Joan of Arc (28 page)

Southey wrote quickly and can be read quickly. Dunois played a major part in his narrative, as most of his story focused on the relief of Orléans. He was less sure of touch in delineating Joan, who is made to declare, like a Lakeland peasant:

And

Eventually, the English army’s defeat at Patay clears the way to Reims, where

And so the Maid

Southey later became an anti-French Tory journalist, and from 1813 until his death in 1843 he was poet laureate. The one book of his readily available is the
Life of Nelson
(1813), his encomium on one of the most anti-French of English heroes.

Meanwhile, in 1801 a version of Joan’s life was staged at Weimar by one of the most formidable of European Romantics, Friedrich von Schiller.
Die Jungfrau von Orleans
(
The Maid of Orléans
) was but one of many plays in which Schiller re-examined the past of many European countries. Schiller took pains to gain a sound knowledge of history; he probably first came across Joan in Hume’s
History of England
and he knew Shakespeare and Voltaire. Joan to him was a woman given a national destiny. Like Wilhelm Tell, she stood for liberty, but as he explained, he had ‘overcome the historical facts’. Schiller’s Joan was important in legend. As facts about her did not matter, he could decide what the facts should be. Without Voltaire’s wicked sense of humour, his story is full of love interest. Joan and her two sisters, called Margot and Louison, each have suitors, Dunois falls in love with Joan and she falls in love with an English knight, Lionel, whose life she spares, with the result that her failure to remain free of sexual feeling brings about her fall, a Romantic variant on the Shakespearean slur that she was a seductress. Historical dilemmas did not interest Schiller. In the prologue, Joan seizes a helmet, because she must fight, and she dies in battle, since that is her destiny.

Within ten years of the execution of Louis XVI, Joan’s fortunes revived in France. After the tumults of the 1790s the youthful General Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and as First Consul became Head of State of the French Republic. Since 1789 France had been divided chiefly by religion and royalism, and so Bonaparte planned to woo natural conservatives by offering them a sort of monarchy, and to woo Catholics by assuring them that they could practise their faith without the protection of a king.

The Concordat Bonaparte signed with the pope in 1803 gave him some control over the French Church. Operating under the Concordat system, the Bishop of Orléans wrote to the Minister of the Interior, Chaptal, to beg permission to revive the festival of Joan of Arc. Chaptal consulted Napoleon, who, with his eagle eye for propaganda, responded in the official paper,
Le Moniteur
:

The deliberation of the city council is very pleasing to me. The illustrious Joan of Arc has proved that there is no miracle that French genius cannot achieve when national independence is threatened. United, the French nation has never been vanquished, but our neighbours, abusing the openness and loyalty of our character, constantly sowed in us the dissension from which came the calamities of the period in which the French heroine lived, and all the disasters our history recalls.
⁴

To mark the resumption of the feast the city acquired a statue by Etienne Gois showing Joan as an Amazonian maid, wounded in the shoulder by an arrow, grabbing hold of her sword and rolling up an English flag.

Napoleon’s intervention had a lasting effect on the cult of Joan. Before 1789 France had been a kingdom and all French people were subjects of the king. After 1789 France was a nation and all French people were citizens. Between 1799 and 1870 monarchical power remained the norm, as First Consul Bonaparte gave way to Emperor Napoleon I, then two senior and one junior Bourbon king, Louis XVIIII, Charles X and Louis-Philippe and finally Emperor Napoleon III. If dynasties changed, there was a constant search for heroes and heroines from the nation’s past.

From 1803 Joan steadily became better known. Scenes from her life were themes for paintings or sculptures in the Salons, the biennial State-sponsored exhibitions held in Paris; it was in the Salon of 1802 that Gois first showed his statue of Joan. The new interest in Joan was initially just a sign of the new vogue for medieval history; and the new school of painting that cultivated the so-called troubadour style was much loved by Napoleon’s first wife, the Empress Joséphine. There was something glamorous in the sheen of a coat of armour and the fantastic hats and long trains beloved by high-born ladies in the fifteenth century, and Joan, an elegant girl in male costume, had an air of becoming grace.

