On this day in 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan d'Arc, the 15th Century peasant girl who lead French forces in a revived effort to recapture lost grounds from the English after hearing voices commanding her to act for the French crown. She ultimately paid for her efforts with her life, being burned at the stake after being falsely convicted of heresy, a charge now universally regarded as absurd and which was itself reversed in 1456.
Even no less of figure as Winston Churchill regarded Joan as a saint. That the illiterate farm girl was able to gain access first to the French crown and then the army in the field commander was and is proof of her divine mission. With the army, she offered advice to its noble commanders which was frequently taken and French fortunes against the English in fact reversed and their army started to do remarkably well.
She is believed to have been born in 1412 in a region of Lorraine that retained loyalty to the French crown during the Hundred Years War, a contest between the Plantagenets, the Norman rulers of England, and the House of Valois, the rulers of France, over who should rule France. The house she grew up in and the village church there still stand. As those who have ready Henry V know, the English long maintained that they should rule both kingdoms and they often regarded France as more important than in England. That contest commenced in 1337 and featured a long running series of campaigns. Trouble in the French royal family had been taken advantage of by Henry V who had been able to greatly expand the amount of English controlled territory in the 1415 to 1417 period. By 1429, when Joan commenced her mission, half of France was controlled directly by England or by French duchies that were loyal to England.
The English commenced a a siege of the FRench city of Orleans in 1428, a town that was a holdout in its region for the French king, Charles VII.
Joan began to have visions in 1425, at which time she was 13 years old. She identified the first figures she saw as St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who told her to drive the English out of France and take the Dauphin to Reims for his consecration. At age 16 she made demands upon a relative to take her to see the crown which were received with scorn. Nonetheless she was taken to Vaucouleurs where she demanded an armed escort to the royal court, which was denied. Returning the following year, she secured the support of two soldiers and their urgings and support she was conducted to the court after she reported the results of a distant battle she had not been at two days prior to messengers arriving to report it. She as then escorted to the court disguised as a male soldier as it involved crossing hostile Burgundian territory. At that time she was 17 years old and Charles VII 26.
She secured permission to travel with the army, which was granted. Everything she used in the mission was donated to her, including the banner that she used. She never used any weapons in battle but rode under her banner. She did, however, gain access to councils of war and was listened to. As noted, the fortunes of the French reversed in this period. The siege of Orleans was broken by the French and Reims taken. The Dauphin was crowned as a result in Reims.
After a brief truce between the English and the French she was captured in battle in 1430 and put on trial for heresy. Heresy being a religious offense, she was tried by English and Burgundian clerics, but the English officers oversaw the trial. The trial was irregular and conducted without religious authority and without the individual commissioned to find evidence against her being able to find any. Her conviction hinged on her having worn male clothing when under escort across hostile Burgundian soil. She was convicted by this tribunal of heresy and burned at the stake in May 31, 1431. Her executioner later greatly feared that his service in this role would result in his damnation.
In spite of her death, the dramatic reversal in French fortunes continued on and by 1450 the English had been pushed off the continent. In fact, French borders surpassed their current ones, as France's resulting borders included what is now part of Belgium, a not surprising result given that Belgium is a multiethnic state.
A regular canonical trial to examine the first one's propriety was convened in 1455 and reversed the conviction in 1456.
She's been a popular figure ever since her death and in any age the nature of her mission is hard to deny. Illiterate and born in a region separated from the retreating French royal lands, she nonetheless managed to convince the French crown and the chivalric leaders of its army that she had a divine mission, something that was aided by her knowledge of things that she could not have known but for her commission. Under her, in spite of the fact that she was a teenage girl with no experience in military matters, French military fortunes permanently reversed.
It's no doubt her youth and gender that have caused her popularity to remain outside of France, but she is a saint whose nature should cause moderns to pause.
She was not, as some no doubt imagine her, as some sort of proto feminist teenage leader in an age of male patrimony and would not have seen things that way. She was singularly devout and saw her mission as a religious one. She was known to be opposed to the heresies of her era and Islam. She was intensely Catholic and caused the army she lead to be adherent to the faith. The war for control of France changed from a contest between two royal families to a war with religious overtones and even, as viewed from a modern eye, as one involving nationalism in an early form. Her modern fans would do well to take note of her mission and the fact that its impossible to imagine it without crediting the divine voices that she attributed it to.
And indeed, her mission did have impacts on the religious map of Europe in ways that would not be possible to appreciate at the time of her execution at age 19 in May, 1430. England was pushed off the continent in 1450 by which time Henry VI was king. That same year he was forced to put down a rebellion against the crown in England. In 1533, a mere 83 years later during a period of time in which events often moved slowly, King Henry VIII would take the formerly devout England away from the Church and marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn, bringing the Reformation to England in a personal effort to generate a male successor through a fertile female. The following acts would result in crown licensed theft of church property, murder and decades of strife and war. While France would fall to secularism in 1790, its position up until that time remained stalwart.
