TWENTY-FIVE
THE LATE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL
In 1961 a French lay philosopher and theologian subjected Joan to a rigorous analysis. His slim book is a reminder that Joan took to politics because of her faith.
According to Jean Guitton, Joan presents the enquirer into her life with a ‘problem’ and a ‘mystery’. If the trouble with Michelet, Guitton says, is that he reduces Joan to a myth, the weakness of Anatole France is that he reduces her to a nonentity, so that there is no need to ask how her success is related to her faith. For Guitton the essential problem with the story of Joan is that historical method as such is inadequate for the task of evaluating her: no scanning of sources, for example, provides adequate material to answer the question ‘were her voices true?’ Guitton claims that for Joan the voices were true, but that no one who shares her belief can explain why someone who does not believe in them is wrong; on the other hand, the sceptic cannot prove that one who believes in them is wrong; and for the sceptic there is the additional problem that often what her voices told her was no illusion. She did save Orléans, she did bring about the coronation of her Dauphin as king at Reims before she was tried, and after her trial her Duke of Orléans and France were freed from the English. Joan is a historical figure who exists beyond history. Part of her ‘mystery’ is that she did not view her voices with detachment. To her the experience was clear. What muddled her was the attempt of her judges to make her experience comprehensible to them. But her voices were not akin to the experiences described by later mystical theologians such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, since what they describe was remote from Joan’s sense of persistent contact with angels and saints. Her voices did not tell her sublime truths, but simply what to do or not to do, and what would happen; and sometimes what she thought they said turned out to be wrong or misleading. She seems to have been convinced that she would be saved from prison, but she was not. She faltered in her belief in her voices; and yet in the end she died for believing in them.
There is an additional problem about the voices that Guitton touches on. Even Joan’s admirers like Michelet and Lang had not known what to make of them; and those assessing her during the process of canonisation had wondered whether she was hysterical. Today hallucinations are normally regarded as signs of schizophrenia. The problem, Guitton notes, is that psychiatrists relate psychological phenomena such as the hearing of voices to the onset of psychosis. But Joan was remarkably sane; and nobody has a theory of how a sane person can hallucinate. For modern scientists Joan’s voices are a problem; for the student of Joan, they are a mystery.
One trait that separates her from the standard spirituality of her day is that she thought of her religion in terms appropriate only to a lay person; her mission involved civic duty and a political programme; almost everything written on Christian devotion, however, was predicated on a life that was essentially monastic. Joan lived, it is true, at a moment of cultural change. She was at the beginning of adult feminine life. As discovered again and again, she remained a virgin; and it is as a virgin that she is ranked among the saints of the Catholic Church. Joan was not without faults. She was too fond of martial glamour; she could be manic; she could be hectoring.
Guitton asserts that, just as Aristotle became more important in the thirteenth century AD than he was in the fourth century BC, so Joan has become more important in the twentieth century than she was in the fifteenth. In her own lifetime her case forced the Church to look at its inquisitorial processes and the king to ponder the justification of his authority. Now it forces the French to redefine their sense of national destiny and the Church to re-examine its ideas on sanctity. In 1963, soon after Guitton wrote his book, a personal friend succeeded John XXIII as Pope Paul VI, and so Guitton had a semi-official position within the Church.
In the early years of the new pontificate an even more eminent lay philosophical theologian, Jacques Maritain, was able to write with greater freedom than had been possible about the historical record of the Catholic Church. His book The Church of Christ(1970) has a long section confronting difficulties from the past: the Crusades; the treatment of the Jews; the role of the Inquisition; and finally two test cases, the condemnation of Galileo and the condemnation of Joan. His verdict on Joan is that her story is ‘the most extraordinary of Christian times’. Her mission is universal. ‘I think,’ he adds at the end, ‘that Joan of Arc . . . is par excellence the saint and the patron of the temporal mission of the Christian, in other words the saint and patron of the Christian laity.’1
Guitton and Maritain were among the last of their kind. They were writing towards the end of the Catholic revival in France, which had embraced intellectuals and artists of all kinds. Maritain, for example, championed Modernist Christian art as evident in Georges Rouault, whose tiny Notre Jeanne (1940–8) expresses in stark design and rich colours the isolation of a saint. Joan, defined with thick lines that recall the outlines of stained glass, dominates a desolate landscape whose only notable feature is a distant church. Oblivious to what surrounds her, with head raised to look at her banner and surrounded by a ring of light like a halo, she rides towards her unknown destiny.
