Joan of Arc and the Politics of Uncertainty

This week Sophie discusses the French heroine Joan of Arc and contrasts her with an intriguing modern figure.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Joan of Arc and the Politics of Inconvenient Certainty, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of several books that have been described variously as meticulously researched, elegantly written, and by one Amazon reviewer, not what I expected when I searched for biographies of famous women, which I choose to interpret as a compliment. I am your guide today through a life so extraordinary, so contested, and so thoroughly weaponized by subsequent centuries, that getting to the actual human being at its centre requires something between archaeological patience and a very good torch. Before we begin, I want to say something that I think is important, and that I will probably have to keep reminding you of as we go. The figure we are discussing today is one of the most mythologised individuals in the entire Western historical tradition. She has been claimed over the centuries by the Catholic Church, by French nationalism, by feminism, by conservatism, by the political right, by the political left, by royalists, by republicans, by pacifists, and by militarists. Every one of these groups found in her exactly what they needed to find. That tells you something about her. It tells you rather more about the groups doing the finding. My grandmother, a perfectly sensible woman from Kingston upon Thames, who had strong opinions about the correct temperature for tea and very little patience for what she called historical fuss, once told me that the surest sign of a genuinely important person was that everyone claimed them after they were dead, and no one had treated them properly while they were alive. She was, as usual, substantially correct. We are talking about Joan of Arc, Jeanne d'Arc, in the original, born, as best the historical record can tell us, around 1412, in the village of Dombremy, in the Duchy of Bar, in what is now northeastern France, died on May 30th, 1431, in the marketplace of Rouen. She was nineteen years old, possibly. The records again are not immaculate. What is certain is that she was very young, and that what she accomplished in the brief window between her obscurity and her death was so improbable that five hundred and ninety odd years later, people with advanced degrees in medieval history, myself among them, are still not entirely sure how to account for it. Let us begin where she began. Domremy was a small village, genuinely small, perhaps a few dozen families, farming and herding along the Meurs River. The kind of community where everyone knew everyone's business and ambition was considered a mild social eccentricity. Her father, Jacques Darc, was a prosperous peasant farmer, not destitute, not nobility, somewhere in the respectable agricultural middle that every pre modern society depended upon entirely and thought about very little. Her mother, Isabel Romay, was by later accounts a devout woman who raised her children in orthodox Catholic piety. Joan was the youngest of five children. She could not read, she could not write. She had never left her village in any significant sense. She was, by every conventional measure, a person to whom history would not happen. France at this moment was in a condition that can charitably be described as catastrophic and uncharitably described as apocalyptic. The Hundred Years War, that magnificently named conflict that actually lasted a hundred and sixteen years, because medieval people had the same relationship to accuracy in naming that the British have to accuracy in weather forecasting, had been grinding on since thirteen thirty seven. By the fourteen twenties the situation for France was dire. Henry V of England had won the Battle of Agencourt in fourteen fifteen. The Treaty of Troy in fourteen twenty had effectively disinherited the French Dauphin Charles in favour of the English crown. Paris was under English and Burgundian control. The Dauphin, who would become Charles VIII if anyone got around to crowning him, which was beginning to seem optimistic, was holed up south of the Loire, with a court that was simultaneously broke, demoralized, and riven by faction. Orleans, a strategically critical city, was under English siege. France was losing its own country. Into this situation came a teenage girl from a village no one had heard of, who claimed that God had told her to fix it. The voices began, according to Joan's own testimony, given at her trial, and therefore our most direct access to her account of herself when she was approximately thirteen. She described hearing a voice accompanied by light, which she eventually identified as Saint Michael the Archangel. Subsequently, she heard the voices of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Margaret of Antioch. The voices told her that she had a divine mission, to drive the English from France and see the Dauphin crowned king at Rams, which was the traditional coronation site, and therefore the one that actually counted symbolically and politically in the medieval calculus of legitimacy. Now, what do we do with the voices? This is a question that has occupied theologians, psychiatrists, historians, and a great many people on the internet for several centuries, and I want to address it directly because the answer you give shapes everything that follows. The church, at her canonization in 1920, took the view that the voices were genuine divine revelation. Various psychiatrists over the years have proposed diagnoses including schizophrenia, temporal lobe epilepsy, bovine tuberculosis affecting the brain, and at least one suggestion involving ergot fungus in the grain supply that I find both creative and insufficiently evidenced. Historians tend to take the pragmatic view that the phenomenology of the experience is less historically relevant than its