JOAN OF ARC VERSUS THE CHURCH
More than her defiance of the Church’s authority, more than her claims to know the future, more than her perhaps heterodox enthusiasm for the host, she was condemned for experiencing the other world as simply and as concretely as she experienced this world every day.
—MARINA WARNER, Joan of Arc
On the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the end of a long gallery dotted with Rodin sculptures, Jules Bastien-Lepage’s painting Jeanne d’Arc hangs on a tall white wall. A magisterial eight feet by nine feet, thickly painted and lush with color, the canvas dominates the gallery as if it had just moved into the area and intended to show off its prosperity. The impression is partly one of comparative size. Its neighbors, paintings by Alfred Stevens and Alexandre Cabanel, are a great deal smaller. Mainly, though, it is one of comparative subject. As anyone who has encountered representations of Joan knows, she tends to dwarf the importance of everything around her. Her charisma is brash. She should be isolated. Johan Huizinga, the distinguished Dutch historian, excluded her from his classic The Waning of the Middle Ages because he knew she would throw off the book’s balance.
In Bastien-Lepage’s portrait, unbalance is the point, but the artist achieves this effect in a way that is difficult at first to articulate. Joan is portrayed in the garden of her childhood home in the village of Domrémy, in the northeast of France. She is wearing peasant clothes: a sackcloth skirt and a blue blouse tied across her belly and chest. Her head is cocked quizzically to the side, her long neck is outstretched, and her left hand reaches to touch the hanging leaves of a tree. In this setting and in this position, the passing viewer could easily mistake her for an ordinary country girl in repose, perhaps daydreaming of a suitor. But if one stands in front of the painting, one’s gaze inevitably comes to rest on Joan’s eyes, and the true nature of the scene flashes into focus. Her eyes are bright, blue, and wide, and she stares with them into the distance as if she is possessed or in a trance. They are so absorbent, so gaping and terrifying, in fact, that it can take several moments to notice that deep in the background, brushed in with the weeds and the branches, the artist has included the source of Joan’s rapture. Three haloed saints, two in flowing robes and one in golden armor, hover ethereally above ground that to this day is considered by many to be sacred—the birthplace of a saint.
It is not considered so by everyone. When Bastien-Lepage’s painting had its premiere in Paris, in 1880, Emile Zola castigated the artist for spoiling an accomplished work of naturalism with unfortunate superstition. He approved of Bastien-Lepage’s attempt to get at “the real Joan of Arc, a simple peasant in the setting of her small Lorraine garden,” but he found the supernatural tableau intrusive:
[The artist] thought he should portray the moment when Joan hears voices to dramatize the painting and put it in a historical setting. The young girl was sitting under an apple tree, working, when she heard the voices; she stood up, her eyes fixed, in ecstasy, she took a few steps, her arm extended, listening. The movement is done well. We can feel the hallucination in it…. But M. Bastien-Lepage, probably to make his subject more intelligible, thought to paint in the branches of the tree the vision of the girl, two saints and a knight armored in gold. To me, this is unwelcome; Joan’s attitude, her gesture and her hallucinating eyes, were enough to give the whole drama; and this childish fleeting apparition is nothing but a pleonasm, a useless and awkward sign.1
The aesthetic point is well taken. Joan’s perennial allure stems from the improbable gulf between her origins and her achievements. The outline of the tale can be quickly told. A poor girl from an obscure village, Joan arrived in 1429 at the court of the dauphin Charles of France, a vacillating pretender to the throne of a country literally split in two by the Hundred Years’ War with England, its longtime dynastic rival. Armed with little more than an iron will and a professed divine mission—to take France back and crown Charles king—Joan was given an army and a royal sanction, with which she helped turn the tide of the war in France’s favor with a series of stunning military victories. Her moment was brief. By 1431 she had been captured by the English, tried by the Inquisition, and burned as a heretic. But those two years were long enough to stamp into history the indelible force of her personality. No accoutrements, heavenly or otherwise, are needed.
Still, Bastien-Lepage’s ghostly tableau adds an element to this story that Zola’s criticism only serves to highlight. That element is not Joan’s voices, which both delivered and accompanied her on her mission, but, rather, the battle over their meaning. Joan’s life, the familiar interpretation goes, was the epitome of heroism. Her power was individual and indivisible. From the moment that she stepped out from the pastures of Lorraine and into the brutal arena of history, her life was tragically subject to what the critic Mark Schorer has called, in the context of William Blake’s life, the “politics of vision.” Her experience of voice-hearing was immediately and forever torn between the poles of insubstantiality and physicality, between the metaphorical and the literal, the personal and the public.
The tension inherent in Joan’s voices is not her own. It is an unavoidable consequence of publicity and always has been. Between Socrates and Joan (both of whom referred to their voices as their “counsel”), only the shape of the pool has changed; the shock of immersion has remained the same. But Joan’s voices made a comparatively large splash—more outwardly consequential, starker, and more violent. This is attributable partly to the dualist spirituality of her age and its tendency to see demons lurking in the inexplicable. But it also has to do with the perilous language Joan used to describe her experiences, language that ultimately clashed with the mind-set of her alleged superiors. As with Socrates, this clash resulted in a trial, but in this case we have a transcript and not an apology, a record from which there emerges a historical as opposed to a legendary Joan. And that Joan is, at her core and in the best possible way, simple. Facing an army of scholars, she never cloaked her experiences in abstract terms that muddled the line between the sensual and the spiritual. She couldn’t. Illiterate and unschooled in everything but the most basic aspects of devotion, there was for Joan only the matter-of-fact. She heard voices; they told her what to do; she obeyed. This obedience is the essence of Joan and the engine of both her success and her demise.
