(ca. 1412–1431). The most heroic of France’s saints, Jeanne d’Arc was born to a peasant family in Lorraine. At thirteen, Jeanne began hearing the “voices” (of SS. Michael, Catherine, and Margaret) that inspired her. In February 1429, she persuaded a Valois captain to provide an escort for her dangerous journey to the court of Charles VII. At Chinon, Jeanne convinced the king of her divine mission to defeat the English and to assist at his overdue coronation. After formal inquiry into her orthodoxy and chastity, she was given a commanding role in a relief force for Orléans and led reinforcements into the besieged city on April 29. She inspired counterattacks that compelled the English to abandon the siege on May 8. A month later, her army’s decisive victory at Patay ensured Valois control over the Loire Valley and destroyed the myth of English invincibility. The subsequent campaign that brought Charles to Reims for a triumphant coronation on July 17 was the high point of Jeanne’s meteoric career.
Now a political force, Jeanne became a recognized leader of the court faction favoring renewed war over negotiations with the Anglo-Burgundians. Failure in war soon destroyed her influence. When she was defeated and wounded in an ill-considered assault on Paris in September, Charles arranged a truce and disbanded his army. Though her family had been ennobled, Jeanne was politically isolated and left the court in the spring to bolster Compiègne’s resistance to a Burgundian siege. She was captured there on May 24, 1430, and, to his eternal discredit, abandoned by Charles. Jeanne’s cross-dressing, claims to divine guidance, and success had aroused suspicions of sorcery, but her subsequent trial and execution for heresy were acts intended primarily to discredit the Valois cause. In response to an accusation by representatives of the University of Paris, her Burgundian captors delivered her for trial at Rouen under the direction of Bishop Pierre Cauchon. Eloquent in testimony and steadfast when threatened with torture, Jeanne submitted only when weakened by illness and faced with execution.
Sentenced to a life of imprisonment and penance, she relapsed and was condemned. Courageous to the end, she insisted on her innocence and asked the executioner to hold the cross high so she could see it through the flames. Jeanne remained a controversial figure, and in 1456 Charles VII arranged the annulment of her conviction mainly to clear himself of a suspect association.
Shrouded in myth and exalted by unceasing artistic glorification, Jeanne endures as a figure inspiring even the most skeptical. Her historical importance could be narrowly construed: she was essentially a military figure whose inspirational leadership and ephemeral battlefield success helped restore the prestige of the Valois dynasty, ensuring its survival but not its eventual triumph. Few, however, would restrict themselves to such a reductive assessment. Jeanne’s courageous example and her martyrdom assure her an enduring role in modern life, not unlike that played by Roland in the Middle Ages. She has become a symbolic figure emblematic of many and varied hopes. Above all, she is the symbol of 20th-century France at war with both itself and its German invaders. In the late 19th century, the “Maid of Orléans” become a popular heroine who inspired generations of French conservatives in the struggle against the secularism of the Third Republic and reminded all Frenchmen of the need to regain the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine seized by Germany in 1870. This popular devotion led to her canonization in the aftermath of the First World War and final confirmation that her greatness transcends if not defies historical analysis.
