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The critical turning point in the Hundred Years War came with what many regarded as a miracle. In spring, 1429, an uneducated, seventeen year old peasant girl from Domremy, named Joan of Arc, appeared at Chinon. Inspired by her voices whom she identified as Saints Catherine, Marguerite, and Michael, Joan claimed that it was her mission to conduct the dauphin to his coronation at Rheims and to free France from the English. This historiographic essay researches Joan's achievements that are oftentimes called miracles and examines the period in which Joan lived.
The aim of the paper is to discover in depth the life of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc Joan was born at Domremy, a village on the uncertain border of Champagne and Lorraine, 4 about 1410. She was the daughter of a ploughman and early tended the sheep: a peasant girl with no book learning, gentle and pious. The land around Domremy was held for the Armagnacs by an experienced captain of the Dauphin, Robert de Baudricourt, who commanded the castle at nearby Vaucouleurs and led the garrison out from time to time on punitive raids against Burgundian incursions and the roving bands of English or French routers, the Ecorcheurs or flayers, successors to the Tard-Venus of Edward Iii's time who were then ravaging the surrounding countryside. Even a remote countryside such as Domremy was not free from the depredations of armed bands, and tales would reach her of the kingdoms piteous plight. But as a rule, the common man, absorbed in his own hardships, has little compassion for sufferings not under his own eyes.
The first and greatest miracle of Joan is that the distress of the whole realm filled a little shepherdess with shame and sorrow. The second miracle is that she felt it her personal mission to heal the wounds of the land. The inspiration came to her in the form of visions and voices, St. Michaels, St. Catherines, St. Margarets.
In those days the veil between heaven and earth would often melt away: the otherworldly was not rejected as anti-natural. The first visions were a sign of Joan's piety not of her patriotism: they told her simply to be good and go assiduously to church. The call to action came later. Joan did not at once convert her family to her conviction.
Her father swore that he would rather drown her with his own hands than let her go venturing among the soldiers. Five years elapsed between her first vision and her leaving her fathers house. Finally, an uncle, believing her, took her to the Sire de Baudricourt, Captain of Vaucouleurs. A prophecy was abroad that the kingdom, lost through a woman, would be redeemed through a woman. Baudricourt, prudently, sent word to the dauphin. The answer was: Let her come.
Joan set forth; the people of Vaucouleurs had bought her armor, the duke of Lorraine had provided her with a horse. Five men were her escort. The third miracle is the extraordinary definiteness of Joan's mission in her own mind. She did not sally forth to save the kingdom in a vague mystic glow.
She had two objectives: to raise the siege of Orleans, to have the dauphin crowned at Rheims. The importance of Orleans was not beyond the grasp of sound peasant sense. The coronation was the link between Joan's piety and her loyalty to her side. She identified France with the dauphin, not with Henry VI; and she felt that her liege should be the Lords Anointed, if he were to bring peace to the distracted kingdom.
Sometime in the autumn of 1428, when she was aged about 17, Jeanne presented herself at the castle of Vaucouleurs and told her tale to the skeptical captain. Since her childhood, she said, she had heard heavenly voices. They spoke to her in the wind and in the bells of the village church, and they told her of the Dauphin Charles, of the plight of his kingdom, of how she must go to see him at Chinon. There the Dauphin would give her an army with which she would raise the siege of Orleans and then she would lead the Dauphin to his coronation at Rheims, and all of France would rise up singing and drive the Goddams from the land they had usurped. It took several visits before Robert agreed to help her, and it was the first of her miracles that she finally convinced this grizzled old soldier of the French wars to risk his command and reputation by giving her his support. He found horses, helped her to disguise herself as a boy, sent a messenger to Chinon to give the Dauphin warning of her coming, and provided a small escort.
If she could make her way to the court across hundreds of miles of hostile, harried territory, that in itself would be another miracle, and if not, there was little lost. Like his sovereign a little later, Robert de Baudricourt thought it was worth the risk. The listless, divided court at Chinon seemed an unfavorable ground for her message, but even the skeptics were not hardened freethinkers. Queen Yolanda supported her; there is no evidence that the queen in vented her, primed her, used her as a piece of propaganda. Joan was tested and found no impostor and no lunatic, but clear-eyed and pure. There was no sudden flare of enthusiasm; but the king gave her a small troop, and she threw herself into besieged Orleans.
No story is more familiar than the brief career of Joan, and we need not rehearse it in detail. It must be noted that miracles, to be manifested on an earthly plane, must be translated into earthly terms. The realistic historian will find little to wonder at in the campaign of 1429. The events in themselves were not so miraculous as the victories of Cressy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. The English did not have an overwhelming force before Orleans; the material and moral aid brought by Joan was sufficient to turn the tide. In a few days (April 29 -May 8) the English were driven away.
At Play (June 28) Sir John Talbot, a famous fighter, was defeated and captured. Joan did bravely on the battlefield, but she was not in actual command. She showed in her truer colors when she pitied and comforted the wounded soldiers. Philip of Burgundy, whom Bedford had recently snubbed, was not displeased that the English should receive a sharp lesson. So he did little to hinder the march of the dauphin toward Rheims, although much of it was through territory he controlled. On July 17 Charles VII was crowned in the city where Clovis had been baptized.
