TWENTY-TWO
THE MAID OF DOMREMY
The early 1870s was a period of decisive change in the history of France, of the Catholic Church and of the cult of Joan.
France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war destroyed for ever its reputation as the leading Continental power. The crowning of the King of Prussia as German Kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles symbolised France’s national humiliation, and the siege of Paris brought misery to a capital to which the Emperor Napoleon III had given its majestic layout. The ensuing civil war between the left-wing supporters of the Paris Commune and the Versailles government fuelled lasting class hatred, but nothing hurt so much as the wresting away from France of German-speaking Alsace, which had been French since the reign of Louis XIV, and still more the industrial parts of French-speaking Lorraine, French since the reign of Louis XV.
The threat of war had led France to withdraw troops that for a generation had protected the pope in Rome and the patrimony of St Peter (which corresponds approximately to the modern Lazio). As Prussia’s ally, the new kingdom of Italy was free to invade papal territory and to take control of most of Rome. Pope Pius IX, a ‘prisoner in the Vatican’, would have nothing to do with the anticlerical regime based in his own city. At the Vatican Council that met just before war broke out, he had been declared infallible when, speaking as successor of St Peter for the whole Church, he pronounced on matters of faith and morals. This doctrine would have surprised fifteenth-century conciliarists such as Gerson, who thought that the ultimate authority of the Church lay in a General Council; and indeed a minority at the Vatican Council, including Dupanloup, thought the timing of the pope’s declaration inopportune.
Defeat in the Franco-Prussian war transformed the role of Joan in France. The new borders meant that, as in Joan’s time, Domremy was situated at the edge of France; and now all Frenchmen were united by a desire for revenge. France set out to train all its young men to fight; and the spread of primary schooling inculcated a sense of national identity.
As an act of reparation for the sins that had brought disaster, a conservative government voted for the building of a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacré Coeur, perched high on the hill of Montmartre, may look like the sugary confection of some architectural cake-maker, but it implied France’s Catholic destiny and, when a huge picture of the Triumph of the Sacred Heart was eventually designed for the church, Joan of Arc was the one Frenchwoman among the group who worship Christ.
By the time church and the picture were ready, Joan was on the point of being made a saint. The process had been halted by warfare, but in 1874 Dupanloup resumed his project of supervising preliminary enquiries in Orléans. By then he knew that France’s failure against Prussia in 1870–1 meant that France was a republic. The Bonapartist cause was in defeat a lost cause, and so the alternative was a Bourbon king, who could be one of two princes: Henri, comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X, last Bourbon of the senior line to be king, or the comte de Paris, grandson of Louis-Philippe of the junior line who had supplanted Charles. To make matters easy the comte de Paris was heir to the childless comte de Chambord, but Henri ‘V’ made matters harder. He had not set foot in France since he was a child and gauging the country’s mood was beyond his imagination to grasp. It would be an affront to his honour, he announced, to accept the tricolour as the national flag instead of the fleur-de-lis, ‘the flag of Henry IV, of Francis I, of Joan of Arc’.1He went into exile, where he remained until he died. His behaviour made clear that the royalist restoration Dupanloup hoped for would never take place. Others, like Louis Veuillot, a rabid right-wing journalist, supported the stand taken by the comte de Paris, although the royal heir had left France for ever, and looked forward to an ideal king who would rescue France from atheists, socialists, radicals and Catholic liberals like Dupanluoup, all of whom might accept a republic, if they disagreed about what sort of republic France should have. Royalist sentiment survived, but did not unite the French. And yet while the lilies of the French crown withered, the demand to proclaim Joan’s sanctity grew.
At the same time, however, many on the republican, anticlerical Left in France also developed a devotion to Joan, seeing her as the simple peasant abandoned by her king and her Church; and outside France, above all in the English-speaking world, she was admired.
