Joan of Arc (33 page)

In 1938, just before the Second World War, there was a remarkable marriage of text and sound when the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, most serious-minded of the group called Les Six, set words by Paul Claudel to create the oratorio
Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher
(‘Joan of Arc at the stake’). Claudel, a devout Catholic, found his ideal match in a Protestant musician; and Honegger called on various Christian traditions in music.

At times in the oratorio, words are spoken, notably by Joan and by Brother Dominic, Joan’s chief interlocutor, the same Dominic who had founded the order of Friars Preacher, to which some who had taken part in Joan’s trial belonged. This device was taken from Protestant oratorio, as was the use of choral tunes by one part set against elaborate melodies for the other parts (as for example in Bach’s Advent cantata
Wachet Auf
, or
Sleepers Wake
). Honegger also uses monastic plainchant, sometimes given to a priest, sometimes to a choir of children, just as Claudel uses dignified liturgical Latin. Dramatist and composer also liked jokes. The variety the two men aimed for may be one reason why the piece is still performed.

Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher
is a sort of popular medieval entertainment, a synthesis of spectacle and speech. Like Claudel himself, it is other-worldly, belonging to a world remote from the political concerns of the age; but then Claudel, a former ambassador, with diplomatic flexibility praised Pétain, who accepted defeat in 1940, and de Gaulle, who resisted it; and in this sense his Joan is apolitical. But in the war that followed the figure of Joan became more political than ever before.

T
he spirit of reconciliation that St Joan had brought about in France in 1920 was remarkable, but there were vociferous groups in France that did not want to be reconciled. As French armies were brushed aside in May 1940, many on the French Right assumed that it alone stood for Joan’s vision of France. The collapse of the forces of the atheistic republic before the onslaught of Panzers and Stuka bombers proved that if France recovered, that recovery would be thanks to an ageing marshal, Joan’s true representative.

The Vichy government over which Pétain presided and which Laval tended to run was meant to stand for French values distinct from those of the republic it had replaced. In the place of the internationalist and universal
Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité
Vichy’s motto was the cosy
Travail, Famille, Patrie
(work, home, country). Before the war Pétain approved of conservative movements that defended the family; and like many on the Right he linked attachment to the family with attachment to the soil. When Rouen celebrated Joan’s fifth centenary in 1931, he wrote: ‘Joan of Arc incarnates patriotism in its most complete sense.’ Her great lesson to her own and his fellow countrymen was ‘unity in the service of a country’.
¹
In 1940 his role would be to foster such unity.

The ethos of the Vichy government opposed the economic, political and social results of modernity. It admired folk song, folk dance, quaint customs, local patois, regional writers. Joan’s feast at Orléans was an excuse to praise the Marshal. The preacher in 1941 called Pétain’s arrival in the city ‘an unexpected joy’, as the people cried ‘
Vive la France! Vive le Maréchal! Vive Jeanne d’Arc!
’

In the First World War Joan’s image had been used pictorially and politically to attack the Germans for bombarding Reims and damaging the cathedral where Charles VII had been crowned King of France. In the Second World War the bombing of Rouen was marked by a poster in which a huge figure of Joan wrings her hands over the city where the English had betrayed her twice. On 13 May 1944 a series of posters and stickers appeared with the text: ‘
Pour que la France vive il faut comme Jeanne d’Arc bouter les Anglais hors d’Europe
’ (‘So that France may live, like Joan of Arc we must kick the English out of Europe’). When D-Day came, the Marshal spoke of an invasion of the country; and the Free French who joined in the invasion were cast in the role of modern Burgundians. Pétain was too senile to note the paradox that Vichy’s Joan was the saint-as-collaborator.

Throughout the war, to lay a wreath at the feet of a statue of Joan of Arc could be seen as an act of patriotic defiance. The annual commemorations of Joan in Chinon always cited her struggles against the English but were construed by some as covert signals of anti-German sentiment. The national festival of Joan of Arc on the Sunday after 8 May might be an excuse for pulling down a swastika flag. As France was progressively freed, former supporters of Vichy took refuge in silence; and the only acceptable idea of Joan became the idea of her held by de Gaulle.

As late as 1942 Jacques Maritain, a French intellectual who took refuge in the United States, told an audience bent on raising money to help the French that ‘France ardently desires another Joan of Arc, and she has nobody.’
²
De Gaulle may not have agreed. He was a staunch believer rather than a devout one, but he was sure that in French history he would occupy a special place. Brought up in a royalist family in the north, he was a republican, even if a critic of the republic. In 1940 he fled to England, where with the help of Churchill he broadcast to his fellow countrymen, urging them to resist. At first ignored, he gradually gained sympathy for the cause of the Free French, so that by the time of the D-Day landings he was the only possible leader of a liberated France. Although he never said as much, Joan became the patron saint of resistance.

