As she was being led to the stake to be executed, most of the hostile crowd thought she was a witch. Yet, by the time Joan of Arc had been burned alive on May 30, 1431, many of the onlookers were weeping. Even some of the judges who had condemned her broke down in tears, and one onlooker famously said, “We are lost. It is a saint we have burned.”1
Almost six centuries later, the life story of this fifteenth-century Frenchwoman continues to be retold in biographies, novels, children’s books, movies, histories, and even journal articles. The famous American writer Mark Twain spent a dozen years researching Joan’s life and wrote a respectful novel about her, even though he was no friend of Christianity or the Catholic Church. Another famous biography was written by Hilaire Belloc, a naturalized English citizen who was born in France and who balanced the perspectives of England and France without ignoring Joan’s Catholicism.
A fascinating life often misunderstood
For some reason, the story of Joan’s life seems to fascinate non-Catholics in a way that does not happen with the lives of other Catholic saints. Perhaps that’s because the pivotal periods of Joan’s life were not spent in a university, like Thomas Aquinas, or in a convent, like Clare of Assisi, but on a battlefield and in a courtroom.
Over the centuries, Joan has been a powerful symbol of patriotism in France. Some French authors have described her accomplishments in glowing terms, and some are entranced by stories that appear to be mere legends that have evolved over the centuries. Other Frenchmen have written disparagingly and critically about Joan and her legacy.
English speakers continue to write biographies about Joan as well. Some books have been written for people who delight in the intricate details of military campaigns, fifteenth-century history, and the personalities of European nobility. Other books read less like history and more like imaginative fiction.
Put bluntly, the story of Joan’s life seems to act like a Rorschach inkblot test. Our contemporaries interpret the particulars of her life based on the axe they want to grind. For feminists, Joan was a strong leader who was held back by the oppressive patriarchy (translation: she was a feminist). Atheists claim that her reputed visions were really signs of neurosis or that she was merely experiencing adolescent “flights of fancy” when she said God told her to lead an army. Others have implied that Joan possessed some unspecified intersex condition and was actually a male who had the exterior signs of being a female. That implication is, of course, deeply insulting to women because it implies that the only way Joan could have been a successful military leader was that she was, underneath it all, a man.
Perhaps the most humorous passage in all the treatments of Joan occurs in a modern book. The author explained Joan’s fasting as the method she used to “call her angels”. If one does not understand God, angels, saints, fasting, or the Catholic faith, that might be a reasonable way to describe what happened. Catholics, on the other hand, understand that Joan fasted as an act of penance in the hope that God would reveal to her through the voices of her patron saints what she should do next in a difficult situation.
This detail points to an important distinction that Catholics must make about Joan of Arc. The Catholic Church did not choose to canonize her because she was a military leader, but because she was holy. After all, it was a bit controversial for the Church to pursue canonization for someone who led an army in battle, particularly when the soldiers on both sides of that battle were Catholics. Setting aside her military victories, what evidence is there that Joan should be called a saint?
Ordinary beginnings, extraordinary actions
Joan (c. 1412-1431) was born in the village of Domrémy, France. Her father was a peasant farmer, and her mother, Isabelle, was a devout woman. Like her brothers and sister, Joan did not go to school. Instead, she cared for the family’s livestock, and she learned to weave, spin, and sew. According to witnesses, she was an obedient, hardworking, and pious girl.
At the time of Joan’s birth, England and France had been fighting for control over large regions of northern France for seven decades. Simplifying this long conflict greatly, the English kings had enough blood from the French nobility in their bloodlines to give them reasonable claims to these territories, and the French kings were not always strong enough, in military terms and otherwise, to stand up to them. Conquered territories had been in English hands for so long that some feudal French lords had become wealthy and comfortable under English control.
The king of France during Joan’s childhood, Charles VI, was, without question, mentally ill. Obviously, it is difficult to govern a kingdom when one is alternately lucid and psychotic. Another complication to Charles’ ability to reign was his queen. It was commonly known that his wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, had been repeatedly unfaithful to him, and it was unclear which of her twelve children were truly Charles’ heirs.
