had besieged Orléans, as she had told him they would, and he, similarly besieged, had to agree to surrender his castle unless the Dauphin came to his aid by a specified date. Before sending Joan to the Dauphin, he had her examined and exorcised.

Charles agreed to the interview with Joan in desperation. Orléans, besieged since October of 1428, had great strategic importance; its fall would shake the loyalty of his remaining supporters and the readiness of his cities to provide money. Joan’s appearance at court on February 25, 1429, after traveling through enemy territory for eleven days, brought fresh hope. She identified the Dauphin at once in the crowded room, and she gave him some sign, “the King’s Secret,” which confirmed her mission but whose nature is still debated. A second exhaustive investigation of Joan occurred at Poitiers, where her piety and simplicity impressed everyone. Charles established a household for her. She had a standard made and adopted an ancient sword, discovered, through her directions, buried in the church of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois.

On April 28, 1429, Joan and an expedition, believing they were on a supply mission, entered Orléans. Joan addressed the English commander, calling on him to retreat. She turned rough French soldiers into crusaders, conducting daily assemblies for prayer and insisting that they rid themselves of camp followers and go to confession. When a party bringing supplies to the city on the opposite bank found the wind blowing against them, she predicted the sudden change of wind that permitted the boats to cross. Nonplussed Englishmen allowed another shipment led by priests to pass without firing on it; they explained their lack of action as the result of bewitchment. Within the city, Joan’s inspired leadership encouraged the troops to follow her famous standard and her ringing cry, “In God’s name, charge boldly!” On May 7, though seriously wounded as she had predicted, she rallied the troops to victory at the Tourelles fortification, after the French captains had given up hope. The next day, the English withdrew from Orléans.

In little more than a week, with much plunder and killing of prisoners, the French drove their enemies from the remaining Loire strongholds of Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency. Though Joan took part in these actions, her principal influence remained her extraordinary attraction and rallying of forces; she later said that she had killed no one. The troops of Arthur de Richemont, brother of the Duke of Brittany, who now joined the Dauphin, counted decisively in another victory at Patay on June 17.

Charles’s coronation on July 17 at Reims, deep in enemy territory, clearly shows Joan’s influence. Counselors and captains advised Charles to take advantage of his victories and move against Normandy. Joan persuaded him instead to travel to Reims, and city after city yielded to siege or simply opened its gates to the Dauphin: Auxerre, Troyes, Châlons, and Reims itself. The stunned English regent, the Duke of Bedford, offered no resistance.

After the coronation, Joan’s single-minded drive to take Paris and gain the release of the Duke of Orléans conflicted with a royal policy of caution and diplomacy based on the expectation that Burgundy, too, would rally peacefully to Charles. Charles ennobled Joan and her family and provided her with attendants and money, but she was too popular to permit her return to Domremy. Her voices warned that she had little time. By September 8, when the assault on Paris finally began, the English had regained their aplomb. Joan, again wounded, unsuccessfully urged an evening attack. Charles’s orders the next day forbade an attack, though the Baron of Montmorency and his men came out of the city to join the royal army, and on September 13, Charles withdrew his troops.

Joan now joined in a holding action to prevent the English forces from using the extended truce to retake their lost positions. Her men took Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, but lack of supplies forced her to abandon La Charité. In the spring of 1430, she led volunteers to stiffen the resistance of Compiègne against the Burgundians, contrary to the royal policy of pacification. That helps to explain Charles’s failure to negotiate her release after her capture at Compiègne on May 23—an event also predicted by her voices. The Burgundians sold her to the English authorities.

Joan’s trial, which ran from January 9 through May 30, 1431, tested her faith and gave her a final opportunity to uphold the French cause. Her death was a foregone conclusion; the English reserved their right to retry her if the Church exonerated her. Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais took the lead, realizing that a church trial, by proving her a witch, would turn her victories to Anglo-Burgundian advantage. Indeed, her captors may have believed her a camp trollop and sorceress until a physical examination by the Duchess of Bedford, the sister of Philip of Burgundy, proved Joan’s virginity. That made it clear that she had not had carnal relations with Satan, a sure sign of sorcery.