Domrémy, the town in which Joan was born and that has since been renamed in her honor Domrémy-la-Pucelle—Domrémy-the-Maid—sits on the border between Lorraine and Champagne on the banks of the Meuse River, less than a hundred miles from present-day Germany. It is a sleepy town that has not changed much in the past six hundred years, with broad, verdant pastures, cobblestone roads, and medieval architecture. The most conspicuous difference is that much of the village is now given over to Joan’s memory. Halfway up Domrémy’s main street, a shop sells overpriced spoons with Joan’s face on them and postcards of Ingrid Bergman burning in Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc. At the top of the hill, a sleek visitors’ center has just been completed, “a discreet and silent place,” according to its brochure, that “takes the visitor into a new world of images, sounds and light to discover life during the Middle Ages and the many faces of Joan.” Halfway between these spots there is Joan’s childhood home, preserved as a tourist attraction, and behind it is the fertile garden, now just a patch of grass, where Joan first heard her voices.
Or, rather, allegedly first heard her voices. Joan’s life has been more carefully researched than almost any other medieval figure, but as she was an anonymous peasant whose public life did not begin until she was seventeen, her early years can only be viewed as if through a shroud. The famous pastoral scene immortalized by Bastien-Lepage comes from the transcripts of Joan’s trial. Responding to an early question about her voices, Joan said that “from the age of thirteen, she received revelation from Our Lord by a voice…. And the first time she was greatly afraid. And she said that the voice came that time at noon, on a summer’s day, a fast day, when she was in her father’s garden, and that the voice came on her right side, in the direction of the church. And she said that the voice was hardly ever without a light, which was always in the direction of the voice.”2
This is not the only extant origin story about Joan’s voices, nor is it the first. After her most celebrated military victory—the lifting of the siege of Orléans in May 1429—Perceval de Boulainvilliers, a prominent courtier to Charles VII, wrote to the duke of Milan in praise of Joan’s victory and offered a self-consciously literary account of her rise. Boulainvilliers is in agreement with Joan regarding the age at which her voices began, but in his letter the setting has changed to a nearby meadow, where Joan has been competing in a footrace. While she is resting, a boy—a relative? a friend? mysteriously, the letter claims she couldn’t tell—informs Joan that her mother is calling for her to return home. But when she rushes back to the house, her mother denies having sent for her.
Thinking then that the boy had played a trick on her, she started back to rejoin her companions, when suddenly a luminous cloud appeared before her eyes, and out of the cloud came a voice, saying, “Jeanne, you are destined to lead a different kind of life and to accomplish miraculous things, for you are she who has been chosen by the King of Heaven to restore the Kingdom of France, and to aid and protect King Charles, who has been driven from his domains. You shall put on masculine clothes; you shall bear arms and become the head of the army; all things shall be guided by your counsel.” After these words had been spoken, the cloud vanished, and the girl, astounded by such a marvel, at first could not give credence to it, but, in her ignorant innocence, remained perplexed as to whether she should believe it or no.3
Between Joan’s story and Boulainvilliers’ we should favor Joan’s. But the comparison reveals two common features. The first is the vagueness of Joan’s voices. In the minds of her partisans and in her own mind during the first stages of her trial, Joan’s counsel had no identity beyond its divinity. A revelation from “Our Lord,” a voice from a cloud—the similarity is the absence of personification, of a mouth from which the voice emerged. The element of solidity would be supplied by Joan’s enemies or, more specifically, by the collision of her experience with their ideas.
The second feature that the two stories have in common is the conspicuous gap between Joan’s revelation and its unveiling. For four years Joan remained in Domrémy alone with her voices, and then suddenly she burst forth into the world of knights, dukes, and kings. Why did she wait so long to proclaim her mission? The likely answer is that she had not yet been given it. Shortly after her story of the voice in the garden, Joan told her judges that in the beginning her counsel had merely “taught her how to behave.”4 They had acted as a sort of divine superego; they told her to go to church and to preserve her virginity. It was only later on that these passive moral instructions hardened into the public and the political, and Joan was coaxed into the position of national savior.
To understand the transformation that Joan’s voices made, history has to serve as context. Divine voice-hearers often portray their experiences as, and even train them to be, removed from the worldly domain. But this was never true of Joan. Her voices were always intimately connected with her everyday experiences, and the most formative of her experiences were of violence. By the time Joan was ten, the conflict between France and England had devolved into a civil war, with the powerful Duke of Burgundy allied with the enemy and the country divided along the Loire River. And, like towns along the Mason-Dixon line during the American Civil War, Domrémy was a microcosm of the struggle. Not only was it prey to the side effects of warfare—poverty, famine, banditry—but the area in which it lay was neatly split along political lines. Maxey, a nearly identical village across the Meuse, favored the duke; Domrémy favored the dauphin. The children from the towns, Joan reported at her trial, would come home battered and bloody from fighting one another.5
The war also compromised the safety of the town. In 1425, Burgundian soldiers, along with some English, drove off Domrémy’s cattle and burned the church in which Joan had been baptized. It was the same year that she began to hear her voices. Three years later the threat of additional marauding drove Joan and her family to seek refuge in the nearby town of Neufchâtel. For two weeks they slept in an inn, until it was safe to return. For a girl of Joan’s nature, a girl who thrived on clarity and honor, it must have been a disturbing upheaval. It certainly stoked her anger. At her trial she made her hatred of the enemy absolutely clear. She knew of one Burgundian in Domrémy “whose head she would like to see chopped off.” (But only, she added piously, “if it had pleased God.”)6 Is it any wonder that it was around this time that Joan’s voices began to speak of revenge, of victory over the enemies of France, and of stability? She was told, she said, that she “should go into France.” Though she was only “a poor woman, who knew nothing of riding or of making war,” she obeyed.7 By February 1429, with the help of a devout cousin and the captain of the local French garrison, she made it to Chinon, the site of the French court in exile. She hadn’t told her family.