Joan came from an era when the kings of France were anointed with the oil of St Remigius and crowned in Reims Cathedral. The ceremony she regarded as the supreme triumph of her mission was re-enacted for the last time in 1825, to honour Louis XVI’s youngest brother, Charles X. Fervent royalists longed for the reunion of throne and altar, which Joan took for granted.

At the base of Gois’s statue of Joan, four scenes were sculpted in relief: the battle of Orléans; Joan receiving a sword from the hands of Charles VII; the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral; the reading of the death sentence and the carrying out of the sentence in Rouen. This Napoleonic statue was itself a neoclassical concoction, with no trace of medieval reality, but after 1815 artists began to aim at authenticity. The department of the Vosges bought Joan’s family house in Domremy, and once the building was refurbished, its new status was commemorated in lithographs. Some pupils of Napoleon’s first painter, David, wrote to their former master, now in exile in Brussels, to inform him of the recent revival of interest in Joan. They told him that there were ‘crowds of Maids at the Salon; there have never been so many in all classes’ (of works of art). ‘Joan of Arc is represented in the principal situations of her too-short career, and her life, almost in its entirety, is set before people’s eyes.’
⁵
Some of the painters were committed royalists, notably Pierre-Henri Révoil, whose painting of Joan of Arc in prison at Rouen, now in the city’s museum, demonstrated meticulous research into the clothes of the time. Others discovered a lifelong vocation for historical painting. Paul Delaroche achieved fame in 1824 with his treatment of Joan’s interrogation in prison by Cardinal Beaufort. This picture, also in Rouen, illustrates a fictional scene. Its realism is psychological rather than historical. The fierce Bishop of Winchester in his blood-red cardinal’s robe points down to hell while a sick Joan raises her eyes heavenwards. In this painting too, the painter is keen to render the costume in authentic detail.

Although Charles X fell in the glorious revolution of 1830, medievalism survived; and with it the artistic obsession with Joan. The July Monarchy set up after the mob had done its work, under the junior Bourbon, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, took a paradoxical view of Joan. The new ruling classes were by instinct anticlerical; for a time the festivities in Orléans were suspended; and yet in a reign when sceptics and republicans set the tone of society, scholars took pains to gather the materials the past had left behind. This coincided with a private concern of King Louis-Philippe to make Versailles a museum of all French history, royalist, republican and Napoleonic. One picture chosen for permanent exhibition was Auguste Vinchon’s
The Consecration of Charles VII at Reims, 17 July, 1429
, in which Joan occupies the geometric centre of the painting. Also in Versailles is a fine sculpture by Louis-Philippe’s own daughter, Marie d’Orléans, who sculpted several statues of Joan. A copy of the Versailles
Joan
now stands in front of the town hall in Orléans. The royal sculptress managed to express what few contemporaries were able to portray in any visual form – Joan’s inner life.

In the 1840s Jules-Etienne-Joseph Quicherat set to work on the task of editing the manuscripts relating to Joan in the royal library. The scholarly and literary achievement of the age had an enduring effect on the cult of Joan. Her life and death were finally subjected to honest, scrupulous evaluation.

Using the techniques of the Ecole de chartes (the school of charters), an institution founded by Louis XVIII, Quicherat edited all the texts he could find relevant to her story. Between 1841 and 1849 he produced a great work in five volumes,
Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc dite la Pucelle . . . suivis de tous les documents historiques qu’on a pu réunir et accompagnées de notes et d’éclaircissements
(‘The process of condemnation and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, called the Pucelle . . . followed by all the historical documents that can be found together with notes and explanations’). The first volume contained transcriptions of the trial of 1431, the second and third volumes those of the nullification trials, the fourth the ‘chronicles, reminiscences and impressions by contemporaries’, the fifth consisted of ‘literary extracts, contemporary poetry’ and an index. Quicherat enabled scholarly historians to study not just the relatively familiar trial of 1431 (most accounts of Joan stopped with her death), but also the duller form, in which the memories of those who had known, loved and admired her were preserved. He also freed historians from dependence on a chronicler like Monstrelet, who could not recall anything that was said on the one occasion when he said he met Joan and who forgot that his patron had sold her to the English. Quicherat made researchers aware of the cult of Joan since 1456, down to the moment when the Orléans festival was revived in 1803. His work has lasted. Only recently have modern editions of the trials of 1431 and 1450–6 replaced his first three volumes, and even in the twenty-first century no publication has yet has made his fourth and fifth volumes obsolete.

