Joan of Arc, page 2
There was a medieval term for adolescence, adolescentia, but its boundaries were unfixed. Dante put its end point at forty-five. Following Roman law, in many medieval societies young men under twenty-five were not allowed to carry out certain actions without a guardian and before this point were not permitted to exercise their full civil rights. Girls of the nobility were often married quite early, but this was because they had virtually no access to the arena of public action, where proper judgment would be crucial. Perhaps a better way of looking at Joan’s youth is that in all her major battles she was younger than anyone she rode beside, and in all the important rooms of her life she was alone among her elders.
We would like to believe that youth, ardor, audacity, courage, and natural intelligence will prevail against bureaucratic power and corruption. In Joan’s case, there is an important sense in which they did not. She died, after all, at her enemies’ hands. But she stands for the triumph of the invisible over the visible, of the potency of pure intention, of acts that shimmer and endure beyond the life of the actor or the efficacy of the acts.
We have always needed someone like her, someone who can disinfect us of our disreputable or petty tendencies. If we can love her, then we are not a people who hate women. If we can call her death a triumph, we are not time servers, pension collectors who measure success only by what seems to work. If we devote ourselves to her, we are higher creatures than the way we live our lives suggests. We need her as the heroine of our better selves.
But she is much more interesting as herself than as the hero of our need of her. My Joan, who is just as much a mirror of my own desires as anyone else’s, is, above all, a young girl. She has a young girl’s heedlessness, sureness, readiness for utter self-surrender. She loves life; she is afraid of dying. This cocky, pure, maddening, unwise girl forgot herself in a cause greater than herself. She was talky and self-contradictory; she died in silence. But even in death she refuses singleness. So everyone who uses words to describe her must understand that her project is impossible, one or another kind of failure, one or another partial shot.
If I could, I would begin this study in a way that would defy the limits of space and time. I call it a study, or a meditation, hesitating over the honorable term biography, with its promise of authority, of scholarship, of scope and sweep. Ideally, I would present you not with pages, but with an envelope of paper strips, each with some words written on it, and a series of snapshots. I would have you open the envelope, drop the strips and photographs onto the floor, then pick them up and read them in whatever order they had arranged themselves in your hand. I would require, then, that you replace the strips in the envelope and empty them again. And pick them up again. And read and look again. And again, and again, giving pride of place to no one order. Until you had felt that you had understood something in a way that refused finality. That you could tolerate an understanding that allows that the fragments can be endlessly reordered, must be, and that the sense of knowing is always temporary, subject to revision, reversal, recombination, and a relaxation of the compulsion to know what is unknowable.
In writing what I think of as a biographical meditation, I do homage to her instability. I involve myself in the task, unfinishable, of contemplating the mystery of a girl who came from nowhere, supported an equivocal cause, triumphed for a few months only, failed as a soldier, saw visions, abjured the primacy of her vision, then recanted her abjuration, died in agony, a saint whom the Church refused canonization for five hundred years, yet who stands in our imagination for the single-minded triumph of the she— and it must be a she—who feared nothing, knew herself right and fully able and the chosen of the Lord.
CHAPTER I
OF HER TIME AND PLACE
THE FIRST DREAM of Joan of Arc was dreamed by her father. He saw his daughter traveling with an army: a camp follower.
When he awoke, he told her brothers that if this ever happened, he would ask them to drown her, and if they refused, he would do it himself. He communicated nothing of this to his daughter directly; her mother relayed it to her. Father fears for daughter’s virtue and tells sons and mother: mother tells daughter. No surprises here.
It is profitless for us to look at Joan’s family background for clues about her history. She was probably born on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, in the year 1412, the daughter of Jacques d’Arc, or Tart, and Isabelle, called Romée. Jacques d’Arc was a peasant in the village of Domrémy, on the border between the provinces of Champagne and Lorraine, distinguished only because he seems to have been a person of some local consequence; he was appointed the representative of the villagers in a suit that had been brought against Robert de Baudricourt, the lord of neighboring Vaucouleurs. Later, Baudricourt would give Joan her first official support.
Isabelle was given the name Romée because that was a sobriquet given to one who had participated in a long pilgrimage; this would indicate an unusual piety, and probably, as well, a somewhat unusual, though not unheard of, initiative in a young woman. Joan tells us that from her mother she learned her prayers, and the ordinary household tasks that would be taught to a young woman. With her characteristic boastfulness, she asserts that there was no one superior to her in sewing and spinning. She probably had charge of the sheep, although this was not so much a part of her daily life as iconography about her would indicate, and she probably drove the cattle from time to time, although she denied the importance of it at the trial, as if it suggested a lowness of occupation with which she was unwilling to associate herself. She had a sister and two brothers, the younger of whom accompanied her until her capture. After Joan’s death, her brothers participated in a scheme to pass off an imposter as the real Joan, a kind of sideshow. They did it for the money.
