On 16 May 1920, as a hushed crowd of thousands waited outside St Peter’s Basilica, Joan of Arc was recognised as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The declaration had been half a century in the making: it had been in 1869 that Félix Dupanloup, then bishop of Orléans, first petitioned the Holy See to examine her case. The town of Orléans had never forgotten her, but it was history, rather than memory, that animated Bishop Dupanloup’s campaign. He had read the transcripts of her trials when the manuscripts were published by the pioneering scholar Jules Quicherat in the 1840s, and his conclusion was clear. ‘She is a saint’, he declared. ‘God was in her.’
In fact, in several respects Joan made an unlikely candidate for canonisation. Not many saints had been put to death by the judgement of the same Church that was asked to recognise their sanctity. That, of course – said the promoter of the faith, or devil’s advocate, assigned to test her case in 1892 – was a reflection of the fact that she had not been martyred for her faith, but killed for political motives, through the enmity of those whom she had defeated in battle. She had been rightly admired for her military achievements, he conceded, but, like Christopher Columbus, for whose canonisation a vocal lobby had argued unsuccessfully in the 1870s, her outstanding spiritual virtue had not been proved. During her life she had shown anger, and arrogance, and a fondness for worldly luxury, and she had not embraced her suffering with patience and heroic fortitude, but abjured her visions out of fear, and met her death with lamentation and anguish.
In 1892, and again in 1901 and 1903, the many pages of the promoter’s arguments were met with hundreds more of rebuttal from the defender, who pressed Joan’s case on the basis of her divine revelations and advanced counter-proposals to demonstrate that she had indeed displayed all the virtues to a heroic degree. On 6 January 1904, it was the defender’s reasoning with which Pope Pius X concurred. Four years later he acknowledged three miracles that had taken place through her intercession: three nuns had been cured of grievous illness after invoking her aid in their prayers. The need for a fourth miracle, the Holy Father accepted, was obviated by her salvation of France in her own lifetime. ‘Joan of Arc’, he declared, ‘has shone like a new star destined to be the glory not only of France but of the universal Church as well.’ On 18 April 1909 she was beatified, and in 1920 – after the agonising intervention of the Great War – came her canonisation, as a virgin who had lived a life of saintly virtue. The feast day of St Joan, the Maid of Orléans, was inscribed in the Church’s calendar on 30 May, the anniversary of her execution almost five hundred years before.
Over the span of half a millennium, from the trials of 1431 and 1456 to the canonisation hearings in twentieth-century Rome, the events of Joan’s brief and extraordinary life have been the subject of legal processes designed to assign her to a category: heretic or saint. In each case, evidence has been sifted, seized and discarded, a winnowing dictated by theological principles which, for the expert assessors, are paramount and all-pervasive. And yet, in theology as in history, answers reached are shaped by questions posed and facts admitted. For all the commissioners’ warnings to the Maid’s mother about the unpredictability of the outcome, there was no possibility that the hearings of 1456 would uphold the sentence of 1431: the information they sought and the purpose for which they sought it would not allow that conclusion, just as there had been no chance that the trial of 1431 would exonerate Joan from the charges of heresy that defined every moment of that earlier investigation. Both sides were sure that God’s purpose was at work in the world, but their shared certainty underwrote diametrically opposed understandings of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. And therein lies the essence of faith: did Joan’s king win the war because she came from God, or did she come from God because he won the war?
For those in search of Joan herself, the surviving documents produced by these tribunals present a double challenge. Though their purpose may be clear, their rules of engagement – articles of inquiry, for example, glimpsed only through the responses they elicit – can be disconcertingly elusive. And the difficulty of interpreting the information they contain is compounded by the shockingly vivid presence of a girl who, through the unforeseeable effect of her own unyielding conviction, had achieved what should, for someone of her sex and class, have been impossible. Her forceful charisma is palpable in the transcript of the trial that condemned her to a heretic’s death. When dazzlingly displayed through the differently partisan judgement which annulled that verdict, it transformed the Maid into a legend, an icon and a saint.
In gaining a saint, however, we have lost a human being. This ferocious champion of one side in a complex and bloody war has been robbed of her context and her roaring voice. By 2011, Pope Benedict XVI could say, of what he called ‘her mission among the French military forces’, that ‘she sought to negotiate a just Christian peace between the English and French’. It is hard not to believe that Joan herself – who told the English king that ‘wherever I find your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they want to or not, and if they will not obey, I will have them all killed’ – might have put it in markedly different terms. One of the most eminent of the Maid’s historians suggests that ‘Joan is above all the saint of reconciliation – the one whom, whatever be our personal convictions, we admire and love because, overriding all partisan points of view, each one of us can find in himself a reason to love her’. But, in becoming all things to all people, the woman herself risks disappearing altogether.
She is still there to be found. If we read the remarkable records of a wholly exceptional life in the knowledge of how those documents came to be made, if we immerse ourselves in her cultured, brutal and terrifyingly uncertain world, assured of nothing but the supreme force of God’s will, then perhaps we can begin to understand Joan herself: what she thought she was doing; why those around her responded as they did; how she took her chance, to miraculous effect; and what happened, in the end, when the miracles stopped.
And, still, in the well-worn pages of her trials there are unexpected moments that catch the humanity, the violence and the transcendence of her story. On 7 May 1456, a nobleman named Aimon de Macy gave evidence in Paris in the presence of the archbishop of Reims. De Macy was now in his fifties, but he had encountered the Maid when he was a young man, a friend of her captor Jean de Luxembourg. His testimony was an ugly thing: he told of visiting Joan in her cell at Rouen with de Luxembourg and the English lords Warwick and Stafford, to mock her with feigned offers of ransom, and he could confirm that she was virtuous, he said, because of the force with which she fought him off every time he grabbed at her breasts or put his hands into her clothes. Then he had been at Saint-Ouen to witness her abjuration, with the clerk holding the pen in her hand to put her mark on the paper. The last sentence of his statement appears an afterthought, almost as if he turned back to speak once he had risen to leave. ‘And he believes she is in paradise.’