achieve when national independence is threatened. United, the French nation has never been vanquished, but our neighbours, abusing the openness and loyalty of our character, constantly sowed in us the dissension from which came the calamities of the period in which the French heroine lived, and all the disasters our history recalls.4

  To mark the resumption of the feast the city acquired a statue by Etienne Gois showing Joan as an Amazonian maid, wounded in the shoulder by an arrow, grabbing hold of her sword and rolling up an English flag.

  Napoleon’s intervention had a lasting effect on the cult of Joan. Before 1789 France had been a kingdom and all French people were subjects of the king. After 1789 France was a nation and all French people were citizens. Between 1799 and 1870 monarchical power remained the norm, as First Consul Bonaparte gave way to Emperor Napoleon I, then two senior and one junior Bourbon king, Louis XVIIII, Charles X and Louis-Philippe and finally Emperor Napoleon III. If dynasties changed, there was a constant search for heroes and heroines from the nation’s past.

  From 1803 Joan steadily became better known. Scenes from her life were themes for paintings or sculptures in the Salons, the biennial State-sponsored exhibitions held in Paris; it was in the Salon of 1802 that Gois first showed his statue of Joan. The new interest in Joan was initially just a sign of the new vogue for medieval history; and the new school of painting that cultivated the so-called troubadour style was much loved by Napoleon’s first wife, the Empress Joséphine. There was something glamorous in the sheen of a coat of armour and the fantastic hats and long trains
beloved by high-born ladies in the fifteenth century, and Joan, an elegant girl in male costume, had an air of becoming grace.

  THE END OF LEGEND

  Joan came from an era when the kings of France were anointed with the oil of St Remigius and crowned in Reims Cathedral. The ceremony she regarded as the supreme triumph of her mission was re-enacted for the last time in 1825, to honour Louis XVI’s youngest brother, Charles X. Fervent royalists longed for the reunion of throne and altar, which Joan took for granted.

  At the base of Gois’s statue of Joan, four scenes were sculpted in relief: the battle of Orléans; Joan receiving a sword from the hands of Charles VII; the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral; the reading of the death sentence and the carrying out of the sentence in Rouen. This Napoleonic statue was itself a neoclassical concoction, with no trace of medieval reality, but after 1815 artists began to aim at authenticity. The department of the Vosges bought Joan’s family house in Domremy, and once the building was refurbished, its new status was commemorated in lithographs. Some pupils of Napoleon’s first painter, David, wrote to their former master, now in exile in Brussels, to inform him of the recent revival of interest in Joan. They told him that there were ‘crowds of Maids at the Salon; there have never been so many in all classes’ (of works of art). ‘Joan of Arc is represented in the principal situations of her too-short career, and her life, almost in its entirety, is set before people’s eyes.’5 Some of the painters were committed royalists, notably Pierre-Henri Révoil, whose painting of Joan of Arc in prison at Rouen, now in the city’s museum, demonstrated meticulous research into the clothes of the time. Others discovered a lifelong vocation for historical painting. Paul Delaroche achieved fame in 1824 with his treatment of Joan’s interrogation in prison by Cardinal Beaufort. This picture, also in Rouen, illustrates a fictional scene. Its realism is psychological rather than historical. The fierce Bishop of Winchester in his blood-red cardinal’s robe points down to hell while a sick Joan raises her eyes heavenwards. In this painting too, the painter is keen to render the costume in authentic detail.