Burned Again the Critics

98 THE CRITICS on the border between north and south. If they took that city, they could cross the Loire and invade the rest of France. That was the situation which Joan’s voices eventually addressed. They told this illiterate peasant girl, who had never been more than a few miles from her village, to go to Orléans, raise the siege, and then take the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned King Charles VII of France. In other words, they told her to end the Hundred Years’ War. A CRITIC AT LARGE She did so. Or, by inspiriting the 6 French soldiers at Orléans, she provided the turning point in the war. How Joan BURNED AGAIN managed to get to Charles, and persuade him to arm her, and then convince the The woman at the stake is worthy of another five hundred years of obsession. Valois captains that she should join the BY JOAN ACOCELLA charge at Orléans is still something of a mystery, but at that point the French forces were so beaten down that they OAN OF ARC movies, understand- man finishes, he does up his fly and says were almost willing to believe that a vir- ably, have always been low on to his mates, “Your turn.” Thus begins gin had been sent by God to deliver them. J sex, but in the newest entry, “The the career of Besson’s Joan of Arc. In And once Orléans was saved, under her Messenger: The Story of Joan of past ages, Joan has been seen as a mys- banner, many of the French came to see Arc,” by Luc Besson, the French action- tic, a saint, a national hero. Now, in her as an angel, an actual heavenly messen- movie director, that omission is ad- keeping with the times, she is a victim ger. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Burgundians dressed. Early in the film we have the of post-traumatic stress disorder. regarded her as a witch. (See Shake- following scene: Little Joan, maybe ten speare’s “Henry VI, Part 1,” where she is years old, comes out of church to find OAN, as she testified at her trial, was a witch.) She was a subject of interna- that her village is on fire. We are in the J thirteen when she was first visited tional debate, but not for long. Seven- middle of the Hundred Years’ War, and by voices from Heaven. It was summer- teen when she set out for Orléans, she English soldiers are rampaging through time, around noon, in her father’s garden. was eighteen when the Burgundians fi- Domrémy. Joan enters her house, and At first, it seems, the voices just told her nally captured her and sold her to the there she finds her older sister Cather- to be a good girl and go to church, but English for ten thousand pounds. The ine. (She has just told her confessor how eventually their instructions became more Church then put her through a four- much she loves this sister.) Catherine pointed. The Hundred Years’ War was a month heresy trial—basically a fake had been about to climb into a cup- dynastic conflict over whether the Plan- trial. (Her chief examiners were firmly board to hide from the English, but tagenets (English) or the Valois (French) in league with the English, who de- now she stuffs Joan in the cupboard were the rightful rulers of France. The manded her death.) She was nineteen instead, closes the door, and stands English invaded France, and by the when she was taken out, barefoot, to the in front of it. In come three English fourteen-twenties they had divided the marketplace in Rouen and burned alive. goons. Two of them sit down to eat the country in half. Most of the lands below All that happened in the fifteenth family’s dinner. The third—leering, the Loire were held by the Valois, under century, and it gave Joan a privileged filthy, appalling—approaches Catherine, Charles, the uncrowned, uncertain, un- place in the high and low culture of Eu- pins her against the cupboard (we get a warlike Dauphin. The lands above the rope ever after. For years following her shot of her feet dangling above the Loire were controlled by the English, in death, people claimed that she was still floor), and impales her on his sword, alliance with the Burgundian dynasty. alive, that someone else had been burned which, now wet with her blood, pierces Joan’s village was in the north, in Anglo- in her place. (There were Joan sightings, the cupboard as well, barely missing Burgundian territory.There is no evidence like Elvis sightings. There were also Joan. He then loudly copulates with that she had an older sister Catherine, Joan impersonators.) Paintings, plays, Catherine’s dead body—bang, bang, let alone that she witnessed the murder epic poems were devoted to her. But it bang, against the cupboard—as Joan, of such a sister, but she certainly saw was not until the nineteenth century together with the camera, watches his her village suffer, as all of France suf- that she really came into her own. As contorted face through cracks in the fered. (In the war’s hundred years, the George Bernard Shaw pointed out in the cupboard door. The two other soldiers, country’s population was halved.) In preface to his play “Saint Joan,” she was put off their feed, also watch. When the 1428, the English laid siege to Orléans, born before her time. She was, he said, MULTIMEDIA FACETS COURTESY PHOTOFEST; KIPA; LEFT TO RIGHT: Milla Jovovich as Joan, photographed by Brigitte Lacombe. Bottom, left to right: Renée Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc,” Geraldine Farrar in Cecil B. De Mille’s epic, and Sandrine Bonnaire in Jacques Rivette’s “Joan the Maid.” 100 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 15, 1999 one of the first Protestant martyrs: it sensitive politically, had been carefully they wish to or not; and if they will not was her claim that she had a direct, un- recorded by court notaries. Likewise the obey, I shall have them all killed. I am sent from God, the King of Heaven, to chase mediated connection with God—and proceedings of the so-called nullifica- you all out of France. that she, not the Church, would judge tion trial, by which, after the testimony the truth of her voices—that got her of more than a hundred witnesses, the She was the same way at the trial. condemned as a heretic. Furthermore, Church revoked the verdict against Again and again, her judges tried to trip in her insistence that race and national her twenty-five years after her death. her up, lead her into heretical state- boundaries overrode dynastic inheri- Most of these documents were sitting ments. Again and again, she answered tance, she was one of Europe’s first na- in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Qui- them boldly, commonsensically, even tionalists. (By medieval standards, the cherat called them up from the stacks, wittily. As the transcripts prove, she did English monarchy’s claim to France was edited them, and published them in five not embrace sainthood. Unlike Francis arguably quite legitimate.) volumes (1841-49), whereupon a great of Assisi, for example, she never en- But it wasn’t just nationalist senti- change came over the Joan legend. Be- gaged in soul-struck behavior—never ment that endeared Joan to the nine- fore, she had been a heroine, an icon. ran naked or threw herself on thorn- teenth century. Her story had everything Now she became a nineteen-year-old bushes. When the old Duke Charles II, that century liked. First, medievalism, girl. The trial testimony tells us a huge fallen ill, summoned her and asked and medieval spirituality: the voice of amount about her: her childhood games, whether he would recover, she told him God, arriving to a child in her father’s her love of fine clothes, how impressed she had no idea and then gave him a potato fields. Second, primitivism: the she was by Charles’s court. (There were lecture on his personal conduct. (He fact that she was a child, and a peasant, more than fifty torches in the room, she had fathered five bastards.) Nor did she and so, by nineteenth-century lights, reported.) As a result of Quicherat’s have any interest in becoming a martyr. morally superior to the educated, the work, we know more about this French The most poignant thing about the trial mature, the ordained. Third, sentimen- farm girl than about any human be- transcripts is how hard she tried to save tality: if, as Poe said, there was nothing ing before her time, including—as we herself—how, facing, with no help (she more poetical than the death of a beau- find out in Régine Pernoud and Marie had no lawyer), thirty-odd theologians tiful woman, then, as Dickens and Har- Véronique Clin’s book “Joan of Arc”— and legal scholars maybe twice her age, riet Beecher Stowe proved, the death of Plato, Caesar, and Christ. The tran- she fought, reasoned, and bargained— a beautiful girl was even better. scripts also show her to have been an and how afraid she was of dying. At Joan was thus designed by God for immensely appealing person. Some- one point she tells the judges that her nineteenth-century artists, and they times, in reading the history books, one heavenly guides have promised to save heard the call. Verdi and Tchaikovsky wonders how Joan got soldiers to follow her, but that she doesn’t know whether devoted operas to her; Gounod a music her.

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