Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  A wider public was reached in the 1890s when a great American novelist restated the case for Joan by depicting her as the heroine of a romance. For Mark Twain Joan was a sort of female Huck, a boyish girl who did not want to be ‘sivilised’ and whose simplicity was an unconscious rebuke to scheming courtiers and devious clerics; she was almost a fifteenth-century democrat. He began writing in 1892. By including Michelet, Quicherat and Henri Wallon in his bibliography he showed that he had consulted French as well as English authorities. He gave his narrator, sieur Louis de Conte, his own initials, S.L.C., Samuel L. Clemens; and he said he felt a tender affection for his, that is ‘de Conte’s’ Recollections of Joan of Arc. The legendary Conte, whose name bears a suspicious likeness to the historical de Coutes, is said to have been Joan’s secretary. Two years her senior, he had grown up with her in Domremy and had stayed with her to the end of her life. Twain signals to the reader that de Conte, writing in 1492, exactly 400 years before Twain, was alive when Columbus sailed to America. The memorialist is thus a modern as well as a medieval man, a mediator between Joan’s age and ours.

  Few would assert that Twain’s novel is a great work of fiction, but it can give much pleasure in idle moments, as the Joan de Conte recalled was physically as well as morally attractive. For his courage and fidelity de Conte almost deserved to be an American. In finding a pretty girl both heroic and wholesome, de Conte anticipated Twain himself. His American outlook is summed up in a conclusion that Michelet would have liked. With Joan of Arc, love of country was more than a sentiment – it was a passion. She was the ‘Genius of Patriotism’ – she was Patriotism embodied, made flesh, palpable to the touch and visible to the eye.12 Twain had made Joan accessible in the land of the free.

  Just before the First World War, a Scot, irritated by the translation of Anatole France’s Life into English, took up the cudgels for Joan. Andrew Lang was a Scots critic, poet, translator and historian, in love with Homer, myths, legends, border ballads, French medieval love poems and the house of Stuart. He had already written a historical romance about a real monk of Dunfermline who commented from Scotland on the story of Joan of Arc. He boasted that ‘the Scots stood for her always, with pen as with sword’, and he counted a fellow Scot as one of his predecessors, the empirical philosopher David Hume, whose History of Britain ‘recognised the nobility of her character’.13

  Before Lang’s writing, no British life had been based on Quicherat, and nobody had been so well briefed. While carrying on a polemic against Anatole France in his preface and footnotes, Lang provided a well-written account of Joan, in which his own tendency to whimsy was kept under control. The Maid of France appeared in 1908, and in 1912 its author died.

  It was, however, a native of Orléans who put into verses sentiments that are the poetic equivalent of the pictures of de Monvel and Lenepveu. Charles Péguy was tormented by doubt; and he worked through his doubts in relation to his persistent love of Joan. In 1895–7, while studying in Paris, he wrote his first book, a trilogy of plays on Joan, but few people took any notice of his writing, much of it left-wing journalism, until he returned to the topic of Joan’s vocation with Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc in 1910. He claimed that his earlier work had been about ‘the history of her inner life’, but it was in truth his own problems he focused on rather than hers, for in becoming a socialist he had ceased to be a believing Catholic. By the time he wrote the second work, however, he had recovered his faith and it was as an individualistic Christian that he prepared for the quincentenary of his heroine’s birth in 1912. He had shifted from viewing Joan as a class heroine to the conviction that her religious calling was one of the most remarkable there had ever been. He believed her to be one of the greatest of saints, only a little lower in heaven than Mary mother of Christ. He made a new claim for Joan: it was her charity that raised her so high. What fascinated him was Domremy, the place where Joan found her vocation, rather than the sites of her later victories or defeats.

  Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc does not attempt to be a drama. Set in Domremy in 1425, at the time when Joan first claimed to hear her voices, it focuses on how she came to realise and accept the role she was to play. Péguy sticks to just three characters, Joan, Hauviette and Madame Gervaise. Much of the writing is in prose, until it bursts into a free verse that can be as sonorous as the Psalms or clipped, even harsh. Madame Gervaise talks the most, as she exhibits the piety of the conventionally religious (she is a young nun), whereas Joan is called to a life out of the ordinary. At the end of the play Madame Gervaise prays that Christ will save Joan’s soul and Joan says Amen to that and adds the words ‘Orléans, which is in the country of the Loire’, for her vocation calls her to action.

