EPILOGUE
Debates continue; women’s studies in the United States will be ever more refined; but whoever wishes to understand the continuing appeal of Joan of Arc must make for Orléans.
On the evening of the first or occasionally the second Friday in May, a crowd converges on the cathedral of Ste-Croix. Although there have been continuous festivities of some sort since the end of April – when a girl chosen in alternate years from a Catholic college and a secular lycée rides into the city – serious enjoyment has only just begun. Bands of young people clad in coats of many colours from all over Europe play outside the fine Renaissance hotel that is the Hôtel de Ville, at whose entrance stands a bronze replica of the quiet, meditative statue of Joan carved by Marie d’Orléans, daughter of the citizen-king Louis-Philippe. At the end comes the band of the stolid folk of Orléans, with comfortable bellies on which to rest their little, high-pitched drums.
This concert is the entrée. The chef d’oeuvre is a son et lumière spectacle, a style of show the French have made their own. As night falls, sonorous speeches by Monsieur le Maire and Monseigneur l’Evêque are lost in the wind, but as their public rhetoric gives way to professional singing and an actor’s commentary, an amazing sequence of pictures are projected onto the façade of the cathedral and all present crane their necks upwards to watch the familiar story re-presented and to learn yet again how a teenage girl had inspired the city’s relief. Darkness returns and Orléans has just begun to celebrate the 570th and something anniversary of the singular triumph of Orléans’s own Maid.
On the morning of the official 8 May national holiday, the principal event is High Mass in the cathedral. In the nave hang the escutcheons of Joan’s companions, among them the arms of Gilles de Rais (who was nicknamed either Barbe bleu or Barbe bleue), Etienne de Vignolles, known as La Hire, Poton de Xaintrailles, the obscure Florent d’Illiers and, chief of all, those of royal blood: the Duke and the Bastard of Orléans and Joan’s beau duc, the Duke of Alençon. After Mass, the first of the processions due that day file past, the procession of the provinces of France. In the afternoon, the armed forces and the dignitaries go on longer circuits, which like the morning’s parade also lead to place du Martroi, centred on Foyatier’s statue. That occasion is more serious, for behind the fighting men in uniform on foot and in motorised transport come robed figures of the administration, the law, the university and the clergy – France is a country that loves to honour the professions – and fittingly the place of honour is taken not by an ecclesiastical figure but by a political grandee, though none was as grand as President Mitterrand, who came twice, in this way symbolising secular and republican reconciliation with France’s Catholic and royalist past. Elsewhere in the city, medieval banquets, markets, dances and jousts, jugglers and minstrels bring excitement to the Sunday. Since the Second World War, presidents, prime ministers and, recently, distinguished women such as Bernadette Chirac or Régine Pernoud, have led the celebrations. The wily Le Pen has harangued his followers on 1 May in place des Pyramides in Paris, beside Fremiet’s statue of Joan; and on 30 May the Church will venerate Joan’s death in Rouen. The events in Orléans, however, are meant to unite not to divide: all the French, all nations are welcome; and, radiant in the rain, a seventeen-year-old girl with two pages beside her reminds everyone that there is no honour equal to that of playing Joan.
Orléans always has been the place where Joan is most cherished. Shortly after the festivities a producer may put on the plays about Joan by Ste Thérèse of Lisieux. During the festivities guides at the Maison de Jeanne d’Arc – not really her house, which was destroyed in the last war – greet visitors in medieval dress. A few metres’ stroll on foot would take the idle tourist to the Musée Charles Péguy, devoted to Orléans’s finest poet, who worked out his religious, political and ethical convictions by writing about her.
In the grand street of rue Jeanne d’Arc, which leads up to the cathedral, the closed doors of the Collège Bailly conceal the entrance to the Centre Jeanne d’Arc, which has the best collection anywhere of material related to Joan, based on the extensive holdings of Régine Pernoud, doyenne of Johannic studies. Prominent in the cathedral are the tombs of Bishop Dupanloup and Cardinal Touchet, the men chiefly responsible for the first and the last steps in her canonisation; in the south aisle a series of fine stained-glass windows just over a hundred years old make her tale shine in the light; and in the old quartier to the south, the deconsecrated church of St-Pierre-le-Puellier, once the church dear to Joan’s mother in her old age, has been used to mount a retrospective exhibition of the modern pageants. The oddest poster was printed in anticipation of an event that never occurred, when in 1946 de Gaulle was invited to come to Orléans. He did not turn up until 1959, after receiving a second invitation. In the 1946 picture the silhouette of his great nose and massive body dwarfs the figure that stands in for Joan – but in reality, Joan made even that great man feel small.
The celebrant at Mass in 2004, the Archbishop of Tours, metropolitan of central France, preached on the theme of national reconciliation brought to France by Joan’s canonisation, and as the Mass was introduced in five European languages care was taken to stress her international role. In 2005 the celebrant was the Archbishop of Barcelona. In such ways, somewhat incongruously, Joan has become a symbol of reconciliation in Europe – but then a myth is nothing if not adaptable. And as a myth ‘Joan’ stands for virtues that were too long neglected in past struggles between European nations. In 2005, 8 May was also the sixtieth anniversary of the ending of the Second World War in Europe. 2004 was the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, 2005 the centenary of the French secular State. Such events are reminders that however much historians dispute her importance in her lifetime or however much she has puzzled theologians and psychologists – or however hard it is to identify a just cause for warfare – Joan has come into her own only in a world she could not have imagined, where there is no chance that France will ever have a king again, where France and England still quarrel, but only over how much each contributes to a common budget or how close each country should be to the United States, not over who has a right to rule France. Joan of Arc still matters, since in her story Church and country, myth and history intersect.