St. Joan of Arc

Who was St. Joan of Arc?

Joan of Arc was a farmer's daughter from the village of Domrémy, in northeastern France, who at seventeen went to the uncrowned king of France and told him God had sent her to drive the English from his kingdom. Within a few months she had helped break the English siege of Orléans and stood beside Charles VII at his coronation in Reims. A year later she was captured, sold to the English and put on trial for heresy before a church court at Rouen. She was burned there on May 30, 1431, at about nineteen.

The French called her la Pucelle, the Maid. She never learned to read or write, yet the record of her trial is one of the best-documented lives of the Middle Ages: page after page of her own answers, taken down by notaries while she spoke. Twenty-five years after her death, a court authorized by the pope declared that trial null and void. The Catholic Church canonized her in 1920.

She is the patron saint of France and of soldiers, and her feast day is May 30. Catholics, French patriots of every political stripe, soldiers, novelists and filmmakers have all claimed her.

Early life in Domrémy

Joan was born around 1412 to Jacques d'Arc, a farmer of modest means, and his wife Isabelle. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the traditional date of January 6, 1412, though no record of her birth survives. At her trial she said she thought she was nineteen.

She grew up in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. By the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, the English king had been named heir to the French throne, and the Dauphin Charles, son of the mad king Charles VI, was shut out. The English and their Burgundian allies held Paris, Normandy and Reims, where French kings had always been crowned. Domrémy sat on the border, loyal to the Dauphin, and its people lived with raids. Joan told her judges that once, "for dread of the Burgundians," her family fled to the nearby town of Neufchâteau.

She told them too that her mother taught her the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Creed, and that she learned to sew and spin: "in sewing and spinning, she feared no woman in Rouen." She went to confession and Mass, and Benedict XVI noted that from childhood she "showed great love and compassion for the poorest, the sick and all the suffering."

The voices

Everything Joan did began with what she called her voices, or her "counsel." What we know of them comes almost entirely from her own testimony at Rouen. At her session of February 22, 1431, the record says:

Afterwards she declared that at the age of thirteen she had a voice from God to help her and guide her. And the first time she was much afraid. And this voice came towards noon, in summer, in her father's garden

The first, she said, was St. Michael, "and he was not alone, but accompanied by many angels from heaven." Then came St. Catherine and St. Margaret, the two virgin martyrs whose statues stood in many French churches. Asked whether she saw them in reality, she answered: "I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you; and when they left me, I wept; and I fain would have had them take me with them too."

The voices, she said, told her to be good and go to church, and later to go to the help of the king of France. She resisted for years. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, when they pressed her she answered that she was "a poor girl" who did not know how to ride or fight. The Church has never ruled on what Joan experienced; her canonization honored her faith and virtue, not her voices as such. But she never wavered about them, even when it would have saved her life.

The mission of 1429

Vaucouleurs and Chinon

In May 1428 Joan persuaded a relative to take her to Vaucouleurs, the nearest royal fortress, where the captain Robert de Baudricourt sent her home. She came back in January 1429. By then the English had been besieging Orléans, the key to the Loire valley, since October. This time Baudricourt gave her an escort. She cut her hair short, put on men's clothes and rode for eleven days across enemy country to the Dauphin's court at Chinon.

Asked at her trial whether she had sinned by leaving her parents without permission, she said that "since God commanded, if she had had a hundred parents, or had been the king's daughter, she would have gone nevertheless."

At Chinon, the story goes, Charles hid among his courtiers to test her, and she went straight to him. The Catholic Encyclopedia says she gave him a secret sign, which she would never reveal, even under threat of torture. Charles sent her to Poitiers, where a panel of bishops and theologians examined her for about three weeks and found nothing heretical in her. He then gave her armor and a place with the army sent to relieve Orléans. Her voices, she said, told her where to find an old sword buried behind the altar of the chapel of St. Catherine at Fierbois, and it was found there.

Orléans

Joan reached Orléans on the evening of April 29, 1429. Before the fighting she sent letters to the English commanders summoning them, in the name of God, to go home. Over the next ten days the French took the English forts around the city one by one. On May 7, at the assault on the Tourelles, the fortress guarding the bridge, she was struck by an arrow; she told her judges she was "wounded in the neck by an arrow or crossbolt but she received great comfort from St. Margaret." She went back to the attack, and the fort fell that evening. On May 8 the English army withdrew.

What she carried into battle was her banner. She described it in detail at Rouen: white linen "sown with lilies," with the figure of Christ holding the world between two angels and the words Jhesus Maria. She said she "liked her standard forty times better" than her sword, and that she carried it herself "to avoid killing any one; she said she had never killed a man."

