Joan of Arc (Fr. JEANNE D'ARC), the Maid of Orleans, one of the most striking figures that ever crossed the stage of history, was born of poor but devout parents, in the village of Domremy, near Vaucouleurs, on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne, 6th January 1412. Like other maidens of her rank she was taught to sew and spin, not to read and write; and in the quietness of her country-life she grew up tall and handsome in form, sweet and womanly in nature, unlike the other girls around her only in her greater modesty, industry, and devotion. Her religious faith was ardent almost from her cradle; she loved to be alone, and she brooded in her waking dreams over the Bible story and the legends of the saints, until these became as real to her as they were to St Teresa. The cold abstraction of patriotism she never discovered for herself, but she mourned with passionate prayers and tears over the sorrows of down-trodden France, until these prayers took real shapes, and returned to her with form and sound as messages from heaven. And thus there gradually grew up within her heart the conviction that she had been chosen by God to do a special work of deliverance for her country. At thirteen, the noon of a summer's day, she first saw a light and heard an audible voice from heaven, and her terror gradually disappeared as these signs were repeatedly vouchsafed and became dear and familiar to her. St Michael, St Catharine, and St Margaret bent over her and whispered in her ears her heavenly mission, and though calm to outward eyes, henceforward she lived an inward life apart, given to God and her saints. During that unhappy time of national degradation a prophecy, ascribed to Merlin, was current in Lorraine, that the kingdom lost by a woman (Queen Isabella) should be saved by a virgin, and no doubt this, together with her visions, helped to define her mission to the brooding and enthusiastic mind of the young peasant girl. 'I had far rather rest and spin by my mother's side,' she said with simple pathos, 'for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it.' Her story was at first laughed to scorn, but her persistence bore down all opposition, and at last she succeeded in making her way to the Dauphin and convincing him by secret signs of her sincerity. 'There is more in God's book than in yours,' she said to the doubting and hesitating theologians. She put on male dress and a suit of white armour, mounted a black charger, bearing a banner of her own device—white, embroidered with lilies, on one side a picture of God enthroned on clouds, on the other the shield of France, supported by two angels, together with a pennon on which was represented the Annunciation. Her sword was one that she divined would be found buried behind the altar in the church of St Catharine de Fierbois. Thus equipped she put herself at the head of an army of 6000 men, dictated a letter to the English, and advanced to aid Dunois in the relief of Orleans, which was hard beset by the victorious enemy. Her arrival fired the fainting hearts of the French with a new enthusiasm, and rough and hardened soldiers left off their oaths and their debauchery under the spell of her pure presence. On the 29th April 1429 she threw herself into the city, and, after fifteen days of fighting, the English were compelled to raise the siege and retreat, carrying with them the tale of terror at the strange witchcraft by which they had been overcome. At once the face of the war was changed, the French spirit again awoke, and within a week the enemy were swept from the principal positions on the Loire. Amid the carnage and confusion of her strange surroundings, Joan showed the same purity, simplicity, and good sense that had marked the village girl. She shrank with womanly tears from the sight of bloodshed, and trembled with terror at her first wound, while the brutal taunts of the English soldiers stung her purity to the heart, and drew hot tears of indignation from her eyes. But all thoughts of self were lost in devotion to her mission of which heaven had given such infallible proofs, and now, with resistless enthusiasm, she urged on the weak-hearted Dauphin to his coronation. Less than three months later she stood beside him at Rheims, and with tears of joy saluted him as king. 'Would it were God's pleasure,' she said to the archbishop, 'that I might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters and my brothers: they would be so glad to see me again.' But heaven had reserved for her its highest honour—to set the martyr's crown upon her brow.