Ongoing battles for control of France meant that the residents of Domrémy, like many other poor French peasants, lived in constant fear. Joan’s family and neighbors personally knew the reality of hunger and suffering after troops burned their homes and stole their livestock and food. Throughout Joan’s childhood years, peasants in many regions of France were in daily danger of looting, violence, and starvation.
Some say Joan was thirteen years old when her visions began. According to Joan, for at least a year, perhaps longer, the Archangel Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch2 spoke to Joan and sometimes appeared to her. When she was about sixteen years old, in response to a command from these “voices”, she asked a relative to take her to a nearby garrison of French soldiers. From this point in time and throughout the next few years, Joan made many accurate predictions regarding the future. According to numerous witnesses, she somehow knew about the outcome of battles occurring far away.
Although she had no military training, she seemed to have great insight into military strategy, including how, when, and where to successfully attack a city. She won the heir to the French throne, Charles VII, over to her side by apparently revealing to him in private that she knew his great secret: he was afraid he was not the son of Charles VI because of his mother’s unfaithfulness. Joan told him that he was the true heir and personally crowned him in Reims Cathedral a year later, after many successful battles. The wisdom that Joan possessed seemed remarkable, perhaps even divinely inspired, for an uneducated peasant girl.
Joan’s insightful modern biographer, Sven Stolpe, points out that some of the stories about Joan’s military genius may have been exaggerated. There were, after all, several French lords with a lifetime of practical experience in battle who could have been making the most critical decisions. And there were certainly long periods when Joan was forced to sit and wait for the king and his nobles to graciously agree to call up their soldiers and fight. However, it must be pointed out that those same leaders had regularly lost their battles until Joan showed up.
The peasants of France, demoralized by so many defeats, encouraged one another with a widely known prophecy that France would be “destroyed by one woman and reborn through a virgin from Lorraine.”3 It was easy for ordinary Frenchmen to recognize the woman who had destroyed their country: the voluptuous and adulterous Queen Isabeau. But who was the promised virgin who would help them?
A life of heroic virtue and an unjust death
While it is not possible to be certain how much of Joan’s military acumen was fact or fiction, her personal holiness during this period cannot be doubted. Although she was only an uneducated teenager, she clearly displayed heroic virtue.
Today, she is commonly called Joan of Arc, yet she called herself Joan the Maid (Jeanne d’Arc and Jeanne la Pucelle, respectively, in French), that is, Joan the Virgin. She lived a chaste, holy life in a military camp, surrounded by soldiers who were not angels, and convinced them (well, commanded them) to attend Mass, go to Confession, and get rid of their prostitutes and swearing. She never killed anyone in battle, she wept over the dead bodies of the slain, and she repeatedly intervened to stop her soldiers from killing wounded English soldiers. She bravely entered numerous battles armed only with a banner bearing the names of Jesus and Mary. Her true armor was not the beautiful white armor designed for her by King Charles, but her unshakeable trust that God would help her people regain their land if they would only trust in Him and fight for it.
On May 23, 1430, Joan was captured in battle. She was imprisoned in a castle but initially treated respectfully. On two occasions, she tried to escape, which she considered her patriotic duty, but was caught both times. The English paid a large ransom4 to take custody of her, and on January 9, 1431, French supporters of the English crown put Joan on trial as a blasphemer and a witch in the city of Rouen.
Although modern methods of trial and imprisonment are very different from those used six centuries ago, the way Joan was treated was both cruel and unjust by any Christian standard.
Her imprisonment in Rouen was hardly luxurious. Some say Joan was kept in an iron cage, while others say she was merely confined to a small room in a castle. Either way, she was manacled by her ankles to her cell. During her trial, she was kept fettered with tight chains on her neck, hands, and ankles, and she almost died from what appears to have been an attempted poisoning.
