PART THREE
EIGHTEEN
The verdict of 1456 should have settled Joan’s reputation for good, but it did not. In contemporary England, which was soon exchanging the bitterness of defeat in a dynastic war overseas for the even more bitter experience of a dynastic war at home, there was no motive for anyone to study, let alone accept, the verdict. In France, apart from certain places associated with her life, such as Domremy and Orléans, there were not many signs of devotion to her memory. Joan belonged to history, she could become a figure of legend; only to a few was she a figure of myth.
History, legend and myth are various ways of coming to terms with the past. In narrative sections of the Old Testament it is possible to discover each of these kinds of explanation. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel or Noah and his ark are properly myths. With the arrival of Abraham, the story moves on to legend. When exactly history begins is hard to establish. Some would say with Moses, others with David, others with the Babylonian captivity or the return of the Israelites to the Holy Land. What is worth noting is that some of the later figures in the narrative have been given mythic qualities: Moses is the man who gave Jews the Law, David the king who centred Israel on Jerusalem, Ezra the prophet who centred the lives of those returning from exile on the worship of the Temple and the observance of the law. These mythic qualities were later said to be incarnate in Jesus, as a new Moses, a new David and a new Ezra, lawgiver, king, priest and prophet. And in traditional Christian hagiography this or that characteristic of a figure in the Bible was thought to be evident in the life of a particular saint.
This is all remote from the case of Joan. The chief primary sources in her case are a series of carefully drafted historical documents, those connected with the 1431 trial and the inquiries of the 1450s, but she also appears in narrative accounts of the period; and there are even records of some of her expenses. Legends became attached to her name and she was also treated as a myth, but once the history was known the legends faded away and the myths were seen as attempts to focus on the inner reality of a known life.
If a myth is defined as an erroneous idea or a fictitious person, then Joan was not mythical in either of those senses. For a person of the fifteenth century some periods of her life are known in astonishing detail and the earliest records convey a vivid sense of a special person. Nor is Joan mythical in the sense that Adam and Eve are mythical: they stand for a collective reality, for all men and all women, whereas Joan was merely herself. In Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism, Marina Warner has explored her myth by analysing Joan in terms of certain received categories of female heroism. Warner would probably admit that Joan eludes all such attempts at definition; indeed, what people have found difficult to comprehend has been her uniqueness.
But the techniques of ordinary biography do not elucidate all the available information about Joan. There is no easy way of making sense of what makes her unique – her voices. How can a biographer observe abnormal phenomena, when talk of phenomena is inaccurate, as the phenomena were not phenomenal? Joan remains elusive. She did not hear her voices in the way she heard the church bells that rang while she was listening to her voices, not did she see them in the way that she could see the priests who asked her to describe them. If she hallucinated, she did not have delusions in the same way as a schizophrenic or a thirsty man lost in the desert who sees a mirage of an oasis. The numinous quality in Joan puts her outside most classes of people, even spiritual people. Her judges, aware that she was unusual, put this distinctiveness down to the spirit of evil, but then they had not confronted the historic Joan, the girl who often prayed, went to confession and communion, was kind to her enemies – they did not want to know the Joan known to family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. For this reason, efforts to consider her in purely political terms break down – her mission was political in its implications, but the mission, she asserted, was given her by God. Her critics understandably did not and do not agree.
Anyone who studies the story of Joan of Arc must be puzzled by three paradoxes. First, a girl tried and condemned in 1431 by a French Church court was rehabilitated indirectly by the nullification of that verdict by another French Church court in 1452–6, and then, after a much longer process, in 1920 canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church. Secondly, in that year this belatedly canonised saint was also declared by the Church to be the patroness of France and given a public holiday by the secular French State, while at the same time she was widely admired in the English-speaking world, where in her lifetime she would have found her most determined enemies. Thirdly, whereas in the fifteenth century she had divided opinion, by the early twentieth century there was virtual unanimity in assessing her heroism, her patriotism, her goodness, since Allied victory in the First World War seemed to have implied a need to recognise her.
To those who realised how essential had been the contribution of women to the Allies’ triumph in 1918, Joan was suddenly modern.1 The English were Allies of the French; American soldiers fighting in Lorraine had paid their respects at Domremy; Allied propaganda made much of the German bombardment of Reims, where Joan had seen her king crowned,2 and a popular French biography of Joan, written for children and beautifully illustrated by its author, had been translated into English and published in both England and America.3 French and English speakers shared the conviction that Joan symbolised the values of freedom for which the victorious Allies believed they stood. Joan, a historical figure from the forgotten past, had become the subject of a modern myth.
The myth of Joan essentially involves spiritual realities or a spiritual way of looking at everyday realities. If not an evil person, as the nullification trial records testify, she may have been a good person who was simply misled – a spiritual simpleton. The spiritual side of Joan is hard to make sense of, and yet it was the most important part of her. The key to her lies outside the confines of normal history.
She was, however, a historical figure, not a legend. Famous people tend to attract those who find the mere truth boring. Some have maintained that Joan was in fact a member of the French royal family, that she did not really die at the stake in Rouen; and after her death at least one other woman claimed to be Joan of Arc. Such views do not merit serious discussion, for the numerous extant documents provide a firm basis for parts of her actual life and the whole of her actual death.