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Who, if Anyone, Deserves our Admiration?
Would Joan of Arc Make your List of Admirable People?
Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know
nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except
those who die there.
Joan of Arc
[The patriotic poster on the left was commissioned
by the United States Treasury Department at the time of the First World
War. (Cynics have not failed to note that Joan saved France from
America’s ally in WWI, the English.) More than a few men have
fallen in love with a picture, and between the idealized generic beauty of
her face and her form fitting
armour Haskell Coffin’s heroine
must have stolen the heart of many a young lad. But those who know her
story, like Mark Twain, love her
beyond any personal magnetism or physical allure she may have possessed.
In the photograph on the
right we see one saint portraying another. St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) was
another famous admirer, even
writing poems and a play about
her—though it should be remembered that Thérèse was a saint and
not a poet, and that poems often lose something in translation.
If you watched all forty-odd films about Joan of
Arc you would never suspect that we know more about her than any other
medieval figure, more about her than just about anyone else until modern
times. (Except with respect to the notions of its director the 1999 film,
The Messenger, is exceptionally unhistorical.) And this wealth of
information, combined with her brief but extraordinary career, has made
her the third most studied and celebrated
figure in Western culture after
Jesus and Napoleon. As we acquaint ourselves with the facts and the
stock image of Joan fades away—by her mere presence on the
battlefield an illiterate peasant girl, shrouded in myth, spurs otherwise
incompetent soldiers on to victory—our admiration is apt
to be tinged at first with envy. At sixteen Joan spun wool and tended
sheep, a pious girl who had never held a sword in her
hand or probably even seen an Englishman. At seventeen she commanded the military forces
of a nation: and she never lost a battle. One of those battles, the lifting
of the Siege of Orleans, is found in Sir Edward Shepherd
Creasy’s famous book, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the
World. After ninety-two years of engaging in dynastic and civil war
the English
were on the brink of achieving their goal: a dual monarchy. It took
Joan just thirteen months to undo the victories of Poitiers, Crécy and
Agincourt. The
war continued on for another 22 years, but from the
moment Joan arrived on the scene the English cause was doomed.
It’s no wonder they thought she was a witch, a line they took
for over 300 years. Being a witch, they insisted that she was ugly too.
Yet the popular
reappraisal of Joan began, not in France, but in
England. Napoleon jumped on the bandwagon in 1803 and she’s
been invoked by all and sundry ever since.
It should not be imagined that Joan was a mascot, a
merely inspirational presence in the background of battle. On May 7,
1429, she took an arrow between her neck and shoulder during the assault
on the fortified gateway called Les Tourelles. On June 11, during the
battle of Jargeau, a stone projectile struck her helmet, knocking her off a
scaling ladder. On September 8, during the assault on Paris, the bolt from
a crossbow went through her thigh. (There are two schools of thought
about these wounds: either they were much less severe than one would
expect—the bolt from a crossbow was 9 inches long with a 3/4 inch
diameter head of hardened steel while, according to Jean Dunois’
testimony, the arrow, shot from above, penetrated six inches—or
Joan enjoyed God’s providential care.) Despite the military
timidity, political indecision, and frequent opposition of
others—she had many heated exchanges with Dunois in the war
councils—her tactics and strategy invariably produced results.
Many observers, but especially her comrades in the field, testified to her
horsemanship, her skill with sword and lance (a weapon that was effectively
used for the last time by British calvary
against retreating Boers in 1899), her stamina, and, not least,
her uncanny sense of where to place artillery. In the Rouen Trials she
touchingly but naively remarked that she had “never killed
any one.”
It is not generally known that Joan’s
military genius was matched by her skillful defense—she had no
advocate—before a court determined to “have her
yet,” as Cauchon put it. Her presence of mind, subtle replies, and
flawless memory must have driven them
crazy. The trial lasted more than
three grueling months while they wore her down with hardship and threats
of torture. After
trying every trick in the book the trained theologians and
hand-picked prosecutors eventually had to resort to deception. Her
biggest headache had always been how to avoid being seduced by her
comrades or raped by the enemy. Rape was a weapon of war then as it is
now, and although her close comrades professed that there was something
about her that discouraged thoughts of seduction she had many enemies
who had no such qualms. Hence
the wearing of men’s clothing. It was the only chink in her
armour, and eventually they found it. Her story is beyond improbable,
beyond romantic, beyond tragic. If it wasn’t for the fact that we
have complete records of
the trial and the rehabilitation trial 24 years later—discovered in old
archives in the nineteenth century and convergent with everything else
that was known about her—she would be beyond belief.]
We declare that you are fallen again into your former
errors and under the sentence of excommunication which you originally
incurred we decree that you are a relapsed heretic; and by this sentence
which we deliver in writing and pronounce from this tribunal, we
denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the
other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut
off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off,
separate and abandon you, praying this same secular power on this side of
death and the mutilation of your limbs, to moderate its judgment towards
you, and if true signs of repentance appear in you to permit the sacrament
of penance to be administered to you.