One of the charges against Joan was that she scandalously chose to wear men’s clothing. Obviously, pants are a better clothing choice when one is riding a horse in battle, and Joan claimed that her voices had given her permission to do so. But during her imprisonment, she fiercely insisted on wearing men’s clothing and tightly wrapped her clothes around her body. When questioned about this, she repeatedly said that she was doing so to protect herself from the men who were guarding her. The foul-mouthed guards not only constantly insulted her, they repeatedly attempted to sexually assault her. Historians are divided over whether any of them succeeded, but witnesses recorded that they saw her bloodied and disheveled more than once.
In cases involving suspected witchcraft, it would have been reasonable for Joan to be interrogated and face trial with two judges. Instead, Joan was interrogated, privately and publicly, for months by dozens of Church leaders. She was outnumbered 100 to one, yet after long hours of daily attempts to make her contradict herself or misstate Church teaching, her enemies could not claim victory over her statements. Instead, they merely charged her with the same lies they had used before the trial began.
A few of her judges recognized that Joan was innocent and quickly left Rouen. Others were obviously willing to believe that she was a witch because they had, for whatever reason, chosen to side with the English. There were a few men who quietly tried to help Joan, and one of them appears to have suggested to Joan that she ask to be sent to the pope to be judged. When Joan publicly requested this, the leaders of the trial simply ignored her.
Christlike in her suffering
In the end, those men who had become convinced that she was innocent were too afraid of the real man behind the trial, Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, to speak up for Joan. They were willing to let a nineteen-year-old girl die—and be beaten and perhaps raped—to save their own necks. The less said about weak King Charles VII, who owed his crown to Joan and did nothing to free her, the better.
Although Joan changed the course of world history by inspiring Frenchmen to fight for their land, the Church declared her a saint for other reasons. Joan’s behavior during her public life—her courage, charity, faithfulness, forgiveness, prayerfulness, purity, and grace under pressure—are clear signs of holiness, signs of the presence of God in her soul. Ironically, the detailed records that her enemies made of her trial also made it easier for Joan to be publicly rehabilitated in Paris twenty-five years after her death and to be declared a saint five centuries later.
Joan never considered herself a savior and never wanted to become a queen. Until the very end, she thought her role in God’s plan was merely to lead France’s army to victory over the English and be present at the coronation of her king. She probably hoped to live a long life afterwards.
In this way, she demonstrated another of God’s greatest but most misunderstood attributes: simplicity. Joan was a simple girl who obeyed God’s commands, even when they seemed ridiculous and impossible. She did not always understand what He wanted her to do next, but she was always singularly focused on obeying His will.
Sven Stolpe’s biography of Joan makes the startling but reasonable claim that Joan was not just a martyr, but a mystic, even though she didn’t spend her life in a convent or write books about her visions. As Stolpe explains:
The great fault with nearly all previous accounts of Joan’s life is that they have ignored or minimized the fact that her spiritual development was that of a typical mystic. Through hard moral schooling, through listening to the inner voice, and through asceticism, she advances to the supreme sacrifice, martyrdom.
It was during Joan’s final days of imprisonment, when she was completely alone, abandoned, mistreated, and condemned to death, that Joan became most Christlike in her suffering. It is no wonder that the onlookers cried when they watched her die. It is also no wonder that the example of a young woman bravely dying a brutal death should capture the imaginations even of unbelievers. They also admire her passion, but do not know that such love can only come from the heart of God.
Endnotes:
1 Sven Stolpe, The Maid of Orleans: The Life and Mysticism of Joan of Arc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 263.
2 These were popular saints of France at the time, and perhaps there were images of them in her parish church. After all, Joan was illiterate.
3 Stolpe, 24.
4 They paid 10,000 livre tournois for Joan. According to one online currency converter, that would be about $40,000 today.
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one is struck by the duplicity and savagery of that age until one reflects on the holocaust of the Holy Innocents in this age. It causes one to wonder how the Almighty can have Mercy on us.
Yes, it’s amazing: He knew all this would happen and He still chose to create us and die for us!
Dawn, that was a beautiful resumé of much careful reading and research. Thank you for writing it.
