Joan of Arc (30 page)

She was born a peasant. In the late nineteenth century French rural society was in process of modernising; and as it did so the cult of Joan spread. Eugen Weber, who has studied the transformation of rural society in this period, insists that ignorance about Joan among French schoolteachers had become unacceptable by the 1880s. In five years in the 1870s the number of signatures in the visitors’ book at Joan’s house in Domremy jumped from about 1,300 to over 2,000. Visitors were largely either from neighbouring departments or from Paris. Other than soldiers, they were for the most part lesser nobility and elegant townsfolk. Travel was still a pastime for the rich and only slowly did Domremy turn into a popular shrine. In 1881 work began on building the huge basilica of Bois-Chenu in Joan’s honour. The basilica was given a function when Domremy became an official place of pilgrimage; and artists vied to decorate its walls. Two statues were made for the village:
Joan Hearing her Voices
and
France Arming Joan
. Visitors to Domremy now came from every class and many came from much further away. It is not hard to account for the increasing numbers. The popularity of miniature encyclopaedias like the Petit Lavisse had inexorably spread knowledge of Joan. In 1907
Le Figaro
, the Paris-based newspaper for the well-educated Right, indignantly noted that of the previous year’s recruits to the army, almost half had never heard of Joan. They soon would. The young men in the barracks were not allowed to speak Breton or Basque or any local patois such as the Lorraine dialect Joan had used. Better educated than her in that they were semi-literate in French, they were more aware of their common identity than any young Frenchmen before them; and devotion to her person bolstered their sense of being French.

Popular writers, artists and illustrators also spread her fame. Henri Wallon, Catholic, republican and sometime Minister of Education, wrote a life of Joan for the Catholic middle classes that remained unopened on the shelves of many private libraries. A more overtly political life by Joseph Fabre became much better known. It was priced low to widen circulation, and with patriotic fervour the author donated his profits to the construction of thousands of monuments to Joan all over the country. As a result, as Anatole France put it, ‘people saw in amazing abundance Joan praying, Joan armed and skirmishing, Joan the captive, Joan the martyr’.
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Among illustrations of Joan’s story, one book written for young people is striking.

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel had fought in the war of 1870–1. He wanted to give future French men the conviction to fight another war in the hope of victory. He decorated his text with pictures of an unequalled intensity, directness and clarity of design. Pure colour reinforces his message. ‘Open this book, dear children, with devotion in memory of this humble peasant girl who is patron of France, who is the country’s saint as she is the country’s martyr. Her story will tell you that to conquer you must have faith in victory. Remember her on the day when your land will need all your courage.’
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In central Paris, the national shrine, the Panthéon, became home to Lenepveu’s series of paintings on the life of Joan, which were copied into history books for generations. No work of art, however, is quite as startling as Leroy’s
The Saint of the Frontier
, ominously shown at the Salon of 1914, which sets an ethereal armoured saint holding her banner inscribed Jesus and Mary in the midst of a party of dragoons. They relax like coiled springs. She has only to give the word, then they will mount their horses and charge.

This was a country where industrialisation was casting its grim shadows in the department of the Nord and in the east, in St-Etienne, where trains belching smoke and coal dust chugged into remote hamlets. Paradoxically, in this country whose ruling middle class worried about its shares and workers’ strikes and ambitious businessmen invested in an ever expanding colonial and commercial empire, the nation clung to a figure from a society that had been overwhelmingly rural and dominated by a privileged caste of nobles. Intellectuals knew that many of their families had been recently uprooted from peasant life; and in retrospect the life of one devout peasant girl seemed marvellous.

Joan had been a listener. One of the most moving nineteenth-century statues of Joan is by Rude, the sculptor famous for the clamorous relief sculpture of
La Marseillaise
on the Arc de Triomphe. Rude’s Joan is a girl who stands calmly with one ear cocked. In another attempt to capture this side of her character, the artist Bastien Lepage had placed her in front of her home at Domremy with Sts Margaret, Catherine and Michael festooned like wreaths on the house. Both sculptor and painter wished to convey the same truth, but Rude’s omission of any ghostly saints is more effective. His work implies as well as any work of visual art can that Joan was in touch with an invisible world known only to her. She could never adequately convey what she heard or what she saw.