During the ceremony Joan proudly held her own banner: it was her only reward. Her mission was accomplished. Yet she was induced to remain and play a part in strategy and politics which she little understood. She led an assault on Paris (September 8). It failed, and she was wounded. It is surmised that, unwilling to offend Burgundy, the all-powerful neutral who had many friends in Paris, the royal forces did not heartily support the Maid.
In May, 1430, she went to the relief of Compiegne, which was besieged by the Burgundians. She managed to enter the city on the twenty-third; the same evening, in a sally, she was captured. No effort was made to rescue her: the commander was an agent of La Tremoille, the kings favorite, who resented Joan's prestige and influence. She was turned over by her captor to Jean de Line, a vassal of Burgundy. He held her for months, expecting a bid from Bourges which never came. Then he sold her to the duke of Burgundy, who delivered her to the English.
For six years after Joan's great campaign, nothing of note happened. There was no recrudescence of activity on the part of the French, no crumbling away of English power. In 1435 the decisive event took place: it was a deal of a drab, realistic nature. It was through the defection of Burgundy that Henry V had been able to conquer. They could have killed her outright or allowed her to waste away in prison; the trial was obviously a piece of counterpropaganda. The miraculous claims made on her behalf seemed to prove that Heaven itself ratified the Salic Law and endorsed Charles VII: it was Bedfords cue to prove that her power was not of God.
So she was brought before an ecclesiastical court at Rouen on a charge of witchcraft. Out of a hundred clerics only two or three were of English origin; most of them were Normans; a few came from the University of Paris; all were committed to the Anglo-Burgundian cause. The president was the bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon. No one wishes to defend Cauchon and his associates: their judgment has been reversed twice over, by the rehabilitation trial of 1456, by Joan's canonization in 1920.
But apart from their flagrant political bias, their attitude is intelligible. They stood for the hierarchy: the Church alone has the right to pass on the validity of individual revelations. The Maid professed to be an obedient child of Rome, but Dieu premier servi, God to be served first of all. Ignoring official channels, divine inspiration could come straight to the chosen soul. This direct allegiance to the Supreme Power is the stand of the mystic; it is that also of the heretic and the freethinker. Joan fought her inquisitors honestly, bravely, with delightful flashes of homely common sense.
She uttered the words which first focused French nationalism: I know not whether God loves the English or hates them, but I know they will be thrown out of the kingdom of France. Yet, weakened by the harsh prison regime, the interminable ordeal, the pressure of learned men in high office, she recanted and was sentenced to life imprisonment (May 24, 1431). Her enemies were not satisfied. They trapped her into a technical relapse: she was forced to don once more mans clothing, one of her most heinous crimes. Roused by this supreme injustice, she abjured her abjuration.
This justified her being sent to the stake as Heretic, Renegade, Apostate, and Idolater. Broken in spirit, she retracted once more, without any hope of saving her life. She was burned in the Old Market Place, at Rouen, on May 30, 1431, with the name of Jesus on her lips. Charles VII had not stirred a finger to save her; the Holy Chrism had made a king of him, but not a man. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the entire saga is not that a young girl heard voices and believed she had a divine mission, but that the King of France believed her and entrusted her with an army. There is now a popular belief, fuelled by Shaw among others, that when Joan arrived at Chinon the Dauphin was living in penury, his soldiers disillusioned and unwilling to fight, his courtiers nothing but effete fops.
None of this is true. The Dauphin already had plenty of money and would experience no great difficulty in raising more. His soldiers, if as yet none too successful in battle, were still in the field, swiftly regaining any territory the Anglo-Burgundians captured and stoutly defending the walls of Orleans, while a stream of defector knights arrived daily from Plantagenet holdings in the north. The Dauphin still ruled in much of France, and among his supporters were such warlike captains as La Hire, Portion de Xaintrailles, Arthur de Richmond, and Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, a host of knights and burghers and a mass of common people. He still needed the Maid but the reason for this need must therefore be a cause of speculation. She never actually commanded the army; her role was more that of a living standard, charging recklessly at the head of the troops.
Indeed, her only tactic was the charge, her only policy a relentless determination to attack the English wherever they could be found. Perhaps it was this that made Charles support her; he was well aware that he lacked what we now call charisma, while this girl dazzled his court, his captains, and all who met her. Maybe, with her at their head, his troops could defeat an English army in the field and put the Goddams on the road back to their foggy island of Albion. Anyway, it was worth the risk. Joan of Arc was, however, much more than a romantic creation, or a useful tool of kings. She was and remains the embodiment of patriotic France.
Her chief appeal lay not with the King and his court, who first used her, then ignored her, and finally abandoned her, but the common people and the common soldier. In Jeanne, people saw the hand of God, fulfilling all their hopes; hopes of an end to this interminable war, the final expulsion of the English and the Free Companies, and the creation of a France in which they, too, might have some share in the future peace and prosperity. Bibliography: DeVries, Kelly. Joan of Arc: A Military Leader. Stroud, 1999. The Trial of Joan of Arc.
Edited by W. S. Scott. Westport, Conn. , 1956. Fraioli, Deborah A. Joan of Arc: the Early Debate.
Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2000. Period Regine and Marie-Veronique Clin. Joan of Arc: Her Story. Revised and translated by J. D. Adams.
New York, 1998. Reilly, Bernard F. The Medieval Spain's. Cambridge, 1993.
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