After twice attempting to escape (for which her voices blamed her), she stood trial in Rouen. The two earlier investigations and Joan’s impeccable behavior obliged Cauchon to falsify evidence and maneuver her into self-incrimination. She showed great perspicacity—her voices told her to answer boldly. Cauchon finally reduced the seventy-two points on which she had been examined to twelve edited points, on which her judges and the faculty of the University of Paris condemned her.

Seriously ill and threatened by her examiners, Joan apparently signed a recantation which temporarily spared her life. Cauchon claimed that she had renounced her voices; some historians claim forgery, admission to lesser charges, or some code by which she indicated denial. In any case, she returned to woman’s clothing as ordered and to her cell. She was later found wearing men’s clothing (perhaps partly to protect herself from her guards). When questioned, Joan replied that her voices had rebuked her for her change of heart. On May 29, the judges agreed unanimously to give Joan over to the English authorities. She received Communion on the morning of May 30 and was burned as a heretic.

Summary

Mystics with political messages abounded in Joan’s world, but none had Joan’s impact on politics. Widespread celebration in 1436 of Claude des Armoises, claiming to be Joan escaped from the flames, demonstrated her continuing popularity. Orléans preserved Joan’s cult, and Domremy became a national shrine. A surge of interest beginning in the nineteenth century with Napoleon has made Joan one of the most written-about persons in history, but efforts to analyze her in secular terms reaffirm the continuing mystery of her inspiration.

Many people in the huge crowd that witnessed Joan’s death believed in her martyrdom and reported miracles. English insistence on complete destruction of her body, with her ashes thrown into the Seine, underscored the point. When he took Rouen and the trial records in 1450, Charles VII ordered her case reopened, but only briefly. Too many influential living persons were implicated in Joan’s condemnation, and a reversal of the verdict would also support papal claims to jurisdiction in France. A papal legate, Guillaume d’Estouteville, later encouraged Joan’s aged mother to appeal to the pope, which brought about rehabilitation proceedings and the declaration of her innocence in 1456. Even then, the revised verdict merely revoked the earlier decision on procedural grounds without endorsing Joan’s mission or condemning her judges. Joan was canonized by Pope Benedict XV on May 16, 1920, and France honors her with a festival day on the second Sunday of May.

Bibliography

Fabre, Lucien. Joan of Arc. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1954. Fabre’s account reflects the French and Catholic position. He calls the English “Godons,” as Joan did (from their characteristic oath), and makes Cauchon a monster. He bases conclusions about the various puzzles on documents and provides a guide to the vast literature.

Guillemin, Henri. The True History of Joan “of Arc.” Translated by William Oxferry. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972. An example of the tradition that Joan did not die in 1431. One of the many variations in this tradition makes her the sister of Charles VII. Historians have never given much credence to books of this genre.

Lightbody, Charles Wayland. The Judgments of Joan: Joan of Arc, a Study in Cultural History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. A 171-page book on a very large topic. Lightbody treats the literature on Joan through the trial for rehabilitation; by way of apology, he promises a fuller treatment, which never appeared. Worth reading, but any author who treats George Bernard Shaw’s play as revelatory about Joan and her times must be held suspect.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Joan of Arc. London: Allen Lane, 1976. The necessary counterbalance to Fabre’s biography. An objective and scholarly accounting, but in treating Joan’s voices as hallucinations the author loses touch with Joan and her times. Lucie-Smith suggests a sympathetic approach to Joan’s judges.

Pernoud, Régine. Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses. Translated by Edward Hyams. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. A work of great integrity and judgment by the director of the Centre Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans. She has culled documents of Joan’s own times for an extremely useful book.

