Joan of Arc

About Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc came from Domrémy, a village near the boundary between France and Lorraine, and entered public life while rival rulers fought for the French crown. Born around 1412, she grew up in a farming family and learned prayers and Christian observance at home, especially from her mother. She was a laywoman, not a member of a religious order. Her brief public career would take her from that household to the royal court, an army, and finally a prison. The surviving records include her hostile condemnation trial and a later inquiry that gathered testimony from people who had known her.

During the trial of 1431, Joan said that she had first heard a voice at about thirteen, in her father's garden. She described fear at the experience and later identified her guides as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. According to her account, they directed her toward the king and the relief of France. She also told the court about ordinary skills, including sewing, and resisted an unrestricted oath to reveal everything she knew. The record establishes that she gave these answers; it does not independently establish the supernatural origin of what she experienced.

Joan reached Orléans in the spring of 1429, when the city was under English siege. She stayed in the house of Jacques Boucher, treasurer to the duke of Orléans, from April 29 to May 9. That stay places her among the city's inhabitants during the decisive days of the relief. The building now presented as her house is a later reconstruction; its association preserves the documented lodging, not an untouched room surviving from her visit.

The English lifted the siege on May 8. Joan then participated in the Loire campaign, whose formal command belonged to the duke of Alençon. Her influence and courage mattered, but she was not the sole commander of every royal force. She pressed for Charles VII's coronation at Reims, which took place on July 17. Success did not make the rest of her campaign inevitable: an attack on Paris failed in September, and she was wounded. In May 1430 she was captured near Compiègne by Burgundian forces and subsequently passed into English custody.

A surviving letter shows another side of her work: obtaining supplies. Writing from Moulins on November 9, 1429, she asked the people of Riom to send military materials for an intended siege of La Charité. Her request named gunpowder, saltpeter, sulfur, projectiles, and large crossbows. The recent assault on Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier had depleted the army's stores, she explained, and delay would hinder the next operation. She addressed civic and religious leaders together and urged a practical response. This was the language of provisioning a campaign, not a general appeal to heroic feeling or an assertion that material preparation could be dispensed with.

The letter was dictated to a scribe, with the name Jehanne signed at its end. The British Library identifies the document as an original preserved in the municipal archives of Riom. Its uneven signature gives a more precise picture than simply imagining Joan as the writer of every surviving sentence under her name. A secretary could put her instructions into a formal letter while she supplied its authority.

At Rouen, an ecclesiastical court presided over by Bishop Pierre Cauchon pursued charges against her in an English-controlled setting. Her political role made the proceedings more than a detached examination of private religious experience. Questions concerned her reported revelations, obedience to church authority, and male clothing. The accusations were compressed into articles that did not fairly represent all her answers. On May 24, under threat of execution, she accepted an abjuration; after returning to male dress and repudiating that recantation, she was condemned as having relapsed. She was burned at Rouen on May 30, 1431.

Later witnesses challenged the conditions under which the first trial had been conducted. Guillaume Manchon, one of its notaries, recalled pressure from the English and attempts by secret writers to produce a record unfavorable to Joan. He said that he had refused to alter his own notes to match theirs. He also described her insecurity under male guards and her fear of mistreatment. These recollections help explain the later challenge to the verdict, but they remain testimony given years afterward, including by a participant defending his own conduct. They should not be flattened into an unqualified account of everything that happened in her cell.

The condemnation was annulled in 1456, long before the formal Catholic process that recognized Joan as a saint. That later process examined her life and claims of miracles attributed to her intercession. She was beatified under Pius X in 1909 and canonized by Benedict XV on May 16, 1920. Canonization was an act of the Catholic Church, distinct from the reversal of the fifteenth-century judgment. The two decisions answered different questions: whether the original proceedings could stand, and whether she should receive the Church's public veneration as a saint.

Prayers for Joan of Arc