A moving example of the new devotion to Joan is found ironically in Lisieux, in whose cathedral is buried its former bishop, Pierre Cauchon. On 27 January 1894 Pope Leo XIII had permitted the introduction of Joan of Arc’s cause for beatification, after which she was given the title of Venerable; and in the National Assembly Henri Wallon proposed a national holiday of patriotism on 8 May to honour her. Although the editor of the Lisieux paper
Le Normandy
thought the idea a plot to secularise her, on 8 May 1894 a flag of the ‘glorious Liberatrix’ was placed in Cauchon’s chapel. This was the chapel where the editor’s pious nieces had attended daily Mass; and the youngest of them, Thérèse Martin, was to be a powerful advocate of the cause of Joan, although in 1894, with two older sisters, she was a nun in the local Carmelite convent.

At this stage, Céline, the sister closest to Thérèse, was the only daughter at home in the Martin household, where she cared for their ageing father. In the course of the year Monsieur Martin died and Céline was free to become a Carmelite too. She brought into the convent one precious possession that kept up the link with her previous way of living, as she was allowed to bring her camera. One of her first photographs in the convent shows a smiling Thérèse – in 1894 it was still hard for a photographer to snap people smiling – with hair over her shoulders, a banner and sword in her hands, acting the protagonist in her own play on Joan of Arc.

Since childhood Thérèse had been drawn to the figure of Joan. In her autobiography,
The Story of a Soul
, first published in 1898, the year after her death, she speaks of her early devotion to Joan. ‘In reading the tales of the patriotic actions of French heroines, in particular those of the venerable Joan of Arc, I had a great desire to imitate them.’
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Now as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, she could write about Joan, whom she thought of as a shepherdess – in this Thérèse was mistaken, but then shepherdesses were in vogue – for she was convinced that her own role in life, like Joan’s, was to emphasise the value of obscure origins. In the convent she was told to write and to act. She produced two plays about Joan,
The Mission of Joan of Arc
(or
The Shepherdess of Domremy Hearing her Voices
) acted on 21 January 1894, and
Joan of Arc Fulfilling her Mission
, performed on 21 January 1895.
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The facts came from Henri Wallon. What fired the fiction was its theme – vocation. Thérèse emphasised the way in which Joan had been called from a remote village to follow a calling that would make her famous throughout the world. It was a theme that matched Thérèse’s own destiny, although in her case she did not live to see that destiny fulfilled.
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Sister Thérèse’s view of Joan mirrored that of the pious milieu in which she lived. Her writings reveal attitudes typical of French conservatives of the 1890s who strove to avoid making a noise in national life. But the nineties was a clamorous decade; and the conservatives who became prominent were those who took their battles into the streets.

In the 1890s most French Catholics, while like the Martins still instinctively royalist, were less spiritually minded than Sister Thérèse because they were stirred chiefly by religious politics. French society was polarised in 1894 by the unjust conviction of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus for spying. What kept the Right together, Catholic or unbelieving, was not republicanism but admiration for the Army. The Army’s verdict had been challenged, but the Army could do no wrong. Among the most vociferous on the Right was the group of able journalists of Action Française, an organisation that, regardless of truth, would stand up for ‘true’ anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Jewish France. Their magnetic leader Charles Maurras made a powerful impact on the elegant young men of the Right who rejoiced in the nickname of hawkers of the king, the ‘Camelots du Roi’ who sold the paper, called
Action Française
like the movement. In 1908
Action Française
became a daily paper. It was never widely read, but its writers were widely influential. Even more influential in the long run was the behaviour of the Camelots, who set a pattern of street fighting followed only too often in the last century. In 1905, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, an anticlerical government transformed France into a secular State and banned religious processions. This prohibition made the Camelots all the keener to process in honour of their heroine, Joan.