That Joan found a sympathetic audience in Charles is one of the abiding mysteries of her story and arguably the most remarkable achievement. The faith and certainty of a child are one thing. That child’s ability to persuade a king, a man surrounded by a thick retinue of courtiers, each with his own interests and loyalties, to give her an army and a sizable amount of money is quite another. The achievement is partly due to good historical timing. The medieval period was primed for the arrival of a female savior. As the historian Régine Pernoud has written, “We are dealing with an age in which above the doors of the cathedrals stood the image of a Virgin. From the troubadors’ songs to the romances of chivalry, the age of feudalism had devoted to Woman a veritable cult…. [Joan] was expected by her age; men’s minds were prepared for that astounding phenomenon.”8 They were even prepared literally: Fifteenth-century France was replete with prophecies about a maiden who would emerge to rescue the country from its troubles. Some seemed even to point specifically to Joan. One prophecy, attributed to the Arthurian wizard Merlin, spoke of a virgin coming from the Bois Chesnu, the oak woods bordering Domrémy, to save France. Another, from the visionary Marie d’Avignon, directly addressed the troubles of the Hundred Years’ War. “She spoke…of having had frequent visions concerning the desolation of France. In one of them Marie saw many pieces of armour which were brought before her, which frightened her. For she was afraid that she would be forced to put this armour on. But she was told to fear nothing, and that it was not she who would have to wear this armour, but that a Maid who would come after her would wear it and deliver the kingdom of France from its enemies.”9
The grip that such prophecies had on the imagination not only of the peasantry but of the royalty cannot be overestimated as a factor in Joan’s success. Charles was particularly prone to them. Broke, mired in defeat and uncertainty, and torn apart by intrigue, the dauphin’s cause was grim at the time of Joan’s arrival. It was also desperately hungry for divine sanction. In the medieval mind, a disputed crown bespoke a heavenly uncertainty. “God’s mandate,” the novelist and historian Marina Warner has written of this time, “was a sensitive, finely primed pointer, influenced by individual action and wobbling accordingly, now withdrawing, now returning, now withdrawing again.”10 Charles was in need of a magnet to hold the pointer steady on his head. Joan provided it.
But nothing is left to divinity alone. Joan’s claim of heavenly sanction was welcome news, but it was released to a world that was brutal and real, and it is there that it would have to make its way.
The story of Joan’s first audience with Charles is a vacuum that has been filled with warring fictions. The most popular legend, which appears in George Bernard Shaw’s play and in several other versions of Joan’s life, has it that she convinced Charles of her divine legitimacy by picking him out from a crowd of courtiers in which he had hidden to test her. Another has it that she convinced him by revealing her knowledge of a prayer he made in private to the effect that if he were not the true blood heir to the throne—which, indeed, he may not have been—he be allowed to leave France and the troubles of the war. This story claims that Joan reinvigorated Charles by reassuring him of his legitimacy. Still another legend has it that Charles was convinced by the arrival of an angel that swooped down and delivered a crown to him, in a sort of Gallic version of the Annunciation, with the dauphin cast in the role of both Virgin Mary and Messiah, and Joan as the Archangel Gabriel.
These legends all seek to dramatize the “miracle” of Joan’s arrival at court—the galvanizing effect she had on the French cause and on a leader previously known to be pusillanimous and incompetent. They accomplish this feat, but they typically ignore what came next. Joan reinvigorated Charles with a sense of divine authority, but that authority was not so convincing that he was going to hand over thousands of troops at the request of a teenage girl. Heaven may well have sent Joan, but armor cost money, and before he was going to take on such an expenditure, committing himself to a great political and military risk, he needed assurance that she did not come from the other side—hell, that is, not England. To test Joan’s divine mettle, Charles sent her to nearby Poitiers to be examined for three weeks by a council of learned clergymen.
The record of Joan’s interrogation at Poitiers has been lost, and the episode is therefore traditionally passed over as only a minor pit stop on the road to her heroism and martyrdom. But it is the crucial first indication of the dichotomy at the heart of Joan’s story. All eras subject voice-hearing to a test. For the Greeks the test was political. Socrates’ prosecutors asked, Do the voices subvert or corrupt the workings of the city? In our time the test is psychiatric: Are voices healthy or pathological? In Joan’s time the question was theological: Do the voices come from God or from the Devil? This was the deep anxiety of the culture in which Joan lived—anxious because the question could never be answered to anyone’s satisfaction. The Devil was the master of disguises, and his favorite disguise was that of his heavenly adversary. No matter how pure Joan seemed, no matter how much confidence she could offer those with whom she came in contact, she could, by a simple, terrifying reversal of the divine equation, be the embodiment of evil.
