Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (21 page)

For the rest of the fifteenth century Joan was for the most part a local heroine, honored mostly in Orléans by festivals in celebration of their liberation in 1429. By the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, she was a figure of embarrassment to cool-headed French atheists and agnostics. Voltaire ridiculed Joan’s virginity, and his era generally regarded her as a curiosity from a dim, superstitious past. The accounts of the Hundred Years’ War had not yet been widely circulated, and the trial documents and other contemporaneous accounts were left to collect dust until serious research was undertaken in the nineteenth century.

Later, left-wing politicians and an impressive list of socialists transformed Joan into a daughter of the people, a social activist with no interest in the spiritual life. Equally out of balance are those on the extreme right, sustained by prejudice and xenophobia, who claim that her piety validates a kind of French preeminence.

Joan objected to the possibility of a vanished France, absorbed into the English empire. She took no stand against including a variety of peoples speaking many languages and representing a colorful palette of historical antecedents, from Anglophilic Normandy to Celtic Brittany, from the Spanish Pyrenees to Italianate Provence, from the Germanic eastern borders to the Flemish northern regions—all of them part of what eventually became a unified France. Indeed, she knew people from all these regions.

As we have seen, it was precisely this developing sense of nationhood, quite against empire building, to which Joan responded and which her actions reinforced. As the historian Siobhan Nash-Marshall has succinctly stated, “There was no real kingdom of France” when Joan came on the scene. Instead France was “a series of counties, duchies, and baronies, and the people of France were loyal to their counts, dukes and barons…. The lack of a real sense of nationhood also explains why the people of France did not constantly rebel at the prospect of falling under English rule.”

Somehow her arrival on the scene altered the situation, and her achievements were a critical element in the foundation of French national consciousness—and indeed of the belief in the sovereignty of all nations. Joan claimed the loyalty of thousands whose depression she lifted by a unified desire to throw off the yoke of England. “Joan,” Nash-Marshall added, “taught her people to rise above their petty concerns and provincialism and see that there was a larger unity that needed to be made out of each of the provinces of France…[and] she proclaimed that the larger unity was a sacred thing—that it was a response to a divine calling.”

If Joan was right in her insistence that the unwarranted takeover of one country by another is repugnant, then she is more than a historical curiosity: she remains a prophetic witness for every generation.

In the twentieth century especially, Joan was subjected to a variety of obsessions and passed through the prisms of those with modern preoccupations; thus she was written about and spoken of as if she had been a working-class radical, a warmonger, a closeted lesbian, a biological androgyne, or a pathologically frigid maiden, regardless of the lack of evidence for any such assertions. The English writer Vita Sackville-West, for example, claimed that Joan was obviously homosexual, for the record tells that when accepting hospitality from families, she preferred to sleep with women rather than with men. But in the fifteenth century young and single women routinely shared a bed with one another for mutual protection against attack.

Those with a different agenda point to her military career as a sign of Joan’s sexual confusion, which is perhaps too antique and pathetic an objection to justify rebuttal. At the extreme of the theories concerning Joan’s presumed mental aberration is the assertion that she had tuberculosis of the brain from drinking raw cow’s milk. The only possible conclusion to this position is that if tuberculosis of the brain can produce such marvelous results for a country and a people, we ought immediately to ban the pasteurization of milk. As for her remarkable physical and emotional courage, it was always complemented by admirable common sense and an unhysterical piety that was rooted in a belief that God cares about His world.

In historiography, dramatic literature, fiction, art, music and film, Joan has been an endlessly appealing subject. Four years after her death the first of several plays was staged at Orléans, with a huge cast of characters that included Joan, the Virgin Mary, Saint Michael and God Himself. French chronicles noted the importance of her actions in booting out the English, which eventually led to the end of the Hundred Years’ War; the chronicles did not, however, believe that she was sent by God. The poet François Villon, who was born the year Joan died, mentioned her favorably in his
Ballade des femmes du temps jadis
as “
la bonne Lorraine / Qu’Anglois bruslèrent à Rouen,
” the good girl from Lorraine whom the English burned at Rouen. But by the eighteenth century Voltaire knew his readers would accept his satiric portrait of Joan as a village idiot.

Things changed later, however: in the nineteenth century no fewer than eighty-two French plays sympathetic to Joan were performed, some of them wildly altering the facts of her life, and at least two operas (by Gounod and by Mermet) were enormously successful. In the twentieth century poets, historians and playwrights inevitably turned to her for inspiration, and in 1909 alone (the year she was beatified) seventeen plays were written and produced. After her canonization as Saint Joan of Arc in 1920, there followed no fewer than thirty-nine dramatic works (counting only up to 1986). Some were pious pageants for schoolchildren; others were serious re flections on patriotism, ethics, national identity or the primacy of conscience. Notable examples were Charles Péguy’s triptych,
Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc;
Paul Claudel’s verses for
Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher
were set to music by Arthur Honegger, and the work remains an oratorio in the standard canon, and Jean Anouilh’s play
L’Alouette
was a great success in France and later in America as
The Lark.

Librarians list more than four hundred plays, cantatas, symphonies, tone poems and hymns about Joan of Arc, and archivists can name more than three hundred paintings, statues and engravings—a catalog that makes her by far the most celebrated person in artistic history. French painters have also been drawn to Joan’s story: Ingres, Bastien-Lepage, Carrière and Millais, for example, all created memorable works that have withstood the tests of time and fashion.

