Joan of Arc: The Maid of Orléans | The Hundred Years' War

Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431), also known as the Maid of Orléans, was a peasant girl from the village of Domrémy, in the duchy of Bar, who claimed to have been sent by God to deliver France from the English. In 1429, at the age of seventeen, she approached the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, and was given command of a small French army that was sent to relieve the siege of Orléans. Her success at Orléans was followed by the French victory on the Loire, the coronation of Charles at Reims on 17 July 1429, and a series of later campaigns. She was captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne on 23 May 1430, sold to the English for a substantial sum, tried for heresy by a French ecclesiastical court under English supervision, and burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431, aged nineteen. The rehabilitation process opened in 1450 under Pope Nicholas V; the verdict was annulled in 1456 by a commission appointed by Pope Callixtus III. She was beatified in 1909 and canonised by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920.

The standard scholarly treatment is the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (the trial and rehabilitation transcripts, in the edition of Pierre Duparc, 1977–1989, 5 vols). The most useful single-volume biographies are Régine Pernoud’s Joan of Arc: Her Story (1998) and the more recent work of Kelly DeVries, Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (1999). Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. III (2009), treats Joan’s career in detail.

Early life

Joan was born c. 1412 in the village of Domrémy, in the duchy of Bar, on the border of Lorraine and Champagne. Her father, Jacques d’Arc, was a prosperous peasant farmer who held a small piece of land from the local lord. Her mother, Isabelle Romée, was a deeply religious woman who taught her daughter the Catholic faith.

Joan grew up in a world marked by the long war between England and France. The Burgundian faction, supported by the English, controlled much of northeastern France, and Domrémy itself was on the frontier between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions. The villagers of Domrémy were royalists, and they had been forced to flee their homes on several occasions during the civil war. Joan’s later insistence that she was the agent of the French crown, rather than of either faction, was a feature of her political identity from the start.

Joan’s religious devotion was intense from an early age. She reported hearing the voices of saints, including Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, who she said had instructed her to support the Dauphin and to free France from the English. The voices, she said, had been with her since she was thirteen. The question of how literally to take the voices is the central problem of Joan’s interior life; the standard reading, set out by Pernoud and developed in the modern literature, is that the voices were Joanians rather than hallucinationary, and that they are intelligible within the framework of late-medieval female religious experience.

The mission to the Dauphin

In 1428, when she was about sixteen, Joan decided to seek an audience with the Dauphin. She travelled to Vaucouleurs, a town loyal to the Dauphin, and approached the local garrison commander, Robert de Baudricourt, with her request. Baudricourt was initially sceptical, but Joan’s persistence eventually won him over, and in February 1429 he provided her with a small escort to take her to the Dauphin’s court at Chinon.

Joan’s journey to Chinon was a remarkable episode. A young peasant girl, dressed in men’s clothing and claiming to have been sent by God, travelled through Burgundian-controlled territory to the court of the disinherited Dauphin. Her arrival at Chinon in early March 1429 was greeted with a mixture of curiosity, scepticism, and, in some cases, hostility. Many of the Dauphin’s advisors regarded her as a fraud or a madwoman, and only the Dauphin himself, desperate for any opportunity to recover his position, agreed to give her an audience.

Joan was questioned by a committee of theologians at Poitiers, who were charged with determining whether her claims were genuine. The committee eventually concluded that there was no obvious sign of fraud, and the Dauphin agreed to give Joan command of a small army and to send her to Orléans.

The lifting of the Siege of Orléans

The siege of Orléans, which had been underway since October 1428, was the immediate test of Joan’s mission. The city, strategically located on the Loire, was the key to the reconquest of France, and the fall of the city would have opened the way for an English advance into the south.

Joan arrived at Orléans on 29 April 1429, and her presence transformed the situation. The French garrison, inspired by Joan’s conviction and her claim of divine support, fought with renewed vigour, and the English bastides around the city were captured one by one. The English abandoned the siege on 8 May 1429, retreating northward. The French re-entered the city in triumph.

The lifting of the siege was followed by a series of French victories at Jargeau (11–12 June), Meung-sur-Loire (15 June), Beaugency (16–17 June), and Patay (18 June), the last of which was a major French victory over an English army under the command of John Talbot. The English were forced to evacuate much of the Loire valley, and the way was open for the French to march on Reims, the traditional city of French coronations.

The coronation at Reims

The coronation of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429 was the high point of Joan’s career. The Dauphin, who had been a dispossessed prince, was now the legitimate King of France, crowned and anointed in the traditional city of French coronations. The coronation was a major political and symbolic event, and it was the direct result of Joan’s determination and leadership.

Joan, however, was not a politician, and her role after the coronation was increasingly marginal. She urged Charles to march on Paris and to drive the English from France, but the king and his advisors were more cautious. Joan was wounded during an unsuccessful attack on Paris in September 1429, and she returned to the Loire valley, where she continued to lead French forces in a series of smaller actions.

The capture and trial

Joan was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiègne on 23 May 1430, during a skirmish outside the town. The capture was a serious blow to the French cause, and the Burgundians, eager to please their English allies, sold Joan to the English for a substantial sum. The most recent work on the financial question, by Olivier Bouzy in Jeanne d’Arc et l’Angleterre (2005), puts the price at about 10,000 livres tournois.

Joan was taken to Rouen, the English stronghold in Normandy, where she was put on trial for heresy. The trial, which began on 21 February 1431, was conducted by a French ecclesiastical court under English supervision. The presiding judge was Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, a French cleric who was loyal to the English. The prosecution, led by Cauchon, charged Joan with a long list of offences, including wearing men’s clothing, claiming to hear the voices of saints, and refusing to submit to the authority of the Church.

The trial was a remarkable episode. Joan, who was illiterate and had no formal theological training, repeatedly outwitted her examiners. She insisted on the genuineness of her voices, and she refused to recant her claim of divine mission. She was convicted, however, and on 30 May 1431 she was burned at the stake in the market square of Rouen, aged nineteen. The English captain who was supposed to burn her body a second time, in case the crowd tried to retrieve relics, was so affected by the death that he wept.

The rehabilitation

The trial of Joan was a miscarriage of justice. The presiding judge was a partisan of the English, the procedures were irregular by the standards of contemporary ecclesiastical law, and the verdict was politically motivated. The French government, eager to rehabilitate Joan’s memory, began the process of appealing the verdict in 1450 under Pope Nicholas V. The process was completed in 1456 by a commission appointed by Pope Callixtus III, which declared the original verdict null and void and Joan’s memory cleared. Joan was beatified in 1909 and canonised as a saint by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920. Her feast day is celebrated on 30 May, the anniversary of her death, and she is one of the patron saints of France.

The legacy

Joan of Arc is one of the most celebrated figures in French history and one of the most famous women in world history. Her life has been the subject of countless works of art, literature, and music, including Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, and a long French tradition of hagiographical and historical writing. The story of her mission, her trial, and her death has been a touchstone of French national identity for centuries, and she remains a powerful symbol of French resistance to foreign occupation.

The modern historiographical question, set out by Pernoud and developed in the more recent work of DeVries, is how to read Joan’s voices. The traditional reading, that Joan was the recipient of genuine divine revelation, has been replaced in the scholarly literature by readings that take the voices seriously as historical evidence without necessarily accepting them at face value. The standard reading is that the voices were real to Joan, that they were a feature of her interior life, and that they are intelligible within the framework of late-medieval female religious experience. The reading, however, is not unanimous, and the question of Joan’s mental state at the trial is one of the live issues in the modern literature.