This horrifying ambiguity was deepened by the fact that Joan’s interrogators had only earthly tests with which to determine her voices’ divinity. Twenty years after her death, for a number of political reasons, the Catholic Church set up a trial in absentia to rehabilitate Joan’s image. There, a professor of theology who had been present at Poitiers reported that he had said to her, “God cannot wish us to believe in you unless he sends us a sign to show that we should believe in you.” Joan’s response was characteristically blunt and practical. “In God’s name, I have not come to Poitiers to make signs,” she said. “But lead me to Orléans, and I will show you the signs I was sent to make.”11 Orléans, the military gateway to the north of France, had for months been under heavy siege by the English. Joan’s orders, given to her by her voices, were to lift the siege and lead Charles to the ancient city of Rheims, deep within enemy territory, to be crowned king. What else but her success would confirm the divinity of her mission? This logic, in fact, expressed the model of Joan’s incredible rise. Her voices would lend her an initial divine authority, the right to be heard and taken seriously, and her success would confirm and compound that authority. The heavenly would open the door for the earthly, and the earthly would reveal the wisdom of the heavenly. It was an effective formula, but it was also risky, for it could be sustained only by achievement. If she faltered, so, too, would her legitimacy. From the beginning, then, Joan walked a tightrope, with good on one side and evil on the other. In this light, her gruesome fate seems almost predetermined.
But with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see Joan’s death on the horizon. In the moment, armed with at least the curiosity of the Armagnacs, as Charles’s party was called, Joan’s voices worked to her advantage by transforming her pluck and her good fortune into the seeming grace of God. An incident that illustrates this well occurred a month after her examination at Poitiers, when she joined Charles’s troops, led by Count Jean de Dunois, on the march to Orléans. Joan’s voices had told her, and she had told Dunois, that the Armagnac army should attack from the north. Dunois, a seasoned soldier, dismissed Joan’s advice and approached from the south. This was a miscalculation since, when they reached the Loire River, they were prevented from crossing by a strong wind. Joan, realizing she had been ignored, turned on Dunois: “You thought you had deceived me but it is you who have deceived yourselves, for I am bringing you better help than you ever got from any soldier or any city. It is the help of the King of Heaven.” At that exact moment the wind changed direction and the army was able to cross. Dunois, stunned, was won over to Joan’s cause and thereafter believed her to be an instrument of heaven.12
Such belief was not universal. In the testimony that we have regarding this period, Joan comes off as cocky, impertinent, volatile, and possessed with a belief in herself that far outweighs her abilities. This type of character could hardly have appealed to experienced captains of war, with their superior knowledge of troop formations, artillery positions, and enemy tactics. Nor should they have all bowed to her authority: Joan’s military acumen was not particularly impressive. But her presence was irrefutably electrifying, and she rallied the troops as only a hero can. At the time of Joan’s arrival in Orléans, English forces had held a series of fortifications around the city for six months. Within a week the enemy was cleared away and the city saved. Again, Joan had little technical hand in the victory—command of the troops at this point in her career was left to the experts—but her apparent holiness, and her bravery (she received an arrow shot to the shoulder that caused her to fall off her horse), was its spiritual fulcrum, and the victory in return confirmed her holiness. The swiftness of the Armagnac success at Orléans was proof that Joan was the emissary of God’s will. Her prophecy, delivered to her in Domrémy and announced at Chinon, was fulfilled at Orléans. Heaven’s mandate was now clear: God favored the French.
At the trial for Joan’s rehabilitation, Jean D’Aulon, the affectionate and loyal squire whom Charles had assigned to her, told of an episode that occurred just prior to the first significant battle at Orléans. The pair was resting quietly in Joan’s tent, waiting for the news of action, when suddenly she sprang out of bed. “In God’s name,” she exclaimed, “my Counsel has told me that I must attack the English.” Not waiting for D’Aulon’s help in suiting up, she rushed from the tent, commandeered a page’s horse, and hurried to the site of a skirmish in progress at a nearby fort where she had won her first victory.13
According to D’Aulon, Joan was often this impulsive. In his testimony, she is constantly leaping on her horse and calling for her standard and sword. For a while this active method was successful. From early May to mid-June 1429, Joan either helped take or was given credit for taking a series of Anglo-Burgundian strongholds surrounding Orléans, forcing the enemy to abandon its campaign in the Loire Valley. She then set out with equal vigor to fulfill the second of her voices’ dictates: the crowning of Charles VII at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Rheims. From June to August, Joan led the dauphin on a long march through enemy countryside, precipitating the return to Armagnac allegiance of a series of cities along the way, and then back again.
It was a remarkable spate of achievements. It was also short-lived, not least of all because Joan’s behavior was untenable. Following the coronation, she intended to fulfill a third prophecy that her voices had proclaimed: the liberation of Paris, the capital, from which Charles had been expelled by the Burgundians in 1418. The will was still there, but the political sponsorship wasn’t. Tapped for resources and increasingly put upon by a firebrand whose arrogance undermined his ability to negotiate with the enemy, Charles stymied Joan’s plans by agreeing to a two-week truce. The decision deeply frustrated Joan, but she had a more authoritative edict than Charles’s to follow, and she mustered an army to storm the city. For the first time she failed. Wounded by an arrow through her thigh and thwarted by the tepid fighting of her officers, Joan was ordered by Charles to retreat. More than a military debacle, it was a blow to her image, the source of her power. The voices had never before been proven wrong; now their very provenance was called into question. Compounding the problem was Joan’s decision to attack Paris on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a decision that many deemed impious. The failure seemed almost predetermined.
