Joan of Arc (24 page)

If a myth is defined as an erroneous idea or a fictitious person, then Joan was not mythical in either of those senses. For a person of the fifteenth century some periods of her life are known in astonishing detail and the earliest records convey a vivid sense of a special person. Nor is Joan mythical in the sense that Adam and Eve are mythical: they stand for a collective reality, for all men and all women, whereas Joan was merely herself. In
Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism
, Marina Warner has explored her myth by analysing Joan in terms of certain received categories of female heroism. Warner would probably admit that Joan eludes all such attempts at definition; indeed, what people have found difficult to comprehend has been her uniqueness.

But the techniques of ordinary biography do not elucidate all the available information about Joan. There is no easy way of making sense of what makes her unique – her voices. How can a biographer observe abnormal phenomena, when talk of phenomena is inaccurate, as the phenomena were not phenomenal? Joan remains elusive. She did not hear her voices in the way she heard the church bells that rang while she was listening to her voices, not did she see them in the way that she could see the priests who asked her to describe them. If she hallucinated, she did not have delusions in the same way as a schizophrenic or a thirsty man lost in the desert who sees a mirage of an oasis. The numinous quality in Joan puts her outside most classes of people, even spiritual people. Her judges, aware that she was unusual, put this distinctiveness down to the spirit of evil, but then they had not confronted the historic Joan, the girl who often prayed, went to confession and communion, was kind to her enemies – they did not want to know the Joan known to family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. For this reason, efforts to consider her in purely political terms break down – her mission was political in its implications, but the mission, she asserted, was given her by God. Her critics understandably did not and do not agree.

Anyone who studies the story of Joan of Arc must be puzzled by three paradoxes. First, a girl tried and condemned in 1431 by a French Church court was rehabilitated indirectly by the nullification of that verdict by another French Church court in 1452–6, and then, after a much longer process, in 1920 canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church. Secondly, in that year this belatedly canonised saint was also declared by the Church to be the patroness of France and given a public holiday by the secular French State, while at the same time she was widely admired in the English-speaking world, where in her lifetime she would have found her most determined enemies. Thirdly, whereas in the fifteenth century she had divided opinion, by the early twentieth century there was virtual unanimity in assessing her heroism, her patriotism, her goodness, since Allied victory in the First World War seemed to have implied a need to recognise her.

To those who realised how essential had been the contribution of women to the Allies’ triumph in 1918, Joan was suddenly modern.
¹
The English were Allies of the French; American soldiers fighting in Lorraine had paid their respects at Domremy; Allied propaganda made much of the German bombardment of Reims, where Joan had seen her king crowned,
²
and a popular French biography of Joan, written for children and beautifully illustrated by its author, had been translated into English and published in both England and America.
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French and English speakers shared the conviction that Joan symbolised the values of freedom for which the victorious Allies believed they stood. Joan, a historical figure from the forgotten past, had become the subject of a modern myth.

The myth of Joan essentially involves spiritual realities or a spiritual way of looking at everyday realities. If not an evil person, as the nullification trial records testify, she may have been a good person who was simply misled – a spiritual simpleton. The spiritual side of Joan is hard to make sense of, and yet it was the most important part of her. The key to her lies outside the confines of normal history.

She was, however, a historical figure, not a legend. Famous people tend to attract those who find the mere truth boring. Some have maintained that Joan was in fact a member of the French royal family, that she did not really die at the stake in Rouen; and after her death at least one other woman claimed to be Joan of Arc. Such views do not merit serious discussion, for the numerous extant documents provide a firm basis for parts of her actual life and the whole of her actual death.

P
ierre Champion, one of the greatest experts on Valois France, has shown how manuscripts of the nullification trials were carefully kept in the collections of the king and of the Duke of Orléans, who both had a stake in Joan’s good name. As for the documents of the 1431 trial, they were collated with great care after the event and deliberately diffused to as wide an audience as possible. The interrogations had been in French. The Rouen lawyer Guillaume Manchon and the Paris theologian Thomas de Courcelles were entrusted with the task of translating this French text into Latin, a task that gave de Courcelles the opportunity to remove his own name from the list of those who advocated torture. In the end there were no fewer than three official records of the documents, one for the Inquisitor, one for Cauchon, one for King Henry, and two other copies were made. This work of translation into Latin made the story of Joan’s trial available to the learned; and the fact that many more clerics could read Latin than French may be a reason why the whole French text does not survive.

