Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  Another artistic figure of the Right lived on to die in peace in 1954. In 1908 the fanatical young monarchist Maxime Réal del Sarte came to prominence by taking part in the attacks on Thalamas and by openly challenging the pardon that had been granted to Dreyfus. He had been trained as a sculptor, and after the First World War, which left him without a left arm, he became celebrated for a series of public monuments to the dead erected all over France. He also produced several statues of Joan: Joan of Arc at the Stake, for place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen (1929); Joan of Arc Prisoner, for Arras (1930); Joan of Arc, for Domremy (1940). The emphasis on the suffering Joan rather than the triumphant Joan fitted the sombre mood of interwar France. For his work he was given the Légion d’honneur in 1940. Like Brasillach, he has a place of honour in the pantheon of those who inspire the modern far Right.

  On 8 May 1945, Joan’s French national feast day and the day Europe celebrated VE Day, de Gaulle visited the tomb of a French hero – but it was the tomb of Georges Clemenceau, the Prime Minister who had led France to victory at the end of the First World War.

  France had found two saviours, first Marshal Pétain, then General de Gaulle. A clever young boy, with Turkish immigrants parents, was puzzled. Why should his new home have two saviours? Both were soldiers, but one did not want to fight on and the other did – and yet both with equal confidence but not with equal plausibility invoked the blessing of Joan of Arc. Even before the war was over, the boy, Edouard Balladur, was sure that de Gaulle was right and Pétain wrong. It took the appalling experience of subjection to the Nazis for most of the French nation to see too that de Gaulle had been right all along, and at least two generations before most French people have been able to come to terms with the betrayal of quintessentially French ideals that collaboration with the Nazis entailed.

  As a boy, Edouard Balladur was astonished that his compatriots held mutually exclusive views of Joan. Now in his seventies, an ex-Prime Minister (1993–5), much respected by the moderate Right, Balladur has tried to explain why the memory of Joan, so vivid in his childhood, has slowly slipped away from national consciousness. For too long, he thinks, France has relied on a myth of the saviour; and the saviour of the nation has often been cast in the mould of Joan. Mature people, however, are self-reliant, and a mature nation too needs to solve its problems itself. In the past France has been both too arrogant and too insecure.

  Balladur may be right that Joan has fulfilled her role in French history, and in a period when the French are preoccupied with how to treat their Muslim fellow citizens, how to provide pensions for an ageing population, how to base foreign policy around their relations with Germany, how to preserve French culture, the French language and French cuisine, how to cleanse some local governments of corruption, Joan’s call to heroic action may seem irrelevant.

  The one party to stick by Joan is the party of the far Right, the Front National (FN), led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen is no thug like the leaders of the British National Party. He is versed in the tradition he stands for: his website refers to Maurras, Brasillach and Réal del Sarte; he is a demagogue, with honed rhetorical skills, at turns noble, sarcastic and grandiloquent. Every 1 May members of the FN meet in front of Fremiet’s girl-warrior in place des Pyramides, to be harangued by Le Pen. These meetings are the only political rallies in modern France that invoke the spirit of St Joan. Le Pen’s addresses begin with an evocation of Joan’s remarkable life before he launches into an attack on the euro, the European Union, immigration, the erosion of French sovereignty – and he is contemptuous of President Chirac. At the last presidential election Le Pen was the alternative candidate to Chirac in the final round of voting, and he gained about 20 per cent of the vote, which probably represents the support he can expect from a worried electorate.

  For Le Pen Joan is the emblem of a finer France, when first the non-French, then the English, recently the Jews and now the Muslims are booted out back to their own country, while society is stable, jobs secure, France free. To some this is a seductive ideal.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  St Joan: A Modern Heroine?

  THE LATE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL

  In 1961 a French lay philosopher and theologian subjected Joan to a rigorous analysis. His slim book is a reminder that Joan took to politics because of her faith.

  According to Jean Guitton, Joan presents the enquirer into her life with a ‘problem’ and a ‘mystery’. If the trouble with Michelet, Guitton says, is that he reduces Joan to a myth, the weakness of Anatole France is that he reduces her to a nonentity, so that there is no need to ask how her success is related to her faith. For Guitton the essential problem with the story of Joan is that historical method as such is inadequate for the task of evaluating her: no scanning of sources, for example, provides adequate material to answer the question ‘were her voices true?’ Guitton claims that for Joan the voices were true, but that no one who shares her belief can explain why someone who does not believe in them is wrong; on the other hand, the sceptic cannot prove that one who believes in them is wrong; and for the sceptic there is the additional problem that often what her voices told her was no illusion. She did save Orléans, she did bring about the coronation of her Dauphin as king at Reims before she was tried, and after her trial her Duke of Orléans and France were freed from the English. Joan is a historical figure who exists beyond history. Part of her ‘mystery’ is that she did not view her voices with detachment. To her the experience was clear. What muddled her was the attempt of her judges to make her experience comprehensible to them. But her voices were not akin to the experiences described by later mystical theologians such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, since what they describe was remote from Joan’s sense of persistent contact with angels and saints. Her voices did not tell her sublime truths, but simply what to do or not to do, and what would happen; and sometimes what she thought they said turned out to be wrong or misleading. She seems to have been convinced that she would be saved from prison, but she was not. She faltered in her belief in her voices; and yet in the end she died for believing in them.

