Joan of Arc (29 page)

While she wavered, the English, secure in their pride, never did. ‘Never were the Jews so vehemently opposed to Jesus as they were to the Pucelle.’ Under pressure she gave up her sole protection in the world in which she moved, her male attire. When she resumed men’s clothes, she was doomed and the English made sure there would be no escape. ‘As she died, a secretary of the King of England called out, “We are lost, we have burnt a saint”’ But Michelet is clear they had also burnt a French woman. ‘This last figure from the past was also the first figure of the future. In her appeared at the same time the Virgin . . . and already the Nation.’ Joan stood for a stable national destiny. France was given to frequent regime change between 1814 and 1870, but all the while the French nation persisted; and Joan symbolised the nation at its best.

By the time Michelet’s work was published, the pear-shaped citizen-king Louis-Philippe had died in exile in England, there had been a new revolution and a new republic and then the Second Empire. For a time Napoleon III toyed with the idea of being crowned. One of the first artistic commissions of his Minister of Art was to ask the painter Ingres to finish the picture
Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII at Reims
(1854). The emphasis in the painting is not on Charles VII but on Joan, standing at the composition’s still centre, her soft flesh set against the hard, gleaming armour, her lustrous eyes cast up to heaven, standing with one hand on the altar, the other holding her standard, in front of a tonsured cleric and a page both on their knees, some way in front of a standing nobleman. In the end Napoleon was not consecrated and no other French ruler has ever been crowned. The idea of sacred monarchy was dead.

Even without a consecrated monarch Joan was central to the story of France. In the preface to the historical novel
Joan of Arc
(1842), Alexandre Dumas (the father) called her the ‘Christ of France’, who has ‘redeemed the crimes of the monarchy’, and for him a scholar wrote an extended appendix outlining the sources available before the publication of Quicherat’s volumes.

The first and one of the most scholarly Englishman to discuss Joan’s case was John Lingard (1771–1851), who was born a year after Wordsworth and who died the year after him. A Catholic priest with unrivalled knowledge of Continental archives, Lingard was conscious of intending to refute popular misconceptions about English history by the dispassionate presentation of the evidence; and this method he applied in his discussion of Joan. His account of Joan, like that of Dumas, is based on a reading of those texts available before Quicherat’s studies. In it he practises the methods he thought historians should use, methods essentially sceptical and open-minded.

Lingard wondered why she ‘mistook for realities the workings of her own imagination’. She was marvellously successful, he said, in the two important enterprises for which she claimed divine inspiration, the relief of Orléans and the conducting of the Dauphin Charles to his consecration at Reims, and then she wanted to return to her simple life, but was persuaded by Charles to continue in his service. When she was captured, ‘the unfortunate maid was treated with neglect by her friends, with cruelty by her enemies’. The Bishop of Beauvais, who was devoted to the English interest and in whose diocese she had been taken, ‘claimed the right of trying her in his court on the accusation of sorcery and imposture’. After various attempts had been made ‘to save her from the punishment of death, by inducing her to make a frank and explicit confession’ and after one abjuration which she quickly recanted, she was finally burnt at the stake ‘embracing a crucifix and calling on Christ for mercy’.

At the start of his account of Joan, Lingard comments: ‘The wonderful revolution which she accomplished by means apparently supernatural, will justify an endeavour to trace the origin of the enthusiasm which, while it deluded, yet nerved and elevated the mind of this young and interesting female.’ Towards the end of his discussion, he states: ‘An impartial observer would have pitied and respected the mental delusion with which she was afflicted; the credulity of her judges condemned her, on the charge of having relapsed into her former errors . . . This cruel and unjustifiable tragedy was acted in the market-place of Rouen, before an immense concourse of spectators, about twelve months after her capture.’
⁷
Lingard reserved for a mere footnote a reference to the nullification of her trial. In not discussing her extraordinary psychology, he is typical of people who never go beyond the facts in dealing with Joan.

A younger Englishman, Thomas De Quincey, was more partisan. His essay on Joan was an unashamedly Francophile response to Michelet. Best known now as a writer on opium addiction, he also left his
Recollections of the Lake Poets
, a group he had cultivated assiduously. In commenting, then, on Michelet’s first thoughts on Joan in the
History of France
, De Quincey had the advantage of knowing Southey. ‘Twenty years after, talking with Southey, I was surprised to find him still owning a secret bias in favour of Joan, founded on her detection of the Dauphin.’
⁸
Thanks to Michelet, De Quincey was better informed. Rightly he divides her public career into two parts, but is drawn to the sequel when ‘what remained was – to suffer.’

