St. Joan of Arc

Domrémy was a poor place on a dangerous border, loyal to the French king in a country half-swallowed by the English and their Burgundian allies. Joan was the daughter of Jacques d'Arc, who farmed and held a minor village office, and Isabelle, called Romée, who taught her the Our Father and the creed and the love of the Church but never a letter. She span and sewed and minded the animals, and in the church she was known for praying longer than the other children.

The voices began when she was about thirteen, at first only a light and a goodness she could not name, then named at last as St. Michael the archangel and two virgin martyrs, St. Catherine and St. Margaret. They came nearly every day. She made a private vow to keep her virginity for as long as it pleased God. When her father, who had dreamed uneasily that his daughter would run off with soldiers, arranged a marriage for her, she went before a court at Toul and refused the match, and won. She told almost no one what she was hearing. The thing growing in her was too strange, and too large, for the garden where it had started.

The nearest stronghold loyal to the Dauphin was Vaucouleurs, and its captain, Robert de Baudricourt, was the man the voices kept naming. She walked there with an uncle in the spring and stood before a soldier who took one look at a teenage farm girl claiming a mission from God and told her uncle to slap some sense into her and take her home.

She did not go home for long. She came back, and stayed in the town with a wheelwright's family, going to Mass, waiting, refusing to be dismissed. People began to come and look at her. A popular old prophecy said France, ruined by a woman — the discredited queen — would be saved by a virgin from the marches of Lorraine, and here she was. The turning point was the day she announced, calmly, that the French had suffered a heavy defeat near Orléans that very morning — the "Day of the Herrings." When a courier confirmed it days later, Baudricourt stopped laughing. He gave her a horse, an escort of a few men-at-arms, and the men's clothing the road demanded. She cut her hair short. "I was born to do this," she said, and rode out into winter and enemy country toward a prince she had never met.

At the castle of Chinon the Dauphin's advisers were divided and suspicious, and to test the girl they staged a deception: Charles dressed plainly and stood among his courtiers, with a decoy seated in the place of honour. Joan came into the torchlit hall, passed by the man on the throne without a glance, went straight through the crowd to Charles, knelt, and saluted him as her king. He drew her aside, and she told him something in private that no one else ever heard — some secret, the tradition holds, that only God could have known — and he came away shaken and convinced.

Convinced was not enough for the Church. They sent her to Poitiers, where for three weeks a panel of theologians and doctors of law cross-examined her for heresy, for sorcery, and for fraud, and where the matrons confirmed her virginity. When one learned cleric pressed her for a sign, she answered that she had not come to Poitiers to make signs but to be sent to Orléans, where God would give the sign in victory. They found nothing against her and much for her. She was given armour, a household, and a banner she designed herself — Christ in judgment, the lilies of France, the names Jhesus Maria — and told them to find a sword buried behind the altar of a church at Fierbois, which, when they dug, was there.

She entered the besieged city on the night of the twenty-ninth of April, 1429, on a white horse, and the people pressed in around her with torches as if salvation had ridden through the gate. The captains meant to keep the seventeen- year-old well back from the real fighting and to wait for reinforcements. She would not wait. When the assault on the fort of Saint-Loup began without her she mounted in a fury, rode out, and turned a faltering attack into a victory, and after that the men followed wherever her standard went.

Fort after fort fell over a handful of days. At the great stone fort of the Tourelles, on the seventh of May, she set a scaling ladder herself and an English arrow drove clean through her shoulder above the breast. She was carried off weeping, more from the shock than the wound, and a soldier offered to charm the pain away; she refused the charm, let them dress it, prayed, and went back. By evening the Tourelles had fallen. The next morning the English drew up in line of battle outside the walls; Joan had Mass said and would not let the French attack a foe who was only standing there. The English turned and marched away. The siege that had held Orléans for two hundred days was over in nine.

She knew her time was short and meant to spend it fast. On the Loire her forces took town after town, and on the eighteenth of June, near Patay, the French caught the retreating English army in the open and broke it utterly — the reckoning, at last, for a generation of French defeats. The way north lay open.

What stood in the way now was not the enemy but her own side: a king who hesitated and a court that counselled caution. She argued, pleaded, and all but dragged Charles toward Reims, the city deep in enemy territory where French kings had always been crowned. Towns that shut their gates she talked or frightened into opening them; Troyes, which meant to resist, surrendered as she began to fill the ditch for an assault. On the seventeenth of July, 1429, in the cathedral of Reims, Charles VII was anointed and crowned the true King of France, and Joan stood beside him through it all with her battle standard in her hand. Asked afterward why the banner had been carried to the very altar, she gave the answer that has outlived her: it had shared the toil, so it was just that it should share the honour.