effect. What Joan believed and what she conveyed to others with total conviction was that she had been personally commissioned by God to save France. That belief, whatever its origins, whatever its neurological substrate, was the engine of everything that followed. She was sixteen, perhaps seventeen, when she left Domremie. She walked out or rode, the accounts differ, to Vaucoule, the nearest town with a garrison commander, a man named Robert de Baudricourt. She told him she needed an escort to the Dauphin's court at Chinon. He told her, in what must be ranked as one of the more comprehensively wrong assessments in military history, to go home. She went away. She came back. She told him again, he told her again. She came back a third time, and by this point there were soldiers in the garrison talking about her, and a local prophecy circulating about a maiden who would save France, and Baudricour, who was not stupid, concluded that whatever she was, she was more useful sent toward the Dauphin than kept arguing in his courtyard. He sent her. The journey to Chinon was approximately five hundred kilometres, much of it through territory either hostile or uncertain. She travelled disguised as a male soldier, at night, through eleven days of winter. She arrived at Chinon in February or March of fourteen twenty nine. She was, depending on the calculation, seventeen years old. The meeting with the Dauphin Charles has all the hallmarks of a scene that subsequent storytelling has improved upon considerably, but whose core is apparently supported by contemporary evidence. Charles, either as a test or from sheer anxiety, concealed himself among his courtiers. Joan, who had never seen him, walked directly to him. She addressed him. She told him things. She would later testify to having shared a private prayer from his own heart that no one else could have known. Charles was, to put it temperately, shaken. He arranged for her to undergo theological examination at Poitiers, which was the medieval equivalent of a background check conducted by an entire committee of very serious men in robes. She passed. Or rather she convinced them. Which is either the same thing or a very different thing, and I'll leave that for your contemplation. She was given armour, she was given a horse, she was given a banner, white with the image of Christ, and the words Jesus Maria, which she designed herself, and which she later testified, she loved more than her sword. She was given command, or something adjacent to command, since the actual military commanders were understandably hesitant to fully subordinate themselves to an illiterate teenage peasant girl, which is perhaps forgivable even if history vindicated her rather than them. She arrived at Orleans in april fourteen twenty nine. The city had been under siege since october fourteen twenty eight. The English had constructed a ring of fortifications around it that the French military had failed, repeatedly, to breach. Within nine days of Joan's arrival, the siege was broken. The English fortifications fell one by one. The French, who had been demoralized for months, fought with a ferocity that contemporary accounts unanimously attribute to her presence and her conviction. She was wounded. An arrow through the neck or shoulder, depending on the account, and returned to the fight. Orleans was relieved on may eighth, fourteen twenty nine. It is even now, even having read the accounts many times, a genuinely astonishing sequence of events. Military historians have debated for centuries how much of it was tactic, and there are serious arguments that Joan's instincts for direct assault over the cautious attrition favoured by professional commanders were genuinely sound. And how much was psychological the effect of her certainty on the men around her? The honest answer is probably both inseparably. She changed what was possible by changing what people believed was possible, and then she executed on that change with a directness that the professionals had lost the will to attempt. The Loire campaign that followed was similarly swift and decisive. French forces retook a series of strategically vital towns. The road to Renz, deep in territory that should have been impassable, was opened. On july seventeenth, fourteen twenty nine, Charles VII was crowned King of France at Rheims Cathedral. Joan stood beside him at the coronation, holding her banner. She had done in approximately four months what the professional military and political establishment of France had failed to do in a generation. This is the point at which a sensible person might have gone home. Joan did not go home. She wanted to retake Paris. Charles, now crowned and therefore in the peculiar position of a man who had received exactly what he wanted and was consequently no longer sure he wanted more, became cautious. He negotiated. He delayed. The military momentum that Joan had generated began to dissipate in the bureaucratic amber of royal indecision, which is where military momentum so often goes to die. In May fourteen thirty, during a military engagement at Compienne, Joan was unseated from her horse and captured by Burgundian forces. French allies of the English, she was sold to the English, and here begins the final act, which is among the most damning legal proceedings in medieval history, and that is a category with some serious competition. The trial at Rouen was presided over by Pierre Cochon, Bishop of Beauvais, a man who had significant political and financial reasons to produce a conviction, and who approached his task with the thoroughness of someone who has confused judicial process with predetermined conclusion. It was an ecclesiastical trial, meaning it was conducted by the church, which was both the institution empowered to judge heresy and in this particular instance, the institution with the most to gain from a guilty verdict. The charge was heresy. The specific articles included her male dress, which