  Once this poem made his poetry well known, Péguy, who always regarded himself as a man of the Left, came to be cherished by those on the Right who saw in Joan the standard bearer to lead them. In the circumstances of 1910 the popularity of Péguy’s poem showed that the cause of Joan was a cause believed in by both the French nation and the French Church.

  THE MAKING OF SAINT JOAN14

  In 1909 Joan was declared Blessed by the Catholic Church. Bishop Coullié, successor to Dupanloup, continued with enquiries in 1885 and 1887–8, which led to Joan’s cause being submitted to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome. In 1892 and 1898–1902 Joan was subjected to new enquiries, more searching than any since the fifteenth century. In 1452–6 her first trial had been nullified, but its verdict had been grudging. What her supporters hoped for was an enthusiastic endorsement of her life as one of heroic virtue. Those who acted successively as the Promotor Fidei (Promoter of the Faith), better known as the devil’s advocate, outlined the case against her. They were energetic in carrying out their task. The first, Augustine Caprara, found no difficulty in 1456 in admitting that she deserved to be rehabilitated, and he admitted that she was an outstanding figure in fifteenth-century history, a person with an impact on her age analogous to that of Christopher Columbus, whose candidacy for canonisation had been mooted only to be rejected. Like Columbus, he said, she was admired for political not religious virtues. Caprara took seriously many of the points made against her at the 1431 trial. He trusted the records of the condemnation process more than the records of the nullification process; and he maintained that before her capture she was admired chiefly as a soldier, not so much as a saint, for he doubted her modesty; he was also worried that the Duke of Alençon had seen her beautiful breasts several times. Caprara could not see how she could be a martyr for the faith, he was not sure if she had submitted her visions to the judgement of the Church. He conceded that in recent time there had been a growth in devotion to her. He also conceded that if she were added to the ranks of the blessed, she would deserve extremely well not only of France but also of all Christendom. In short she could be a Catholic saint. He admitted her cause might triumph.

  Against Caprara’s arguments, set out in 55 pages of arguments and 47 pages of documents, the defender of Joan’s cause replied in 170 pages. The defender was delighted with his opponent’s conclusion, but indignant at the slurs on Joan’s character. The judges decided that at this stage there was no insuperable obstacle to her cause; in 1894 it was announced that the case could go further – this was the moment when Pope Leo XIII declared her Venerable.

  Joan’s sanctity was put to the test on two subsequent occasions: in 1898–9 and in 1903. In 1898–9 the Promoter, Joseph Baptist Lugari, argued that, like the original trial, her rehabilitation ‘trial’ was a political act. He also questioned her virtues. She did not practise faith, hope and charity heroically, nor prudence and justice, while her courage was shaky; she took too much pleasure in finery and her own chastity to be truly temperate. He did not like the fact that she was always glad to be tested for virginity, not having given sufficient weight to the fact that in the fifteenth century, as a witch was considered to be always promiscuous, so a virgin could not be a witch. His chief worry concerned her reliance
on private revelations, in other words her voices, and a secondary worry was her lack of deference to her judges. As a cleric himself, he did not like the fact that she had rebuked a bishop. The precise grounds on which the Promoter’s views are based are not recorded. All that is known is that once more they were not held to be grave enough to impede the progress of the cause.

  There is more information about the final stage of the process. This time, whereas Alexander Verde, the last devil’s advocate, presented his ideas in 24 pages, the reply takes up 367; and this was followed by 198 pages exposing Joan’s virtues. The opponent’s chief concern was the suspicion of hysteria and a secondary one, whether her stand for France was inspired by God; the defenders also worried about the passage of time since the records dated back to the fifteenth century. On the first point her defender replied that she did not exhibit the normal symptoms of hysteria. On the second point the Promoter had already conceded that she may be ‘praised to the stars as the liberator of France whose deeds had been inspired by God Himself’.15 On the third point he defender also thought the documents were in the main reliable.16

  In her lifetime Joan probably did not perform any miracles. Had she done so, contemporaries might have found it harder to discount the views of those moved by her goodness, just as her carefully guarded virginity prevented the charge of witchcraft from being pressed home. To promote her canonisation, however, those directing her cause in the early twentieth century had to prove that from heaven she could perform four miracles, of which two at least were ‘of the first class’. Two were needed for beatification, two more for canonisation. The pope might dispense with one miracle if the candidate had founded a religious order. Joan was let off one for having saved France.

