Joan of Arc (31 page)

In the course of the nineteenth century Joan acquired more friends in the English-speaking world. She attracted the attention of Pre-Raphaelite painters, notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, and of the fairy-tale illustrator Charles Ricketts.
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No less a person than Queen Victoria saw a play about Joan by the French dramatist Jules Barbier set to music by Gounod and pronounced it ‘lovely’.
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The French firm Hachette published in London and Boston an abbreviated version of a life of Joan by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, complete with a scholarly introduction and a glossary at the back.
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English and American students of French therefore could learn the language by learning about Joan.

A wider public was reached in the 1890s when a great American novelist restated the case for Joan by depicting her as the heroine of a romance. For Mark Twain Joan was a sort of female Huck, a boyish girl who did not want to be ‘sivilised’ and whose simplicity was an unconscious rebuke to scheming courtiers and devious clerics; she was almost a fifteenth-century democrat. He began writing in 1892. By including Michelet, Quicherat and Henri Wallon in his bibliography he showed that he had consulted French as well as English authorities. He gave his narrator, sieur Louis de Conte, his own initials, S.L.C., Samuel L. Clemens; and he said he felt a tender affection for his, that is ‘de Conte’s’
Recollections of Joan of Arc
. The legendary Conte, whose name bears a suspicious likeness to the historical de Coutes, is said to have been Joan’s secretary. Two years her senior, he had grown up with her in Domremy and had stayed with her to the end of her life. Twain signals to the reader that de Conte, writing in 1492, exactly 400 years before Twain, was alive when Columbus sailed to America. The memorialist is thus a modern as well as a medieval man, a mediator between Joan’s age and ours.

Few would assert that Twain’s novel is a great work of fiction, but it can give much pleasure in idle moments, as the Joan de Conte recalled was physically as well as morally attractive. For his courage and fidelity de Conte almost deserved to be an American. In finding a pretty girl both heroic and wholesome, de Conte anticipated Twain himself. His American outlook is summed up in a conclusion that Michelet would have liked. With Joan of Arc, love of country was more than a sentiment – it was a passion. She was the ‘Genius of Patriotism’ – she was Patriotism embodied, made flesh, palpable to the touch and visible to the eye.
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Twain had made Joan accessible in the land of the free.

Just before the First World War, a Scot, irritated by the translation of Anatole France’s
Life
into English, took up the cudgels for Joan. Andrew Lang was a Scots critic, poet, translator and historian, in love with Homer, myths, legends, border ballads, French medieval love poems and the house of Stuart. He had already written a historical romance about a real monk of Dunfermline who commented from Scotland on the story of Joan of Arc. He boasted that ‘the Scots stood for her always, with pen as with sword’, and he counted a fellow Scot as one of his predecessors, the empirical philosopher David Hume, whose
History of Britain
‘recognised the nobility of her character’.
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Before Lang’s writing, no British life had been based on Quicherat, and nobody had been so well briefed. While carrying on a polemic against Anatole France in his preface and footnotes, Lang provided a well-written account of Joan, in which his own tendency to whimsy was kept under control.
The Maid of France
appeared in 1908, and in 1912 its author died.

It was, however, a native of Orléans who put into verses sentiments that are the poetic equivalent of the pictures of de Monvel and Lenepveu. Charles Péguy was tormented by doubt; and he worked through his doubts in relation to his persistent love of Joan. In 1895–7, while studying in Paris, he wrote his first book, a trilogy of plays on Joan, but few people took any notice of his writing, much of it left-wing journalism, until he returned to the topic of Joan’s vocation with
Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc
in 1910. He claimed that his earlier work had been about ‘the history of her inner life’, but it was in truth his own problems he focused on rather than hers, for in becoming a socialist he had ceased to be a believing Catholic. By the time he wrote the second work, however, he had recovered his faith and it was as an individualistic Christian that he prepared for the quincentenary of his heroine’s birth in 1912. He had shifted from viewing Joan as a class heroine to the conviction that her religious calling was one of the most remarkable there had ever been. He believed her to be one of the greatest of saints, only a little lower in heaven than Mary mother of Christ. He made a new claim for Joan: it was her charity that raised her so high. What fascinated him was Domremy, the place where Joan found her vocation, rather than the sites of her later victories or defeats.

Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc
does not attempt to be a drama. Set in Domremy in 1425, at the time when Joan first claimed to hear her voices, it focuses on how she came to realise and accept the role she was to play. Péguy sticks to just three characters, Joan, Hauviette and Madame Gervaise. Much of the writing is in prose, until it bursts into a free verse that can be as sonorous as the Psalms or clipped, even harsh. Madame Gervaise talks the most, as she exhibits the piety of the conventionally religious (she is a young nun), whereas Joan is called to a life out of the ordinary. At the end of the play Madame Gervaise prays that Christ will save Joan’s soul and Joan says Amen to that and adds the words ‘Orléans, which is in the country of the Loire’, for her vocation calls her to action.

Once this poem made his poetry well known, Péguy, who always regarded himself as a man of the Left, came to be cherished by those on the Right who saw in Joan the standard bearer to lead them. In the circumstances of 1910 the popularity of Péguy’s poem showed that the cause of Joan was a cause believed in by both the French nation and the French Church.

In 1909 Joan was declared Blessed by the Catholic Church. Bishop Coullié, successor to Dupanloup, continued with enquiries in 1885 and 1887–8, which led to Joan’s cause being submitted to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome. In 1892 and 1898–1902 Joan was subjected to new enquiries, more searching than any since the fifteenth century. In 1452–6 her first trial had been nullified, but its verdict had been grudging. What her supporters hoped for was an enthusiastic endorsement of her life as one of heroic virtue. Those who acted successively as the
Promotor Fidei
(Promoter of the Faith), better known as the devil’s advocate, outlined the case against her. They were energetic in carrying out their task. The first, Augustine Caprara, found no difficulty in 1456 in admitting that she deserved to be rehabilitated, and he admitted that she was an outstanding figure in fifteenth-century history, a person with an impact on her age analogous to that of Christopher Columbus, whose candidacy for canonisation had been mooted only to be rejected. Like Columbus, he said, she was admired for political not religious virtues. Caprara took seriously many of the points made against her at the 1431 trial. He trusted the records of the condemnation process more than the records of the nullification process; and he maintained that before her capture she was admired chiefly as a soldier, not so much as a saint, for he doubted her modesty; he was also worried that the Duke of Alençon had seen her beautiful breasts several times. Caprara could not see how she could be a martyr for the faith, he was not sure if she had submitted her visions to the judgement of the Church. He conceded that in recent time there had been a growth in devotion to her. He also conceded that if she were added to the ranks of the blessed, she would deserve extremely well not only of France but also of all Christendom. In short she could be a Catholic saint. He admitted her cause might triumph.

Against Caprara’s arguments, set out in 55 pages of arguments and 47 pages of documents, the defender of Joan’s cause replied in 170 pages. The defender was delighted with his opponent’s conclusion, but indignant at the slurs on Joan’s character. The judges decided that at this stage there was no insuperable obstacle to her cause; in 1894 it was announced that the case could go further – this was the moment when Pope Leo XIII declared her Venerable.

Joan’s sanctity was put to the test on two subsequent occasions: in 1898–9 and in 1903. In 1898–9 the Promoter, Joseph Baptist Lugari, argued that, like the original trial, her rehabilitation ‘trial’ was a political act. He also questioned her virtues. She did not practise faith, hope and charity heroically, nor prudence and justice, while her courage was shaky; she took too much pleasure in finery and her own chastity to be truly temperate. He did not like the fact that she was always glad to be tested for virginity, not having given sufficient weight to the fact that in the fifteenth century, as a witch was considered to be always promiscuous, so a virgin could not be a witch. His chief worry concerned her reliance on private revelations, in other words her voices, and a secondary worry was her lack of deference to her judges. As a cleric himself, he did not like the fact that she had rebuked a bishop. The precise grounds on which the Promoter’s views are based are not recorded. All that is known is that once more they were not held to be grave enough to impede the progress of the cause.

