Titans of History

JOAN OF ARC

c. 1412–1431

I have been sent here by God, the King of Heaven, to drive you, an eye for an eye, from the whole of France.

Joan of Arc, in a letter to the English forces besieging Orléans (March 22, 1429)

France’s national heroine, Joan of Arc, was a simple peasant girl who became a soldier, a martyr, and finally a saint. Convinced that God had told her to free France, she showed remarkable moral and military leadership and inspired the French to fight on against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. Dressed in men’s clothes, Joan defied convention, and the objections of both statesmen and churchmen, and in the end embraced death in her pursuit of salvation.

Joan was just fourteen when she first heard the “voices” of Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret calling her to save France from the English. After half a century of war, the French seemed on the verge of losing the contest for their crown. Five years after the death of the Valois king Charles VI, his son, the Dauphin Charles, had still not been crowned, and the city of Orléans, the key to central France, seemed about to fall to the English.

Joan traveled across war-torn enemy territory to seek an audience with Charles, driven on by the persistent voices of the saints. Her quiet unbending determination gained her access to the Dauphin and persuaded him that he must reinvigorate the campaign against the English, and that it was God’s will that he should be crowned at Rheims. She never disclosed what she had whispered to him that day, but Charles and the French leadership were either convinced that she had divine guidance or that this peasant girl would be useful to the French cause, probably a little of both.

Clad in white armor and wielding a battle-ax, Joan rode at the head of Charles’s army to relieve the besieged city of Orléans. The English were routed, and other victories followed—as Joan was somehow sure they would. Hailed by the French as their savior, and accused by the English of being a witch, it seemed that the Maid of Orléans must have some supernatural power, as the myth of English invincibility that had sprung up since Agincourt was conclusively shattered. In July 1429 the Dauphin was crowned as Charles VII at Rheims, with Joan in attendance.

Indefatigable, Joan urged the vacillating Charles on to push his advantage and press on to Paris. When Valois forces finally attacked the capital, Joan stood high on the earthworks, calling to the city’s inhabitants to surrender to their rightful king. Undaunted by wounds received in the fight, she refused to leave the field—although the attempt to take Paris was not successful.

Captured by the English allies, the Burgundians, as she rushed to help the besieged town of Compiègne, Joan was sold to the English and tried as a heretic in Rouen, the seat of English power in France. Charles, eager for a truce with Burgundy and reluctant to be associated with a witch, was nowhere to be seen. At her trial the peasant girl faced up to France’s leading theologians, confident of her divine mission, while avoiding being tricked into criticizing the Church. Joan was so impervious to the threat of torture that her interrogators decided that it would be useless to try.

But when the Church threatened to hand her over to the secular courts, Joan—petrified and ill—confessed to heresy and agreed to put on women’s clothes, choosing life imprisonment over a painful death. Within days of recanting, however, Joan changed back into men’s clothes, saying the voices had censured her treacherous abjuration. Handed over to the secular authorities, the young woman barely out of her teens—who had always had a premonition of an early death—was burned at the stake as a witch.

Joan’s conviction was unwavering. Allowed to make her confession and receive communion, she died gazing at a cross held up by a priest, who, acceding to her request, shouted out assurances of salvation so that she could hear him over the fire’s roar. So anxious were the English that no relic of her should remain to keep her legend alive, they burned her body three times, then scattered her dust in the River Seine.

Twenty years later, safely installed on his throne, Charles VII ordered an inquiry into the trial. Joan’s conviction was overturned. Five hundred years later, on May 16, 1920, she was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.