Was Joan of Arc Burned at the Stake? | The Hundred Years' War

Yes. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on 30 May 1431 in the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen, the market square of the Norman capital. She was 19 years old. The execution was carried out by the English occupation government, after a trial for heresy conducted by a French ecclesiastical court under the presidency of Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais. The trial was, in the considered judgment of the rehabilitation commissions of 1450 and 1456, marked by procedural irregularities so serious as to render the verdict null and void. The standard modern treatment in English is Régine Pernoud’s Joan of Arc: Her Story; in French, the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the verbatim trial record, is the indispensable primary source.

The trial

The trial opened in the chapel of the castle of Rouen on 21 February 1431 and ran for three months. The seventy charges against Joan included the wearing of men’s clothing, the claim to hear the voices of saints, the refusal to submit to the authority of the Church, the assertion of a vocation to acts of violence, the leaving of her parents without consent, the practice of sorcery, and the violation of the divine ordinance of women. The prosecution was led by Pierre Cauchon, a French cleric of the Burgundian faction who had been driven from the see of Beauvais by the Armagnacs and who hoped, in the event of an English victory, to be restored to it. The assessors were largely French clerics of the Anglo-Burgundian party.

The trial record, preserved in the Procès, is one of the most remarkable documents of the Middle Ages. Joan conducted her own defence, refused to take an oath to tell the whole truth (the “in partibus” oath, the standard French inquisitorial formula), and repeatedly outwitted her examiners. Her answer to the question of whether she was in the grace of God — “If I am, may God keep me there; if I am not, may God bring me there” — has passed into the standard reference works of French law. The trial, by any modern standard of procedure, was a disgrace.

The verdict

Joan was found guilty of heresy on 9 May 1431, on the basis of her refusal to submit to the Church and her persistence in wearing men’s clothing. The judges, recognising that the verdict would be controversial, gave her the opportunity to recant, and she agreed, on the morning of 24 May, to submit to the Church and to wear women’s clothing. The recantation was signed by Joan in the chapel of the castle.

The recantation lasted four days. On 28 May, in the prison, Joan was reported to have said that she had heard her Voices again and to have resumed men’s clothing. The relapse was treated by the court as a return to heresy. The sentence of death, by burning at the stake, was pronounced on 29 May. The execution was carried out on 30 May 1431.

The execution

Joan was taken to the Place du Vieux-Marché, the old market square in the centre of Rouen, in the morning of 30 May 1431. She was tied to a tall wooden post erected on a platform; a fire was lit at her feet, the wood piled so that the flame would take some time to reach her. The execution was witnessed by a large crowd, the English officials of the Rouen garrison, the Burgundian officers, and a number of chroniclers, including Jean Massieu and the canon of Rouen who would later testify at the rehabilitation. The accounts differ on the details of Joan’s last words, but the most reliable report is that she called upon Jesus and continued to do so until the smoke and flame took her. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.

The execution, by the English government’s own later admission at the Congress of Arras in 1435, was a political miscalculation. The English had hoped that the death of the so-called Pucelle would end the French political revival of 1429. The opposite happened. Joan’s death made her a martyr, and the French cause was strengthened.

The rehabilitation

The rehabilitation was opened at the request of Charles VII and Joan’s family in 1450. The first process, conducted under the authority of Pope Nicholas V, heard testimony from the surviving witnesses of the trial and from the residents of Joan’s home village of Domrémy. The second process, opened in 1452 and concluded in 1456, was conducted by a commission appointed by Pope Callixtus III. The verdict, pronounced on 7 July 1456, declared the 1431 conviction null and void on the grounds of procedural irregularity, of the partiality of the presiding judge, of the intimidation of witnesses, and of the use of evidence not properly tested. The rehabilitation did not canonise Joan; it annulled the verdict of heresy. The canonisation would come 464 years later.

The canonisation

Joan was beatified on 18 April 1909 by Pope Pius X. She was canonised on 16 May 1920 by Pope Benedict XV. The feast day, in the Roman calendar, is 30 May, the anniversary of her death. She is one of the patron saints of France and one of the most widely venerated saints in the modern Catholic Church.

The cultural legacy

The story of Joan’s life and death has been the subject of works of art and literature for six centuries. Christine de Pizan was writing about Joan within a generation of her death; Shakespeare, in Henry VI, Part 1 (c. 1592), drew on the English chronicle tradition of Holinshed and Hall. Voltaire, Schiller, Verdi, Twain, Shaw, and Anouilh have all made Joan a central character of their work. The execution has become one of the most iconic moments of medieval European history, and it remains a touchstone of French national identity.

Significance

The execution of Joan of Arc is the most famous single episode of the war. The trial has been the subject of legal study as well as historical study; the rehabilitation proceedings of 1450 and 1456 are one of the first examples of a formal judicial review on the modern inquisitorial model; the canonisation proceedings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are a model for modern Catholic procedure. The story of her life and death has done more than any other single fact to make the Hundred Years’ War legible in the popular imagination.