If Rouault’s Joan was aloof, detachment was the way of one of France’s finest film directors. Robert Bresson emphasised the religious meaning of Joan’s story in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962). Obsessed with the workings of God’s grace, a preacher of a self-effacing kind, he indicated a story’s meaning in its unfolding. Long after colour film had become the norm, he stuck to black and white camera work because that technique uses subtlety of tone instead of a kaleidoscope of colours. He reduced his plot to essentials, for like Dreyer he understood the advantages of classical drama unified by action, time and place. Scrupulously accurate, he based his screenplay on fifteenth-century documents. His Joan of Arc is sharper in her replies than Dreyer’s Joan and more remote. Spied at through keyholes, she is watched relentlessly in one long act of voyeurism. For this reason the spectator too is detached, so that Joan (played by Florence Carrez, now a well-known writer) is a model to be admired rather than pitied – that is, until the body is burnt to nothing and her chains of imprisonment are left hanging from the stake; and then and then only, is she free.
Shaw exaggerated when he argued that Joan was a proto-Protestant. In the fifteenth century, Europe defined as a Latinate, clerical, international order was beginning to die. By the twenty-first century that order is virtually moribund. It is noticeable how many from Protestant backgrounds, such as Shaw himself, Dreyer and Honegger have found Joan an inspiration to their art. Even the Catholics Bernanos and Bresson were so keen to draw attention to the workings of God’s grace that they seemed more sympathetic than many fellow Catholics to the views of Luther and Calvin. In the light of the Second Vatican Council it is possibly to maintain that Joan has taught many Catholics the truths dear to Protestants. Religious wars are over.
Joan’s Church claimed to be universal, but to say that she can be a patron of freedom for all would have seemed extraordinary before the 1960s. After the Second World War, first the United Nations, then European countries, then the Catholic Church affirmed the concept of universal human rights. By 1970 the Catholic Maritain stated that Joan’s role has a universal meaning. For most French people, however, Joan is still primarily a symbol of their common national destiny, but as the memory of war recedes, her kind of patriotic appeal wanes. In the festivities at Orléans she has been honoured by presidents of Left and Right, by believing and non-believing presidents. In this sense she does not belong to any one faction. In an address at Orléans, Michel Rocard, Prime Minister from 1988 to 1991 and at one time the most popular socialist in France, compared Joan to famous figures like Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa or Nelson Mandela. But Joan has steadily drifted from the forefront of French minds. In 1948 11 per cent of those asked put her in a list of famous French men and women; in 1980 that figure was 2 per cent, in 1989 zero per cent. She is no longer the model for enterprising and modern girls. Marie Curie, a physicist who won two Nobel prizes and was an atheist, is now regarded as a more inspiring figure from the past, and her past is more recent. Thanks in part to André Malraux, the novelist and art historian who became de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, the Centre Jeanne d’Arc was founded in Orléans as an international centre of Johannic studies; and partly thanks to such official approval, French Johannic scholarship operates at the highest level. The French people in general, however, take Joan for granted, and the young scarcely know her. An ironic result is that Joan has become relatively more important in the English-speaking world, partly because English (usually American-English) preoccupations dominate popular culture. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Joan is known through films and through university departments of women’s studies.
JOAN IN HOLLYWOOD
In the 1930s, Joan intrigued English literary historians such as Vita Sackville-West. While taking care to consult the Jesuit scholar Father Thurston, who had written about Joan thirty years earlier, Sackville-West tried to understand Joan, if she shared none of Joan’s Catholic assumptions. The same may be said of Edward Lucie-Smith in recent times. English professional historians who specialise in fifteenth-century studies tend to view Joan sceptically.
None of these writers has had any influence comparable to that exercised by popular drama. Jean Anouilh’s delightful L’Alouette (The Lark, 1953) certainly set up some cultural ripples. As an artistic construct the play makes clever use of flashbacks, but as history it is flawed since Anouilh followed Voltaire in introducing Charles’s mistress Agnès Sorel into the story. Besides, whimsically he allows Joan to be put on trial but not to be burnt, as ‘the story of Joan of Arc is a story that ends well’.2 Films, the more populist dramatic form, are made of sterner stuff.
The great years of blockbuster Joans came soon after 1945. For fifteen years, costume epic flourished, until the rising costs of extras and the competition of television, with its leaning towards intimate drama, forced studios to cut back on sumptuous productions. In this golden age of ‘Medieval’ Joan, Ingrid Bergman played Joan twice, once with Victor Fleming in 1948 (based on a Maxwell Anderson play in which she had played in New York), and once with her lover Roberto Rossellini in 1954 (based on Claudel). Bergman was too majestic, and yet in the end Fleming’s is still the most successful Hollywood version of the Maid, and Bergman remains Hollywood’s Joan; if the film shows how limited is the genre when treating a spiritual theme, then the audience did not object.Joan of Arc won Oscars for costume and photography; a special award went to the producer Walter Wanger for adding to the industry’s ‘moral stature in the world’; and Jose Ferrer (who played the Dauphin) and Bergman won Oscar nominations. As for Fleming, he owes lasting fame to Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, rather than to his last film, Joan of Arc.