  There is an additional problem about the voices that Guitton touches on. Even Joan’s admirers like Michelet and Lang had not known what to make of them; and those assessing her during the process of canonisation had wondered whether she was hysterical. Today hallucinations are normally regarded as signs of schizophrenia. The problem, Guitton notes, is that psychiatrists relate psychological phenomena such as the hearing of voices to the onset of psychosis. But Joan was remarkably sane; and nobody has a theory of how a sane person can hallucinate. For modern scientists Joan’s voices are a problem; for the student of Joan, they are a mystery.

  One trait that separates her from the standard spirituality of her day is that she thought of her religion in terms appropriate only to a lay person; her mission involved civic duty and a political programme; almost everything written on Christian devotion, however, was predicated on a life that was essentially monastic. Joan lived, it is true, at a moment of cultural change. She was at the beginning of adult feminine life. As discovered again and again, she remained a virgin; and it is as a virgin that she is ranked among the saints of the Catholic Church. Joan was not without faults. She was too fond of martial glamour; she could be manic; she could be hectoring.

  Guitton asserts that, just as Aristotle became more important in the thirteenth century AD than he was in the fourth century BC, so Joan has become more important in the twentieth century than she was in the fifteenth. In her own lifetime her case forced the Church to look at its inquisitorial processes and the king to ponder the justification of his authority. Now it forces the French to redefine their sense of national destiny and the Church to re-examine its ideas on sanctity. In 1963, soon after Guitton wrote his book, a personal friend succeeded John XXIII as Pope Paul VI, and so Guitton had a semi-official position within the Church.

  In the early years of the new pontificate an even more eminent lay philosophical theologian, Jacques
Maritain, was able to write with greater freedom than had been possible about the historical record of the Catholic Church. His book The Church of Christ (1970) has a long section confronting difficulties from the past: the Crusades; the treatment of the Jews; the role of the Inquisition; and finally two test cases, the condemnation of Galileo and the condemnation of Joan. His verdict on Joan is that her story is ‘the most extraordinary of Christian times’. Her mission is universal. ‘I think,’ he adds at the end, ‘that Joan of Arc . . . is par excellence the saint and the patron of the temporal mission of the Christian, in other words the saint and patron of the Christian laity.’1

  Guitton and Maritain were among the last of their kind. They were writing towards the end of the Catholic revival in France, which had embraced intellectuals and artists of all kinds. Maritain, for example, championed Modernist Christian art as evident in Georges Rouault, whose tiny Notre Jeanne (1940–8) expresses in stark design and rich colours the isolation of a saint. Joan, defined with thick lines that recall the outlines of stained glass, dominates a desolate landscape whose only notable feature is a distant church. Oblivious to what surrounds her, with head raised to look at her banner and surrounded by a ring of light like a halo, she rides towards her unknown destiny.

  If Rouault’s Joan was aloof, detachment was the way of one of France’s finest film directors. Robert Bresson emphasised the religious meaning of Joan’s story in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962). Obsessed with the workings of God’s grace, a preacher of a self-effacing kind, he indicated a story’s meaning in its unfolding. Long after colour film had become the norm, he stuck to black and white camera work because that technique uses subtlety of tone instead of a kaleidoscope of colours. He reduced his plot to essentials, for like Dreyer he understood the advantages of classical drama unified by action, time and place. Scrupulously accurate, he based his screenplay on fifteenth-century documents. His Joan of Arc is sharper in her replies than Dreyer’s Joan and more remote. Spied at through keyholes, she is watched relentlessly in one long act of voyeurism. For this reason the spectator too is detached, so that Joan (played by Florence Carrez, now a well-known writer) is a model to be admired rather than pitied – that is, until the body is burnt to nothing and her chains of imprisonment are left hanging from the stake; and then and then only, is she free.

  Shaw exaggerated when he argued that Joan was a proto-Protestant. In the fifteenth century, Europe defined as a Latinate, clerical, international order was beginning to die. By the twenty-first century that order is virtually moribund. It is noticeable how many from Protestant backgrounds, such as Shaw himself, Dreyer and Honegger have found Joan an inspiration to their art. Even the Catholics Bernanos and Bresson were so keen to draw attention to the workings of God’s grace that they seemed more sympathetic than many fellow Catholics to the views of Luther and Calvin. In the light of the Second Vatican Council it is possibly to maintain that Joan has taught many Catholics the truths dear to Protestants. Religious wars are over.