THE GIRL ON A GOLDEN HORSE
A fine gilt statue of Joan of Arc on horseback holding her banner in place des Pyramides is one of four statues of Joan in Paris. The statue of Emmanuel Fremiet evokes the strongest emotions. It was erected in an area where, and at a time when, the statue mattered. The site is near the heart of Napoleonic Paris, not far from place Vendôme, home to the column Napoleon put up in honour of the army that triumphed at Austerlitz in 1805. This was a part of Paris that was devastated in 1871. On the defeat of French troops in the Franco-Prussian war a mob hacked down the Vendôme column and burnt down the Tuileries Palace, the principal residence of France’s rulers from 1799 to 1871. The erection of Fremiet’s statue in 1874 seemed to reaffirm faith in an older, more permanent France.
The statue was a call to arms. Glistening in the sun, it would inspire the nation to recapture Lorraine, and, if Joan could not yet be called a saint, she was the heroine who would ride out to inspire the soldiers of France. All over France similar statues of Joan were put up, in churches, in squares, even in remote landscapes. In French Lorraine alone there were said to be some 1,000 statues of Joan. From 1871 to 1914 the aim of winning back Alsace-Lorraine was the policy from which no politician dared dissent. Every young conscript was taught the story of Joan. Domremy, her village, was again a frontier village, but now a frontier village in what became a 75-year war against the Germans. As in the fifteenth century, in a period of national humiliation, Joan’s hour had come. The republican Anatole France noted that after the Franco-Prussian war, under the influence of patriotic feeling and the revival of Catholic belief among the middle classes, ‘the cult of the Maid redoubled in fervour’.2 A 1883 life by the republican historian Fabre called her the ‘Libératrice de France’; and in 1912 the quincentenary of her birth was celebrated throughout France.
She was born a peasant. In the late nineteenth century French rural society was in process of modernising; and as it did so the cult of Joan spread. Eugen Weber, who has studied the transformation of rural society in this period, insists that ignorance about Joan among French schoolteachers had become unacceptable by the 1880s. In five years in the 1870s the number of signatures in the visitors’ book at Joan’s house in Domremy jumped from about 1,300 to over 2,000. Visitors were largely either from neighbouring departments or from Paris. Other than soldiers, they were for the most part lesser nobility and elegant townsfolk. Travel was still a pastime for the rich and only slowly did Domremy turn into a popular shrine. In 1881 work began on building the huge basilica of Bois-Chenu in Joan’s honour. The basilica was given a function when Domremy became an official place of pilgrimage; and artists vied to decorate its walls. Two statues were made for the village: Joan Hearing her Voices and France Arming Joan. Visitors to Domremy now came from every class and many came from much further away. It is not hard to account for the increasing numbers. The popularity of miniature encyclopaedias like the Petit Lavisse had inexorably spread knowledge of Joan. In 1907 Le Figaro, the Paris-based newspaper for the well-educated Right, indignantly noted that of the previous year’s recruits to the army, almost half had never heard of Joan. They soon would. The young men in the barracks were not allowed to speak Breton or Basque or any local patois such as the Lorraine dialect Joan had used. Better educated than her in that they were semi-literate in French, they were more aware of their common identity than any young Frenchmen before them; and devotion to her person bolstered their sense of being French.
Popular writers, artists and illustrators also spread her fame. Henri Wallon, Catholic, republican and sometime Minister of Education, wrote a life of Joan for the Catholic middle classes that remained unopened on the shelves of many private libraries. A more overtly political life by Joseph Fabre became much better known. It was priced low to widen circulation, and with patriotic fervour the author donated his profits to the construction of thousands of monuments to Joan all over the country. As a result, as Anatole France put it, ‘people saw in amazing abundance Joan praying, Joan armed and skirmishing, Joan the captive, Joan the martyr’.3
Among illustrations of Joan’s story, one book written for young people is striking.
Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel had fought in the war of 1870–1. He wanted to give future French men the conviction to fight another war in the hope of victory. He decorated his text with pictures of an unequalled intensity, directness and clarity of design. Pure colour reinforces his message. ‘Open this book, dear children, with devotion in memory of this humble peasant girl who is patron of France, who is the country’s saint as she is the country’s martyr. Her story will tell you that to conquer you must have faith in victory. Remember her on the day when your land will need all your courage.’4
In central Paris, the national shrine, the Panthéon, became home to Lenepveu’s series of paintings on the life of Joan, which were copied into history books for generations. No work of art, however, is quite as startling as Leroy’s The Saint of the Frontier, ominously shown at the Salon of 1914, which sets an ethereal armoured saint holding her banner inscribed Jesus and Mary in the midst of a party of dragoons. They relax like coiled springs. She has only to give the word, then they will mount their horses and charge.
