Saint Joan

Saint Joan
© 1924 George Bernard Shaw
160 pages

            

In the darkest hour of the Hundred Years War, a teenage girl re-inspired both a defeated nation and a despondent king to fight again for what was theirs. She -- Joan of Arc -- would be captured by her enemies and condemned a heretic by the English, but later vindicated by the Church. In 1920, in fact, Joan was pronounced a saint. Shaw's play no doubt follows on the heels of the news of her canonization.  Scoffing at saintly romanticization of the Maid, Shaw chose to pay tribute to her in his own way, making her an apostle of Whiggism.  “Saint Joan” pays tribute to the Maid’s time in the historical sun, relegating unpleasant battle-and-execution bits  to the background and focusing instead on her conflicts with the silly men she is forced to enlighten. Considering that the title character is burned alive, the play is far funnier than it has a right to be, from the opening scene with a duke arguing with his page almost to the end, where the man Joan made king is visited by the shades of his past after her vindication.   Shaw fills the play with modern conceits; his characters seem to wish they were living in the 1920s instead of the rotten ol’ middle ages. They even invent words like Protestant and Nationalism to describe how Joan makes them feel. 

Shaw’s Joan is more ambiguous than this, however; he endeavors to save her from beatification and her enemies from damnation in the same stroke.  Joan as written is not ‘saintly’ she is cheeky. Assuming familiarity with lords of the realm and lords of the church alike, she gives as good as she gets when they argue her down with reason, or scold her for acting so presumptuously. The irreverent, tomboyish Joan may be the star of the play, but her opponents are no villains. They may be guilty of pious fraud at times, but their arguments seem perfectly sensible, and prompt a reader to wonder just where Shaw’s sympathies lie.  When the churchmen accuse Joan’s patriotic  zeal of threatening to divide Christendom into nations and in so doing, dethrone Christ and allow the world to perish in a welter of war,  the graveyards of the Great War do not seem far removed from Shaw’s mind.  They are less villains than men moved to horror through fear, and happily ere the conclusion is reached they experience the genuine crisis of remorse, repenting in turn.  Although Shaw is just as guilty as having the Maid carry his own standard as any of the old romanticists,  “Saint Joan” succeeds in granting both her and her enemies humanity and redemption.

The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

© 1896 Mark Twain

455 pages       

 In 1428,  a young French teenager arrived at the court of Robert Baudricourt and announced that she and he were to be allies in a mission from God: a mission to save France from conquest and disillusion.  The girl, Joan, was to lead an army to the besieged city of Orleans, but she needed first men to take her to Chinon, the residence of king in exile. Skeptical at first, then persuaded by an apparent prophecy,  the astonished Baudricourt sent Joan on her mission, where she took center stage in a complete reversal of the ninety-year conflict between the nobles of England, Orleans, and Burgundy.  Though eventually captured and burned alive by a small council of hostile Anglo-Burgundian partisans,  within a few years of her death Paris was captured,    England’s alliance with Burgundy abandoned,  and France on its way to salvation. Joan would be hailed as France’s savior, declared a saint by the Church, and serve as a icon of hope to the French French in World War 2. Perhaps more remarkable than her military victories, however, is her complete conquest over the melancholic heart of one Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

 The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is a  biographical novel,  the story of her life as told through a childhood friend.  Sieur Louis de Conte thought she was a marvel even as a child, enchanted with her dreams and startled by her courageous intelligence. When the local priest attacked a 'fairy tree' that the children enjoyed spending time in, delighting in the company of gentle spirits, she argued him into abashedness.  When she confided to Louis that God had spoken to her in a vision and told her she must inspire the dauphin -- the rightful heir to France's throne, disavowed by his mother in the Treaty of Troyes -- to claim his crown by leading an army against the English, he was among the first to join her. Fighting in her every campaign, and then infiltrating Rouen during her trials, securing a position as an assistant court clerk, Louis delivers a full account of her life.  Based on Twain's twelve years of research into  her life, it's remarkable in many respects.  It's easily the most personable biography of Joan I've read;   Louis allows the reader to not just admire her from afar, or idealized her as a remembered saint, but to love her as a friend.  Such adoration is startling from a man like Twain, known for his irreverence and cynicism.  There are traces of the familiar Twain here,  as Louis describes how men are inheritors of their beliefs and foibles, repeating a sentiment expressed more stridently in A Connecticut Yankee in  King Arthur's Court.  But this is a story replete with the miraculous;  Joan's visions extend not just to commanding her to battle and giving her moral courage, but she's an intermittent prophet, predicting her own death within a year and -- at the trial -- announcing to her captors that within seven years' time,  disaster will strike and English power in France will be broken for a thousand years.  Louis does not doubt Joan's word; he has no reason not to believe, for throughout the tale she demonstrates foreknowledge. 