Excellent article. Saints are hard to come by. Seldom do they stay as long Sr. Lucia of Fatima or leave too soon like Sts. Francisco and Jacinta; but they always leave a lasting impression. Too often though the Church seems to take forever to recognize their greatness.
Thanks for the thoughtful and informative article. I became fascinated with Joan of Arc as a child in the 1950s, initially because of a lovely young nun I met whose name was Sister St. Joan. I’ve read a good deal about the Maid, and one caution I’d make to anyone wanting to learn more about her: writers have a tendency to see Joan as a mirror that reflects their own image and likeness. To some, she’s a proto-Protestant; to others, a proto-feminist — both of which assessments, imho, miss the mark.
Rewarding, historical account of Saint Joan of Arc. St Therese of Lisieux had a strong devotion to Saint Joan of Arc writing poems, plays which she acted in at her convent in Lisieux. St Therese died 1873 during the time when there was a movement in France to canonize Joan.
This was the period 1871 when France lost Alsace Lorraine to Prussia, Lorraine the region of Domrémy. Although that may not have been a rationale for Therese’s devotion to Joan of Arc. Rather more a rationale for Frenchmen to seek Joan’s canonization. Personally I’m devoted to both heroic saints.
It still makes no sense to me that God cared about whether Charles VII was king of France instead of Henry VI, whose claim was equally valid. Charles’ betrayal of Joan hardly suggests a great worthiness. And the Hundred Years’ War in France at this time was more of a civil war than anything: the House of Burgundy, representing a significant part of France, backed Henry.
Why divine intervention then but not in 1939?
We read: “The famous American writer Mark Twain spent a dozen years researching Joan’s life and wrote a respectful novel about her, even though he was no friend of Christianity or the Catholic Church.” Yet, he “regarded the “Joan of Arc’ as worth all his other books together” (Edward Wagenknecht, “Mark Twain: The Man and His Work,” University of Oklahoma Press, 1935/1967, p. 60).
Why? Maybe this…
Twain is known to have been a historical determinist. But, then, along comes the anomaly, Joan…an undeniable exception of irreducible human freedom that could overturn closed determinism (a theme in Andrew Tadie’s introduction to the 1989 Ignatius printing; including the above citation).
On this point, novelist Twain is a kind of Galileo who also broke open natural cosmology by simply noticing another anomaly—moons circling around Jupiter. Twain bumped into the world-changing implication of even one truly free person circling around in history, like Joan of Arc. With even one solitary exception determinism is doomed.
(In Twain’s Tom Sawyer, the vagrant Injun Joe is trapped in a cave and is found dead only one day after he has expired from dehydration, on the wrong side of the sealed cave door. His only source of water had been a small hollow in a rock underneath a cave dripping. Had the hollow been any larger he would have had enough water to live one more day until rescue. But the cup had been sized by geologic action beginning tens of thousands of years before. His insignificant fate in the grand scheme of things was already rigged from eons before—historically determined….or, maybe not?)
The history of Lorraine and Alsace are kind of confusing. Wasn’t Lorraine part of the Holy Roman Empire in St. Joan’s day? Or perhaps her village was outside that border?
Lorraine was part of the Holy Roman Empire, not France in the Middle Ages. Joan was “ethnically French:” but not actually a French subject.
A great way to learn about Joan is by reading the transcripts of her two trials (the one that condemned her and the “rehabilitation” trial about 20 years later), a available in English edited by Regine Pernoud.
Thank you for the clarification Miss Sandra. I have trouble keeping up with all the ins and outs of that region throughout history.
The other night I saw somebody sharing something on one of the platforms, it was somebody remarking on the calculatingly, cold caprice of the culture. It was a woman dancing and the chyron read something on the order of “my fetus dancing right before it gets aborted”. Pure evil.
“That implication is, of course, deeply insulting to women because it implies that the only way Joan could have been a successful military leader was that she was, underneath it all, a man.”
Think about French Men. They are being told the only way they can win is to be led by an untrained teenage girl. Of course France is the inventor of “preemptive pusillanimity” and “strategic surrender”.