It isn’t necessary to dwell on the depressing events that followed. Joan’s success, from Orléans to Paris, lasted less than five months. Her decline would last more than eight. Reading of the events during that period is like watching the dissipation of a great artist in time-lapse photography. Even more dispiriting is the knowledge that Joan might not have fallen so far and so hard had she not been left to her own impetuous devices. Following the defeat at Paris, Joan laid siege to a number of cities, but in all cases she did so as a free lance, without adequate resources or advice. The result was a tragedy that she later claimed her voices had foreseen, but she does not appear to have foreseen the tragedy’s scope. On May 23, 1430, while attacking Burgundian forces outside the northern city of Compiègne, Joan was outmaneuvered, pulled from her horse by an archer, and taken hostage. Charles, no longer desiring her presence, declined to secure a ransom, and Joan was bartered between competing interests until she was finally given over to the Inquisition for a full ecclesiastical trial. In little more than a year, she had gone from peasant to hero to prisoner. She would never be free again.
When Joan was pulled to the ground, yanked by a gold and scarlet cloak that she vainly wore into battle, she made a spiritual as well as a physical descent. Religious politics have always been the same. God’s sanction is reserved for winners. In the record of Joan’s fall, one can almost see the grace change hands. “It has pleased our Blessed Creator to allow and grant us a great grace—The Maid has been captured!” the Duke of Burgundy, Joan’s great enemy, wrote to the inhabitants of Saint-Quentin shortly after she was taken. He continued gleefully: “Now the error and foolish belief of those who approved and favored this woman will be recognized. We write you this news in the hope that it will give you joy, comfort, and satisfaction, and that you will thank and praise our Creator Who sees and knows all things.”14
The implication is clear: Joan had lost the endorsement of heaven. Also clear, at least in hindsight, is the action that must follow. Joan had been imbued with legitimacy at Charles’s court as the direct result of her voices. They were the key that had unlocked the gate to her new life, and within that life they had been her most powerful weapon—the instrument of severe Anglo-Burgundian embarrassment. Joan’s enemies could not reverse their humiliation, but they could reverse her divinity. This is the task they set out to accomplish when, six months after Compiègne, they handed Joan over to Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, to orchestrate her inquisitorial trial.
Joan’s trial, which took place in the city of Rouen, not far from the English Channel, in the winter and spring of 1431, is both the centerpiece and endgame of Joan’s life. It is also the most classically dramatic and thus a favorite of the many artists and writers who have been attracted to Joan, either as an exemplar of the human spirit or as the embodiment of sainthood. But we do not need a work of art to inflate the drama of Joan’s trial or to bring her back to life. The transcripts are enough. In them, Joan’s answers to her judge’s questions seem to have been recorded faithfully and accurately, and the result is a character infinitely more heroic, because infinitely more human, than the images that have been thrown up by her partisans or her worshippers. In the record, she comes across as defiant, clever, willful, loyal, frightened, petulant, and confused—in short, a nineteen-year-old girl of irreducible complexity.
And of preternatural strength. Joan’s trial is not a passion play, but it is undoubtedly an ordeal. During the three months of her trial, Joan was besieged by questions from high-level theologians and lawyers hostile to her ideals and driven by the single goal of her elimination. Unable to read and in any case without recourse to the records of the proceedings, she had to rely on her wit and her memory to keep track. She was the only witness and, in accordance with inquisitorial tradition, had no aid in her defense. When not under interrogation, she was chained to a post in a small locked cell. Her guards were English soldiers who taunted and threatened to rape her. She was not allowed to receive the sacraments, to attend Mass, or to offer her confession. She was never formally tortured—her judges deemed her too stubborn to benefit from the rack—but her treatment was without question torturous.
In light of these conditions, Joan’s performance was nothing short of glorious. At times she flatly refused to respond to her judges’ inquiries (“Next question!” is a frequent refrain); at others she admonished them (“I warn you not to judge me wrongfully,” she told Cauchon, “for you would so put yourself in great danger”); at others she was even playful (in retaliation for an error in citing evidence, she threatened to pull one judge’s ears). What she never allowed to enter into the proceedings was condescension. But glory can’t save a life; it is what is offered to someone in lieu of being saved. And for Joan, salvation was impossible. In her judges she faced men whose minds were qualitatively different from her own. Trained in the strict scholastic manner of Thomas Aquinas, Joan’s judges knew only the dichotomous mode of the Church, in which body and soul are in strict opposition and truth can be attained through careful philosophical reasoning. Joan, by contrast, had an intuitive mind. She found truth in bare experience, no matter how vague or undefined. She knew nothing of philosophy. Faced with her judges’ questions, then, she could answer well enough, but she could never understand the intentions behind them or the conclusions they were moving toward. She was on a course she could neither comprehend nor exit.
This clash of consciousness was the engine of the most important line of questioning at Joan’s trial. Her judges explored many concerns during those three months—Joan’s cross-dressing, her childhood, her interactions with Charles, her military exploits—but they were consumed with her voices. They probed them from every angle: When did Joan first hear the voices? What figures did they represent? Did she see them as well as hear them? Did they tell her to try to escape? Were they present at her arrival in Chinon? Did they foresee her injuries? Did she ever touch them? Smell them? Embrace them? Were they clothed? Bald? Luminescent? What did they sound like? Their desire was always for greater specificity. By coaxing Joan’s voices into the world of physical reality, they could prove she had erred. Unless they said otherwise, the holy was ineffable.
