Jeanne d'Arc (c.1412-1431). An illiterate girl from a prosperous peasant family of Domrémy in the Barrois, Jeanne played a brief but decisive role in restoring the fortunes of the Valois monarchy when at their lowest ebb in the Hundred Years War. Contemporary mystery, posthumous legend, and Romantic imagination have transformed her into the unrivalled heroine and saint of French national history, celebrated in art, cinema, and an enormous literature, recently augmented by gender studies.
In her own day Jeanne was seen by some churchmen as threatening traditional values in two main respects: by her assumption of the archetypal male profession of soldier (including, for obvious practical reasons, its dress) and because she made ‘prophetic’ claims. Moved by ‘voices’ she identified as those of Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, Jeanne crossed enemy territory to reach the royal court at Chinon in February 1429 on a ‘divine’ mission to save France. There she galvanized the uncrowned dauphin (Charles VII) into sending an army to the relief of Orléans, besieged by the English, and then urged him to go to Reims for coronation (17 July), her most signal service. She was already a pawn in the factional intrigues about the king, and there followed several unsuccessful military ventures in which the Maid participated until taken prisoner at Compiègne in May 1430 by Burgundian forces. Deserted by Charles VII, Jeanne was handed over to the English in Normandy, who arranged a trial for sorcery before an augmented Church court. At Rouen on 30 May 1431 she was burned as a relapsed heretic after a harsh imprisonment bravely endured.
Several ‘false Joans’ appeared immediately after her death and a legal process, begun in 1450, ‘rehabilitated’ her. In the 17th c. she was the subject of Chapelin's ill-fated national epic La Pucelle (as also, later, of a scurrilous mock-epic of the same name by Voltaire), but it was not until the 19th c. that the image of La Pucelle as a ‘national saviour’ was principally created. She was canonized in 1920. Popular interest in her career appears insatiable, whilst some recent scholarly appraisals have usefully employed insights gained from modern feminist studies.
[Michael Jones]
Bibliography
- Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981)