The French were told the only way they could win was to follow God.
France is a part of the reason that we are no longer a British colony.I’ve read there were more French troops than Americans in some battles.We also were aided by Haitians.
To be fair, not all of France’s soldiers fighting in the American Revolution were French. There were Irish, German, & Scots in the French forces as well.
I get weary of people peddling revisionist American history. Haitians? Really? How many? More of them than the majority white male population? I dont think so. History is not an appropriate place for “everyone gets a participation trophy”. At least, not real history. There was a famously effective Black regiment from Rhode Island during the Revolution. They were AMERICAN, not Haitian. I am certain there were half a dozen Italians in North American by the mid 1700’s for example, but to ascribe the winning of the Revolution to Italians would be absurd. Yes, the French helped us out, after long persuasion by American Diplomats. And it escapes the notice of some that the French waited until the Americans showed an ability to stand their ground and win a few battles before the French committed themselves to helping us against an old enemy. They were less interested in actually helping us than hitting an old adversary. Some of the French like Lafayette came here at their own expense, because they took a personal interest in the cause. America had plenty of Germans (thank you William Penn) and Irish of our own fighting on our side. But to belabor the point, they thought of themselves as AMERICANS at that point.
I dare say if we had as much foreign help as some suggest during the Revolution, it should not have taken us 7 years to win the war. When your troops are mainly under-supplied farmers however, it stacks up a little different.
It is inaccurate to portray the American Revolution as some exercise in present day globalism when it was nothing of the sort. I am aware it is the current revisionist fashion to do so, but that doesnt make it valid. Any more than the debunked 1619 Project was valid. It was not. Its just a way to sell books.
American history might have been quite different minus assistance from the French. And the Haitians. There’s a statue commemorating them in Savannah.
🙂
The American revolution was violent bloody and contained a lot more than untrained farmers. Troops from many places aided the colonists. It took 7 years because they were fighting the greatest military in the world at the time. If not for global aid they would have lost. This is real history and fact as is the history of slavery presented in the 1619 project.
Excerpted from Marx’s Das Kapital
History’s pretty complicated. Thousands of slaves including one of Washington’s, fought or served on the British side & they were given their freedom. The Royal Ethiopian Regiment wore sashes with “Liberty to Slaves”.
At the end of the war many were evacuated by the British Navy to Nova Scotia where some of their descendants still live today.
Oh darling, there were NOT a lot of “global” forces helping us at all. We were on our own for quite a long time. Do you recall a place called Valley Forge where more of our men died from hunger and exposure than by battle? Where was the foreign help? Bunker Hill? Saratoga? Battle of Trenton? Even the Boston Tea Party? Just where was that foreign help? Nowhere. Not until much later and in small doses. Until the French finally showed up. If you believe the leftist tripe about the country you are going down a fools path. In fact, the vast majority of American soldiers fighting in the Revolution were indeed farmers. If you imagine that we would have lost the war, you dont know Americans at all. You think we went through Valley Forge to just give up? And if you happen to be American, shame on you. Nobody fights for 7 years and then gives up. Certainly, WE do not. I have documented 3 direct ancestors who fought in the American Revolution. Two of them were shot while fighting in battle. Spoiler alert: they were not Haitian. But they were farmers. And the 1619 Project was well debunked as garbage by most serious historians of American History.
Its popular now to debunk American history and give everybody else credit— a “feel good” way to teach history which is not true or balanced but is all the rage so nobody feels “left out”. You are entitled to feel however you do about American History (clearly you have no positive feelings). You are not entitled to make up your own facts or to dismiss the sacrifice of those who actually fought because they dont fit your political narrative.
“France is a part of the reason that we are no longer a British colony.”
Well, that was a different France, before their submission to the Masonic revolution, they had their own reasons for assisting the Colonists and any debt we owned them was paid many times over as we saved their sorry posteriors from the Kaiser and the failed artist.