But Joan’s family does not seem to have been of much consequence to her. When she decided to obey her voices and go off to crown the king of France, she left home with a cousin, who was her godfather, employing an ordinary, adolescent lie. She told her parents she was going to help out with the cousin’s wife’s labor, and then with the new child. She never spoke to her parents again, and when she was asked during her trial if she felt guilty about what could only be construed as a sin of disobedience, she said, “Since God commanded it, had I had a hundred fathers and a hundred mothers, had I been born a king’s daughter, I should have departed.”1
So we would do well not to linger over Joan’s family for explanations of anything. Like any genius, Joan resists attempts to trace the nature of her history in clues from antecedents. She is an impossibility, a puzzlement, and yet she did come from somewhere. It is probably more useful to look at the larger context of her early life than at the narrow sphere of the domestic, which she could hardly wait to leave.
The State
The Hundred Years’ War is one of those historical events or epochs to which the imagination is not naturally drawn. The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries can be thought of as the otiose and yet malnourished rump of the Middle Ages. The major war was not a cataclysmic horror but the drawn-out dance of nearly a century of fruitless and debilitating destruction. Rather than imagining a great blaze, we should think of a series of small brushfires that are never put out but smolder continually, creating a noxious smoke and sparking other small fires in the vicinity, filling the air with poisonous vapors and destroying the land’s possibilities for productive habitation. The population of France had been decimated by plagues and famine in the fourteenth century, but now the countryside was being devastated not as the result of great battles but because of the marauding of the armies when they were not engaged.These freebooters, called écorcheurs, or fleecers, ravaged the land looking for spoils—the only way they could support themselves, since the powers who had hired them (England and France) could not raise enough money to pay them properly. Ostensibly the war was fought under the banner of chivalry, but the gap between the chivalric ideal and the behavior of those who claimed it was enormous. The écorcheurs were not noble themselves, but their behavior was tolerated by nobles who turned a blind eye.
The people of the countryside had to contend with a shifting cast of ravagers, and all the divisions of this vexed society were mirrored in the mixed origins of the écorcheurs. The mix was made more complex by the fact that the marauders whom we would think of as “French” were composed of two separate and warring factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. At the time of Joan’s birth, France was not only at war with England; it was also in a state of virtual civil war, the rich duchy of Burgundy having allied itself with the English against the French monarchy.
The Burgundian marauders were the ones whose effect Joan and her family most closely felt. In 1425 the Burgundians, and some English, drove off the cattle of the inhabitants of Domrémy, and the church was burned and plundered; 1425 was the year that Joan first heard her voices. The juxtaposition of Joan’s first experience of civil violence and the onset of her puberty may be one of those historical accidents that suggest more than they finally explain. But, no doubt, the witnessing of hatred and disorderat a vulnerable time in her life marked Joan permanently. In 1428, months before she left Domrémy on her mission to crown the dauphin, her family had to flee their home for the neighboring town of Neufchâtel as a result of Burgundian marauders. It was here that Joan worked at the inn of a woman called La Rousse, generating later rumors that she had consorted with soldiers. It was here, and no earlier, that she learned to ride a horse.
Joan was clear, when she spoke during her trial of her early years, that the Burgundians were her chief enemy and that Domrémy was united in its hatred of them. With her usual avoidance of understatement she said, “I knew of only one Burgundian there, and I could have wished his head cut off—however only if it pleased God.”2 But just across the river Meuse, in the neighboring town of Maxey, the citizens were supporters of Burgundy. The children of both villages would come home bloody from fighting over loyalties to the duke or the king. It is tempting to wonder what would have become of Joan had she been born on the other side of the river Meuse, where devotion was not to the beleaguered king but to the duke who had allied himself across the Channel.
This confusion of affiliations is an index of the disorder of the times and the muddled loyalties that a nature like Joan’s, thriving on clarity, must have found as anguishing as the burning of her church and the destruction of her neighbors’ cattle. But muddle and confusion are the hall-mark of the Hundred Years’ War, which victimized thousands because of an unclear dynastic claim, a problem created by the fact that the royal families of England and France were closely related by blood.
The dynastic muddle begins with Edward II of England. He claimed the French crown as a result of his being the grandson of Philip IV, the French king, who died in 1314. Philip’s three sons had no male issue; Edward was the child of Philip’s daughter, Isabella. When the youngest of Philip’s sons died, the contenders to the throne were Edward of England and Count Philip of Valois. Philip of Valois was the son of the dead king Philip’s younger brother. Edward’s claim to the throne was, therefore, a generation nearer to the crown than Philip of Valois’s, but its validity was weakened because it came through the female line. Whether this invocation of the “salic law” was in fact valid, or just a ploy used by the French to prevent having an Englishman on their throne, has been a matter for scholarly debate.