Not until 1957 was a boyish Joan shown in film. In that year Otto Preminger asked Graham Greene to revise Shaw’s text (with, in French, subtitles by Anouilh). Preminger looked for the perfect Joan and came up with an amateur actress, the gamine Jean Seberg, who sadly lacked the appropriate personality. ‘I always wanted to make a picture of it,’ Preminger told Bogdanovich, the film critic and director. ‘I loved the play so much that I didn’t analyse it. I realised only later that the play is actually a very intellectual, analytical rendition of the story of St Joan. It’s not an emotional story, and it just wasn’t moving enough to get the masses to follow. Even the play, as I found out later, was never a big popular success.’3 Joan had been portrayed as a new woman, but did not fit into the New Wave, the movement in French film direction that began in the late 1950s.
Authenticity inspired a very late New Wave account of Joan’s career, trial and death in Jacques Rivette’s 1994 Jeanne la Pucelle, a version of the life that opted for comprehensiveness. Like many attracted to Joan of Arc, Rivette had read Péguy and saw that the real events of her life were so dramatic that there was no need to invent. His chief actress Sandrine Bonnaire was no mere amateur. Those with time to spare for a six-hour, two-part film may find her riveting. Some like their films cut, and Joan the Maid makes Luc Besson’s long-winded The Messenger (1999) seem short.
Besson has emigrated from France to Hollywood, and in The Messenger he brought Hollywood to France – and French audiences loved it. The film won eight nominations from the French Academy of Cinema and took the prize for cinema photography. It aimed to replace Joan the saint with Joan the soldier, but it was not only the restricted range of Milla Jovovich that damns the film: despite its international cast, Besson’s view of Joan is chauvinistic. The film starts with a scene of rape in Domremy that leads to the murder of Joan’s sister by an English soldier, while historically, the ‘foreigners’ who went to Domremy were Burgundians. Besson glosses over the truth that Joan’s captors and all her judges were French; and so he gives the English actor Timothy West the part of Cauchon. One overt nationalist, Le Pen, admits that the film misleads. Even in fiction Joan deserves the truth.
At least Besson has shown that Joan can be commercial. He also saw the potential of playing on the morbid fascination of unhealthy psychology. His Joan is hysterical, not just when she is having visions but also when arguing or fighting or encouraging others to fight. A century earlier the great actress Sarah Bernhardt, who attended Charcot’s public lectures, had studied photos of hysterics before performing in a play on Joan at Domremy by Jules Barbier. Even Sybil Thorndike, Shaw’s first Joan, thought that because she did not menstruate, Joan must have been an hysteric. Poor d’Aulon has never known what trouble his single sentence has caused.
JOAN AND HER SISTERS
Joan challenges the way in which women are perceived. Not until 1912, in the annual festival at Orléans, did a girl play the role of Joan. The First World War gave women a sense of freedom, and since 1945 women have become more prominent in public life, above all in the United States. Not only teenage girls in Orléans compete for the thrill of being Joan, actresses from Bernhardt to Bergman and women politicians feel compelled to play the part, for Joan opened a new way for women to act.
If ‘new women’ were boyish, then Joan’s boyishness became easier to understand: her cropped hairdo was ‘sensible’, her male clothes fashionable – so much more practical than the dresses with long trains worn by the ladies at court – and presumably she never rode side-saddle. Shaw put a modern girl on stage and cinema heroines set a new style.
Views of Joan have changed as views of women have changed. It is tempting to think of Joan as fitting a feminist archetype, as a young woman who, like some redoubtable actresses who have played her, enjoyed wearing trousers. And yet since her canonisation, the world has changed more slowly than some commentators think. The emancipation Joan stood for was never freedom from Christian morality, only freedom from foreign rule. This is not to deny that in the context of the fifteenth century she defied ordinary conventions of female behaviour in dress and behaviour.
Joan’s contemporaries were familiar with prophetesses like Catherine of Siena, with women who wielded power as royal consorts or as mothers of kings and, if rarely, in their own name or even, as in the case of Christine de Pisan, as educated writers; but a woman warrior, familiar to fiction, was unfamiliar in fact. Nobody’s interpretation of Joan is fixed in stone. Shaw asserts in his preface that Anatole France was ‘a Parisian of the art world’ who did not know any of the ‘hard-headed, hard-handed’ women who run business Paris and provincial France.4 Shaw was perhaps unkind, but his wit was acute.