(from the sentence publicly read to Joan before she was burnt at the stake)
In the course of an interview Fr. Benedict Groeschel
told investigative reporter and author of The Miracle Detective,
Randall
Sullivan: “And Joan of Arc, there’s a girl. She
said she spoke to the saints, when what she really saw were statues. But
they spoke to her. Was she crazy? I don’t know. I do know that
she stopped the
longest war in European history. Winston Churchill, no less, said of
Joan, ‘Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that
she finds no equal in a thousand years.’ Freud, on the other hand, called her
a schizophrenic. Who’s right? You decide. Was she both mad
and blessed? It’s entirely possible, my friend. Entirely
possible.”
[Nobody could accuse Mark Twain of being well-disposed
towards Christianity or of being on particularly friendly terms
with the deity. Au contraire! Nevertheless, as with so many others, he
fell under Joan’s spell. George Bernard Shaw claimed that he was
infatuated by her—perhaps there’s something about a woman in
armour—but then, as Bernard Levin remarked, Joan was ‘the only woman who ever
managed to wipe the smirk from Shaw’s face.’ In point of fact, the fictionalized
book that Twain wrote about her, Personal Recollections of Joan of
Arc, was solidly researched and much more reliable than
Shaw’s great
play. If the critics were unimpressed and the
public suspected a joke, the book being so out of character, Twain
was unperturbed. On his 73rd birthday, when all his major books
were far behind and he could judge without prejudice, he gave his final
verdict: ‘I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is
the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven
times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of
preparation & a year of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got
none.’ The following passage is from the end of
an essay on Joan
that Twain wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1904.]
She was deeply religious, and believed that she had
daily speech with angels; that she saw them face to face, and that they
counseled her, comforted and heartened her, and brought commands to
her direct from God. She had a childlike faith in the heavenly origin of
her apparitions and her Voices, and not any threat of any form of death
was able to frighten it out of her loyal heart. She was a beautiful and
simple and lovable character. In the records of the Trials this comes out
in clear and shining detail. She was gentle and winning and affectionate,
she loved her home and friends and her village life; she was miserable in
the presence of pain and suffering; she was full of compassion: on the
field of her most splendid victory she forgot her triumphs to hold in her
lap the head of a dying enemy and comfort his passing spirit with pitying
words; in an age when it was common to slaughter prisoners she stood
dauntless between hers and harm, and saved them alive; she was
forgiving, generous, unselfish, magnanimous; she was pure from all spot
or stain of baseness. And
always she was a girl; and dear and worshipful,
as is meet for that estate: when she fell wounded, the first time, she was
frightened, and cried when she saw her blood gushing from her breast;
but she was Joan of Arc! and when presently she found that her generals
were sounding the retreat, she staggered to her feet and led the assault
again and took that place by storm.
There
is no blemish in that rounded and beautiful character.
How strange it is!—that almost invariably the
artist remembers only one detail—one minor and meaningless
detail of the personality of Joan of Arc: to wit, that she was a peasant
girl—and forgets all the rest; and so he paints her as a strapping
middle-aged fishwoman, with costume to match, and in her face the
spirituality of a ham. He is slave to his one idea, and forgets to observe
that the supremely great souls are never lodged in gross bodies. No
brawn, no muscle, could endure the work that their bodies must do; they
do their miracles by the spirit, which has fifty times the strength and
staying power of brawn and muscle. The Napoleons are little, not big;
and they work twenty hours in the twenty-four, and come up fresh, while
the big soldiers with the little hearts faint around them with fatigue. We
know what Joan of Arc was like without asking—merely by what
she did. The artist
should paint her spirit—then he could not fail to
paint her body aright. She would rise before us then, a vision to win us,
not repel: a lithe young slender figure, instinct with “the unbought grace
of youth,” dear and bonny and lovable, the face beautiful, and
transfigured with the light of that lustrous intellect and the fires of that
unquenchable spirit.
Taking into account, as I have suggested before, all
the circumstances—her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early
environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited
her high gifts and made her conquests in the field and before the courts
that tried her for her life,—she is easily and by far the most
extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.
A perfect woman, nobly plann’d,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.
William Wordsworth
Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all
that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in
either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in
plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the
reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all
that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as
admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out
its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic
in Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our
time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his
hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had
all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but
fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while
Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the
peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was
the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was
more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a
perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild
speculators who do nothing.
G. K. Chesterton
Jeanne’s mission was on the surface warlike,
but it really had the effect of ending a century of war, and her love and
charity were so broad, that they could only be matched by Him who
prayed for His murderers.
Arthur Conan Doyle
More
Thoughts about Joan of Arc
Consider this unique and imposing distinction. Since
the writing of human history began, Joan of Arc is the only person, of
either sex, who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of
a nation at the age of seventeen.
Louis Kossuth (19th Century European Freedom
Fighter)
As I wrote she guided my hand, and the words came tumbling
out at such a speed that my pen rushed across the paper and I could barely
write fast enough to put them down.... I do
not profess to understand [her].
George Bernard Shaw
The history of this woman brings us time and again to
tears.
Jules Michelet (19th Century French Historian)
There now appeared upon the ravaged scene an Angel
of Deliverance, the noblest patriot of France, the most splendid of her
heroes, the most beloved of her saints, the most inspiring of all her
memories, the peasant Maid, the ever-shining, ever-glorious Joan of
Arc.
Winston Churchill
Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of
Arc, and there you will find it.
Mark Twain
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