St. Joan of Arc

The girl from Domrémy and the voices

Joan was born in 1412 in Domrémy, a farming village in eastern France, in the depths of the Hundred Years' War — with the English and their Burgundian allies holding much of France and the rightful heir, the Dauphin Charles, uncrowned and faltering. She never learned to read or write. She learned, by her own account, to spin, to sew, and to pray.

From about the age of thirteen, Joan testified that she heard voices accompanied by light, which she identified as St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine of Alexandria, and St. Margaret of Antioch — telling her, over several years and with increasing insistence, to go to the Dauphin and see him crowned. This is her own sworn testimony, given under interrogation and maintained with total consistency through months of hostile trial, under threat of death. Whatever one makes of it, she never wavered on it, embellished it, or contradicted herself — a fact her judges found maddening and posterity has found remarkable.

In 1429, at sixteen going on seventeen, she persuaded the garrison commander at Vaucouleurs to escort her across enemy territory to the Dauphin at Chinon. Charles had her examined for weeks by theologians at Poitiers, who found in her — in their words — nothing but goodness, humility, and simplicity, and advised he put her to the test at Orléans.

Orléans, Reims, and the crown

Orléans had been under English siege for months, and its fall would have opened the heart of France. Joan arrived in late April 1429, seventeen years old, in armor, carrying not a sword in battle but her banner — bearing the names Jhesus Maria. Within days the siege that had strangled the city for half a year was broken; on May 8, 1429, the English withdrew. Victories followed at speed, and on July 17, 1429, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII in the cathedral of Reims — the anointing that transformed him, in the eyes of France, from claimant to king. Joan stood beside the altar with her banner. Asked later at her trial why her banner had that place of honor, she gave one of her perfect answers: it had borne the burden; it was right that it should have the honor.

She told her judges she had never killed anyone — she carried the banner precisely so she would not — and said she loved it “forty times better” than her sword. In May 1430, at Compiègne, she was pulled from her horse in a skirmish and captured by Burgundian troops, who sold her to the English. Charles VII, the king she had crowned, made no serious effort to ransom her. She was eighteen; she would turn nineteen in an English prison.

The trial: when churchmen wronged a saint

What followed must be said plainly, because the Church herself has said it plainly. Joan was tried at Rouen in 1431 before a church court headed by Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais — a court operating in English-held territory, serving English political interests, whose purpose was to destroy the legitimacy of Charles VII by condemning the girl who crowned him as a heretic and a witch. She was denied counsel, held in a military prison guarded by soldiers rather than in a church prison with women attendants, and interrogated for months by teams of learned men.

The nineteen-year-old illiterate outfenced them, and the transcripts survive to prove it. Asked the trap question — whether she knew she was in God’s grace (to say yes was presumption; to say no was confession) — she answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The notaries recorded the court’s astonishment. Asked whether St. Michael appeared to her unclothed, she replied: “Do you think God has not wherewithal to clothe him?”

Condemned on charges centering on her voices and her male dress, trapped in a staged relapse, she was handed over and burned at the stake in the old market square of Rouen on May 30, 1431. Witnesses — including the executioner, who was shaken — testified that she asked for a cross, kissed it, and died calling aloud, again and again, the last word she said on earth: “Jesus.” In 1456, a papal court under Pope Callixtus III, after formally re-examining the case, annulled the entire trial as tainted by fraud and procedural violation, and declared Joan innocent. In 1909 she was beatified; on May 16, 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized her. The court that killed her was made of churchmen; so, five centuries on, was the Church that raised her to the altars and admitted the wrong.

“I was born to do this” — what she actually said

The line most often printed under Joan’s image — “I am not afraid; I was born to do this” — should be handled with the honesty she deserves. In that neat English form it does not appear in the trial transcripts, which are the bedrock source for her actual words; it is a loose popular rendering that has drifted far from any single documented sentence. She said things near it in spirit — her serene insistence that she came at God’s command, that she feared nothing because God was with her — but the quotable slogan is the gift shop, not the transcript.

The good news is that her verified words are better. The state-of-grace answer. The banner that deserved the honor because it had borne the burden. Her flat statement that she had never killed a man. Under threat of fire, month after month, an unlettered teenager produced answers that theologians could not crack and history cannot forget. No invented quote improves on that record.

Her feast and her patronage

Joan’s feast is kept on May 30, the day of her death. She is the patroness of France — declared so formally in the twentieth century — and of soldiers, who have carried her name into battle from her own century to the trenches of the First World War, where French troops bore her image in the very years of her beatification and canonization. She is also invoked by prisoners and by all who suffer condemnation unjustly.

She belongs naturally beside St. Michael the Archangel, the captain of her voices; and beside St. Thérèse of Lisieux — her countrywoman, canonized in the same era, who wrote plays about Joan and was named co-patroness of France alongside her. Two French girls, one with a sword she never used and one who never left her cloister, sharing the patronage of a nation.

In Their Words

Prayers