Joan of Arc (16 page)

From the duchy of Normandy, only the Channel Islands, which the French consider Anglo-Norman, then remained and still remain English. Of all the lands and cities conquered or re-conquered during the Hundred Years War, the only place left to England was Calais; and over Calais an English king or queen reigned for just over 200 years. At enormous cost to lives, money and land, almost the whole of France had been secured for the King of France. From 1453 until his death, Charles VII was king of a nation as well as of a country. Posthumously, in a way and at a time that in her impatience she could never have endured, Joan’s prophecies had come true. Her fame, which at her death seemed destined to be transitory, would have an astonishing and enduring afterlife.

B
y 1450 it was safe to remember Joan of Arc. Even when she was a figure who divided Frenchmen against one another, there were impressive defenders of her Valois cause.

Of these the most renowned was Jean Gerson, former Chancellor of the University of Paris, who spent his last years in Lyons, deep inside the lands favourable to Charles VII. Gerson was Paris’s leading theologian in a period when the city was still reputed to have the most famous university in Christendom. With his mentor and predecessor Pierre d’Ailly, he worked energetically to end the Great Schism; and the two put forward the theory of conciliarism as a response to a choice Catholics must make: which pope to obey. From 1378 to 1415, when there was one pope in Avignon and another in Rome, the French usually sided with the Avignonese and the English with the Roman pope. In the end there were three rival popes. In these circumstances it was hard to sustain the papal lawyers’ view, which was given its most magniloquent form in the final ringing sentence of Boniface VIII’s Bull
Unam Sanctam
: ‘it is altogether necessary for salvation that a human being should be subject to the Roman pontiff’. It is hard to see how this declaration could apply to a Chinese mandarin or a Persian sufi, of whose existence some Catholics had heard, let alone to an African south of the Sahara or to an American or an Australian
in terra incognita
. Philip IV of France was equally unimpressed, and his agents captured Boniface, while the next popes relied on France’s favour. A century later the papacy seemed such a derisory institution that it could be rescued only by the intervention of a general council of the Church. If the popes had lost their authority, what authority did a council have? The answer must be that, as the epitome of the Church, the council had authority over a pope, still more over two or three popes, and indeed, as a last resort, a council could depose a pope. Gerson expounded such ideas at the Council of Constance in 1415.

Gerson’s theories are apposite to Joan’s trial, for as late as 1431 she learnt that churchmen were not sure who should be pope; but it was not Church politics that made Gerson sympathetic to her mission. At Constance he had a moral cause to defend. He had been outraged not only by the murder of Louis, Duke of Orléans, at the instigation of John, Duke of Burgundy, but even more by Jean Petit’s defence of the act as justifiable tyrannicide. To Gerson this seemed a travesty of Christian ethics, and despite able pleading by a university lawyer, one Pierre Cauchon, who showed an assured grasp of inquisitorial technicalities, Gerson, in the name of Charles VI of France, secured the condemnation of Petit’s views if not of the duke who inspired them. While arguing his case he was ranged against a group of men who were to be Joan’s prosecutors: Jean Beaupère, Erard Emengard, Jean de Châtillon, Pierre Miget, Guillaume le Boucher and the future grand Inquisitor of France, Jean Graverent. Back in Paris, Gerson had to cope with the duke’s bullyboys, who plundered his house and tried to kill him. He learnt that the duke had vowed to destroy him; and the ‘nation’ of Picardy in the university, who came from the duke’s lands, urged that he be punished
atrociter
.

When the Council ended Gerson slipped away, and at the invitation of the archbishop, eventually settled in Lyon. One of his brothers was the prior of a religious house in the city; and it was here, in July 1429, that he died. His enemies dismissed him as an Armagnac spokesman who stuck by the discredited French king and the king’s closest relatives of the house of Orléans, but in fact Gerson was the only Parisian theologian who counted as an international figure. Not one work by any of those who at Joan’s trial laboured to impress her with their erudition has ever been published; at their best they were acute debaters, at their worst time-servers. Only Gerson has been studied; only he can be studied.

As a clerical man of affairs, he followed the contemporary events in northern France. Just before he died, two tracts began to circulate, one cautiously, the other clearly in Joan’s favour, and both from his entourage. The first was
De quadam puella
, or ‘About a certain girl’, the second
De mirabili victoria cujusdam puellae
, ‘On a certain girl’s wonderful victory’. As
De quadam puella
shows no knowledge of Joan’s military achievements it must have been written before the relief of Orléans.
De mirabili victoria
does not make sense unless written after the relief of Orléans. The first treatise is probably more authentically Gersonian, as it focused on an issue that preoccupied Gerson: the discernment of spirits.

De quadam puella
has a detached, academic tone, constructed in the form of propositions for and against Joan. The author argues first that Joan is a real person and a true maid; second, that the Church still needs prophets; third, that now and again there are some prophets who work miracles; fourth, that women and young people can bring about salvation, for example Deborah, Esther, Judith, Daniel and David; fifth, that no evil man appears in Scripture as if he were a woman; and sixth and lastly, that this girl is a real human person, sent by God to act with His powers, and that she is to be trusted. The author’s long training then leads him to examine the opposing case. First, many false prophets arise, claiming to be sent from God. Second, false prophets can see into men’s hearts and foretell the future. Third, it is hard to distinguish between a true and a false prophet by exterior signs. Fourth, it is implausible that a mission sent by God will have a worldly end. Fifth, despite the prohibition in Holy Scripture, this girl wears men’s clothes and a mission from God ought to relate to an interior state, so ‘it seems indecent that such a person may transform herself into a secular man of arms’. Sixth, it cannot be shown convincingly that this girl has been sent by God, that God works through her and that she should be trusted.