Joan’s answers to this insistent questioning varied throughout the trial from disobedience to candidness. Taken in sequence, however, they reveal the slow effect of her interrogators’ thinking and language on her own. As we have seen, one feature of the early descriptions of Joan’s voices is their indistinctness. Joan referred to them quite simply as her “counsel,” and she identified their source, equally as simply, as God. During the early stages of her trial, she did not waver much from this stance. Joan first spoke about her voices at her second public session, during which she told of her revelation in the garden in Domrémy, and though she said it was “the voice of an angel” that approached her, this appears to have been more a reverent metaphor than a stab at literal truth. She was more convincing when she used the phrase digna vox—worthy voice—and refused to proceed.
Under the constant, wearing pressure of the interrogation, however, her refusals were not bound to last long, and, indeed, Joan’s voices soon underwent a swift materialization. At her third public session, two days later, she seems to have sensed the traps being set for her. Questioned by the theologian Jean Beaupère, Cauchon’s deputy and the most hostile of Joan’s judges, as to whether she saw something along with the voices, Joan answered testily that “it is a beautiful voice, righteous and worthy; otherwise, I am not bound to answer you.” Asked whether the voices had eyes and could see, she threw up a shield of folk wisdom: “There is a saying among little children that people are often hanged for telling the truth.” But then, at her fourth public session three days later, her voices made a sudden transformation. Questioned by Beaupère as to whether she had heard the voice while in her cell and whether it was “the voice of an angel, or of a saint, or directly from God,” her singular inspiration split in two: “She answered that the voices were those of Saint Catherine and of Saint Margaret. And their heads are crowned with beautiful crowns, most richly and preciously.” Several questions on, these figures spawned a third, and for the first time the triumvirate of Bastien-Lepage’s canvas springs into view:
She said she also said that she received counsel from Saint Michael.
Questioned which came first,
She said it was Saint Michael.
Asked if it were long ago,
She answered: I do not speak of Saint Michael’s voice, but of the great comfort [he brought me].
Asked which was the first voice that came to her when she was thirteen,
She said it was Saint Michael whom she saw before her eyes; and he was not alone, but was accompanied by angels from heaven.15
She would never be able to take it back. But then it is unlikely that she would have wanted to. Joan’s acquiescence to the literality of her judges was unconscious. Like many prisoners, she integrated the mind-set of her captors into her own so that when she began to proclaim the identities of her voices, she did so in all honesty, and probably with relief. She also did so according to her own experiences and in accordance with her character. The saints in whose mouths Joan placed her voices might have materialized as the result of prodding, but they were perfect choices for an adventurous, patriotic virgin intoxicated by heroism and brought low by vengeful enemies. Michael, for instance, whose official canonical status is that of an archangel, was intimately connected with the Armagnac cause. When the abbey of Saint Denis fell to the English in 1419, the dauphin Charles ordered that Michael’s likeness replace Denis’s on the standards of his soldiers. Mont-Saint-Michel, the Benedictine monastery on the coast of Normandy, became the last bastion of French loyalty in the north; throughout the Hundred Years’ War, pilgrims would sneak through English blockades to visit it. Marina Warner writes that Michael was the “emblem of French resistance,” the saint whose name was the battle cry in heaven against evil and whose traditional role was to save the souls of the faithful from the hands of the enemy.16
Catherine made sense on a more personal level. The patron saint, ironically, of Maxey, the village whose children Domrémy’s used to fight, Catherine had been through an ordeal similar to Joan’s. According to tradition (there is no evidence that she actually lived), Catherine was a high-born virgin in early-fourth-century Alexandria who protested against Emperor Maxentius’s persecution of Christians. Brought before him, she defeated the arguments of fifty learned philosophers, all of whom were then beheaded. When Maxentius, impressed, proposed marriage, she refused in order to preserve herself for Christ. She was tortured and thrown in jail for her impudence. An attempt to break her on a spiked wheel ended in failure when the wheel broke apart, and she was finally beheaded. Catherine, Warner writes, “stood chiefly for independent thinking, courage, autonomy, and culture. She was the saint chosen by young unmarried women in France.”17
Margaret of Antioch, like Catherine a figure of legend, was also revered for upholding her virginity against the advances of a pagan. Tending her flock one day during the reign of the Roman Empire, Margaret was admired by a magistrate wandering by. She refused his advances and was brought to trial for her defiance. In the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Threatened with death unless she renounced the Christian faith, the holy virgin refused to adore the gods of the empire and an attempt was made to burn her, but the flames…left her unhurt. She was then bound hand and foot and thrown into a cauldron of boiling water, but at her prayer her bonds were broken and she stood up uninjured.”18 Margaret, too, was beheaded. Like Catherine, with whom she was sometimes represented in the iconography of the Middle Ages, she was often portrayed armed—an important point for the warrior Joan.19
Joan’s choice of saints bespoke a genius for symbolism that has always been a significant factor in her fame. A prodigy of self-representation, she allied herself with images with which she will always be associated because they fit so well with her cause. In life, however, that alliance was her undoing. It led her into a trap of duality the existence of which she could only intuit but that her judges had dedicated their lives to uphold. Joan had been free to worship angels and saints, but to sense them, to hear their voices, was to contaminate holy spirit with sinful flesh. The inhabitants of heaven could not be substantial unless they were demonic simulacra, and Joan could not have heard them unless she had become a daughter of Satan.