Was the Hundred Years War a just war? If not, why was Joan declared a saint of the Catholic Church by the Pope? If it was a just war, what made it such? Perhaps the “Just War Experts” could tell us.
Well, one reason was that Charles IV of France died without leaving any male heir, so according to French law, which did not allow for a woman to inherit (the Salic Law), the crown passed to his cousin, who became Phillip VI. According to English law, the rightful heir to the French throne was Edward III of England, whose mother was Isabella of France, the only surviving child of Phillip IV.
So the legal question was: should the throne of France be given according to French law, which did not allow a woman to inherit? Or according to English law, which did allow a woman to inherit?
I will let you decide yourself if this question makes it a war of self-defence, and which side was defending itself against aggression.
The war was just on account of Joan and the expulsion of the unjust English.
We say “English” but by this time they were the “progeny” or shoots of the Norman overtake of England 300 years earlier. They got done to them what their forebears did to the English.
But what happened on both sides of the Channel in the subsequent centuries was epic rebellion and contempt against all reason and human cherishing, which got big self-redeeming names like supremacy, settlement, reformation, renaissance, enlightenment and age of reason.
Joan is a Saint independent of the justification for the war.
That’s true Miss susanne. Thank you.
Thank you for this well written reminder of this great saint, on her day, May 30, the day of her death. She did not want to be a saint, or even a model Christian. She wanted to help France shake off foreign rule by fighting in battle and leading warriors to victory. She succeeded and has become a symbol of France’s nationhood (the English king may have had a dynastic claim, but the people in France were culturally and linguistically different from the English, hence the importance of La Pucelle and the eventual triumph of her side for the history of France). Alas, she is more needed than ever in France, as her nation is being conquered—by demographic replacement. Now she is a model Christian and a model defender of her country, her culture and her people. See this:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2026/05/22/new-france-one-in-three-either-foreign-born-or-descendant-of-immigrants/
New France: One in Three People Either Foreign Born or Descendant of Immigrants
Transcripts of Joan’s original trial and her rehabilitation trial have been published in English, providing a unique look at St. Joan in her own words and as her contemporaries saw her. The script for that great silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc is taken entirely from the actual trial record.
Lorraine was separate from France in Joan’s day.
Joan is utterly astonishing. Twain’s book on her is an act of veneration…he was swept away by her life…from the moment the leaflet announcing the play about her flew down at his feet while walking down the street.
Twain’s account shows her whole short life as a trial by fire, forced to prove herself true to all around her, friend and foe alike. It reminds me of the line from the poet Elizabeth Jennings: “Clarify me please, God of the galaxies, make me a meteor….”
Her story, as told by Twain, and also by Belloc in his own little book, is simply supernatural (most of the movies are unwilling and unable to tell her story).
Twain wrote his favorite book was Joan of Arc. He felt a special fondness for this one book. The other stories he had fun with. Some how he felt close to Joan after his years of research. He researched her history in depth. This was not write something quick. In some ways I think he fell in love with Joan. Not in a romantic way but in appreciation of who she was and what she did.
Much gratitude for this article’s well-reasearched biography of Joan of Arc, author Dawn B. My daughter and I were enthralled years ago watching a black- and-white movie version of her life. Truly courageous St. Joan was a mystic; she inspires my daughter who is her namesake.
By Joan’s time, the Holy Roman Empire had long since broken up into Germany, France and Burgundy. Alsace was then in France. In subsequent centuries, it would go back and forth between France and Germany.
I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE MORE CATHOLIC CHURCHES IN ENGLAND DEDICATED TO ST JOAN OF ARC THAN IN FRANCE, WITH A BEAUTIFUL MONUMENT TO HER IN WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL… an effort at reparation?
I expected a mention at least of ‘St Joan’ by GBShaw, a play based on the Acts of her trial, using her very words at times…Although he was an atheistic he made the point
that Joan is the ‘very definition’ of a saint, that’s why he wrote a ‘comedy’ rather
than a ‘tragedy’. HE portrays a very likeable Joan full of common sense and intelligence the one a commoner in those days would have to have in order to survive difficult times…