Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  Although Charles X fell in the glorious revolution of 1830, medievalism survived; and with it the artistic obsession with Joan. The July Monarchy set up after the mob had done its work, under the junior Bourbon, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, took a paradoxical view of Joan. The new ruling classes were by instinct anticlerical; for a time the festivities in Orléans were suspended; and yet in a reign when sceptics and republicans set the tone of society, scholars took pains to gather the materials the past had left behind. This coincided with a private concern of King Louis-Philippe to make Versailles a museum of all French history, royalist, republican and Napoleonic. One picture chosen for permanent exhibition was Auguste Vinchon’s The Consecration of Charles VII at Reims, 17 July, 1429, in which Joan occupies the geometric centre of the painting. Also in Versailles is a fine sculpture by Louis-Philippe’s own daughter, Marie d’Orléans, who sculpted several statues of Joan. A copy of the Versailles Joan now stands in front of the town hall in Orléans. The royal sculptress managed to express what few contemporaries were able to portray in any visual form – Joan’s inner life.

  In the 1840s Jules-Etienne-Joseph Quicherat set to work on the task of editing the manuscripts relating to Joan in the royal library. The scholarly and literary achievement of the age had an enduring effect on the cult of Joan. Her life and death were finally subjected to honest, scrupulous evaluation.

  Using the techniques of the Ecole de chartes (the school of charters), an institution founded by Louis XVIII, Quicherat edited all the texts he could find relevant to her story. Between 1841 and 1849 he produced a great work in five volumes, Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc dite la Pucelle . . . suivis de tous les documents historiques qu’on a pu réunir et accompagnées de notes et d’éclaircissements (‘The process of condemnation and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, called the Pucelle . . . followed by all the historical documents that can be found together with notes and explanations’). The first volume contained transcriptions of the trial of 1431, the second and third volumes those of the nullification trials, the fourth the ‘chronicles, reminiscences and impressions by contemporaries’, the fifth consisted of ‘literary extracts, contemporary poetry’ and an index. Quicherat enabled scholarly historians to study not just the relatively familiar trial of 1431 (most accounts of Joan stopped with her death), but also the duller form, in which the memories of those who had known, loved and admired her were preserved. He also freed historians from dependence on a chronicler like Monstrelet, who could not recall anything that was said on the one occasion when he said he met Joan and who forgot that his patron had sold her to the English. Quicherat made researchers aware of the cult of Joan since 1456, down to the moment when the Orléans festival was revived in 1803. His work has lasted. Only recently have modern editions of the trials of 1431 and 1450–6 replaced his first three volumes, and even in the twenty-first century no publication has yet has made his fourth and fifth volumes obsolete.

  Quicherat’s sound erudition has in the long term done more to restore the reputation of Joan than any great writer’s most exalted flight of fantasy, but it could hardly make her popular, even when in the 1860s his collection of medieval Latin and French texts was translated into modern French. What was required was the verve of a master of the hard art that the French call haute vulgarisation (sophisticated popularisation), and in 1830 such a man emerged into prominence when Jules Michelet, a Parisian university professor, lectured on medieval history. His original account of Joan formed part of his course on the history of fifteenth-century France, but in 1853 it was printed as an independent work. This was a lucky accident. By writing so much Michelet became prolix: what makes his life of Joan a pleasure to read is that for once he was concise, a rare achievement for anyone writing about Joan. Indeed, concision gives his little book its air of authority. When he has pronounced, it seems as if there is nothing more to say.