For de Gaulle the key to France was the love of liberty. Revering the Lorrainer Joan, he chose the cross of Lorraine as his symbol. Family legend had it that Sieur Jehan de Gaulle fought at Agincourt, accompanied Charles VII to Bourges and was one of six men-at-arms who went with Joan to Chinon. De Gaulle’s views on the French past were normal for a man born in 1890, but he also had the literary panache to expound these ideas with a fervour that recalls French pulpit oratory. His favourite poet was Charles Péguy, who had spent sixteen years writing about Joan. In exile at the Connaught Hotel in London, de Gaulle received visitors sitting under portraits of Joan and Napoleon. At his first meeting with Roosevelt, he gave the American President a lecture on his vision of French history, describing inspiring people since Charlemagne who had come to the nation’s rescue, such as Joan of Arc, Napoleon and Clemenceau (a list which might have included himself). This convinced Roosevelt that de Gaulle was a megalomaniac. He joked that de Gaulle believed that he himself was Joan, a joke the general did not find amusing and never forgave.

It was not only because of a portrait that de Gaulle kept Joan in mind in London. He also referred to her in many of his speeches from London. On 2 July 1940 she was one of that dauntless band who ‘would never have agreed to surrender all the arms of France to their enemies so that their enemies could use them against her Allies’. This was a theme he returned to over and over again in the early years of the war. In 1940 the crisis of 1429 had returned. France will recover its sense of national unity as ‘in the age of Joan of Arc and in the age of the Revolution’. De Gaulle saved for 10 May 1942, the eve of Joan of Arc’s feast, a speech devoted exclusively to her:

Our meeting is the proof of our hope. We all think today that, if five hundred years ago France discovered in herself, at Joan of Arc’s call, the flame needed for her salvation, today she can also rediscover the same flame . . . We wish only to join together our minds and our hearts in unshakeable confidence in the destiny of eternal France.
³

De Gaulle’s Joan of Arc was the Joan both of Michelet and of Péguy. While he venerated her, he had no nostalgia for a purely peasant society. He wanted France to modernise: Joan had used cannon – she had wanted to modernise too. On 25 August 1944 de Gaulle re-entered Paris before the Allies and at once walked through bullets to Notre-Dame to thank God for national deliverance. In his
Memoirs
he noted that the statues of Joan of Arc were still standing.

De Gaulle was a man of the Right, but never of the far Right. When in power from 1944 to 1946 he allowed Maurras to live and was content that Pétain dragged out his last days in a remote gaol. One writer, however, he refused to pardon: in 1941 Robert Brasillach had revised a play on Joan’s trial that owes its air of authenticity to a close reading of the actual words Joan had spoken in her French dialect. The first words in his preface to
Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
set out his theme:

The most moving and purest great work of art in the French language has not been written by a man of letters. It is born of the horrid, sad collaboration of a young girl aged 19, visited by angels, and some priests transformed, for the moment, into torturers. Timid legal clerks wrote to dictation, and it is in this way that this stupendous dialogue between Holiness, Cruelty and Weakness, that, while easily surpassing them, brings to life and in the end encapsulates all the fictitious dialogues the allegorical genius of the middle ages had produced . . . Compared with the simplest words of Joan, the most illustrious saints seem like chatter-boxes elaborating on Cicero.
⁴

There is no need to discuss the play in detail, for its details were fixed by the documents. All Brasillach had to do was to re-present them. What makes reading his play a sad experience today is the knowledge that the writer was a Nazi supporter, who in the 1930s had been intoxicated by nostalgic dreams of France’s past and by an idea of athletic Aryans seen in films patronised by a tiny clever man with a club foot, Josef Goebbels, and most seductively by the beautiful Leni Riefenstahl in
The Triumph of the Will
, her documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Brasillach was so carried away by his devotion to Joan that he carried with him a picture of an actress playing her, and at the same time he advocated the purging of France’s Jews. He had tricked himself into supporting the acceptance of torture he had abhorred in the trial of Joan, so that the man who wrote of the charm of innocence with beguiling fervour fell for a false Messiah. He was sentenced not for anti-Semitism but for treason, and although a petition circulated among writers was signed by both the Catholic Mauriac and the existentialist Camus, de Gaulle refused a pardon and early in 1945 Brasillach was shot. His mother told him he was playing the role of Joan of Arc.

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.