Joan could not infuse her spirit into the hesitating coward and his corrupt courtiers, and she wore out her heart with vexation as she saw the work of heaven prevented by the unworthiness of man. She continued to accompany the French armies, and was present in many conflicts, and was mortified to the heart by the failure to carry Paris. At length, on the 24th May 1430, she threw herself with a handful of men into Compiègne, which was then besieged by the forces of Burgundy; and, being driven back by them in a desperate sally, was left behind by her men, taken prisoner, and sold to the English by John of Luxembourg, in November, for 10,000 livres. In December she was carried to Rouen, the headquarters of the English, heavily fettered and flung into a gloomy prison, and at length arraigned before the spiritual tribunal of Pierre Cauchon, then Bishop of Beauvais and a wretched creature of the English, as a sorceress and a heretic, while the dastard she had crowned a king left her to die. Her trial was long, and was disgraced by every form of shameful brutality, under hardly even the forms of justice. Day after day a host of learned doctors tortured her simple heart with tortuous questions, the aim of which was to get their victim to condemn herself. Even through the untrustworthy forms in which they are recorded for us her answers show forth the noble simplicity of very truth. Innumerable questions on the nature of her visions were answered with the same calmness and strength, and her judges were for very shame driven to finish the interrogations in private, and to resort to the nameless infamy of sending Nicholas Loyselleur, a pretended confessor, to draw matter for her condemnation from the most sacred confidences of religion. In the judgment she was found guilty of sacrilege, profanation, disobedience to the church, pride, and idolatry, and the formal condemnation was conveyed in twelve articles. The judges did not disallow the possibility of heavenly visions, but they declared those of Joan to be illusions of the devil. They were now ready to send her to her doom, but they wished first to force her to an abjuration in order to degrade her in public opinion, and they tortured her by alternate threats and promises, until the bewildered girl at length declared that she submitted to the church, and blindly subscribed everything they asked of her. They then condemned her to perpetual imprisonment, and forced her again to put on woman's dress. But it was far from being meant that she should escape the fire. As she lay in her cell overwhelmed with self-reproach and despair, and denied what she most longed for and had been solemnly promised—the eucharist, she was subjected to new indignities from the brutality of her guards, who stripped her of her woman's dress, so that to protect her chastity she was compelled again to put on the forbidden dress she had laid aside. This was at once made the grounds for a charge that she had relapsed, and she was without delay brought again to the stake, May 30, 1431. The woman's tears dried upon her cheeks, and she faced her doom with the triumphant courage of the martyr, declaring that she knew her revelations were from God, and that she had only submitted through fear of the fire. Her confessor to the last held up the cross before her eyes, and in the midst of the flames that wrapped her round she ceased not to repeat the sacred name of Jesus, and to invoke his saints; a last time she was heard to exclaim 'Jesus,' then her head sank down: she had finished her prayer in heaven. So perished the great uncanonised saint of France, leaving an ineffaceable stain upon English honour.
But Joan's mission was accomplished, and by the enthusiasm that she awoke the English were driven from the sacred soil of France. Twenty-five years after her death Pope Calixtus III. acceded to the prayer of her mother and her brothers (who had been ennobled under the name De Lys), that the process by which she was condemned should be re-examined. After a careful inquiry the finding was that the twelve articles on which her sentence was based were false, and that therefore the whole proceedings of the Bishop of Beauvais were null and void. The judgment was publicly declared on the spot, in the market-place of Rouen, on which she suffered. But long before this she had been enshrined a saint in the popular imagination, which read the wrath of heaven into the sudden end that had quickly come to every one connected with the trial. Indeed, the people had been slow to accept the fact that the maid was actually dead, and at first readily believed in the impostor who arose in Lorraine five years later.
The story of Joan has been a rich motive in the world of art, from the honest mediocrity of the youthful Southey and the noble tragic sense of Schiller to the heartless ribaldry of Voltaire and the fantastic mumery of Sarah Bernhardt. Painter and sculptor have spent their genius on the theme without as yet adequately realising its simple grandeur. See Quicherat's elaborate work, Procès de Condamnation et Réhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc (5 vols. 1841-49); the books by Michelet, Henri Martin, and Joseph Fabre; the iconoclastic paradox of Lesigne (1889), H. Wallon's richly-illustrated Jeanne d'Arc (4th ed. 1883), Janet Tuckey's sketch (1880), and works by Blaze de Bury (1889), Lanéry (1889), Sorel (1889), Märenholtz (1890), Ayrolles (1890-94), Lord Ronald Gower (1893), and Mrs Oliphant (1896). For the literary development, see Kummer (1874); and for the military question, Marin's Jeanne d'Arc Stratégiste (1889).