  Michelet saw in Joan a visionary who noticed problems only in order as to solve them. ‘She declared in the name of God that Charles was the heir; she reassured him about his legitimacy which he doubted. This legitimacy she sanctified, by leading her king straight to Reims and gaining over the English the decisive advantage of the consecration.’6 His view of her was based on common sense: ‘it was not rare to see women take up arms’. ‘The originality of the Pucelle did not consist in her visions. In the Middle Ages who did not have them?’ ‘The court of Charles VII was far from being unanimously in favour of the Pucelle . . . Everyone was curious to see the sorceress or the inspired woman.’ At Poitiers the clergy decided: ‘this girl is the messenger of God’. It was not that France did not have enough able soldiers to win back Orléans, but they were not used to obeying the king; this was the age when men obeyed the Virgin rather than Christ; they needed a virgin come down to earth, a virgin ‘popular, young, lovely, kind, brave’.

  Michelet’s chapter headings are terse; ‘Childhood and vocation’, ‘Joan delivers Orléans and has the king consecrated at Reims’, and ‘Joan is betrayed and surrendered’ is followed by ‘The trial – Joan refuses to submit to the Church’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Death’. Michelet is careful to show his sources in footnotes that reveal he knows the chroniclers, Monstrelet, the Bourgeois de Paris, the author of the Chronique de la Pucelle; and he quotes from the records of the 1431 trial and the trials of 1452–6 as well as from other archival material.

  Michelet rightly claims that the consecration of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral marked the apogee of Joan’s mission. ‘Everyone who saw her’ at the moment when she knelt to thank God (here he cites the words of the Chronique de la Pucelle) ‘believed more than ever that this happening was the work of God’. His use of this comment shows how well he could enter into the mentality of the age, since the only comparable occasion during Michelet’s own life, the last consecration of a French king, Charles X, in Reims (in 1825), was greeted with derision by all except devout royalists. Michelet was a man of the Left, however, who became first a liberal, then a republican; and his view of Joan endorsed Napoleon’s assertion that she was a French heroine. In Michelet’s narrative she had perhaps changed from a saint to a captain, from one who took up the sword reluctantly to one who enjoyed wielding a sword. Once captured, she was a political tool. Her king did nothing for her and the Duke of Burgundy, who surrendered her, was more concerned with Anglo-Flemish trade than justice; and so in January 1431 the Anglophile Bishop Cauchon opened the case against her. There must be only one result: her death. ‘If the fire was lacking, the iron remained.’

  While she wavered, the English, secure in their pride, never did. ‘Never were the Jews so vehemently opposed to Jesus as they were to the Pucelle.’ Under pressure she gave up her sole protection in the world in which she moved, her male attire. When she resumed men’s clothes, she was doomed and the English made sure there would be no escape. ‘As she died, a secretary of the King of England called out, “We are lost, we have burnt a saint”’ But Michelet is clear they had also burnt a French woman. ‘This last figure from the past was also the first figure of the future. In her appeared at the same time the Virgin . . . and already the Nation.’ Joan stood for a stable national destiny. France was given to frequent regime change between 1814 and 1870, but all the while the French nation persisted; and Joan symbolised the nation at its best.

  By the time Michelet’s work was published, the pear-shaped citizen-king Louis-Philippe had died in exile in England, there had been a new revolution and a new republic and then the Second Empire. For a time Napoleon III toyed with the idea of being crowned. One of the first artistic commissions of his Minister of Art was to ask the painter Ingres to finish the picture Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII at Reims (1854). The emphasis in the painting is not on Charles VII but on Joan, standing at the composition’s still centre, her soft flesh set against the hard, gleaming armour, her lustrous eyes cast up to heaven, standing with one hand on the altar, the other holding her standard, in front of a tons
ured cleric and a page both on their knees, some way in front of a standing nobleman. In the end Napoleon was not consecrated and no other French ruler has ever been crowned. The idea of sacred monarchy was dead.

  Even without a consecrated monarch Joan was central to the story of France. In the preface to the historical novel Joan of Arc (1842), Alexandre Dumas (the father) called her the ‘Christ of France’, who has ‘redeemed the crimes of the monarchy’, and for him a scholar wrote an extended appendix outlining the sources available before the publication of Quicherat’s volumes.