De Quincy points out astutely that the one way the English undid the psychological effect of Charles VII’s coronation was to ‘taint’ it ‘as the work of a witch’. He is astute too in pointing out that Cauchon’s ambition made him not the only Frenchman to be ‘an instrument of the English’, but adds ‘even at this day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself’. He ends by rebuking English historians in general for bias against Joan.

Enmity was put on one side when in the Crimean war England and France became allies.

It was supremely important for the cult of Joan of Arc that in 1849 one of the most gifted French bishops of the nineteenth century, Félix Dupanloup, a man of letters and member of the French Academy, became Bishop of Orléans. His career in the Church was defined by the fact that his 29-year episcopate coincided with the pontificate of Pius IX, Pio Nono (1846–78). Dupanloup remained in the see of Orléans until the year of his death, the year in which the pope died also.

Before Dupanloup’s episcopate, devotion to Joan was largely a local cult. The Orléannais had never forgotten that Joan had raised the siege; in the 1840s, however, even while a former Duke of Orléans ruled, the annual festivities had stopped. Dupanloup made sure they would not stop again. Gois’s statue, now unloved, was moved to the bridge where the Tourelles had once stood, and Foyatier’s dignified equestrian statue of Joan was put up in the main city square, place du Martroi. Dupanloup reorganised the festivities himself and on the first occasion that the new rite was observed (in 1855) he preached her cause. He also pronounced the panegyric for the 1869 festival.

‘In her I find everything that moves me,’ he announced, ‘including the name of Orléans, that has become mine since God called me to be the bishop of your souls; I like the peasant simplicity in her origins, the chastity in her heart, her courage in battle, her love for the land of France, but above all the holiness in her life and death.’
⁹
He described his visit to Domremy, which reinforced his opinion that she was remarkable in the way she combined love of France with love of God. ‘Do not think . . . you must chose between the duties of a Christian and those of a Frenchman . . . Religion points its finger towards the sky, but it does not make us forget our dear country down here.’

Dupanloup had read Quicherat, for he reminded the congregation how Dunois, her captain, and d’Aulon, her steward, both said they had never met a woman more chaste than Joan. Faced with such virtue, now that feelings of the past had calmed, the bishop was not surprised that almost daily he heard some Englishman express his admiration for Joan:

In spite of English Protestantism a descendant of one she defeated said only yesterday: ‘Such a person sustains our faith and brings splendour to the human spirit and her rightful setting is a church.’ . . . I promise you that you cannot approach her and read, as I have just done, the pages of her story in the processes of the two trials, in which she seems to live on still and even, I would dare say, to be full of vitality, without having the irresistible conviction that in her you are face to face with a heroic saint, a messenger of God . . . She is a saint: God was in her.

On that same day, 8 May, the anniversary of the relief of Orléans, Dupanloup sent off a petition to Rome to open Joan’s cause as a saint.

The early 1870s was a period of decisive change in the history of France, of the Catholic Church and of the cult of Joan.

France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war destroyed for ever its reputation as the leading Continental power. The crowning of the King of Prussia as German Kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles symbolised France’s national humiliation, and the siege of Paris brought misery to a capital to which the Emperor Napoleon III had given its majestic layout. The ensuing civil war between the left-wing supporters of the Paris Commune and the Versailles government fuelled lasting class hatred, but nothing hurt so much as the wresting away from France of German-speaking Alsace, which had been French since the reign of Louis XIV, and still more the industrial parts of French-speaking Lorraine, French since the reign of Louis XV.

The threat of war had led France to withdraw troops that for a generation had protected the pope in Rome and the patrimony of St Peter (which corresponds approximately to the modern Lazio). As Prussia’s ally, the new kingdom of Italy was free to invade papal territory and to take control of most of Rome. Pope Pius IX, a ‘prisoner in the Vatican’, would have nothing to do with the anticlerical regime based in his own city. At the Vatican Council that met just before war broke out, he had been declared infallible when, speaking as successor of St Peter for the whole Church, he pronounced on matters of faith and morals. This doctrine would have surprised fifteenth-century conciliarists such as Gerson, who thought that the ultimate authority of the Church lay in a General Council; and indeed a minority at the Vatican Council, including Dupanloup, thought the timing of the pope’s declaration inopportune.

