Joan of Arc (35 page)

At least Besson has shown that Joan can be commercial. He also saw the potential of playing on the morbid fascination of unhealthy psychology. His Joan is hysterical, not just when she is having visions but also when arguing or fighting or encouraging others to fight. A century earlier the great actress Sarah Bernhardt, who attended Charcot’s public lectures, had studied photos of hysterics before performing in a play on Joan at Domremy by Jules Barbier. Even Sybil Thorndike, Shaw’s first Joan, thought that because she did not menstruate, Joan must have been an hysteric. Poor d’Aulon has never known what trouble his single sentence has caused.

Joan challenges the way in which women are perceived. Not until 1912, in the annual festival at Orléans, did a girl play the role of Joan. The First World War gave women a sense of freedom, and since 1945 women have become more prominent in public life, above all in the United States. Not only teenage girls in Orléans compete for the thrill of being Joan, actresses from Bernhardt to Bergman and women politicians feel compelled to play the part, for Joan opened a new way for women to act.

If ‘new women’ were boyish, then Joan’s boyishness became easier to understand: her cropped hairdo was ‘sensible’, her male clothes fashionable – so much more practical than the dresses with long trains worn by the ladies at court – and presumably she never rode side-saddle. Shaw put a modern girl on stage and cinema heroines set a new style.

Views of Joan have changed as views of women have changed. It is tempting to think of Joan as fitting a feminist archetype, as a young woman who, like some redoubtable actresses who have played her, enjoyed wearing trousers. And yet since her canonisation, the world has changed more slowly than some commentators think. The emancipation Joan stood for was never freedom from Christian morality, only freedom from foreign rule. This is not to deny that in the context of the fifteenth century she defied ordinary conventions of female behaviour in dress and behaviour.

Joan’s contemporaries were familiar with prophetesses like Catherine of Siena, with women who wielded power as royal consorts or as mothers of kings and, if rarely, in their own name or even, as in the case of Christine de Pisan, as educated writers; but a woman warrior, familiar to fiction, was unfamiliar in fact. Nobody’s interpretation of Joan is fixed in stone. Shaw asserts in his preface that Anatole France was ‘a Parisian of the art world’ who did not know any of the ‘hard-headed, hard-handed’ women who run business Paris and provincial France.
⁴
Shaw was perhaps unkind, but his wit was acute.

Another, more subtle error was committed by suffragettes who saw Christabel Pankhurst in the line of Joan, and much the same error is committed by Bertold Brecht in his play
Joan Darc
(
Saint Joan of the Stockyards
, 1932), where Joan Dark is transmuted into a Salvation Army girl fighting injustice in Chicago meat factories. In each case Joan is just the outspoken woman who demands to exercise a function, as voter or union agitator, conventionally allotted to men. This Joan was a fearless woman in pursuit of a moral goal. But the real Joan was much more. She was a girl-woman following a mission she was believed was God-given.

Radical changes in the status of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have meant that Joan, exceptional in her own day, is easier to understand in our own. At universities, above all in America, the academic discipline of Women’s Studies has developed in the context of the feminist movement. Medievalists are familiar with the singing nun Hildegard of Bingen as well as the travails of those accused of witchcraft, most of whom were women. Female mystics achieved a new influence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but Joan was exceptional. Kelly DeVries has shown that at the time there were no other noted female soldiers; and yet Joan was no Amazon in either the ancient or the modern sense.

The word ‘extraordinary’ needs to be emphasised. Joan’s clerical judges in Rouen had probably never met a woman who wore men’s clothes. They expected a man to wear clothing that indicated his status in society, his occupation, his wealth and, not having ever met a female soldier, they assumed that Joan was either the sort of girl who likes to be with soldiers, or else a freak, like a witch or a sorceress, which meant that she was by definition unnatural – and so in either case offensive to God and the Church. Was she a freak of nature? Some have thought that d’Aulon’s one remark about not knowing the malady of women meant that she was, in a biological sense, not truly female; and yet any view about her femininity is a guess.