  The first and one of the most scholarly Englishman to discuss Joan’s case was John Lingard (1771–1851), who was born a year after Wordsworth and who died the year after him. A Catholic priest with unrivalled knowledge of Continental archives, Lingard was conscious of intending to refute popular misconceptions about English history by the dispassionate presentation of the evidence; and this method he applied in his discussion of Joan. His account of Joan, like that of Dumas, is based on a reading of those texts available before Quicherat’s studies. In it he practises the methods he thought historians should use, methods essentially sceptical and open-minded.

  Lingard wondered why she ‘mistook for realities the workings of her own imagination’. She was marvellously successful, he said, in the two important enterprises for which she claimed divine inspiration, the relief of Orléans and the conducting of the Dauphin Charles to his consecration at Reims, and then she wanted to return to her simple life, but was persuaded by Charles to continue in his service. When she was captured, ‘the unfortunate maid was treated with neglect by her friends, with cruelty by her enemies’. The Bishop of Beauvais, who was devoted to the English interest and in whose diocese she had been taken, ‘claimed the right of trying her in his court on the accusation of sorcery and imposture’. After various attempts had been made ‘to save her from the punishment of death, by inducing her to make a frank and explicit confession’ and after one abjuration which she quickly recanted, she was finally burnt at the stake ‘embracing a crucifix and calling on Christ for mercy’.

  At the start of his account of Joan, Lingard comments: ‘The wonderful revolution which she accomplished by means apparently supernatural, will justify an endeavour to trace the origin of the enthusiasm which, while it deluded, yet nerved and elevated the mind of this young and interesting female.’ Towards the end of his discussion, he states: ‘An impartial observer would have pitied and respected the mental delusion with which she was afflicted; the credulity of her judges condemned her, on the charge of having relapsed into her former errors . . . This cruel and unjustifiable tragedy was acted in the market-place of Rouen, before an immense concourse of spectators, about twelve months after her capture.’7 Lingard reserved for a mere footnote a reference to the nullification of her trial. In not discussing her extraordinary psychology, he is typical of people who never go beyond the facts in dealing with Joan.

  A younger Englishman, Thomas De Quincey, was more partisan. His essay on Joan was an unashamedly Francophile response to Michelet. Best known now as a writer on opium addiction, he also left his Recollections of the Lake Poets, a group he had cultivated assiduously. In commenting, then, on Michelet’s first thoughts on Joan in the History of France, De Quincey had the advantage of knowing Southey. ‘Twenty years after, talking with Southey, I was surprised to find him still owning a secret bias in favour of Joan, founded on her detection of the Dauphin.’8 Thanks to Michelet, De Quincey was better informed. Rightly he divides her public career into two parts, but is drawn to the sequel when ‘what remained was – to suffer.’

  De Quincy points out astutely that the one way the English undid the psychological effect of Charles VII’s coronation was to ‘taint’ it ‘as the work of a witch’. He is astute too in pointing out that Cauchon’s ambition made him not the only Frenchman to be ‘an instrument of the English’, but adds ‘even at this day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself’. He ends by rebuking English historians in general for bias against Joan.

  Enmity was put on one side when in the Crimean war England and France became allies.

  REVIVAL IN ORLÉANS

  It was supremely important for the cult of Joan of Arc that in 1849 one of the most gifted French bishops of the nineteenth century, Félix Dupanloup, a man of letters and member of the French Academy, became Bishop of Orléans. His career in the Church was defined by the fact that his 29-year episcopate coincided with the pontificate of Pius IX, Pio Nono (1846–78). Dupanloup remained in the see of Orléans until the year of his death, the year in which the pope died also.