she had adopted for practical military reasons and which she consistently argued she had been instructed to wear by her voices, and her insistence that her divine mandate was direct, personal, and did not require the mediation of the church hierarchy. That last point is the theologically explosive one. The church's authority rested precisely on its role as the necessary intermediary between God and humanity. Joan's entire claim was that God had spoken to her directly, personally, without institutional mediation, and that her obedience was to that direct communication rather than to the church's interpretation of it. This was not merely heretical in the technical theological sense, it was structurally destabilizing to the entire premise of ecclesiastical authority. A peasant girl from Domrimi claiming direct access to divine instruction and acting on it successfully. That was a problem that the church needed to resolve, and resolution required her to either recant or be destroyed. The trial lasted months. Joan, who could not read the documents put before her, who had no legal counsel, who was held in a secular prison and guarded by male soldiers, rather than in the ecclesiastical prison, where female defendants were canonically entitled to be held, defended herself with a coherence and a verbal agility that caused the trial record, which survives, and which is one of the most remarkable documents in medieval historiography, to read at points less like an inquisition and more like a debate in which the judges were not consistently winning. When asked whether she knew if she was in God's grace a theological trap, since church doctrine held that no one could be certain of this, she replied If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am, may God so keep me. The notary who recorded this stated that the judges fell silent. I have read that exchange perhaps a hundred times, and it still stops me cold. She recanted briefly, under what the record strongly suggests was duress, and the misrepresentation of what recantation would mean for her. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. Within days she had resumed wearing male dress, either because she was given no female clothing, or because male clothing protected her from the soldiers guarding her, or because she had reconsidered and chosen her conviction over her survival, or all three simultaneously. This was deemed a relapse into heresy. The penalty for relapsed heresy was death. On may thirtieth, fourteen thirty one, Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake in the Place du Vieux Machet Anjouen. She was, in all probability, nineteen years old. She asked that a cross be held up where she could see it. She called on the name of Jesus as she died. An English soldier who witnessed the execution said afterward that he had done wrong and feared for his soul, because he had seen a dove flying upward from the flames. Whether he did see this I cannot tell you. Whether he said it the record supports. What it suggests about the quality of her death and its effect on those present, I leave to your own reflection. The English soldier's anxiety was, it turned out, historically prescient. Twenty five years later, Charles VII, the king whose crown she had won, authorized a posthumous retrial. The nullification trial of fourteen fifty six declared her conviction void, her execution unjust, and her reputation rehabilitated. In nineteen oh nine she was beatified by the Catholic Church. In nineteen twenty she was canonized. Saint Joan of Arc Feast Day, may thirtieth the date of her execution made holy. The French state claimed her simultaneously. She became a national symbol of such force and flexibility that she has been appropriated by nearly every significant French political movement since the Revolution, which is quite a feat, when you consider that those movements include the constitutional monarchists, the Bonapartists, the Third Republic, the Vichy regime, the French Resistance, and the contemporary far right, all of whom found in Joan exactly the France they wished to see, reflected back at them. That is not biography, that is mythology. And it is mythology of a very specific, very dangerous kind, the kind that erases the actual person in favour of the symbol, and now the T's because that is by now the structure we both understand and apparently enjoy, given that you are still here. Picture someone who heard from a very young age what they were absolutely certain was a calling. Not a career path, not an ambition in the conventional sense, a calling. A sense of personal mission so total and so specific that it organized everything around it. Someone who was told repeatedly. by the institutions and authorities they encountered, that who they were and what they were claiming for themselves was not permissible, that the category they were attempting to occupy was not available to people like them. Picture someone who refused, not with argument or with legal challenge or with the patient work of incremental institutional reform, but with action with the simple radical act of proceeding as though the obstacle were not there. Someone who walked into rooms that were not designed for them and behaved as though they belonged there, with a conviction so total that the rooms eventually bewilderingly conceded the point. Pictures someone whose authority came not from institutional credentials but from a quality of certainty that other people found against their better judgment compelling someone whose followers believed in them with an intensity that unsettled observers. Someone who was, by training and by origin, nowhere near the position they occupied, and who occupied it anyway, and who changed things genuinely and measurably changed things by doing so. Picture someone who has been claimed by people across the ideological spectrum, each of whom found in them the symbol they needed someone whose image has been used to sell