Could Joan have avoided falling into this theological trap? Unlike Teresa of Ávila, who successfully evaded the Inquisition her entire life, Joan was not equipped with the education necessary to make academic distinctions between the bodily and spiritual senses. She also lacked the knowledge that there was a danger inherent in not making such a distinction. But her main handicap was that her experiences were unwaveringly empirical. At no time did Joan experience the voices as part of her, integrated spiritually in a manner that her judges might, in theory, have accepted. In her simple manner, she spoke of them always as being separate from her. They were holy and she was human, but they spoke aloud. This was not the “still, small voice” of Elijah. These were audible voices. In prison she complained that she couldn’t understand what Catherine was telling her because of the noise of the guards.
Joan’s judges exploited the particularity of her experiences and her naiveté with terrible efficiency. Experienced scholars and prosecutors, they prodded her with questions so that her spiritual defeat was inevitable. Joan’s naming of Michael, Catherine, and Margaret occurred on the fourth day of interrogation. Twelve more days followed before her formal indictment—both in public, among dozens of witnesses, and in her cell, among only a few—and during all the interrogations, the judges homed in on the human senses. What did Michael look like? What did Catherine smell like? What did Margaret feel like? A pattern forms: Joan, exhausted and ever more bewildered, lashes out, stalls, and seeks to limit her responses to proclaiming the great joy that the divine visitations give her. Her judges press firmly on. Finally, on the very last day of her questioning—March 17, 1430—a fatal exchange takes place:
Asked if she had ever kissed or embraced Saint Catherine or Saint Margaret,
She said she had embraced them both.
Asked whether they smelt pleasant,
She replied: Assuredly they did so.
Asked whether in embracing them she felt warmth or anything else,
She said she could not embrace them without feeling and touching them.
Asked what part she embraced, whether the upper or lower,
She answered: It is more fitting to embrace them above rather than below.20
Joan was aware of many of the popular beliefs regarding the presence of evil on earth; they circulated in the countryside. She knew of mandrakes and fairies, and she knew that witches were thought to be able to fly. But she did not seem to have recognized the more deeply ingrained superstition to which this line of questioning referred. As subtly as the questions were phrased, she did not know that her judges probably had in mind the witches’ Sabbath, in which spiritually tainted women consorted with the physical manifestations of demons—kissing them, worshipping them, having sex with them. She did not know that her straightforward answers, however artfully coerced, were being examined through a lens of fear, that her voices were being pulled into a ghoulish drama that had been written into the history of Europe over the course of several centuries.
Later, after they had cornered her into guilt and codified her trespasses in a series of articles of condemnation—submitted both on their own behalf and on behalf of the University of Paris, the leading ecclesiastical authority in France at the time—Joan’s judges tried to educate her as to the grave spiritual implications of her experiences. They carefully read to her the charges, which referred to her as “an idolater, and invoker of demons, a wanderer from the Faith.” They implored her again and again to submit to the Church Militant, the administrant of Christ’s faith on earth. They delivered sermons. They bribed her with promises. But Joan would not submit. In the end, she could not have. Even when she was offered the precise knowledge of her sins as seen through the eyes of the Church, the conflict was intractable and not much different from the conflict that had come between her and Charles. To her judges, they alone were the arbiters of truth. To Joan, the voices were sacrosanct. They represented God, a higher authority than the men who sat in judgment of her.
Joan came to understand the nature of her dilemma and expressed it well. “I believe in the Church on earth,” she told an archdeacon who tried to mend her ways, “but for my deeds and words, as I have previously said, I refer the whole matter to God, Who caused me to do what I have done.”21 Her celebrated pluck was also replaced by a brave resignation to her fate: “And if I were to be condemned and saw the fire lit and the wood prepared and the executioner who was to burn me ready to cast me into the fire, still in the fire would I not say anything other than I have said.”22 But abstract fire is different from real fire, and in the proximity of the latter, Joan did bend. On May 24, she was led onto a platform in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen to be publicly excommunicated, in direct view of the executioner and the tools he would use to build the stake and fire. There she collapsed in tears, prayed for guidance, and signed a formal abjuration.
I JEANNE, CALLED THE PUCELLE, A MISERABLE SINNER, AFTER I RECOGNIZED THE SNARE OF ERROR IN WHICH I WAS HELD; AND NOW THAT I HAVE, BY GOD’S GRACE, RETURNED TO OUR MOTHER HOLY CHURCH; IN ORDER THAT IT MAY BE APPARENT THAT NOT FEIGNEDLY BUT WITH GOOD HEART AND WILL I HAVE RETURNED TO HER; I DO CONFESS THAT I HAVE GREIVOUSLY SINNED, IN FALSELY PRETENDING THAT I HAVE HAD REVELATIONS FROM GOD AND HIS ANGELS, SAINT CATHERINE AND SAINT MAR GARET, ETC.23
She was then formally sentenced, warned that she should forever “leave her revelations and other stupidities,” and given female dress. A barber was brought in to shave her head.
Joan’s lapse lasted four days. Sometime after her abjuration, she put her male clothing back on. In the eyes of the Church, it was a sign that she had relapsed into sin. Visited in her prison cell by a group of judges on May 28, she insisted that she had revoked her earlier answers only “through fear of the fire.” She was then asked if she had heard the voices of Catherine and Margaret again. She said yes. In the margin of the record, the clerk transcribing the exchange wrote “Responsio mortifera”—the fatal reply.24 The next day, the Church gave Joan over to the secular arm to be executed. The stake was erected on May 30 in the marketplace at Rouen. The official record notes that many observers wept and that many “murmured greatly against the English.” Afterward, Joan’s ashes were gathered and thrown into the Seine.