The most notorious example of their mob violence occurred in the winter of 1908/9. Thalamas, a professeur at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, called Joan of Arc a witch who had deserved to be punished. For this he was exiled to the provinces. It was then announced that on Wednesday 5 December he would give a free lecture on history at the Sorbonne. The Camelots made ready for him, greeted him with jeers and rotten eggs and, when he tried to leave, he was slapped in the face by Maxime Réal de Sarte, a young man with a future. Such behaviour became a weekly affair. On the
mercredis de Thalamas
the Sorbonne was in a state of siege and Thalamas could lecture only with the help of a military guard; and twice a supporter of Action Française took over a room to give his own course on la Pucelle. At his last talk Camelots got hold of Thalamas and beat him up. Republicans resisted such right-wing efforts to define Joan as a proto-nationalist by reminding Catholics that she had been burnt by the Church and royalists that she had been deserted by the king. Action Française countered by urging that the well-being of France demanded faith in the Army, of which the warrior maiden Joan was heavenly patroness; and only by military victory could France recover Lorraine.

Maurras believed in France, not in God; what mattered to him on Joan’s banner was the fleur-de-lis, not the names of Jesus and Mary, and yet many of his followers were devout. Both non-believers and believers considered Joan their patron, but the Right would not accept that the Left could venerate her honestly; she belonged only to them, as they alone believed that France should have a king.

Early in the new century such a view of Joan was acceptable to some on the Left. If she belonged to the Right, then let them have her, for she had done little, deceived many, including herself. This case was argued in 1908 when one of France’s best novelists, Anatole France, published his
Life of Joan of Arc
. Since he was friendly with Maurras, he was not beaten up.

Intending to write a well-researched biography acceptable to most contemporary readers, Anatole France solicited the help of a youthful researcher, Pierre Champion. The preface to France’s
Life of Joan of Arc
shows that, if he had paid careful attention to primary sources, he also mistrusted many of them. Joan’s perpetual hallucinations made it hard for her to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Chroniclers wrote to please their patrons. Of even less value was the witness in Joan’s rehabilitation, for they had grown old and forgetful. If Alençon asserted Joan knew how to place guns he must have been out of his mind – by the 1450s, like many who had supported her, he had gone to the bad. Even in her lifetime, knowledge of Joan was based on legend. Surprisingly, after this sceptical introduction, Anatole France yet managed to write a large book on a person about whom there was little trustworthy information.

He was more of an amateur than he indicated; the true scholar was his assistant, Champion, future editor and translator of the texts of the nullification trial. France was right to emphasise that the most important contemporary sources were written by clerics; but this applied to the trial documents, not to the chronicles. France’s Joan was manipulated by the clergy, who encouraged, condemned, killed and exonerated her, so that she was, as it were, a clerical construct. But then if clerics could be so manipulative, the Joan of the records was not afraid of contradicting them in ways that were fearless, direct and honest.

Her sense of conviction, for Anatole France, came from belief in her voices, and for this reason he inserted an appendix by a distinguished psychologist, Docteur Dumas, whom he had consulted. Dumas said that at the age of thirteen, the age when puberty normally starts, Joan had unilateral hallucinations (from the right only) affecting her sight and hearing. Charcot, who at one time had influenced Freud, thought these sorts of experiences common among hysterics, but Dumas stated that Charcot’s view was no longer widely accepted. Joan, he wrote, had not expected her voices and they gave her orders, but later she had disobeyed them or summoned them at will. They seemed as real to her as her normal life. In some ways she was like an hysteric, but in other ways not, for she was far from passive. If she were hysterical, the function of the hysteria was to release her secret feelings – it let what she called God come into her life, so that she strengthened her faith and gained a sense of her mission; and yet her character remained holy and upright and, if there was a neurotic element in her, neurosis had not affected her whole personality. Dumas was careful to hedge his bets. Anatole France, however, was a man with a mission: ‘We must finish our liberal monument, before the priests have her placed on their altars.’
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The
Life of Joan of Arc
was quickly translated into English; and in France it has remained in print. His sentiments were shared by French anticlericals, but he had reckoned without Joan’s Anglophone admirers.