De mirabili victoria
may sound convincing to anyone already convinced. In a 2,000-word treatise, the author urged his readers not to judge the Maid hastily. He carefully distinguished between two ideas of faith. Anyone trifling with one category of beliefs, the truths of faith, could be tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal, as in the case of Huss. In the case of beliefs or pious opinions, the principle to be followed is well expressed in the popular phrase, ‘
Qui ne le croit, n’est pas damné
’ (‘he who does not believe is not condemned’); on her ‘pious beliefs’ the reader must not rush to judge Joan; any decision in this respect ought to be left to the Church, its officials and theologians. Secondly, the author argued that restoring a king to his kingdom, instead of seeking her own ends or working by spells, is a ‘just enterprise’, and therefore a sign that her mission is providential. Thirdly, the author argued that the Old Testament prohibition of men’s dress for women does not necessarily bind women who live under the New Testament. The author was circumspect: ‘a certain maid’ must defer to the Church’s judgement.

While
De mirabili victoria
is exultant because the relief of Orléans seemed to prove that Joan’s mission was God-given,
De quadam puella
shows the caution more typical of Gerson. He believed in the Valois cause, but he may not have been a supporter of Joan. Probably he saw in her another test case: was hers a true prophetic gift? He had been exercised by the case of St Bridget of Sweden, whose prophesyings of the disasters to befall France had not stopped her from being canonised by the Church. The Church accepted that St Bridget, for all the problems in her writings, was a true saint. Gerson may well have been uncertain if the same could be said of Joan.

Such caution is not the case of a women friend of his, the poet Christine de Pisan, who has become a feminist heroine. In 1418, after the Burgundian seizure of Paris, Gerson was driven into permanent exile and Christine retreated to the convent of Poissy. Safe there from the Burgundians, and still near the capital, she was well informed about what was going on in the world and could hope to influence opinion outside the conventual walls. From her enclosure, in the last months of her life, she took up the case of the most extraordinary woman of the age with more eloquence and partisanship than the great theologian she was proud to think of as her ally.

Less famous than many of her other poems or prose works, but more remarkable in its own time, is the
Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc
, which probably dates from 1429 and must be Christine’s final work. What marks out Christine from earlier women writers is her zest for the defence of womankind. A virgin who was a soldier in man’s armour – Christine could not have a better theme, for God had wished to save France by a ‘
jeune pucelle
’:

(‘It is worth recalling/that God by a tender maid/should have wished {and this is the truth}/to grant France such a great grace’.)

Christine continued, declaring that she wept over the state of France since the Dauphin had fled from Paris and she had been forced into a convent, but her tears changed to song, when in 1429 the sun had begun to shine again on the kingdom: the rejected child of the previous king is coming as a crowned King, let us praise God as we greet him. In matters of faith the lilies have never erred; and the renown of Charles, seventh of that noble name:

(‘has been raised up by the Maid, who by God’s grace/has laid low your enemies under your standard {a new event})’.

She then turns in her mind to address the Maid directly:

(‘And will you be forgotten, happy Maid,/as God has honoured you/so much that you untied the rope/holding France so tightly bound’.)

Christine compares Joan to the Old Testament heroines Esther and Judith and Deborah, and she is well informed about Joan’s examination at Poitiers and her journey with Charles through the countryside en route for Reims. Her power was first made apparent at Orléans:

(‘What an honour to the female/sex, it seems that God loves it/when this whole great, wretched people/by whom the whole kingdom is wrecked,/is recovered and made safe by a woman’.)

Joan will conquer the English, bring harmony to Church and Christendom, overrun the Holy Land. When Christine ends the poem, Joan was at a decisive moment in her career: would she and the king enter Paris? The poetess died before Joan’s tragedy unfolded after she failed to take the capital, failed to drive out the English, failed to take Jerusalem. Joan would not end her days, as the poetess hoped, in peace, for ever faithful to her king.

What is true of almost all those who put the case for Joan, however tentatively, is that they wrote before her trial and death. Eminent among Charles’s theological advisers was Jacques Gélu, first Bishop of Tours and later Archbishop of Embrun. Initially a sceptic, by mid-1429 he was able to declare ‘we piously believe’. Similarly, Jean Dupuy, a Dominican Inquisitor living in Rome, had heard of Joan through the
De mirabili victoria
. What neither of them faced was how to defend her once she had been burnt as witch and heretic. That dilemma, oddly, was confronted by Martin Le Franc, a priest in the service of the Duke of Burgundy. In 1442 Le Franc completed a mediocre poem,
Le Champion des dames
, that belatedly addressed questions about the roles of the sexes debated some forty years earlier by Christine de Pisan, Gerson and some royal secretaries. As a cleric, if not as a writer, Le Franc was a figure of some importance, who worked for an anti-pope and a pope, but who for a long time was in the service of the Duke of Burgundy. He dared to wonder if the verdict against Joan was safe; but he was not entirely brave, for the verses in which he puts his dangerous case were preserved in only one manuscript, which does not seem to have been published.

After 1450, Philip the Good was no longer the force in French politics he had been; Henry VI no longer counted at all; Charles VII governed more of the country than any of his predecessors and for almost the first time in the fifteenth century it was clear who was the true pope. A brave man might ask Le Franc’s dangerous question: was the verdict against Joan safe? By 1450 most of Joan’s judges were dead; and it seemed a good moment to apply one of Gerson’s most radical ideas – not the view that a council can depose a pope, but the view, ultimately more important, that in judging the state of a soul men need the gift of
discretio spirituum
, the discernment of spirits, the ability to assess aright the tendency of a personality in its intimate relationship with God.