This was a country where industrialisation was casting its grim shadows in the department of the Nord and in the east, in St-Etienne, where trains belching smoke and coal dust chugged into remote hamlets. Paradoxically, in this country whose ruling middle class worried about its shares and workers’ strikes and ambitious businessmen invested in an ever expanding colonial and commercial empire, the nation clung to a figure from a society that had been overwhelmingly rural and dominated by a privileged caste of nobles. Intellectuals knew that many of their families had been recently uprooted from peasant life; and in retrospect the life of one devout peasant girl seemed marvellous.
LISTENING WITH JOAN
Joan had been a listener. One of the most moving nineteenth-century statues of Joan is by Rude, the sculptor famous for the clamorous relief sculpture of La Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe. Rude’s Joan is a girl who stands calmly with one ear cocked. In another attempt to capture this side of her character, the artist Bastien Lepage had placed her in front of her home at Domremy with Sts Margaret, Catherine and Michael festooned like wreaths on the house. Both sculptor and painter wished to convey the same truth, but Rude’s omission of any ghostly saints is more effective. His work implies as well as any work of visual art can that Joan was in touch with an invisible world known only to her. She could never adequately convey what she heard or what she saw.
A moving example of the new devotion to Joan is found ironically in Lisieux, in whose cathedral is buried its former bishop, Pierre Cauchon. On 27 January 1894 Pope Leo XIII had permitted the introduction of Joan of Arc’s cause for beatification, after which she was given the title of Venerable; and in the National Assembly Henri Wallon proposed a national holiday of patriotism on 8 May to honour her. Although the editor of the Lisieux paper Le Normandy thought the idea a plot to secularise her, on 8 May 1894 a flag of the ‘glorious Liberatrix’ was placed in Cauchon’s chapel. This was the chapel where the editor’s pious nieces had attended daily Mass; and the youngest of them, Thérèse Martin, was to be a powerful advocate of the cause of Joan, although in 1894, with two older sisters, she was a nun in the local Carmelite convent.
At this stage, Céline, the sister closest to Thérèse, was the only daughter at home in the Martin household, where she cared for their ageing father. In the course of the year Monsieur Martin died and Céline was free to become a Carmelite too. She brought into the convent one precious possession that kept up the link with her previous way of living, as she was allowed to bring her camera. One of her first photographs in the convent shows a smiling Thérèse – in 1894 it was still hard for a photographer to snap people smiling – with hair over her shoulders, a banner and sword in her hands, acting the protagonist in her own play on Joan of Arc.
Since childhood Thérèse had been drawn to the figure of Joan. In her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, first published in 1898, the year after her death, she speaks of her early devotion to Joan. ‘In reading the tales of the patriotic actions of French heroines, in particular those of the venerable Joan of Arc, I had a great desire to imitate them.’5 Now as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, she could write about Joan, whom she thought of as a shepherdess – in this Thérèse was mistaken, but then shepherdesses were in vogue – for she was convinced that her own role in life, like Joan’s, was to emphasise the value of obscure origins. In the convent she was told to write and to act. She produced two plays about Joan, The Mission of Joan of Arc (or The Shepherdess of Domremy Hearing her Voices) acted on 21 January 1894, and Joan of Arc Fulfilling her Mission, performed on 21 January 1895.6 The facts came from Henri Wallon. What fired the fiction was its theme – vocation. Thérèse emphasised the way in which Joan had been called from a remote village to follow a calling that would make her famous throughout the world. It was a theme that matched Thérèse’s own destiny, although in her case she did not live to see that destiny fulfilled.7
Sister Thérèse’s view of Joan mirrored that of the pious milieu in which she lived. Her writings reveal attitudes typical of French conservatives of the 1890s who strove to avoid making a noise in national life. But the nineties was a clamorous decade; and the conservatives who became prominent were those who took their battles into the streets.