Few at present would deny that in the past, history has been viewed in terms of the deeds of men. Furthermore, most historical documents have been written by men for men to read. Women’s activities have therefore been seen as ancillary. Such assertions have always been part of the truth, but never the whole of the truth, and in fifteenth-century France, when the literate were mostly men except perhaps in noble households, most political power was held by men, men fought the battles that decided the fate of their nations or at least of their lords, men drew up the charters that recorded rights and men alone went to universities, then it might seem that the role of women scarcely mattered. But Joan challenged normal expectations, those of her father, who expected her to stay at home until she was married, those of Robert de Baudricourt, who wanted her to return home, those of courtiers who took it for granted that they alone should run the affairs of the kingdom, those of priests who thought they alone should interpret the will of God. She elicited some sympathy from ladies of the court, just as she elicited some from the good bourgeois of Orléans or from noble ladies when a captive. What might surprise us is that she found men who believed in her mission – her page, her steward, her chaplain, her companions in arms, notably the Bastard of Orléans and the Duke of Alençon – and she was able to convince the theologians of Poitiers and even the suspicious Charles VII that she might be trustworthy.

What would surprise her is that over 550 years since the nullification processes she has been taken up by learned people drawn from her own sex, that she is now a figure of universal significance as a feminist model, if not a model feminist. As joint editor (with a man) of an academic discussion of Joan of Arc, one in a series of books on the Middle Ages that deals with ‘women’s history and feminist and gender analyses’, Bonnie Wheeler states that: ‘Joan proves that self-confidence and independent judgement are qualities so rare and suspect, especially in women, that they are sure to be punished, sometimes by death.’
⁵
The most intelligent of recent English studies of Joan, by Marina Warner, is subtitled ‘the image of female heroism’. Most, but not all, Bonnie Wheeler’s research has centred on women, for instance on Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of a king of France and of a king of England, on Héloise, nun and ex-lover of the theologian Abélard, on women in Arthurian literature, on medieval mothering, on representations of the feminine, on Muslim women. So, too, Marina Warner has written with elegance and erudition on the Virgin Mary, on fairytale women and on
Monuments and Maidens
. Such female scholars may well have insights and qualities rare in male professors; if only for this reason their verdicts on Joan of Arc would deserve respect, were it not that they also compete with men on equal terms. And yet it is possible for a male author to say that Bonnie Wheeler is wrong in saying Joan died because she was forceful.

Joan was punished because she asserted she was told by saintly and angelic voices that she must instruct the King of France to take back his lands from the King of England, who was to return to his own land, and that to fulfil this heavenly mission she was to dress in men’s clothing, usually armour, since her role as a leader of men was singular. In her society it was men she led, men who tried her; and, while some condemned and some doubted her, others were her enthusiastic devotees.

D
ebates continue; women’s studies in the United States will be ever more refined; but whoever wishes to understand the continuing appeal of Joan of Arc must make for Orléans.

On the evening of the first or occasionally the second Friday in May, a crowd converges on the cathedral of Ste-Croix. Although there have been continuous festivities of some sort since the end of April – when a girl chosen in alternate years from a Catholic college and a secular lycée rides into the city – serious enjoyment has only just begun. Bands of young people clad in coats of many colours from all over Europe play outside the fine Renaissance hotel that is the Hôtel de Ville, at whose entrance stands a bronze replica of the quiet, meditative statue of Joan carved by Marie d’Orléans, daughter of the citizen-king Louis-Philippe. At the end comes the band of the stolid folk of Orléans, with comfortable bellies on which to rest their little, high-pitched drums.

This concert is the
entrée
. The
chef d’oeuvre
is a
son et lumière
spectacle, a style of show the French have made their own. As night falls, sonorous speeches by Monsieur le Maire and Monseigneur l’Evêque are lost in the wind, but as their public rhetoric gives way to professional singing and an actor’s commentary, an amazing sequence of pictures are projected onto the façade of the cathedral and all present crane their necks upwards to watch the familiar story re-presented and to learn yet again how a teenage girl had inspired the city’s relief. Darkness returns and Orléans has just begun to celebrate the 570th and something anniversary of the singular triumph of Orléans’s own Maid.