The crowning was the summit, and from it the ground only fell away. Joan wanted to march at once on Paris while the shock of Reims was fresh; the king wanted truces and negotiation, and his favourite, Georges de La Trémoille, wanted the Maid smaller. The attack on Paris, when it finally came in September, was half-hearted and unsupported. Joan led it into the ditches below the walls and was struck through the thigh by a crossbow bolt, and still she stood in the dry moat shouting for the assault to go on until she was carried off by force after dark. The next day the king forbade any renewal and pulled the army back.

The voices had warned her the work would not all be done. She spent a restless, sidelined winter, ennobled by a grateful king who no longer used her, fretting through a court that had moved on to diplomacy. She had told them from the first that she had only a year. The year was nearly up.

In the spring of 1430 she went, almost on her own, to help the town of Compiègne hold out against a Burgundian siege. On the twenty-third of May she led a sortie out of the gates, was caught by a counter-attack, and in the chaos was pulled backward off her horse by an archer. The drawbridge had already been raised behind her. She was taken.

Her captors held her for months and then sold her to the English, who had wanted her dead from the start, for ten thousand livres. Charles VII, who wore his crown because of her, lifted no finger and offered no ransom. Held at the castle of Beaurevoir and hearing that Compiègne would be put to the sword, she threw herself from the top of a tower — sixty feet — meaning to escape, she said, not to die, and was found stunned on the ground, unhurt enough to be carried on. Saints Catherine and Margaret, she told her judges later, had begged her not to leap; she had not been able to help herself. From Beaurevoir she was handed down the chain of her enemies to Rouen, the English capital in France, for trial.

The court was a church court, but it served the English crown, and the man who ran it, Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, was looking to be rewarded with an archbishopric. The charges ran to seventy and then to a refined twelve — heresy, sorcery, the wearing of men's clothes, the claim that her voices came from God. She had no advocate. She was held not in a church prison with women to guard her, as the law required, but in a secular cell, chained, watched by English soldiers, which was the reason she gave for keeping to a man's dress.

For months they questioned her, sixty learned men against one unlettered nineteen-year-old, and over and over she answered with a plainness that turned their traps back on them. Asked the snare-question whether she knew herself to be in God's grace — yes was the sin of presumption, no was a confession — she said that if she was not, may God put her there, and if she was, may God keep her there, and the clerks wrote that the girl had answered well. Asked whether God hated the English, she said she knew nothing of God's love or hatred for them, only that they would be driven out of France. She would not deny her voices to save her life. "I would rather die," she said, "than revoke what God has made me do."

Worn down by illness, threatened with the fire and shown the executioner's cart, she broke at last in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen and put her mark to an abjuration she could not read, agreeing to wear women's clothes. They sentenced her to prison for life instead of death. A few days later she was found again in a man's tunic — left, it was charged, deliberately within her reach — and told her judges that her voices had reproached her for the abjuration. By the law of the Inquisition a relapsed heretic could only burn.

On the morning of the thirtieth of May, 1431, they brought her into the Old Market Place of Rouen and chained her high on a plastered stake above the crowd, with a paper mitre on her head naming her heretic and apostate. She asked for a cross. An English soldier lashed two sticks together and handed it up to her, and she kissed it and pressed it to her breast; a friar ran to the church and brought a crucifix and held it before her eyes through the smoke. She called on the name of Jesus, again and again, and was still calling it when the fire reached her and she could call no more. The recorder of her own trial said that until the last she declared her voices had come from God and had not deceived her. When it was over the executioner scattered her ashes into the Seine.

The discrediting did not hold. A quarter-century later, with the English driven out of France at last, a retrial was opened — pressed by the pope, by Joan's mother and brothers, and by a king with reason to clean the stain from his crown. Witnesses from Domrémy and Orléans and the trial itself came forward, the proceedings of 1431 were combed for their lies and their illegalities, and in 1456 the verdict was declared null and her name cleared.

For centuries after that she belonged to France more than to the Church — a figure for poets and painters and, when the country bled again, for soldiers. The Church came round slowly. She was beatified in 1909 and, in 1920, in the years after a war that had filled France with the young dead, Pope Benedict XV declared her a saint: the only person the Catholic Church has both burned and canonized. The unlettered girl who had heard a voice at noon in her father's garden, and had crossed a kingdom at war on the strength of it, was set among the saints of the same Church that had sent her to the fire.