MARCHING AS TO WAR
In the 1890s most French Catholics, while like the Martins still instinctively royalist, were less spiritually minded than Sister Thérèse because they were stirred chiefly by religious politics. French society was polarised in 1894 by the unjust conviction of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus for spying. What kept the Right together, Catholic or unbelieving, was not republicanism but admiration for the Army. The Army’s verdict had been challenged, but the Army could do no wrong. Among the most vociferous on the Right was the group of able journalists of Action Française, an organisation that, regardless of truth, would stand up for ‘true’ anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Jewish France. Their magnetic leader Charles Maurras made a powerful impact on the elegant young men of the Right who rejoiced in the nickname of hawkers of the king, the ‘Camelots du Roi’ who sold the paper, called Action Française like the movement. In 1908 Action Française became a daily paper. It was never widely read, but its writers were widely influential. Even more influential in the long run was the behaviour of the Camelots, who set a pattern of street fighting followed only too often in the last century. In 1905, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, an anticlerical government transformed France into a secular State and banned religious processions. This prohibition made the Camelots all the keener to process in honour of their heroine, Joan.
The most notorious example of their mob violence occurred in the winter of 1908/9. Thalamas, a professeur at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, called Joan of Arc a witch who had deserved to be punished. For this he was exiled to the provinces. It was then announced that on Wednesday 5 December he would give a free lecture on history at the Sorbonne. The Camelots made ready for him, greeted him with jeers and rotten eggs and, when he tried to leave, he was slapped in the face by Maxime Réal de Sarte, a young man with a future. Such behaviour became a weekly affair. On the mercredis de Thalamas the Sorbonne was in a state of siege and Thalamas could lecture only with the help of a military guard; and twice a supporter of Action Française took over a room to give his own course on la Pucelle. At his last talk Camelots got hold of Thalamas and beat him up. Republicans resisted such right-wing efforts to define Joan as a proto-nationalist by reminding Catholics that she had been burnt by the Church and royalists that she had been deserted by the king. Action Française countered by urging that the well-being of France demanded faith in the Army, of which the warrior maiden Joan was heavenly patroness; and only by military victory could France recover Lorraine.
Maurras believed in France, not in God; what mattered to him on Joan’s banner was the fleur-de-lis, not the names of Jesus and Mary, and yet many of his followers were devout. Both non-believers and believers considered Joan their patron, but the Right would not accept that the Left could venerate her honestly; she belonged only to them, as they alone believed that France should have a king.
Early in the new century such a view of Joan was acceptable to some on the Left. If she belonged to the Right, then let them have her, for she had done little, deceived many, including herself. This case was argued in 1908 when one of France’s best novelists, Anatole France, published his Life of Joan of Arc. Since he was friendly with Maurras, he was not beaten up.
Intending to write a well-researched biography acceptable to most contemporary readers, Anatole France solicited the help of a youthful researcher, Pierre Champion. The preface to France’s Life of Joan of Arc shows that, if he had paid careful attention to primary sources, he also mistrusted many of them. Joan’s perpetual hallucinations made it hard for her to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Chroniclers wrote to please their patrons. Of even less value was the witness in Joan’s rehabilitation, for they had grown old and forgetful. If Alençon asserted Joan knew how to place guns he must have been out of his mind – by the 1450s, like many who had supported her, he had gone to the bad. Even in her lifetime, knowledge of Joan was based on legend. Surprisingly, after this sceptical introduction, Anatole France yet managed to write a large book on a person about whom there was little trustworthy information.
He was more of an amateur than he indicated; the true scholar was his assistant, Champion, future editor and translator of the texts of the nullification trial. France was right to emphasise that the most important contemporary sources were written by clerics; but this applied to the trial documents, not to the chronicles. France’s Joan was manipulated by the clergy, who encouraged, condemned, killed and exonerated her, so that she was, as it were, a clerical construct. But then if clerics could be so manipulative, the Joan of the records was not afraid of contradicting them in ways that were fearless, direct and honest.