Patay and Reims

The army swept the Loire in June, taking Jargeau, Meung and Beaugency, and on June 18 routed the English at Patay. Then Joan insisted on the march to Reims, deep in Burgundian country. Town after town opened its gates. On Sunday, July 17, 1429, Charles VII was anointed and crowned in Reims Cathedral, with Joan standing near the altar holding her banner. When her judges later asked why her standard, and not those of the other captains, had been brought into the cathedral, she answered: "It had been present in the perils; that was reason enough for it to be honored."

Capture and trial

Paris and Compiègne

After Reims, the king hesitated. An assault on Paris on September 8 failed, and Joan was wounded in the thigh by a crossbow bolt. In December Charles ennobled her and her family. In the spring of 1430 she went to defend the town of Compiègne against the Burgundians. On May 23, during a sortie, she was cut off outside the walls when the gate was closed, pulled from her horse and captured by men of John of Luxembourg, an ally of Burgundy.

She was held for months in the castle of Beaurevoir. She tried to escape by leaping from a tower and was badly hurt. She later explained that she had heard the people of Compiègne were all to be put "to fire and to the sword," and that "she would rather die than fall into the hands of the English." Charles VII made no serious attempt to ransom her. John of Luxembourg handed her over to the English for a payment of 10,000 francs, and in December she was taken to Rouen, the English capital in France.

The trial at Rouen

The English wanted her condemned by the Church, which would brand Charles VII as a king crowned with the help of a witch or a heretic. The judge was Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, a strong supporter of the English cause, sitting with the deputy inquisitor Jean Le Maistre and dozens of theologians and lawyers, many from the University of Paris. Joan had no lawyer. Against church law she was held in a military prison guarded by English soldiers, not in a church prison guarded by women.

The public sessions began on February 21, 1431. The judges questioned her about her voices, her clothing, her banner, her leap from the tower and her submission to the Church, often with trap questions. The most famous came on February 24, when she was asked whether she knew she was in God's grace. To say yes would be presumption; to say no would be to confess herself guilty. She answered:

"If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace."

Asked to submit her deeds to the judgment of the Church, she said, "I commit myself to Our Lord, Who sent me, to Our Lady, and to all the Blessed Saints of Paradise," and added that she thought "our Lord and the Church were all one": "Why do you make difficulties when it is all one?" On her men's clothing she said that "the dress is a small, nay, the least thing," and that she wore it only by God's command. She told them she would rather be "torn asunder by horses than have come to France without God's leave."

Abjuration, relapse and death

In May the court threatened her with torture. On May 24 it took her to the cemetery of the abbey of Saint-Ouen in Rouen, where a preacher harangued her before a crowd and an executioner's cart. Frightened, she signed an abjuration and promised to wear women's clothing. A few days later she was found again in men's clothes. Witnesses at the later inquiry gave different reasons, from her own clothes being taken from her to fear of assault by her guards. When the judges came on May 28, she told them St. Catherine and St. Margaret had brought her word from God "of the great pity of this treason by which she consented to abjure and recant in order to save her life." On May 29 the court declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her over to the English.

On the morning of May 30, 1431, Joan was burned at the stake in the Place du Vieux-Marché, the old market square of Rouen. The Catholic Encyclopedia records that she asked for a cross, embraced it and had it held up before her. Benedict XVI, drawing on the eyewitnesses, said she died "her gaze fixed upon the Crucified Jesus and crying out several times the Name of Jesus." Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.

The nullification trial

In 1449 the French retook Rouen, and the trial records fell into their hands. Charles VII, whose own crown was tainted by her condemnation, ordered an inquiry in 1450. The cardinal legate Guillaume d'Estouteville and the inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, opened a church investigation in 1452. In 1455 Pope Callixtus III authorized a formal appeal brought by Joan's elderly mother, Isabelle, and her two surviving brothers. Isabelle presented the petition in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on November 7, 1455.

The commissioners heard well over a hundred witnesses: villagers from Domrémy, soldiers who had fought beside her, and clerics and notaries who had sat through the Rouen trial. On July 7, 1456, in the archbishop's palace in Rouen, they declared the condemnation "null and void," as Benedict XVI put it, and ordered a cross raised where she died. The court annulled the trial for its fraud and procedural abuses. It did not canonize her or rule on her voices.

Miracles of St. Joan of Arc

The stories told about Joan in her lifetime are of a different kind from the healings examined in a canonization cause. Sorted by the labels this encyclopedia uses:

• Traditional: her recognition of the disguised Charles VII at Chinon and her secret sign to him, the finding of the sword at Fierbois where her voices said it was buried, and her predictions, such as her wound at Orléans and the coronation at Reims. Several of these come from her own testimony or the witnesses of 1455–1456, but they were never examined as miracles.
• Reported: her voices themselves, which she described in detail under oath. The Church has made no judgment on them.
• Approved: for her beatification in 1909, the Church accepted three healings of French nuns attributed to her intercession, and for her canonization in 1920 two more cures, according to the Saint Joan of Arc Center: a cure of tuberculosis and the healing of an open sore on a woman's foot. The same source says the pope dispensed with one of the usual four miracles for her beatification.