causes that would have horrified them someone who is in the popular imagination, larger and simpler than the complex, contradictory, sometimes difficult actual person underneath the symbol picture someone whose trial not a medieval ecclesiastical proceeding, but a very contemporary, very public legal and institutional process raised exactly the same fundamental question that Rouen raised in fourteen thirty one. Does this person have the right to a direct relationship with authority that bypasses the established institutional structure? And are the people conducting the proceedings motivated by justice or by the institutional need to contain something that cannot be contained by normal means. Who is this person? It is Malala Yusafsai I see you nodding Good I also see the person at the back who thought I was going to say someone more provocative I made a different choice today and I think it is the correct one let me explain Malala Yusafsai was born on july twelfth, nineteen ninety seven in Mingora, in the Swat Valley of what is now northwestern Pakistan. Her father, Ziodin Yusafsai, ran a school and was, by all accounts, a man of unusual conviction regarding the education of girls in a region where that conviction was not merely unconventional but actively dangerous. Malala grew up in a house where learning was treated as a right rather than a privilege in a community that was, by the time of her childhood, increasingly under the influence of the Teriki Taliban Pakistan, who took a rather different view. The Taliban began targeting schools for girls in the Swap Valley. The local military situation deteriorated Malala, who was eleven years old, began writing an anonymous blog for the BBC Urdu service about life under the Taliban, about the closing of schools, about the right of girls to learn. The blog was published under a pseudonym she was a child. She was describing the destruction of her world with a clarity and a moral certainty that made adult readers on the other side of the planet feel ashamed of their own equivocations. She became publicly known her identity was revealed and became an increasingly prominent advocate for girls education. She was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize in 2011. She was awarded Pakistan's National Youth Peace Prize. She was in short visible and visibility in the Swat Valley in 2012 was a condition that carried a specific and terrible risk. On October 9, 2012, Malala Yusufsai was shot in the head on her school bus by a Taliban gunman. She was fifteen years old. She survived against the medical odds that were initially assessed as very poor. She was airlifted to Birmingham, which is not I note where anyone from Kingston upon Thames would choose to be airlifted for reasons of general atmosphere, but which has an exceptional hospital and she recovered she did not go home it was not safe to go home. She remained in the United Kingdom, finished her education, went to Oxford, graduated in 2020 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. In 2014 she became at seventeen, the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has continued to advocate. The Malala Fund, which she co founded with her father, works toward ensuring twelve years of free, quality education for every girl globally. She is, at the time of my recording this, twenty eight years old, and she has already done more than most people manage in a full lifetime. Now the parallels first and most fundamentally the direct relationship with conviction that bypasses institutional permission. Joan did not ask the church whether God was allowed to speak to her. Malala did not ask the Taliban or the Pakistani state or the international community for permission to believe that girls had the right to learn. Both women proceeded from a certainty that was internal, total and apparently non negotiable in contexts where that certainty was designated by the surrounding authority as impermissible. Both were told with the full institutional weight of the powers arrayed against them that they were wrong, that they were dangerous and that they must stop neither stopped second the youth as both vulnerability and power Joan was a teenager, Malala was a child and then a teenager. In both cases the youth was part of what made them seem non threatening to their opponents initially and part of what made them symbolically devastating once they became known. The attack on a fifteen year old girl on a school bus was not merely a crime it was a statement and like the burning of a nineteen year old at a marketplace in Rouen it rebounded catastrophically on the people who committed it The attempt to silence became the amplification third the subsequent mythologization Joan was made into a saint, a national symbol, a political archetype Malala has been in her own lifetime made into an icon. The girl with the headscarf, the Nobel Prize, the face on posters and in documentaries, and in the popular imagination of people who could not locate the Swat Valley on a map, but who know who she is. In both cases the myth has in some respects occluded the person. Joan, five hundred years dead, cannot object to this Malala, quite alive, has occasionally pushed back against the simplification, noting in interviews that she is a complex person with a full life and that the process of being turned into a symbol is its own particular kind of challenge. Fourth, the institutional trial Joan was tried by the church Malala has not been tried by anyone she is emphatically not a criminal and I am not suggesting otherwise but she has been subjected to something structurally analogous, a sustained institutional attempt by the Pakistani Taliban, and by certain elements of Pakistani political culture, to delegitimise her, to accuse her of Western manipulation, to recategorise her not as a victim and an advocate, but as an agent of foreign influence. The attempt to reframe her as a tool rather than a person, to deny