The documentation of the trials of 1431 and 1450–6 means that Joan as seen through the prism of legal inquiry can be better known than any other alleged heretic of her age, including even Gilles de Rais, her former companion, who was a great nobleman as well as a paedophile. The reason is that Joan’s case mattered to rival claimants for the kingdom of France. But no legal inquiry can reveal all sides of a person. Joan is also mentioned by chroniclers, and although not one until eighty years after her death focuses specifically on her, insights into her story can be gained from early accounts, even if inevitably they are partial histories and sometimes legendary.

These early histories were not published collectively until they appeared in the fourth volume of the material on Joan collated by Jules-Etienne-Joseph Quicherat from manuscripts in the Bibliothèque royale, now the Bibliothèque nationale, in the 1840s. The accounts are partial, because they were written down without knowledge of other contemporary sources.

Although an agitated English soldier who saw her die said he had burnt a saint, and although she may have been considered a saint by some who knew her well, such as her confessor Father Pasquerel, Joan was not written up as a saint. Anyone who reads the chronicles and commentaries of the day will notice, however, that she was a celebrity. Joan’s public career had been so short and so strange that it was impossible to ignore her; and the nature of her achievements forced observers to make decisions about her private life. Was she deluded? Was she inspired by God? Was she misled by the devil?

The modern picture of a medieval chronicler is of an industrious monk bent over his parchment at his desk in the cloister. By the fifteenth century the time of such a man had passed. Most who wrote about Joan were gentlemen in the service of a king, a duke or a count, and wrote in French, English, German or Greek. A few clerics wrote for other clerics in medieval Latin. Some clerics wrote in the classical Latin that was fashionable in Italian cities. Manuscripts were illustrated by miniatures, new printed books by woodcuts, in both cases produced by professional lay craftsmen. In the fifteenth century, as in the nineteenth, the artwork rarely matches the literature about Joan in terms of quality – but then the writers had been set the more difficult challenge: how to come to terms with Joan. Artists could take refuge in fantasy, as in tales of the fierce prophetesses of the Old Testament, but they did not stray from conventional depictions. In most representations Joan wears a dress and her hair hangs long and loose in the style appropriate to a virgin, albeit a sword-wielding, horse-riding virgin. The texts, however, show that in her haircut as in her costume, Joan cultivated a masculine appearance, and in such matters the texts are right.

The texts are not all equally trustworthy: some depend on hearsay, some were composed later, and some conceal what the authors must have known. Joan may have been an astonishing person, but she was also an embarrassing one. She had embarrassed the king by insisting on the attack on Paris, by disappearing up the Loire and, worse, by coming back again, by trying to defend Compiègne, by inspiring his sacred coronation before being burnt as an enemy of the Church, heretic and sorceress. She embarrassed the Duke of Burgundy by being at a coronation in which he should have played a major role and yet the legitimacy of which, as from 1435, he had to admit. She embarrassed the English by outmanoeuvring them in 1430 and by predicting defeats that occurred in the 1440s and 1450s; and she embarrassed English patriots who went on claiming that their rulers were rightfully rulers of France.

Most of the chroniclers fall into obvious groups, pro-French, pro-Burgundian or pro-English, some with less immediate reasons of loyalty to one or other side yet take a strong line on Joan. Only one writes with something like a true historian’s detachment. Enea Silvio Piccolomini stressed his accomplishments as a man of letters by calling himself Aeneas Sylvius. He was a cleric not yet ordained as a priest, a diplomat who had for long been in the service of the anti-pope Felix V who yet ended his life as Pope Pius II, a chameleon at ease in his rakish youth before turning gracefully into an austere old man. His
Commentaries
reveal him as the most astute observer of the age. He never met Joan, but he took the trouble to learn much about her. He may have spoken to Cauchon and some of Joan’s other judges at the Council of Basel, but he shares none of their animosity towards her. He shows a special interest in the events surrounding the coronation and notes that the English had thought of removing the sacred oil from Reims before the French arrived, but failed to do so because ‘they are thought to be have been frustrated by God’s will’.
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He has an improbable tale that Joan was captured outside Compiègne after charging at Duke Philip himself. And yet he demonstrates his innate shrewdness as he concludes: ‘So died Joan, a wonderful, admirable virgin’, before adding, ‘whether her achievement was divine or human, I would find it hard to state.’ Other writers found it much easier to make up their minds.