  Three miracles of the first class were produced. One nun had been cured of leg ulcers, a second of a cancerous ulcer of her left breast, a third of cancer of the stomach.17 These cures were attributed to Joan since they had been preceded by invocation to her in prayer. Pope Pius X solemnly accepted the three miracles as authentic on 13 December 1908. He declared: ‘Joan of Arc has shone like a new star destined to be the glory not only of France but of the Universal Church as well.’ For heroic virtue she was declared Blessed on 18 April 1909. There was nothing to prevent Joan from being canonised, except the coming of war.

  By the end of 1918, as Austria–Hungary disintegrated, there was no longer a major Catholic power in Europe. France and Italy were officially secular, and Spain was politically powerless. In 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the weak German republic was forced to cede the territorial gains of 1871 back to France. Since the French once more had possession of all Lorraine, they were glad to have a Lorrainer as their national heroine. The First World War briefly united Frenchmen; and national unity was briefly symbolised by Joan.

  In the trenches of the Western Front soldiers were painfully aware of their lack of women. They wanted women for every need. They made an industry of prostitution. Poilus became a new nickname for the ‘hairy’ private soldiers who enjoyed cheeky chansons about the barmaid Madelon they met in a café, but above all they sought to be consoled. The cult of Joan had been given the approval of State and Church. Poilus carried pictures of Joan in their pockets. Joan had saved them, nurtured them and made them victorious. Once peace came, it would have been unthinkable for Benedict XV, pope since 1914, not to have declared Joan a saint. In May 1920 the French bishops came to Rome to see her canonised; and that year the French National Assembly at last announced the national holiday in her honour. Quarrels between the French Church and the French State were forgotten. The national feast of Joan was fixed for the Sunday after 8 May, a date that has kept its place in the celebrations of Joan’s triumphs and is still a national holiday. The Church reserved 30 May, the day of her death, for her feast day, not as a martyr, for she had not died for the faith, but as a virgin, a woman who was pure until death. The trials of Joan were finally over.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Cult of St Joan

  In 1920 France was united by Joan. At the same time France was on good terms with the countries it chose to call Anglo-Saxon. The war had improved French relations with English-speaking countries. The Entente Cordiale of 1904 had survived the stresses of an alliance in wartime, and as for the USA, the sympathy that many American intellectuals felt with France had been transformed in 1917 when the nation joined that alliance. The American President needed to persuade the American people that Liberty (as sculpted by Eiffel) should be preserved in the home of Eiffel’s Tower, and when American troops arrived in France, General Pershing recalled France’s aid in the American Revolution with the words, Lafayette, Nous voici. But, when it came to persuading the troops to leave home, the American government found one of the best ways to stir up support for France was to invoke the name of Joan.

  One poster read: ‘Joan of Arc saved France. Women of America save your country. Buy war stamps.’ One painting shows Allied soldiers being led by the spirits of Washington, St George and Joan. Another, for Henry Van Dyke’s book The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France has the inscription, ‘They were also pilgrims drawn by the love of Jeanne d’Arc to Domremy’. A photograph was taken of American soldiers standing by the high altar in the nearby basilica of Bois-Chenu. A popular song, ‘Joan of Arc They are Calling You’, opens with the invocation:

  While you are sleeping, Your France is weeping,

  Wake from your dreams, Maid of France,

  Her heart is bleeding: Are you unheeding

  Come with the flame in your glance.

  Two members of the Air Ambulance posed before the statue of Joan in front of Reims Cathedral. A popular French picture emphasised the key importance of the site where Joan’s king was anointed and crowned, for, while in the background the cathedral burns, Joan herself waves her banner and confronts the Kaiser. Against him Joan was fighting at Verdun, for Lorraine, for Alsace.1

  English speakers were Joan’s friends. Once canonised, Joan became a topic so fascinating that whatever their beliefs, dramatists wished to retell her tale. Outside France the best-known versions of this story are by non-Catholics; and in one case the writing of a play about St Joan in English revived the reputation of an ageing playwright.