Why St. Joan of Arc is the patron saint of France and soldiers

Her patronage of France goes back to what she did: in the darkest years of the Hundred Years' War she turned the tide at Orléans and brought the king to his crowning. In 1922, two years after her canonization, Pope Pius XI declared Our Lady of the Assumption the principal patron of France and named Joan a secondary patron. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was later added as a second secondary patron.

She is the patron of soldiers because she lived as one: she rode with the army, wore armor, was wounded twice and shared the hardships of camp life. Her soldiers remembered her forbidding swearing and sending away the camp followers, and urging the men to go to confession. Her image was everywhere in France during the First World War, and many military chapels bear her name. Popular lists also make her a patron of prisoners and of people ridiculed for their faith. See more patron saints.

Symbols of St. Joan of Arc in art

Since no true portrait of Joan exists, artists have always invented her face. The sketch by Clément de Fauquembergue, the clerk of the Parlement of Paris, was drawn in the margin of his register on May 10, 1429, when news of Orléans reached the city. He gave her long hair and a dress, though she had short hair and wore men's clothes. These are the clues to look for:

• Armor: her most common image since the 19th century, often full plate armor and sometimes a helmet with plumes. In reality she wore armor in battle and a man's doublet and hose the rest of the time.
• The white standard: a banner sown with gold lilies, often with Jhesus Maria written on it, as she described it at her trial. It is the surest way to tell Joan from other armored saints such as St. Michael or St. George.
• A sword: sometimes raised, sometimes held by the blade like a cross, as in Rossetti's painting.
• Short hair: she cut it "round like a young fop's" according to the trial charges. Older paintings often ignore this.
• The fleur-de-lis: the royal lily of France, on her banner, her tunic or her shield.
• Chains, a stake or a cross held to her breast: in scenes of her imprisonment and death. Holy cards usually show her at prayer instead.

Paintings of Joan before the 19th century are rare, and the kneeling figure from Rubens's circle is one of the few Baroque images. The great age of Joan in art came after 1840, when the historian Jules Quicherat published the trial records and France, defeated in 1870, looked for a national heroine. That is when Ingres painted her at Reims, Bastien-Lepage put her in her garden, and Frémiet, Dubois and others made the equestrian statues that stand in Paris, Reims and Orléans. The English Pre-Raphaelites took her up too: Rossetti painted her kissing the sword, an image of devotion more than of war.

Joan lived after the split between East and West, so she has no place in Orthodox iconography; modern Catholic icons in Byzantine style show her in armor with her banner and a halo.

Feast day and where St. Joan of Arc is honored

The Church keeps her feast on May 30, the day she died. It is in the Roman Martyrology and in the proper calendar of France, but not in the General Roman Calendar, so most parishes outside France mark it only when the church is dedicated to her. See the feast day calendar.

Rouen

The Église Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc, designed by Louis Arretche, was consecrated in 1979 next to the place of her death in the Place du Vieux-Marché. Its sweeping roof is meant to suggest the flames of the stake or an overturned boat. Inside are sixteenth-century stained-glass windows saved from the church of Saint-Vincent, destroyed by bombing in 1944. The city holds its own Joan of Arc festival around May 30.

Orléans

The French Ministry of Culture, which lists the Fêtes de Jeanne d'Arc in its inventory of intangible cultural heritage, says Orléans founded them in 1430, making them one of the oldest commemorative festivals in France. They run from April 29, when a young woman of the city chosen to play Joan rides in on horseback, to May 8, the day the siege was lifted, ending with a long civic, military and religious procession. Around 300,000 spectators come over the eleven days.

Paris and the national feast

By a law of July 10, 1920, passed unanimously, the French Republic keeps a national feast of Joan of Arc, "fête du patriotisme," on the second Sunday of May. In Paris the official ceremony is held at her gilded equestrian statue by Emmanuel Frémiet in the Place des Pyramides.

Thérèse of Lisieux and Joan of Arc

St. Thérèse of Lisieux loved Joan from childhood. In the Carmel of Lisieux she wrote two short plays about her for the community, performed in January 1894 and January 1895, and took the part of Joan herself in the second. Her sister Céline, who had entered the Carmel with her camera, photographed her in costume. Thérèse died in 1897, before Joan was beatified; the two women now share the patronage of France.

Prayer to St. Joan of Arc

No traditional prayer to St. Joan of Arc is used across the whole Church, and no prayer of her own composition survives. Catholics ask her to pray for them for France, for soldiers and for courage when their faith is mocked, often simply: "St. Joan of Arc, pray for us."

Some take her own words from the trial record as a prayer of trust, above all her answer about grace: "If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me." The name she called on as she died was the one written on her banner: Jesus.