Joan of Arc: who she was, and how we know

Start with what is certain, and it is not much. She was born at Domrémy, a village on the Meuse at the edge of the kingdom; her father was Jacques d’Arc, her mother Isabelle. She did not know her own date of birth: at Rouen, asked how old she was, she replied that she thought nineteen. The 1412 everyone reads is a subtraction, not a baptismal record.

Her name is not the one you expect either. Questioned about her name and her surname, she replied that in her own country she was called Jeannette, and after she came to France she was called Jeanne; of her surname she said she knew nothing. In her lifetime she was named differently again: Jeanne la Pucelle, Joan the Maid, down to the letter of the English king handing her to her judges.

The rest fits into eighteen months: Vaucouleurs and Chinon early in 1429, Orléans relieved on 8 May, the coronation at Reims on 17 July, the failure before Paris in September, the capture at Compiègne on 23 May 1430.

Here is the extraordinary fact of this life. Almost everything known about her comes from a trial built to destroy her. At Rouen, from January to May 1431, notaries wrote down the questions and the answers session after session. The register was meant to establish that the coronation at Reims had been the work of a heretic; it produced the opposite. Sainte-Beuve said so in 1850: the trial of condemnation, drawn up to blacken Joan’s memory, is the monument best made to consecrate it (our translation of his French).

One image contemporary with her story has survived, and it does not show her. On 10 May 1429 the news that the siege of Orléans had been lifted reached Paris; Clément de Fauquembergue, clerk of the Parlement, dispatched it in a few lines in his register and drew in the margin a young woman in a dress, hair loose, a sword at her side and a banner in her hand. The Archives nationales, which hold the register, call the drawing an imaginary portrait. Champion notes that portraits were indeed made in her lifetime, one shown as far away as Germany: none survives.

That the English tried her. They held her and had bought her from the Burgundians, but the court was a Church court: Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, presided, brother Jean Le Maistre, vicar of the inquisitor of France, joined the trial on 13 March, and many of the assessors came from the University of Paris. The sentence gave her over, in Barrett’s English, “to the secular power”, the justice that is not the Church’s.

That she was condemned for witchcraft. The word is not there: the sentence declares her a relapsed heretic. Relapsed, because she had fallen back. Six days earlier, at Saint-Ouen, she had abjured and signed, and her penalty had become life imprisonment; when she put on men’s clothes again in her cell, the first condemnation became enforceable once more.

That she was a shepherdess. The image is famous, and it contradicts what she said herself. Asked about her childhood on 22 February 1431, she replied that she had learned to sew and spin, that at home she saw to the ordinary domestic tasks, and that she did not go to the fields to look after the sheep and other animals. Pressed again four days later she added that, once grown, she did not commonly look after the cattle but helped to take them to the meadows.

That she fought sword in hand. The register says otherwise. Asked whether she liked her sword better than her standard, she answered that she liked her standard forty times better; she bore it herself when going among her enemies, she said, to avoid killing anyone, and she said she had never killed a man.

The trial can be read in Pierre Champion’s French translation (1921) and in W. P. Barrett’s English one (1932), which is where the words quoted here come from. It is a source of a peculiar kind: the questions come from judges set on destroying her, the answers were turned from French into Latin, and every word passed through a notary’s hand. Nothing else, even so, comes this close to her. Add to it Fauquembergue’s sketch, the 1429 letter to the people of Riom bearing her signature, and the second trial of 1456.

Few memories have been fought over this hard. In the nineteenth century historians and writers made her a patriotic heroine, Michelet first among them from 1841: the left saw a daughter of the people abandoned by her king and burned by a Church in English service, the right and the Catholics a humble peasant obedient to her sovereign and her clergy. Beatified in 1909, she was canonised by Benedict XV on 16 May 1920. That same year the Republic gave her a national holiday.

The register has not moved. You can still read her answer of 24 February 1431, when she was asked whether she knew she was in God’s grace: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The notary wrote down what followed: she would be the saddest creature in the world if she knew she were not in His grace.