On the morning of the official 8 May national holiday, the principal event is High Mass in the cathedral. In the nave hang the escutcheons of Joan’s companions, among them the arms of Gilles de Rais (who was nicknamed either
Barbe bleu
or
Barbe bleue
), Etienne de Vignolles, known as La Hire, Poton de Xaintrailles, the obscure Florent d’Illiers and, chief of all, those of royal blood: the Duke and the Bastard of Orléans and Joan’s
beau duc
, the Duke of Alençon. After Mass, the first of the processions due that day file past, the procession of the provinces of France. In the afternoon, the armed forces and the dignitaries go on longer circuits, which like the morning’s parade also lead to place du Martroi, centred on Foyatier’s statue. That occasion is more serious, for behind the fighting men in uniform on foot and in motorised transport come robed figures of the administration, the law, the university and the clergy – France is a country that loves to honour the professions – and fittingly the place of honour is taken not by an ecclesiastical figure but by a political grandee, though none was as grand as President Mitterrand, who came twice, in this way symbolising secular and republican reconciliation with France’s Catholic and royalist past. Elsewhere in the city, medieval banquets, markets, dances and jousts, jugglers and minstrels bring excitement to the Sunday. Since the Second World War, presidents, prime ministers and, recently, distinguished women such as Bernadette Chirac or Régine Pernoud, have led the celebrations. The wily Le Pen has harangued his followers on 1 May in place des Pyramides in Paris, beside Fremiet’s statue of Joan; and on 30 May the Church will venerate Joan’s death in Rouen. The events in Orléans, however, are meant to unite not to divide: all the French, all nations are welcome; and, radiant in the rain, a seventeen-year-old girl with two pages beside her reminds everyone that there is no honour equal to that of playing Joan.

Orléans always has been the place where Joan is most cherished. Shortly after the festivities a producer may put on the plays about Joan by Ste Thérèse of Lisieux. During the festivities guides at the Maison de Jeanne d’Arc – not really her house, which was destroyed in the last war – greet visitors in medieval dress. A few metres’ stroll on foot would take the idle tourist to the Musée Charles Péguy, devoted to Orléans’s finest poet, who worked out his religious, political and ethical convictions by writing about her.

In the grand street of rue Jeanne d’Arc, which leads up to the cathedral, the closed doors of the Collège Bailly conceal the entrance to the Centre Jeanne d’Arc, which has the best collection anywhere of material related to Joan, based on the extensive holdings of Régine Pernoud, doyenne of Johannic studies. Prominent in the cathedral are the tombs of Bishop Dupanloup and Cardinal Touchet, the men chiefly responsible for the first and the last steps in her canonisation; in the south aisle a series of fine stained-glass windows just over a hundred years old make her tale shine in the light; and in the old
quartier
to the south, the deconsecrated church of St-Pierre-le-Puellier, once the church dear to Joan’s mother in her old age, has been used to mount a retrospective exhibition of the modern pageants. The oddest poster was printed in anticipation of an event that never occurred, when in 1946 de Gaulle was invited to come to Orléans. He did not turn up until 1959, after receiving a second invitation. In the 1946 picture the silhouette of his great nose and massive body dwarfs the figure that stands in for Joan – but in reality, Joan made even that great man feel small.

The celebrant at Mass in 2004, the Archbishop of Tours, metropolitan of central France, preached on the theme of national reconciliation brought to France by Joan’s canonisation, and as the Mass was introduced in five European languages care was taken to stress her international role. In 2005 the celebrant was the Archbishop of Barcelona. In such ways, somewhat incongruously, Joan has become a symbol of reconciliation in Europe – but then a myth is nothing if not adaptable. And as a myth ‘Joan’ stands for virtues that were too long neglected in past struggles between European nations. In 2005, 8 May was also the sixtieth anniversary of the ending of the Second World War in Europe. 2004 was the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, 2005 the centenary of the French secular State. Such events are reminders that however much historians dispute her importance in her lifetime or however much she has puzzled theologians and psychologists – or however hard it is to identify a just cause for warfare – Joan has come into her own only in a world she could not have imagined, where there is no chance that France will ever have a king again, where France and England still quarrel, but only over how much each contributes to a common budget or how close each country should be to the United States, not over who has a right to rule France. Joan of Arc still matters, since in her story Church and country, myth and history intersect.