On a quiet spot above the Meuse River, shouldered into the northern border of the Bois Chesnu, the Basilica of Saint Joan stands each night drenched in floodlight. Built outside Domrémy beginning in 1881 and consecrated in 1926—six years after Joan was canonized by Pope Benedict XV—the cathedral, with its grand stone spire and sprawling grounds, dominates the view from the valley, symbolizing Joan’s full, posthumous acceptance by the Catholic Church. And outside the cathedral, dominating the view in the courtyard, there stands a sculpture that symbolizes the Church’s full acceptance of the very iconography it used to destroy Joan. Produced by André Allar in the late nineteenth century, the sculpture portrays Joan in white marble as a young peasant girl, kneeling and lifting her head to the figures of her three saints, cast in illustrious bronze. Michael, bedecked in glorious armor and crowned with a sunlike halo, raises a finger toward heaven; Catherine, standing above a wheel, the symbol of her martyrdom, bears a long sword in her hands; and Margaret, in flowing robes, proffers a helmet for Joan to wear on her divine mission.
Allar’s sculpture, which stands protected behind a chain rope, bears all the marks of officialdom, but its interpretation of Joan’s inspiration is hardly exclusive. Since the early seventeenth century, artists, historians, and politicians have been bending Joan’s voices to fit their own purposes and hopes. A tour of French statuary alone shows the wide room for variation: An elegant marble work by François Rude, produced in the 1850s and now at the Louvre, portrays Joan as Bastien-Lepage outfitted her, in long skirt and peasant blouse; her head is tilted to the side, and she cups a hand to her ear to listen to her counsel, who are not represented. The image is of psychological rapture. A statue by Antonin Mercié, erected on a bridge in Domrémy in 1902 and intended as a secular contrast to Allar’s work, has Joan lifting a sword with the help of an imposing woman with pearl-embroidered hair. The woman is the personification of France, and Joan’s inspiration is the call of national heroism. Even the militantly nationalist sculptures of Maxime Réal del Sarte, which portray Joan as the protective Mother of France, shepherding the suffering through the Great War, takes a conspicuous position on Joan’s voices—they ignore them completely, as if they corrupted the true, patriotic resonance of her story.
In twentieth-century representations, the banishment of Joan’s voices, whether coy, clever, or complete, has far outweighed their religious personification. The dominant impulse of modern artists has been to rationalize Joan’s inspiration—to pull them from the grasp of the Church and the State and at last hand them over to Science. The novelist Anatole France, who published a two-volume biography of Joan in 1908, was a pioneer of this method. In his account, Joan’s voices were the result of a hysterical religious fervor fomented by medieval priests eager to manufacture a savior for France. A fierce rationalist, Anatole France could not deny the importance of the voices altogether, but he could drain them of the supernatural. They were, he concluded, “ces troubles…hallucinations perpetuelles”—a disorder of perpetual hallucinations.25
George Bernard Shaw, whose 1923 play Saint Joan is widely credited with winning him the Nobel Prize, did not go so far as to diagnose Joan (“Visionaries are neither impostors nor lunatics,” he insisted in his celebrated preface to the work) but, like Anatole France, he did seek a more comfortably rationalistic approach to the mystery of her experiences. The conclusion Shaw drew posited a sort of demotion of the voices (which, in the end, he conflated into her visions) from experiences of personal religious import to imaginative outbursts of the rational faculty. Joan, he wrote outmodedly, was a “Galtonic visualizer,” a reference to Francis Galton, the nineteenth-century polymath and pioneer of eugenics. “She saw imaginary saints just as some other people see imaginary diagrams and landscapes with numbers dotted about them, and are thereby able to perform feats of memory and arithmetic impossible to non-visualizers.”26 In the play itself, this position leads Shaw to contort Joan’s belief into unrecognizable shapes. In Rheims, following Charles’s coronation, she tells the resentful archbishop that he should trust in her voices “even if they are only the echoes of my own commonsense.”27
Since Shaw, Joan’s voices have received a generally fairer showing—which is to say, one more in line with her own words—no doubt because there has occurred a backlash against the hyper-rationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But there remains a palpable undercurrent of embarrassment about Joan’s voices. In a recent biography, the novelist Mary Gordon disclaimed, “As historical character, model, or exemplum, Joan would be far more palatable to the post-Enlightenment appetite if she hadn’t claimed to hear voices.”28
This begs a vital question: Does it matter that Joan’s voices are somewhat unpalatable? It does, of course, if we want Joan’s desires and values to match our own. Being able to stomach her inspiration is then of the utmost importance, for if we can’t, we will have to season it or cut away the spoiled parts or spit it out. To some extent we all treat Joan this way. She is a hero, and heroes are receptacles for our love or our hatred. But she is also a historical figure with a solidity and a reality all her own. In this sense, what we think of her voices is of no concern. It was certainly of no concern to Joan. Against odds that can scarcely be measured, she was not impervious. She faltered and she groveled, and in the end her most closely held belief altered according to the beliefs of others. Yet what never changed, not even for a moment, was the internal meaning of her voices, the simplicity of their effect: They gave her joy. When they were present, she was ecstatic; when they were gone, she was bereft. That is why Joan listened to her voices, why she followed them, and why, the one time she abandoned them, she had to return, though it meant certain death. She would rather die with her voices than live without them.