By the time she died at age nineteen, Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431) was a confidante of kings, a wounded veteran, and a triumphant general. Since then, the illiterate warrior girl has been transformed into the patron saint of France and a cornerstone of its national identity.
Joan was born in Domrémy, a town in northeastern France, in about 1412. Although she is often portrayed as coming from a poor, peasant background, her father was a modestly successful farmer. Still, her region was a focal point of the war with England, which had raged intermittently since 1337, and she witnessed significant destruction during her childhood.
At about age thirteen, according to testimony at her trial, Joan began to hear voices that she believed were those of several saints. The voices told her to take up arms against the English and lead the French to victory.
The Hundred Years’ War had begun as a dynastic conflict over which family should rule France—the House of Valois or the House of Plantagenet, which already controlled England. For ordinary peasants and laborers in France, the fight had little relevance to their daily lives.
But Joan recast the war as a national struggle, pitting not the Valois against the Plantagenets, but the French against the English. She was able to travel to the court of the Valois leader, Charles VII (1403–1461), who was so impressed that he put her at the head of the French military in 1429. She won a huge victory that summer by taking the city of Reims.
In 1430, Burgundian troops captured Joan and sold her to the English. She was put on trial on trumped-up heresy charges the next year, and then she was burned at the stake in Rouen. Her conviction was posthumously overturned in 1456, however, and she was proclaimed a Roman Catholic saint in 1920.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- The fighting continued for twenty-two more years after Joan’s death, until France finally drove the English out in 1453. However, England did not formally abandon its claim to France until 1801, when King George III (1738–1820) dropped the words king of France from his title.
- Joan la Pucelle appears as a villain in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1, a historical play about a part of the Hundred Years’ War told from the English point of view.
- Joan of Arc has been portrayed on film by dozens of actresses, including Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982), Jean Seberg (1938–1979), and Milla Jovovich (1975–). Joan was also the inspiration for a television series, Joan of Arcadia, that aired on CBS from 2003 to 2005.