There is more information about the final stage of the process. This time, whereas Alexander Verde, the last devil’s advocate, presented his ideas in 24 pages, the reply takes up 367; and this was followed by 198 pages exposing Joan’s virtues. The opponent’s chief concern was the suspicion of hysteria and a secondary one, whether her stand for France was inspired by God; the defenders also worried about the passage of time since the records dated back to the fifteenth century. On the first point her defender replied that she did not exhibit the normal symptoms of hysteria. On the second point the Promoter had already conceded that she may be ‘praised to the stars as the liberator of France whose deeds had been inspired by God Himself’.
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On the third point he defender also thought the documents were in the main reliable.
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In her lifetime Joan probably did not perform any miracles. Had she done so, contemporaries might have found it harder to discount the views of those moved by her goodness, just as her carefully guarded virginity prevented the charge of witchcraft from being pressed home. To promote her canonisation, however, those directing her cause in the early twentieth century had to prove that from heaven she could perform four miracles, of which two at least were ‘of the first class’. Two were needed for beatification, two more for canonisation. The pope might dispense with one miracle if the candidate had founded a religious order. Joan was let off one for having saved France.

Three miracles of the first class were produced. One nun had been cured of leg ulcers, a second of a cancerous ulcer of her left breast, a third of cancer of the stomach.
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These cures were attributed to Joan since they had been preceded by invocation to her in prayer. Pope Pius X solemnly accepted the three miracles as authentic on 13 December 1908. He declared: ‘Joan of Arc has shone like a new star destined to be the glory not only of France but of the Universal Church as well.’ For heroic virtue she was declared Blessed on 18 April 1909. There was nothing to prevent Joan from being canonised, except the coming of war.

By the end of 1918, as Austria–Hungary disintegrated, there was no longer a major Catholic power in Europe. France and Italy were officially secular, and Spain was politically powerless. In 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the weak German republic was forced to cede the territorial gains of 1871 back to France. Since the French once more had possession of all Lorraine, they were glad to have a Lorrainer as their national heroine. The First World War briefly united Frenchmen; and national unity was briefly symbolised by Joan.

In the trenches of the Western Front soldiers were painfully aware of their lack of women. They wanted women for every need. They made an industry of prostitution.
Poilus
became a new nickname for the ‘hairy’ private soldiers who enjoyed cheeky
chansons
about the barmaid Madelon they met in a café, but above all they sought to be consoled. The cult of Joan had been given the approval of State and Church.
Poilus
carried pictures of Joan in their pockets. Joan had saved them, nurtured them and made them victorious. Once peace came, it would have been unthinkable for Benedict XV, pope since 1914, not to have declared Joan a saint. In May 1920 the French bishops came to Rome to see her canonised; and that year the French National Assembly at last announced the national holiday in her honour. Quarrels between the French Church and the French State were forgotten. The national feast of Joan was fixed for the Sunday after 8 May, a date that has kept its place in the celebrations of Joan’s triumphs and is still a national holiday. The Church reserved 30 May, the day of her death, for her feast day, not as a martyr, for she had not died for the faith, but as a virgin, a woman who was pure until death. The trials of Joan were finally over.

I
n 1920 France was united by Joan. At the same time France was on good terms with the countries it chose to call Anglo-Saxon. The war had improved French relations with English-speaking countries. The Entente Cordiale of 1904 had survived the stresses of an alliance in wartime, and as for the USA, the sympathy that many American intellectuals felt with France had been transformed in 1917 when the nation joined that alliance. The American President needed to persuade the American people that Liberty (as sculpted by Eiffel) should be preserved in the home of Eiffel’s Tower, and when American troops arrived in France, General Pershing recalled France’s aid in the American Revolution with the words,
Lafayette, Nous voici
. But, when it came to persuading the troops to leave home, the American government found one of the best ways to stir up support for France was to invoke the name of Joan.