Dreyer’s historical adviser was Pierre Champion, the man who had helped Anatole France. His scholarship, Dreyer’s direction and Falconetti’s acting set a standard no other early film could approach. At the time it was not a commercial success but with time it has been recognised as a great work of art. In 1995, on the centenary of the invention of cinema, a journalist for the papal paper Osservatore Romano named it one of the ten best religious films of all time.
Joan of Arc had become a heroine with universal appeal, accessible to those from Protestant as well as Catholic backgrounds. The papacy, however, although won over to the view of the French Church that Joan was a saint, was unhappy about those who regarded her purely as a political symbol. Pius XI used his training as a librarian and soon had a study full of books by Action Française writers. Of Jacques Bainville, the historian of France, he noted that the chapters on Joan of Arc and the Crusades were inadequate from a religious point of view. Of Maurras himself he said, ‘he has a fine mind, one of the finest of our age . . . but he is only a mind. Christ is alien to him . . . [he sees] the Church from outside, not from inside’.4 His conclusion was that the movement valued politics above religion; and this made its influence insidious. In 1927 he placed the movement under the ban of the Church and its paper on the Index of forbidden reading matter. When, on the national holiday in honour of Joan, Action Française staged its procession, Monseigneur, later Cardinal, Baudrillart, Rector of the Institut Catholique in Paris (one of the most prestigious Catholic institutions of higher learning in France), found it impossible to prevent his students from joining in and so thought of resigning. Soon, however, he had the chance to put forward his own views on Joan. Just before the quincentenary of Joan’s execution in Rouen in May 1931, he was one of nine members of the Académie française, along with Marshal Foch, who wrote an essay in a volume called in its 1930 English version For Joan of Arc. Baudrillart focused on Joan the Saint.
Baudrillart is impressive on the issue that made Shaw think Joan was a Protestant, her condemnation for seeming to oppose her own, private revelations to the authority of the Church as represented by one ecclesiastical court. Baudrillart counters: ‘It suffices that these revelations contain nothing contrary to Catholic doctrine or unworthy of true wisdom. The soul thus favoured, after being sufficiently enlightened, is bound to give them the assent of faith.’5 He adds that, if normally the Christian ought to consult his or her confessor, it is not an obligation so to do if the Christian soul is morally certain that it is inspired by the Holy Sprit. The Rouen judges had no right to condemn Joan, for her voices commanded nothing against faith, saying only that ‘Charles VII’s cause was right’, nor against morals, since male costume was ‘a practical matter, not a rule of conduct’.6 Finally, if her opinions involved doctrine, Cauchon should have allowed an appeal to the pope.
England and France were now at peace over Joan: it was only the French who quarrelled about her. On the 500th anniversary of Joan of Arc’s death in Rouen, on 30 May 1931 the Archbishop of Westminster, head of the English Catholic Church, went to the city to express his great admiration of her virtues. Hilaire Belloc, the leading literary historian among English Catholics, had written a moving life of Joan for English readers that could have been written for his French relations. From 1931 dates an eirenic lecture by an Anglophile French scholar Louis Cazamian, who was asked to deliver the Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrews University. Cazamian was at pains to emphasise the involvement of both nations and their institutions in Joan’s fate. ‘England and France join in the guilt; they are at one in the homage of admiration and regret. I may be excused if I claim here as a burden of solidarity what is otherwise an honour, membership of the University of Paris: the Sorbonne took the lead among the abettors of the crime, and showed itself, as Andrew Lang puts it, “capable de tout”.’7
In the same year Maurras gave to his followers an Action Française version of Joan’s life. Maurras was correct to stress Joan’s loyalty to her king, which he admired, but he downplayed her faith, which he did not share. He was also unrepentant in rejecting the papal view of Joan. His essay on Joan for the ‘Association of Young Royalist Ladies’ aimed to be political and divisive.
‘This heroine of the Nation,’ he insisted, ‘is not the heroine of Democracy. Was she just a daughter of the people in the sense that she was ignorant and ill educated? Joan stood for three ideas held by the common people of France: the land saved; the country saved; both saved by royalty re-established.’8 Maurras contends that these truths of French politics were part of the story of Joan of Arc, but generally they were ignored at every feast day of Joan of Arc. Her essential mission was to save the nation by the office of kingship. She was not ungrateful to the founding dynasty, whereas those now claiming to be devoted to her are ungrateful. At the moment the authorities exclude from her career its political element, the cinema starts to leave out of her story its religious element. Soldiers admired her fighting capacity. The principles of her conduct were religious, but her aim was patriotic. Had circumstances been different, she might have been a pure republican, but as it was she acted at a time when kings ruled, when it was important to know who was the true heir of the Capetians. As a patriot she was a legitimist, and so also the heroine of the dynasty. She spoke of the sacred rights of the crown and of holy warfare, she stood above all for the king. She was a soldier in her reactions, not a liberal, nor a democrat. ‘The example of Joan of Arc leads us to ask for a king who reigns and who governs.’9
Maurras was right to maintain that Joan had believed in the divine authority of her king, but this was a normal belief at the time. By 1931, however, the regime she took for granted was irrelevant to France’s situation. Joan could not have believed in the Third Republic, just as she could not have understood what a modern scholar might tell her, that there is no reliable reason for believing that ‘saints’ Margaret and Catherine ever existed. Maurras and other members of Action Française lived in the past.
Another more profound voice saw in Joan a good reason for not conforming. If any thought Joan staid in her virtue, then Georges Bernanos, novelist and polemicist, invoked a fiery heroine. In 1908, during the heady days of Action Française, Bernanos had taken part in the scuffles of the Camelots du Roi but, having left the movement, he made a point of showing how awkward Joan had been. He wrote a brilliant pamphlet that could be read as a defence of Action Française against Pius XI’s ban but should be read as a defence of nonconformity.
Jeanne, relapse et sainte (1929) takes as its subject the woman, Joan, who was condemned for heresy, submitted, retracted her submission, was condemned again as a ‘relapsed’ heretic and is yet a saint. Bernanos enjoyed upsetting people; he found it easier to quarrel than to make up. His tract hammers home one simple message: with ruthless logic he exposes the evasions of both Joan’s enemies and her friends. After the unjust trial nobody dared to defend her until it was safe to do so. Then, over and over again, he says: ‘Our church is the church of saints.’10 The subtext is, ‘but our church also condemns saints’ – Bernanos found the idea of being a conventional Catholic unappealing. While in Majorca in 1936, he witnessed the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and he saw how anti-Christian was the behaviour of Catholic nationalists towards their political enemies.
In the same year, the anti-Semitism that had flourished during the Dreyfus affair set on a new target in France, since the new Prime Minister, Léon Blum, was a Jew. The Right saw evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. In Orléans, Joan’s city, some leading officials were Jews, so a cruel cartoonist pictured a stained-glass window filled with stars of David.
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 Chris
tian 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.
TWENTY-FOUR
Vive la France! Vive Jeanne d’Arc!
The 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.
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