Quicherat’s sound erudition has in the long term done more to restore the reputation of Joan than any great writer’s most exalted flight of fantasy, but it could hardly make her popular, even when in the 1860s his collection of medieval Latin and French texts was translated into modern French. What was required was the verve of a master of the hard art that the French call
haute vulgarisation
(sophisticated popularisation), and in 1830 such a man emerged into prominence when Jules Michelet, a Parisian university professor, lectured on medieval history. His original account of Joan formed part of his course on the history of fifteenth-century France, but in 1853 it was printed as an independent work. This was a lucky accident. By writing so much Michelet became prolix: what makes his life of Joan a pleasure to read is that for once he was concise, a rare achievement for anyone writing about Joan. Indeed, concision gives his little book its air of authority. When he has pronounced, it seems as if there is nothing more to say.

Michelet saw in Joan a visionary who noticed problems only in order as to solve them. ‘She declared in the name of God that Charles was the heir; she reassured him about his legitimacy which he doubted. This legitimacy she sanctified, by leading her king straight to Reims and gaining over the English the decisive advantage of the consecration.’
⁶
His view of her was based on common sense: ‘it was not rare to see women take up arms’. ‘The originality of the Pucelle did not consist in her visions. In the Middle Ages who did not have them?’ ‘The court of Charles VII was far from being unanimously in favour of the Pucelle . . . Everyone was curious to see the sorceress or the inspired woman.’ At Poitiers the clergy decided: ‘this girl is the messenger of God’. It was not that France did not have enough able soldiers to win back Orléans, but they were not used to obeying the king; this was the age when men obeyed the Virgin rather than Christ; they needed a virgin come down to earth, a virgin ‘popular, young, lovely, kind, brave’.

Michelet’s chapter headings are terse; ‘Childhood and vocation’, ‘Joan delivers Orléans and has the king consecrated at Reims’, and ‘Joan is betrayed and surrendered’ is followed by ‘The trial – Joan refuses to submit to the Church’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Death’. Michelet is careful to show his sources in footnotes that reveal he knows the chroniclers, Monstrelet, the Bourgeois de Paris, the author of the
Chronique de la Pucelle
; and he quotes from the records of the 1431 trial and the trials of 1452–6 as well as from other archival material.

Michelet rightly claims that the consecration of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral marked the apogee of Joan’s mission. ‘Everyone who saw her’ at the moment when she knelt to thank God (here he cites the words of the
Chronique de la Pucelle
) ‘believed more than ever that this happening was the work of God’. His use of this comment shows how well he could enter into the mentality of the age, since the only comparable occasion during Michelet’s own life, the last consecration of a French king, Charles X, in Reims (in 1825), was greeted with derision by all except devout royalists. Michelet was a man of the Left, however, who became first a liberal, then a republican; and his view of Joan endorsed Napoleon’s assertion that she was a French heroine. In Michelet’s narrative she had perhaps changed from a saint to a captain, from one who took up the sword reluctantly to one who enjoyed wielding a sword. Once captured, she was a political tool. Her king did nothing for her and the Duke of Burgundy, who surrendered her, was more concerned with Anglo-Flemish trade than justice; and so in January 1431 the Anglophile Bishop Cauchon opened the case against her. There must be only one result: her death. ‘If the fire was lacking, the iron remained.’