Another, more subtle error was committed by suffragettes who saw Christabel Pankhurst in the line of Joan, and much the same error is committed by Bertold Brecht in his play Joan Darc (Saint Joan of the Stockyards, 1932), where Joan Dark is transmuted into a Salvation Army girl fighting injustice in Chicago meat factories. In each case Joan is just the outspoken woman who demands to exercise a function, as voter or union agitator, conventionally allotted to men. This Joan was a fearless woman in pursuit of a moral goal. But the real Joan was much more. She was a girl-woman following a mission she was believed was God-given.
Radical changes in the status of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have meant that Joan, exceptional in her own day, is easier to understand in our own. At universities, above all in America, the academic discipline of Women’s Studies has developed in the context of the feminist movement. Medievalists are familiar with the singing nun Hildegard of Bingen as well as the travails of those accused of witchcraft, most of whom were women. Female mystics achieved a new influence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but Joan was exceptional. Kelly DeVries has shown that at the time there were no other noted female soldiers; and yet Joan was no Amazon in either the ancient or the modern sense.
The word ‘extraordinary’ needs to be emphasised. Joan’s clerical judges in Rouen had probably never met a woman who wore men’s clothes. They expected a man to wear clothing that indicated his status in society, his occupation, his wealth and, not having ever met a female soldier, they assumed that Joan was either the sort of girl who likes to be with soldiers, or else a freak, like a witch or a sorceress, which meant that she was by definition unnatural – and so in either case offensive to God and the Church. Was she a freak of nature? Some have thought that d’Aulon’s one remark about not knowing the malady of women meant that she was, in a biological sense, not truly female; and yet any view about her femininity is a guess.
Few at present would deny that in the past, history has been viewed in terms of the deeds of men. Furthermore, most historical documents have been written by men for men to read. Women’s activities have therefore been seen as ancillary. Such assertions have always been part of the truth, but never the whole of the truth, and in fifteenth-century France, when the literate were mostly men except perhaps in noble households, most political power was held by men, men fought the battles that decided the fate of their nations or at least of their lords, men drew up the charters that recorded rights and men alone went to universities, then it might seem that the role of women scarcely mattered. But Joan challenged normal expectations, those of her father, who expected her to stay at home until she was married, those of Robert de Baudricourt, who wanted her to return home, those of courtiers who took it for granted that they alone should run the affairs of the kingdom, those of priests who thought they alone should interpret the will of God. She elicited some sympathy from ladies of the court, just as she elicited some from the good bourgeois of Orléans or from noble ladies when a captive. What might surprise us is that she found men who believed in her mission – her page, her steward, her chaplain, her companions in arms, notably the Bastard of Orléans and the Duke of Alençon – and she was able to convince the theologians of Poitiers and even the suspicious Charles VII that she might be trustworthy.
What would surprise her is that over 550 years since the nullification processes she has been taken up by learned people drawn from her own sex, that she is now a figure of universal significance as a feminist model, if not a model feminist. As joint editor (with a man) of an academic discussion of Joan of Arc, one in a series of books on the Middle Ages that deals with ‘women’s history and feminist and gender analyses’, Bonnie Wheeler states that: ‘Joan proves that self-confidence and independent judgement are qualities so rare and suspect, especially in women, that they are sure to be punished, sometimes by death.’5 The most intelligent of recent English studies of Joan, by Marina Warner, is subtitled ‘the image of female heroism’. Most, but not all, Bonnie Wheeler’s research has centred on women, for instance on Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of a king of France and of a king of England, on Héloise, nun and ex-lover of the theologian Abélard, on women in Arthurian literature, on medieval mothering, on representations of the feminine, on Muslim women. So, too, Marina Warner has written with elegance and erudition on the Virgin Mary, on fairytale women and on Monuments and Maidens. Such female scholars may well have insights and qualities rare in male professors; if only for this reason their verdicts on Joan of Arc would deserve respect, were it not that they also compete with men on equal terms. And yet it is possible for a male author to say that Bonnie Wheeler is wrong in saying Joan died because she was forceful.
Joan was punished because she asserted she was told by saintly and angelic voices that she must instruct the King of France to take back his lands from the King of England, who was to return to his own land, and that to fulfil this heavenly mission she was to dress in men’s clothing, usually armour, since her role as a leader of men was singular. In her society it was men she led, men who tried her; and, while some condemned and some doubted her, others were her enthusiastic devotees.