In 1337, Philip of Valois, after declaring Edward a “contumacious vassal,” confiscated the duchy of Gascony, which the English considered theirs since the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204). Edward, unwilling to give up his sovereignty in Gascony, waged war with France. But the economic conditions at home made it a half-hearted effort for the English, and for some years the war went on with no clear victory on either side, only misery for the peasants who were its victims, particularly the victims of the underpaid, underemployed soldiers. Then in 1346, the English scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Crecy, and ten years later they did the same at the Battle of Poitiers, during which time King John of France was captured by the English and held for ransom. He died in London in 1364. Under the leadership of his son Charles V, an intelligent and able ruler with little stomach for war, France prospered while England was too absorbed in its own domestic troubles to continue the fight. Charles V’s reign lasted from 1364 to 1380; he was succeeded by his son Charles VI.
Enter Henry V, the first English king strong enough to devote himself to full-scale operations in France. Henry was both a great king and a great general. His counterpart in France, Charles VI, was probably a paranoid schizophrenic subject to long bouts of insanity. The Battle of Agincourt, in 1415, won the French crown for Henry’s heir, and he persuaded the defeated Charles VI to give him his daughter Catherine in marriage, thus strengthening his claim to the French crown. But both Henry V and Charles VI died in the same year, 1422. Henry’s one-year-old son, Henry VI, and Charles VII, then nineteen, were both proclaimed kings of France.
Echoes of this dynastic struggle are familiar to us from Shakespeare: Richard II’s errors of extravagance are set against the backdrop of the economic disaster of the Hundred Years’ War; and the breach that Henry V rode into was at Agincourt—his victory there resulting in untold hardship for the French population. Even though Henry’s soldiers were, as a result of his good leadership, relatively better disciplined than their predecessors (Pistol, Henry’s former friend, is executed for brigandage), the French still had endured seventy years of devastation, during which English troops plundered their stores of food and wine, stole their harvests, drove their cattle from their fields, feasted in their towns by night and set them aflame in the morning. The noble soldiers with the golden tongues whom we encounter in Shakespeare were of the same party as the brutish mercenaries whom the French, including Joan, knew by their constant curse “goddamns” (rendered by them as “godons,” their name for their invaders).
And lest we forget what the real implications of the dynastic claims were, we should try to imagine an English France. An extension of the island kingdom across the channel: a Normandy, Brittany, Provence, all English-speaking, a cultural history in which there was only cheddar and no brie, only Congreve and no Molière, only Chippendale and no French Provincial, only Turner and no Monet. In our time we have seen the ravages of nationalism so clearly that it is easy to think of it only as a curse, but to imagine the flattening out of culture that could have occurred if the English had won the Hundred Years’ War is a deeply dispiriting mental exercise.
Joan, then, came into a world tainted with political and economic disorder, and the moral tone of the society reflected this. Abuses were rampant; the countryside starved while the king’s court was luxurious. The atmosphere of the time was a dark cloud of depression and entropy. It is against this gray-brown background that the girl in white armor, on her black horse, placed herself.
The Church
If the state was in disarray, the Church was no better. At the time of Joan’s birth in 1412, there were three claimants to the papacy: one in Rome, one in Avignon, and one in Spain. She was born into a Church torn by schism, and at the time of her death, although a council of the world’s bishops had removed all the contenders to the papal throne from office and elected a new one, Martin V, the old Spanish pope, Benedict XIII, despite the fact that he had no authority and no followers, would still not give up his claim.
The history of the Great Schism is an indication of the mutually infecting relationship between a civil and religious order. Originally, the first Avignon pope had moved there because internal wars in Italy made it impossible for an orderly running of the Church’s affairs to take place in Rome. But Avignon was in France, and France was involved in a war with England; England and her allies—particularly Germany and Italy—naturally resented the profits that would accrue to France as a result of the papacy’s being centered there, so they put pressure on the Church to return the seat of St. Peter to Rome. In 1378, when the cardinals met in Rome to elect a pope, the population of Rome stormed the streets, demanding the election of an Italian. Probably in response to this, the cardinals elected Bartholomew, archbishop of Bari. Urban VI, as he was known, was a man of such violence of temper that all the cardinals fled his vicinity in Rome and moved back to Avignon to elect another pope, claiming that the election was invalid, since it had been motivated by fear of the crowd. The cardinals elected a Frenchman who took the name of Clement VII.
But Urban would not withdraw his papacy, so there were two popes, both with legitimate claims to having been properly elected. Neither Clement nor Urban possessed admirable qualities. Abuses and corruption were particularly egregious, largely motivated by the Church’s constant need for new sources of money as a result of newly powerful monarchs unwilling to knuckle under to papal demands for revenue. Urban was interested in speaking to these abuses, but his approach was to insult and bully his enemies; Clement seems to have had no impulse to attend to corrupt practices at all.
This corruption led to the rise of such reformers as John Wycliffe in England, and his disciple in Bohemia, Jan Hus. Wycliffe and Hus were appalled by the greed of the clergy and the hierarchy, and their distance from the people whom they were meant to serve. They advocated the use of reason in coming to spiritual and moral conclusions, and a translation of the Bible into the vernacular in order that it could be more widely available to the people.