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian war transformed the role of Joan in France. The new borders meant that, as in Joan’s time, Domremy was situated at the edge of France; and now all Frenchmen were united by a desire for revenge. France set out to train all its young men to fight; and the spread of primary schooling inculcated a sense of national identity.

As an act of reparation for the sins that had brought disaster, a conservative government voted for the building of a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacré Coeur, perched high on the hill of Montmartre, may look like the sugary confection of some architectural cake-maker, but it implied France’s Catholic destiny and, when a huge picture of the Triumph of the Sacred Heart was eventually designed for the church, Joan of Arc was the one Frenchwoman among the group who worship Christ.

By the time church and the picture were ready, Joan was on the point of being made a saint. The process had been halted by warfare, but in 1874 Dupanloup resumed his project of supervising preliminary enquiries in Orléans. By then he knew that France’s failure against Prussia in 1870–1 meant that France was a republic. The Bonapartist cause was in defeat a lost cause, and so the alternative was a Bourbon king, who could be one of two princes: Henri, comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X, last Bourbon of the senior line to be king, or the comte de Paris, grandson of Louis-Philippe of the junior line who had supplanted Charles. To make matters easy the comte de Paris was heir to the childless comte de Chambord, but Henri ‘V’ made matters harder. He had not set foot in France since he was a child and gauging the country’s mood was beyond his imagination to grasp. It would be an affront to his honour, he announced, to accept the tricolour as the national flag instead of the fleur-de-lis, ‘the flag of Henry IV, of Francis I, of Joan of Arc’.
¹
He went into exile, where he remained until he died. His behaviour made clear that the royalist restoration Dupanloup hoped for would never take place. Others, like Louis Veuillot, a rabid right-wing journalist, supported the stand taken by the comte de Paris, although the royal heir had left France for ever, and looked forward to an ideal king who would rescue France from atheists, socialists, radicals and Catholic liberals like Dupanluoup, all of whom might accept a republic, if they disagreed about what sort of republic France should have. Royalist sentiment survived, but did not unite the French. And yet while the lilies of the French crown withered, the demand to proclaim Joan’s sanctity grew.

At the same time, however, many on the republican, anticlerical Left in France also developed a devotion to Joan, seeing her as the simple peasant abandoned by her king and her Church; and outside France, above all in the English-speaking world, she was admired.

A fine gilt statue of Joan of Arc on horseback holding her banner in place des Pyramides is one of four statues of Joan in Paris. The statue of Emmanuel Fremiet evokes the strongest emotions. It was erected in an area where, and at a time when, the statue mattered. The site is near the heart of Napoleonic Paris, not far from place Vendôme, home to the column Napoleon put up in honour of the army that triumphed at Austerlitz in 1805. This was a part of Paris that was devastated in 1871. On the defeat of French troops in the Franco-Prussian war a mob hacked down the Vendôme column and burnt down the Tuileries Palace, the principal residence of France’s rulers from 1799 to 1871. The erection of Fremiet’s statue in 1874 seemed to reaffirm faith in an older, more permanent France.

The statue was a call to arms. Glistening in the sun, it would inspire the nation to recapture Lorraine, and, if Joan could not yet be called a saint, she was the heroine who would ride out to inspire the soldiers of France. All over France similar statues of Joan were put up, in churches, in squares, even in remote landscapes. In French Lorraine alone there were said to be some 1,000 statues of Joan. From 1871 to 1914 the aim of winning back Alsace-Lorraine was the policy from which no politician dared dissent. Every young conscript was taught the story of Joan. Domremy, her village, was again a frontier village, but now a frontier village in what became a 75-year war against the Germans. As in the fifteenth century, in a period of national humiliation, Joan’s hour had come. The republican Anatole France noted that after the Franco-Prussian war, under the influence of patriotic feeling and the revival of Catholic belief among the middle classes, ‘the cult of the Maid redoubled in fervour’.
²
A 1883 life by the republican historian Fabre called her the ‘Libératrice de France’; and in 1912 the quincentenary of her birth was celebrated throughout France.