Her sense of conviction, for Anatole France, came from belief in her voices, and for this reason he inserted an appendix by a distinguished psychologist, Docteur Dumas, whom he had consulted. Dumas said that at the age of thirteen, the age when puberty normally starts, Joan had unilateral hallucinations (from the right only) affecting her sight and hearing. Charcot, who at one time had influenced Freud, thought these sorts of experiences common among hysterics, but Dumas stated that Charcot’s view was no longer widely accepted. Joan, he wrote, had not expected her voices and they gave her orders, but later she had disobeyed them or summoned them at will. They seemed as real to her as her normal life. In some ways she was like an hysteric, but in other ways not, for she was far from passive. If she were hysterical, the function of the hysteria was to release her secret feelings – it let what she called God come into her life, so that she strengthened her faith and gained a sense of her mission; and yet her character remained holy and upright and, if there was a neurotic element in her, neurosis had not affected her whole personality. Dumas was careful to hedge his bets. Anatole France, however, was a man with a mission: ‘We must finish our liberal monument, before the priests have her placed on their altars.’8 The Life of Joan of Arc was quickly translated into English; and in France it has remained in print. His sentiments were shared by French anticlericals, but he had reckoned without Joan’s Anglophone admirers.
UNITING BEHIND JOAN
In the course of the nineteenth century Joan acquired more friends in the English-speaking world. She attracted the attention of Pre-Raphaelite painters, notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, and of the fairy-tale illustrator Charles Ricketts.9 No less a person than Queen Victoria saw a play about Joan by the French dramatist Jules Barbier set to music by Gounod and pronounced it ‘lovely’.10 The French firm Hachette published in London and Boston an abbreviated version of a life of Joan by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, complete with a scholarly introduction and a glossary at the back.11 English and American students of French therefore could learn the language by learning about Joan.
A wider public was reached in the 1890s when a great American novelist restated the case for Joan by depicting her as the heroine of a romance. For Mark Twain Joan was a sort of female Huck, a boyish girl who did not want to be ‘sivilised’ and whose simplicity was an unconscious rebuke to scheming courtiers and devious clerics; she was almost a fifteenth-century democrat. He began writing in 1892. By including Michelet, Quicherat and Henri Wallon in his bibliography he showed that he had consulted French as well as English authorities. He gave his narrator, sieur Louis de Conte, his own initials, S.L.C., Samuel L. Clemens; and he said he felt a tender affection for his, that is ‘de Conte’s’ Recollections of Joan of Arc. The legendary Conte, whose name bears a suspicious likeness to the historical de Coutes, is said to have been Joan’s secretary. Two years her senior, he had grown up with her in Domremy and had stayed with her to the end of her life. Twain signals to the reader that de Conte, writing in 1492, exactly 400 years before Twain, was alive when Columbus sailed to America. The memorialist is thus a modern as well as a medieval man, a mediator between Joan’s age and ours.
Few would assert that Twain’s novel is a great work of fiction, but it can give much pleasure in idle moments, as the Joan de Conte recalled was physically as well as morally attractive. For his courage and fidelity de Conte almost deserved to be an American. In finding a pretty girl both heroic and wholesome, de Conte anticipated Twain himself. His American outlook is summed up in a conclusion that Michelet would have liked. With Joan of Arc, love of country was more than a sentiment – it was a passion. She was the ‘Genius of Patriotism’ – she was Patriotism embodied, made flesh, palpable to the touch and visible to the eye.12 Twain had made Joan accessible in the land of the free.
Just before the First World War, a Scot, irritated by the translation of Anatole France’s Life into English, took up the cudgels for Joan. Andrew Lang was a Scots critic, poet, translator and historian, in love with Homer, myths, legends, border ballads, French medieval love poems and the house of Stuart. He had already written a historical romance about a real monk of Dunfermline who commented from Scotland on the story of Joan of Arc. He boasted that ‘the Scots stood for her always, with pen as with sword’, and he counted a fellow Scot as one of his predecessors, the empirical philosopher David Hume, whose History of Britain ‘recognised the nobility of her character’.13
Before Lang’s writing, no British life had been based on Quicherat, and nobody had been so well briefed. While carrying on a polemic against Anatole France in his preface and footnotes, Lang provided a well-written account of Joan, in which his own tendency to whimsy was kept under control. The Maid of France appeared in 1908, and in 1912 its author died.