As might be expected, the early English histories simply dismissed Joan as a common witch. Shakespeare summarized that view in
Henry VI, Part One,
wherein Joan is little more than a violent, sluttish fiend who depends on the powers of darkness, which finally fail her. Such was the conventional wisdom about Joan until, at the end of the eighteenth century, Robert Southey wrote a long epic poem praising her.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic and best known English celebration is George Bernard Shaw’s play
Saint Joan.
Shaw’s heroine is a sturdy girl, only marginally religious, socially left-wing, intellectually clever and the first Protestant.

How far the English view of Joan has come since Shakespeare may be read in the words of no less a patriot than Winston Churchill, who memorably wrote,

Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang.

In Germany, Schiller’s
Maid of Orleans
featured a mixed-up bumpkin in a monumental kind of Teutonic soap opera: men fall madly in love with her, and she almost succumbs until, after being captured, she breaks her chains and dies fighting alongside her king—not at the stake, not at the hands of clerics.

Joan was also the subject of an Italian opera by none other than Giuseppe Verdi. The libretto laments the waste of her virginity and is concerned mostly with Joan’s reconciliation with her suspicious father. At the end, as in Schiller, Joan escapes her confinement and dies, beautifully and cleanly, in battle. Tchaikovsky’s Russian opera is similarly dismissive of historical facts.

Mark Twain’s
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
was a highly successful American novel about Joan and a wildly uncharacteristic work. Twain spent years researching the latest documentary evidence available at the end of the nineteenth century, and the result was a deeply moving novel. Agnostic misanthrope though he was, Twain considered this book very much his best work, and so it may be. He obviously loved Joan and insisted that she was the most magnificent, virtuous, thoroughly admirable person in the history of the world. His awe is evident in the writing.

American playwright Maxwell Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine
presented an interesting conceit immediately after World War II: the play is about a troop of actors rehearsing a play about Joan, and therefore there is plenty of opportunity for re flections on the nature of compromise—in art and in trials, just as in battle, ethics and all of life.

One of the first films ever made, in 1898, was about Joan of Arc, and producers, directors and actors have since then found her story irresistible. At least fifty-three feature films have reached the screen, directed by, among others, Cecil B. DeMille, Carl Dreyer, Victor Fleming, Roberto Rossellini, Otto Preminger, Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette. Documentary films about her are legion.

Joan of Arc is certainly an example of the victimized political prisoner, of the hostage unjustly taken, betrayed by those to whom she was devoted, oppressed by those who place power before people. Lonely in her suffering, terrified in the face of a dreadful death, she was at last a sacrifice to a suffocating kind of fanaticism.

Religious, psychological, philosophical and literary theories about Joan of Arc are still stockpiled, given new twists, sifted, discarded and taken up again. But perhaps the essential “truth” about her is captured in an affecting and powerful image—that of a country girl in her family’s garden, listening silently in the presence of the living God. Improbably, she becomes the sign that God is free to act as He wills to act, not as we presume He ought to act. Contrary to all expectations, she is a reminder that God in His mercy often chooses the least obvious people for greatness. His freedom is reflected in hers, for she responds in complete trust. Perhaps Joan makes no sense without this leap of faith in the divine ingenuity.

Joan of Arc, with her radical and incandescent confidence in God and her unshakable belief in His love for the integrity of every nation, continues to claim our attention in the work of historians, philosophers, theologians and biographers; in the tropes of poets, playwrights and novelists; in the creative imagination of painters, composers and filmmakers. Almost six hundred years after her death at the age of nineteen, there is no indication that she will quietly disappear.

Acknowledgments

T
his book could not have been written without the cooperation and assistance provided by personnel at the following archives and libraries: in Paris, the Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale; in Orléans, the Bibliothèque Municipale and the Centre Jeanne d’Arc; in London, the British Library; in Copenhagen, the Royal Library, the National Library of Denmark and the University Library of Copenhagen.

I am equally grateful for the assistance of the International Joan of Arc Society/Société Internationale de l’étude de Jeanne d’Arc, a treasury of scholarly information gathered by professors, independent scholars and students.

Among the scholars who have enriched our knowledge and perceptions of Joan, I am grateful to several who took time to answer crucial questions: Kelly DeVries, Loyola College (Baltimore, Maryland); Siobhan Nash-Marshall, College of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota); and Jane Marie Pinzino, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).

My niece, Ann-Britt Elvin Andersen, enabled me to have quick access to rare volumes at the Royal Library, Copenhagen.

Irene Mahoney, OSU, replied generously and extensively to my questions about religious life in the Middle Ages.

The producer and director Pamela Mason Wagner kindly provided a copy of her magnificent documentary,
Joan of Arc—Child of War, Soldier of God
(2005).

I am very fortunate indeed to be represented by my dear friend and agent of thirty years, Elaine Markson. I would have no career at all, or at least a far less happy one, without Elaine and her colleagues—Gary Johnson, Geri Thoma and Julia Kenny. It was they who introduced me to Gideon Weil at HarperSanFrancisco—as enthusiastic and supportive an editor as any writer could hope to find. His intelligent and specific observations much improved the text, and his friendship cheered my work at every stage. Carolyn Allison-Holland was an expert production editor, and Priscilla Stuckey my keen-eyed and graceful copyeditor.

In all my tasks and projects, I am sustained daily by the love and unfailing support of Ole Flemming Larsen, with whom I share my life.

T
HE NAME ON
the dedication page is that of a film and television producer with a long list of credits. Respected by collaborators, admired by directors, and esteemed by everyone who has the good fortune to work with her, Sue Jett is a woman of keen insights and deep sympathies. Courageous and generous, she would very quickly have secured the affection of Joan of Arc. My life is much the better for Sue’s loyalty and confidence, her leavening humor and enduring friendship—and for the happy times I share with her and her husband, Paul Elliott, a remarkably artistic cinematographer with equally impressive credits. I am more grateful than I can say.