Pernoud, Régine. The Retrial of Joan of Arc: The Evidence of the Trial for Her Rehabilitation, 1450-1456. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Foreword by Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955. Though incomplete, this includes the essential 1455-1456 testimony by 144 persons who knew Joan at various stages of her life, making her one of the best-documented personalities of her century. Intended to counteract the earlier trial, it proves something of a whitewash, but it also gives a valid picture of what Joan meant to the French people.

Vale, Malcom G. A. Charles VII. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. A biography of sound scholarship which provides a better guide to the political world than do Joan’s biographies. Vale, an Englishman, plays down Joan’s own importance.

Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Warner finishes what Lightbody began, ranging through the centuries. She is notably good in utilizing recent scholarship, providing, for example, a hard look at how little is really known about Joan’s appearance. Warner’s feminist interpretation, however, imposes modern notions on fifteenth century experience. She plays down Joan’s voices and treats her fasting as possible anorexia and her adoption of men’s clothing as psychologically significant.

Article abstract: Military significance: Joan of Arc led troops that forced British forces to abandon their seven-month siege of the city of Orléans. This was the turning point in the Hundred Years’ War and ultimately led to the driving of English forces out of France.

A defining event of the Hundred Years’ War was the defeat of French forces by the British, led by English King Henry V, at Agincourt on August 25, 1415. The French, demoralized by military losses and decimated by epidemics of plague that lasted from 1348 until Joan’s girlhood, were also divided by factional disputes. These led to the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which named Henry V as heir to the throne of France and disinherited the dauphin (crown prince), the future Charles VII.

In 1428, British troops, aided by Burgundian allies, besieged the city of Orléans, a city critical to control of the south of France. At this crisis, Joan of Arc, daughter of a prosperous farmer father and devoutly religious mother, left the village of Domrémy, claiming voices from God had ordered her to lift the siege. Although illiterate, she convinced first an uncle and then a regional authority, Robert de Baudricourt, to allow her to go to the dauphin at Chinon, where she was received by Charles on March 6, 1429. Wearing short-cropped hair and men’s apparel in defiance of the social codes and religious edicts of her time, she led the troops Charles assigned to her, fighting despite a serious injury. The English fled Orléans on May 8, 1429. She went on to victories at Jargeau, Meung, Patay, Auxerre, and Troyes; a demoralized British force vacated the Beaugency area without a battle. She then convinced the dauphin to legitimatize his reign and escorted him to Rheims, where he was crowned Charles VII on July 17, 1429.

She next wanted to capture Paris, but Charles, without her knowledge, chose negotiation and, on August 28, 1429, signed a truce with Philip III the Good of Burgundy. Charles was deceived; the truce gave the Burgundians time to fortify Paris. Joan fought, failed, and again was wounded. Despite Joan’s protests, Charles ordered her to desist on September 9 and disbanded her army on September 21. Joan was sent to battle a mercenary captain, Perrinet Gressart, at Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier. She won and moved on to help the people of Compiègne resist recapture by the Burgundians.

There, on May 23, 1430, Joan was captured by Burgundian forces. Charles made no attempt to rescue or ransom her. The Burgundians sold her to the British, who had her convicted as heretic and idolator by an ecclesiastical court after a long imprisonment. She was turned over to secular British forces and was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen. In 1456, after the French had retaken Normandy (1450) and the last battle of the Hundred Years’ War was fought at Castillon (1453), Charles, in part to secure his hold on the throne, caused her to be retried. This rehabilitation or nullification trial, held at Rouen, overturned the results of the 1431 trial. In 1920, Joan was canonized a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. By then, she had long since become a symbol of moral and physical courage.

Further Reading:

Devries, Kelly. Joan of Arc, A Military Leader. Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 1999.

Joan of Arc: Virgin Warrior. Documentary. A&E Entertainment, 1998.

Margolis, Nadia. Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film: A Select, Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990.

Pernoud, Régine, and Marie-Véronique Clin. Joan of Arc, Her Story. Translated and revised by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.