  George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan was staged in 1924, first in New York and then in London. Saint Joan was soon thought the masterpiece of a writer who had long said he was ‘the second Shakespeare’, and in this case at least he excelled his rival. Shaw’s Joan is no witch, no heroine, no martyr, just a stubborn, spirited young woman, condemned by well-intentioned judges; and this Joan made Shaw once more the darling of the theatre-going public.

  An English translation of the text of Joan’s trial in 1431 and of the rehabilitation in 1456 appeared in 1902: T. Douglas Murray’s Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, 1429-1431. Shaw was fascinated by the story of the trial, which had never been treated in a play before. The drama was, as it were, ready-made. All he had to do was to disclose it.

  Saint Joan consists of six scenes and an epilogue, to which Shaw, as was his custom, later appended a preface. The preface provided him with an opportunity to argue the case for his interpretation of his heroine. In his survey of previous authors, Shaw was both witty and judicious. After noting the curious degeneration in the Joan of Shakespeare or ‘pseudo-Shakespeare’, he sees Schiller’s Joan as ‘drowned in a cauldron of raging romance’ and is sensible in maintaining that Voltaire’s aim was not so much to denigrate Joan as ‘to kill with ridicule everything’ he ‘righteously hated in the institutions of his own day’.2 He noted that Quicherat’s work marked the turning point in imaginative depictions of Joan, for the availability of transcripts of the trial and rehabilitation had also given credibility to Mark Twain’s romance, which Shaw disliked for its gentility, and to the rival lives of Anatole France and Andrew Lang.

  As a playwright of ideas, Shaw was attracted to the debates over the person and importance of Joan; for him she was a proto-nationalist and a p
roto-Protestant. But, if his preface is fascinating, it is the variety of styles within the play, its humour, its rapid dialogue that makes it such a convincing play on stage. At the climax of the play he condenses all the interrogations of Joan into one grand enquiry that sets Joan against the court; and the dialogue leads up to a magnificent speech by the Inquisitor, not Cauchon, in which he expounds the terrifying consequences of not condemning the girl he calls a Protestant. What Shaw wished to emphasise was the sweet reasonableness with which Joan was sentenced for being a ‘Protestant’. As theatre his idea is a superb invention, as history an invention. His correspondent, the abbess of the Catholic convent of Stanbrook, pointed out, ‘Joan more than once appealed from the court to Rome and a Council.’ She added graciously: ‘There are gifts of wit and wisdom everywhere . . .’3

  For generations now, some English-speaking theatregoers have known Joan through Shaw’s play, but most English speakers, like most French speakers, know her from the cinema. By the First World War Hollywood already ruled the world of film. One of the first films about Joan came in 1897 from the pioneer of silent films Georges Meliès, but the first brash director to see the potential of the subject was Cecil B. de Mille, the man of biblical epics, who adapted Schiller’s play for the screen in 1917.

  Joan’s public life was divided into two parts, the first centring on her time at the French court, at sieges and on the field of battle, the second centring on her imprisonment, trial and death. The first involved external conflicts, the second inner ones. As in Shaw, it is her passion and her death at the stake that have elicited the most impressive work of art-house film directors drawn to Joan’s story, the best of whom have worked in France. The greatest of all Johannic films was made in the 1920s by a Dane from a Lutheran background, Carl Theodore Dreyer. For La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1927–8), Dreyer developed a minimalist technique, not just by concentrating the whole story into the final stages of the trial at Rouen, by using almost no furniture and by eschewing glamorous costumes, but above all by restricting the action largely to the expressions on people’s faces. The silence of a silent film is turned into this film’s strength. There is just enough dialogue to make sense of the action, and the action is emotional reaction. The heads, with cunning or confused expressions, could come from an etching by Rembrandt; and at the film’s heart is the extraordinary acting of the protagonist. Maria Falconetti, the actress who played Joan in her only film role, conveys only a small range of feeling – rapt attention, deep suffering, quiet resignation – but each with almost unbearable intensity. Her judges rail and smirk. At the close, with flames flickering over her body, Joan’s face is shown for the last time, her arms clutching a cross, until her face is destroyed by fire.