  Before Dupanloup’s episcopate, devotion to Joan was largely a local cult. The Orléannais had never forgotten that Joan had raised the siege; in the 1840s, however, even while a former Duke of Orléans ruled, the annual festivities had stopped. Dupanloup made sure they would not stop again. Gois’s statue, now unloved, was moved to the bridge where the Tourelles had once stood, and Foyatier’s dignified equestrian statue of Joan was put up in the main city square, place du Martroi. Dupanloup reorganised the festivities himself and on the first occasion that the new rite was observed (in 1855) he preached her cause. He also pronounced the panegyric for the 1869 festival.

  ‘In her I find everything that moves me,’ he announced, ‘including the name of Orléans, that has become mine since God called me to be the bishop of your souls; I like the peasant simplicity in her origins, the chastity in her heart, her courage in battle, her love for the land of France, but above all the holiness in her life and death.’ 9 He described his visit to Domremy, which reinforced his opinion that she was remarkable in the way she combined love of France with love of God. ‘Do not think . . . you must chose between the duties of a Christian and those of a Frenchman . . . Religion points its finger towards the sky, but it does not make us forget our dear country down here.’

  Dupanloup had read Quicherat, for he reminded the congregation how Dunois, her captain, and d’Aulon, her steward, both said they had never met a woman more chaste than Joan. Faced with such virtue, now that feelings of the past had calmed, the bishop was not surprised that almost daily he heard some Englishman express his admiration for Joan:

  In spite of English Protestantism a descendant of one she defeated said only yesterday: ‘Such a person sustains our faith and brings splendour to the human spirit and her rightful setting is a church.’ . . . I promise you that you cannot approach her and read, as I have just done, the pages of her story in the processes of the two trials, in which she seems to live on still and even, I would dare say, to be full of vitality, without having the irresistible conviction that in her you are face to face with a heroic saint, a messenger of God . . . She is a saint: God was in her.

  On that same day, 8 May, the anniversary of the relief of Orléans, Dupanloup sent off a petition to Rome to open Joan’s cause as a saint.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Holy Patriot

  THE MAID OF DOMREMY

  The early 1870s was a period of decisive change in the history of France, of the Catholic Church and of the cult of Joan.

  France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war destroyed for ever its reputation as the leading Continental power. The crowning of the King of Prussia as German Kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles symbolised France’s national humiliation, and the siege of Paris brought misery to a capital to which the Emperor Napoleon III had given its majestic layout. The ensuing civil war between the left-wing supporters of the Paris Commune and the Versailles government fuelled lasting class hatred, but nothing hurt so much as the wresting away from France of German-speaking Alsace, which had been French since the reign of Louis XIV, and still more the industrial parts of French-speaking Lorraine, French since the reign of Louis XV.

  The threat of war had led France to withdraw troops that for a generation had protected the pope in Rome and the patrimony of St Peter (which corresponds approximately to the modern Lazio). As Prussia’s ally,
the new kingdom of Italy was free to invade papal territory and to take control of most of Rome. Pope Pius IX, a ‘prisoner in the Vatican’, would have nothing to do with the anticlerical regime based in his own city. At the Vatican Council that met just before war broke out, he had been declared infallible when, speaking as successor of St Peter for the whole Church, he pronounced on matters of faith and morals. This doctrine would have surprised fifteenth-century conciliarists such as Gerson, who thought that the ultimate authority of the Church lay in a General Council; and indeed a minority at the Vatican Council, including Dupanloup, thought the timing of the pope’s declaration inopportune.

  Defeat in the Franco-Prussian war transformed the role of Joan in France. The new borders meant that, as in Joan’s time, Domremy was situated at the edge of France; and now all Frenchmen were united by a desire for revenge. France set out to train all its young men to fight; and the spread of primary schooling inculcated a sense of national identity.

  As an act of reparation for the sins that had brought disaster, a conservative government voted for the building of a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacré Coeur, perched high on the hill of Montmartre, may look like the sugary confection of some architectural cake-maker, but it implied France’s Catholic destiny and, when a huge picture of the Triumph of the Sacred Heart was eventually designed for the church, Joan of Arc was the one Frenchwoman among the group who worship Christ.