It was, however, a native of Orléans who put into verses sentiments that are the poetic equivalent of the pictures of de Monvel and Lenepveu. Charles Péguy was tormented by doubt; and he worked through his doubts in relation to his persistent love of Joan. In 1895–7, while studying in Paris, he wrote his first book, a trilogy of plays on Joan, but few people took any notice of his writing, much of it left-wing journalism, until he returned to the topic of Joan’s vocation with Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc in 1910. He claimed that his earlier work had been about ‘the history of her inner life’, but it was in truth his own problems he focused on rather than hers, for in becoming a socialist he had ceased to be a believing Catholic. By the time he wrote the second work, however, he had recovered his faith and it was as an individualistic Christian that he prepared for the quincentenary of his heroine’s birth in 1912. He had shifted from viewing Joan as a class heroine to the conviction that her religious calling was one of the most remarkable there had ever been. He believed her to be one of the greatest of saints, only a little lower in heaven than Mary mother of Christ. He made a new claim for Joan: it was her charity that raised her so high. What fascinated him was Domremy, the place where Joan found her vocation, rather than the sites of her later victories or defeats.
Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc does not attempt to be a drama. Set in Domremy in 1425, at the time when Joan first claimed to hear her voices, it focuses on how she came to realise and accept the role she was to play. Péguy sticks to just three characters, Joan, Hauviette and Madame Gervaise. Much of the writing is in prose, until it bursts into a free verse that can be as sonorous as the Psalms or clipped, even harsh. Madame Gervaise talks the most, as she exhibits the piety of the conventionally religious (she is a young nun), whereas Joan is called to a life out of the ordinary. At the end of the play Madame Gervaise prays that Christ will save Joan’s soul and Joan says Amen to that and adds the words ‘Orléans, which is in the country of the Loire’, for her vocation calls her to action.
Once this poem made his poetry well known, Péguy, who always regarded himself as a man of the Left, came to be cherished by those on the Right who saw in Joan the standard bearer to lead them. In the circumstances of 1910 the popularity of Péguy’s poem showed that the cause of Joan was a cause believed in by both the French nation and the French Church.
THE MAKING OF SAINT JOAN14
In 1909 Joan was declared Blessed by the Catholic Church. Bishop Coullié, successor to Dupanloup, continued with enquiries in 1885 and 1887–8, which led to Joan’s cause being submitted to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome. In 1892 and 1898–1902 Joan was subjected to new enquiries, more searching than any since the fifteenth century. In 1452–6 her first trial had been nullified, but its verdict had been grudging. What her supporters hoped for was an enthusiastic endorsement of her life as one of heroic virtue. Those who acted successively as the Promotor Fidei (Promoter of the Faith), better known as the devil’s advocate, outlined the case against her. They were energetic in carrying out their task. The first, Augustine Caprara, found no difficulty in 1456 in admitting that she deserved to be rehabilitated, and he admitted that she was an outstanding figure in fifteenth-century history, a person with an impact on her age analogous to that of Christopher Columbus, whose candidacy for canonisation had been mooted only to be rejected. Like Columbus, he said, she was admired for political not religious virtues. Caprara took seriously many of the points made against her at the 1431 trial. He trusted the records of the condemnation process more than the records of the nullification process; and he maintained that before her capture she was admired chiefly as a soldier, not so much as a saint, for he doubted her modesty; he was also worried that the Duke of Alençon had seen her beautiful breasts several times. Caprara could not see how she could be a martyr for the faith, he was not sure if she had submitted her visions to the judgement of the Church. He conceded that in recent time there had been a growth in devotion to her. He also conceded that if she were added to the ranks of the blessed, she would deserve extremely well not only of France but also of all Christendom. In short she could be a Catholic saint. He admitted her cause might triumph.
Against Caprara’s arguments, set out in 55 pages of arguments and 47 pages of documents, the defender of Joan’s cause replied in 170 pages. The defender was delighted with his opponent’s conclusion, but indignant at the slurs on Joan’s character. The judges decided that at this stage there was no insuperable obstacle to her cause; in 1894 it was announced that the case could go further – this was the moment when Pope Leo XIII declared her Venerable.