her the authorship of her own convictions is, I would argue, exactly the same move that the Rouen tribunal made in fourteen thirty one. Both institutions needed the woman to be something other than what she was because what she was could not be contained. Fifth the question of faith Joan's voices were explicitly religious. Her entire frame was Catholic Christian mysticism. Malala's faith is Islam she has spoken consistently and clearly about her faith as the foundation of her conviction that education is a right noting that the Taliban's interpretation of Islam is one that she and many Islamic scholars regard as a profound distortion of the religion. Both women position themselves not against their religious tradition, but as more truly representative of its deepest values than the institutional authorities claiming to speak for it. Both said, in effect God is on the side of the vulnerable, not the powerful and I know this because I have listened more carefully than you have. Where do the parallels strain? Joan's mission was explicitly military and political in a medieval sense. She was directing armies, breaking sieges, unseating and occupying power through direct armed confrontation. Malala's work is explicitly nonviolent. She has been consistent and emphatic about this. The means are categorically different. Joan operated within a world where the church was the ultimate interpretive authority on divine will, and her challenge to it was therefore total and existential. Malala operates in pluralist global order with many competing institutional authorities, which both complicates her challenge and distributes it in ways that make a single institutional response impossible. And Joan's story ended at nineteen in fire and silence. Malala's story is still going she is twenty eight. What she does next we do not yet know that is in historical terms an extraordinary gift to have a subject who is still authoring their own story. It is also from the historian's perspective an uncomfortable reminder that biography works best with a full arc, and Malala's arc is delightfully crucially incomplete so the verdict who is more compelling Joan and I say this with full awareness that I am about to explain why a medieval French teenager is more compelling than a living Nobel laureate which is the kind of sentence that requires a very good reason to follow it. Malala Yousafsai is remarkable, admirable, courageous and important. Her work is not finished and its eventual impact may be immeasurable. I do not diminish any of that but the quality of historical compellingness the thing that makes a story lodge in the imagination and refuse to leave is not identical to the quality of moral importance and I think it is worth being honest about the distinction Joan is compelling to me for reasons I find difficult to entirely rationalise. She is compelling because she is inexplicable not in the sense of requiring supernatural explanation I am a historian I do not require supernatural explanation but in the sense of outrunning any purely material or sociological accounting a girl from a village that no longer exists with no education no resources no institutional backing no military training no social capital of any conventional kind walked into the wreckage of a kingdom and put it back together in four months and then stood in a court that had already decided to kill her and verbally match the finest theological minds of her era until they had to change the charges because she was winning the original argument. That is not a human story I know how to normalise and I have tried I am also, I will confess, moved by the particular darkness of her ending in a way that Malala's story, which ended not in a marketplace in Rouen, but in an Oxford tutorial and a Nobel acceptance speech does not yet replicate Tragedy is a specific literary and historical form, and Jones is essentially perfect in its structure the voices, the mission, the triumph, the abandonment by the king she crowned, the trial, the fire and then twenty five years later the vindication that came too late for her to receive it delivered by the same institution that condemned her that is not merely history that is something closer to myth in the sense that myth carries the compressed weight of things that are universally true about human experience, the person whose gift is also their condemnation, the institution that destroys what it cannot contain and then sanctifies it afterward, the young woman who is right in a room full of men who are wrong, and who pays for being right with everything. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames. We had, as I have mentioned, a great many very proper opinions about the correct way to do things, about institutional authority, about knowing your place, about the wisdom of those who had been educated and certified and appointed to know things. Joan of Arc is among many other things the ultimate rebuke to every version of that impulse I have ever encountered. She was not educated, she was not certified she was not appointed she was not supposed to know anything and she was emphatically not supposed to act on what she knew and she changed history anyway. I find that unreasonably, professionally, inconveniently entirely thrilling Chandarc, born in Domremy around fourteen twelve, died in Rouens may thirtieth, fourteen thirty one patron saint of France, canonized nineteen twenty, still arguing with historians, still refusing across five centuries to be made entirely into a symbol still somewhere underneath the mythology, a girl from a small village who heard something the rest of us didn't and went I'm Sophie Manners, thank you for being here. Do please read the trial record if you ever get the chance. It is available in translation and it is one of the most astonishing documents in the European historical tradition and if anyone tells you that teenagers can't change the world, send them this episode good night.