  Joan’s Church claimed to be universal, but to say that she can be a patron of freedom for all would have seemed extraordinary before the 1960s. After the Second World War, first the United Nations, then European countries, then the Catholic Church affirmed the concept of universal human rights. By 1970 the Catholic Maritain stated that Joan’s role has a universal meaning. For most French people, however, Joan is still primarily a symbol of their common national destiny, but as the memory of war recedes, her kind of patriotic appeal wanes. In the festivities at Orléans she has been honoured by presidents of Left and Right, by believing and non-believing presidents. In this sense she does not belong to any one faction. In an address at Orléans, Michel Rocard, Prime Minister from 1988 to 1991 and at one time the most popular socialist in France, compared Joan to famous figures like Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa or Nelson Mandela. But Joan has steadily drifted from the forefront of French minds. In 1948 11 per cent of those asked put her in a list of famous French men and women; in 1980 that figure was 2 per cent, in 1989 zero per cent. She is no longer the model for enterprising and modern girls. Marie Curie, a physicist who won two Nobel prizes and was an atheist, is now regarded as a more inspiring figure from the past, and her past is more recent. Thanks in part to André Malraux, the novelist and art historian who became de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, the Centre Jeanne d’Arc was founded in Orléans as an international centre of Johannic studies; and partly thanks to such official approval, French Johannic scholarship operates at the highest level. The French people in general, however, take Joan for granted, and the young scarcely know her. An ironic result is that Joan has become relatively more important in the English-speaking world, partly because English (usually American-English) preoccupations dominate popular culture. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Joan is known through films and through university departments of women’s studies.

  JOAN IN HOLLYWOOD

  In the 1930s, Joan intrigued English literary historians such as Vita Sackville-West. While taking care to consult the Jesuit scholar Father Thurston, who had written about Joan thirty years earlier, Sackville-West tried to understand Joan, if she shared none of Joan’s Catholic assumptions. The same may be said of Edward Lucie-Smith in recent times. English professional historians who specialise in fifteenth-century studies tend to view Joan sceptically.

  None of these writers has had any influence comparable to that exercised by popular drama. Jean Anouilh’s delightful L’Alouette (The Lark, 1953) certainly set up some cultural ripples. As an artistic construct the play makes clever use of flashbacks, but as history it is flawed since Anouilh followed Voltaire in introducing Charles’s mistress Agnès Sorel into the story. Besides, whimsically he allows Joan to be put on trial but not to be burnt, as ‘the story of Joan of Arc is a story that ends well’.2 Films, the more populist dramatic form, are made of sterner stuff.

  The great years of blockbuster Joans came soon after 1945. For fifteen years, costume epic flourished, until the rising costs of extras and the competition of television, with its leaning towards intimate drama, forced studios to cut back on sumptuous productions. In this golden age of ‘Medieval’ Joan, Ingrid Bergman played Joan twice, once with Victor Fleming in 1948 (based on a Maxwell Anderson play in which she had played in New York), and once with her lover Roberto Rossellini in 1954 (based on Claudel). Bergman was too majestic, and yet in the end Fleming’s is still the most successful Hollywood version of the Maid, and Bergman remains Hollywood’s Joan; if the film shows how limited is the genre when treating a spiritual theme, then the audience did not object. Joan of Arc won Oscars for costume and photography; a special award went to the producer Walter Wanger for adding to the industry’s ‘moral stature in the world’; and Jose Ferrer (who played the Dauphin) and Bergman won Oscar nominations. As for Fleming, he owes lasting fame to Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, rather than to his last film, Joan of Arc.

  Not until 1957 was a boyish Joan shown in film. In that year Otto Preminger asked Graham Greene to revise Shaw’s text (with, in French, subtitles by Anouilh). Preminger looked for the perfect Joan and came up with an amateur actress, the gamine Jean Seberg, who sadly lacked the appropriate personality. ‘I always wanted to make a picture of it,’ Preminger told Bogdanovich, the film critic and director. ‘I loved the play so much that I didn’t analyse it. I realised only later that the play is actually a very intellectual, analytical rendition of the story of St Joan. It’s not an emotional story, and it just wasn’t moving enough to get the masses to follow. Even the play, as I found out later, was never a big popular success.’3 Joan had been portrayed as a new woman, but did not fit into the New Wave, the movement in French film direction that began in the late 1950s.

  Authenticity inspired a very late New Wave account of Joan’s career, trial and death in Jacques Rivette’s 1994 Jeanne la Pucelle, a version of the life that opted for comprehensiveness. Like many attracted to Joan of Arc, Rivette had read Péguy and saw that the real events of
her life were so dramatic that there was no need to invent. His chief actress Sandrine Bonnaire was no mere amateur. Those with time to spare for a six-hour, two-part film may find her riveting. Some like their films cut, and Joan the Maid makes Luc Besson’s long-winded The Messenger (1999) seem short.

  Besson has emigrated from France to Hollywood, and in The Messenger he brought Hollywood to France – and French audiences loved it. The film won eight nominations from the French Academy of Cinema and took the prize for cinema photography. It aimed to replace Joan the saint with Joan the soldier, but it was not only the restricted range of Milla Jovovich that damns the film: despite its international cast, Besson’s view of Joan is chauvinistic. The film starts with a scene of rape in Domremy that leads to the murder of Joan’s sister by an English soldier, while historically, the ‘foreigners’ who went to Domremy were Burgundians. Besson glosses over the truth that Joan’s captors and all her judges were French; and so he gives the English actor Timothy West the part of Cauchon. One overt nationalist, Le Pen, admits that the film misleads. Even in fiction Joan deserves the truth.