Joan’s sanctity was put to the test on two subsequent occasions: in 1898–9 and in 1903. In 1898–9 the Promoter, Joseph Baptist Lugari, argued that, like the original trial, her rehabilitation ‘trial’ was a political act. He also questioned her virtues. She did not practise faith, hope and charity heroically, nor prudence and justice, while her courage was shaky; she took too much pleasure in finery and her own chastity to be truly temperate. He did not like the fact that she was always glad to be tested for virginity, not having given sufficient weight to the fact that in the fifteenth century, as a witch was considered to be always promiscuous, so a virgin could not be a witch. His chief worry concerned her reliance on private revelations, in other words her voices, and a secondary worry was her lack of deference to her judges. As a cleric himself, he did not like the fact that she had rebuked a bishop. The precise grounds on which the Promoter’s views are based are not recorded. All that is known is that once more they were not held to be grave enough to impede the progress of the cause.
There is more information about the final stage of the process. This time, whereas Alexander Verde, the last devil’s advocate, presented his ideas in 24 pages, the reply takes up 367; and this was followed by 198 pages exposing Joan’s virtues. The opponent’s chief concern was the suspicion of hysteria and a secondary one, whether her stand for France was inspired by God; the defenders also worried about the passage of time since the records dated back to the fifteenth century. On the first point her defender replied that she did not exhibit the normal symptoms of hysteria. On the second point the Promoter had already conceded that she may be ‘praised to the stars as the liberator of France whose deeds had been inspired by God Himself’.15 On the third point he defender also thought the documents were in the main reliable.16
In her lifetime Joan probably did not perform any miracles. Had she done so, contemporaries might have found it harder to discount the views of those moved by her goodness, just as her carefully guarded virginity prevented the charge of witchcraft from being pressed home. To promote her canonisation, however, those directing her cause in the early twentieth century had to prove that from heaven she could perform four miracles, of which two at least were ‘of the first class’. Two were needed for beatification, two more for canonisation. The pope might dispense with one miracle if the candidate had founded a religious order. Joan was let off one for having saved France.
Three miracles of the first class were produced. One nun had been cured of leg ulcers, a second of a cancerous ulcer of her left breast, a third of cancer of the stomach.17 These cures were attributed to Joan since they had been preceded by invocation to her in prayer. Pope Pius X solemnly accepted the three miracles as authentic on 13 December 1908. He declared: ‘Joan of Arc has shone like a new star destined to be the glory not only of France but of the Universal Church as well.’ For heroic virtue she was declared Blessed on 18 April 1909. There was nothing to prevent Joan from being canonised, except the coming of war.
By the end of 1918, as Austria–Hungary disintegrated, there was no longer a major Catholic power in Europe. France and Italy were officially secular, and Spain was politically powerless. In 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the weak German republic was forced to cede the territorial gains of 1871 back to France. Since the French once more had possession of all Lorraine, they were glad to have a Lorrainer as their national heroine. The First World War briefly united Frenchmen; and national unity was briefly symbolised by Joan.
In the trenches of the Western Front soldiers were painfully aware of their lack of women. They wanted women for every need. They made an industry of prostitution. Poilus became a new nickname for the ‘hairy’ private soldiers who enjoyed cheekychansonsabout the barmaid Madelon they met in a café, but above all they sought to be consoled. The cult of Joan had been given the approval of State and Church. Poilus carried pictures of Joan in their pockets. Joan had saved them, nurtured them and made them victorious. Once peace came, it would have been unthinkable for Benedict XV, pope since 1914, not to have declared Joan a saint. In May 1920 the French bishops came to Rome to see her canonised; and that year the French National Assembly at last announced the national holiday in her honour. Quarrels between the French Church and the French State were forgotten. The national feast of Joan was fixed for the Sunday after 8 May, a date that has kept its place in the celebrations of Joan’s triumphs and is still a national holiday. The Church reserved 30 May, the day of her death, for her feast day, not as a martyr, for she had not died for the faith, but as a virgin, a woman who was pure until death. The trials of Joan were finally over.