One of the most attractive of Joan’s supporters, Perceval de Cagny, served the house of Alençon for forty-six years. He may not have been so much a witness of what he describes as the spokesman of his master’s voice, but when he began to write in 1436 he was close to the events, and, since Alençon had known Joan better than any other member of the royal family and any other military leader, Cagny’s own voice has a ring of authenticity. ‘Before her arrival, neither the king nor the princes of the blood knew what advice to follow. And after by her aid and counsel things went from good to better to best.’ There is a tone of mounting excitement as she encourages the people of Orléans, gives heart to the soldiers, helps win back the city and watches the English depart. Cagny conveys a sense of her manner of speaking, how she swore ‘by my martin’, how she called his master ‘my fine Duke’ (
mon beau duc
), how she could override all objections, for example to the march on Reims. He tells how, after taking a notable part in capturing the fortified towns of the Loire and winning the battle of Patay, she turned to Alençon to announce: ‘Sound the trumpets, mount our horses! It’s the moment to go to our gentle King Charles to put him on the route from his consecration at Reims.’ Alençon stood in for the Duke of Burgundy at the ceremony, and Cagny does not mention what Joan did, for she played a unique, not a traditional part in the drama, before he and Joan resumed their military campaign. Her aim was simple: ‘The Maid intended to restore suzerainty to the king and the kingdom to its obedience.’ As the king seemed irresolute, while his mind sought out tortuous diplomatic paths, she eventually lost patience. ‘By my martin,’ she told Alençon, ‘I want to see Paris from closer up than I have ever seen it.’ The king’s behaviour frustrated them both. For Cagny the withdrawal from Paris had a disastrous effect on morale: ‘so the will of the Maid and the king’s army was broken’. He was sure that the dominant royal councillors did not want the Maid and Alençon to be together. Her venture in the upper Loire confirmed her disillusion and led to her resolution to save Compiègne. Cagny did not trust her judges at Rouen, as they had used every ruse, he thought, to condemn her and have her burnt for heresy; and yet what angered him was the behaviour of the king, for Charles was reluctant to fight.

Charles VII himself was more inscrutable than his cousin; and the man charged with glorifying him had the harder task. Jean Chartier, a cantor from the royal abbey of St-Denis, was probably given the task of being royal chronicler just because it was traditional that a monk of St-Denis should hold that office. It is likely that he wrote about Joan in the 1440s, when the war had finally turned to French advantage. Again and again Chartier stresses the king’s benevolent role. He tells how the king gave Joan the forces she needed, how after the relief of Orléans he provided extra forces to take the nearby Loire towns, how he raised a grand army to take him on his route for the coronation, how, when Joan wished to take Auxerre by force, the king arranged for the town to surrender peacefully. Chartier does not mention Joan’s part in the coronation, and he kept the king firmly in the centre of the picture. The king decided to return to the Île de France, the heart of his dominions. At Senlis, just north of Paris, the English dared not confront him. Joan, not well informed about the moat protecting Paris, attacked it in vain. Chartier knows about St-Pierre-le-Moûtier – the king commanded her to go there – and does not admit that she was contravening the king’s intention to surrender Compiègne when she was captured. He was certain that at the end she died a good Catholic – it would let the king down if she were not – then he ends the story with a surprising final remark. Once the sword she had received from Ste-Catherine-de-Fierbois was broken, she was never again so successful in war. Chartier is thinking back to the wonderful stories of chivalry, with their insistence on miraculous God-given swords, as in French stories about Charlemagne and Roland or British stories about Arthur. At heart he was a modern servant of a very modern king.