Joan's story is easy to enrapture; how could a girl so dramatically change the course of history? There are circumstances Twain overlooks, of course;  the Duke of Bedford is mentioned, but not his marriage to a Burgundian princess that knit England and Burgundy's interests together, turning a French succession war into a very happy phase of England's on-again, off-again attempt to secure its ancient territory in France by subduing the whole of France.  And yet Joan inspires, both as an ideal -- the quinessence of strength, wisdom, courage, innocence, and purity, all at the same time --  and in practice. The trial transcripts do reveal a staggeringly intelligent and feisty woman.  Yes, her family had repute on its own; Jacques d'arc was no struggling peasant, but a man commendable enough to be named the mayor of a village he had immigrated to, how much of his strength had he imparted to Joan, and how much did she create from her own life?  Even if Joan were the purest of fiction, this tale would be a lovely one,  depicting as it does how a band of grizzled war veterans who had known only defeat could become pious, reverent, and driven in her presence; how  masses could leapt to their feet and throne to touch her banner, fixating on a child as their hope. We are strange creatures, we humans, strange and marvelous. Such is are The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.    Highly recommended for anyone interested in Joan or the tender side of Mark Twain.

Related:

• The Hundred Years' War: England in France: , Desmond Seward
• Joan of Arc: Legend and Reality, Francis Gies
• Joan of Arc: A Spiritual Biography, Siobhan Nash-Marshall

            

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc: A Spiritual Biography
© 1998 Siobhan Nash-Marshall
176 pages

In 1429, France in her darkest hour was startled by the sudden appearance of a shining star -- a teenage girl from a minor village, wielding a standard and claiming that God had ordered her to  lead the nation to victory. The Hundred Years War,  the long struggle between the French and English nobility over Guyenne, Normandy, and the French crown, had left France seemingly nothing but a lost dream.  France had no leader; her last king had gone mad, his queen denounced the heir, and now civil war between the Dukes of Orleans and Valois paved the way for English triumph. But Joan answered the call, raised an army, and within twenty years the war was over. She is one of the most remarkable characters in European history, and this brief biography is a highly complimentary if slightly restrained story of her life.  Though it avoids being too mythical -- the author discounts stories of animals sounding off in happiness at her birth, and does not attempt to make her out to be a poor peasant girl when her father was a fairly well-established landowner --  it avoids being critical as well. The voices and the miracles attributed to Joan -- her foresight in ordering men to move a bit to the left so they wouldn't be stricken by a cannonball, her raising an infant to life long enough to be baptized so its wee soul would be saved, and not linger in limbo -- are repeated here, without either affirmation or skepticism.  [Author]'s focus is on Joan's drive and intelligence,  whpch imparted courage to the French people and struck a blow to build a victory upon. Even when in the custody of her enemies, assailed and jeered at by a hostile court, she maintained  the presence  of mind and the strength of spirit to deliver enigmatic answers that mocked their wrath --  the fury of a band of warriors, priests, and kings focused on a teenage girl.  [Author] provides solid context, however, demonstrating how the Hundred Years War was less an English invasion of France, and more of a French civil war, and an exercise of feudal peculiarities in which the English king was a vassal to the French king, despite legitimately controlling more of France (through inheritance and marriage) than le roi himself.  It's not the strongest of biographies, but delivers a feeling of Joan that is saintly, strong, and sweet.

Related:
Joan of Arc: Legend and Reality, Frances Gies

Joan of Arc: the Legend and the Reality

Joan of Arc: the Legend and the Reality
© 1959 Frances Gies
306 pages

Few historical characters, and no women, are more famous than Joan of Arc. Her name and story are known throughout the world. In the Middle Ages there were women to led armies, female mystics who prophesied and gave advice, and men and women alike whose beliefs led them to the stake. Joan’s story has a unique quality, a fairy tale with a tragic ending, invested with her own personality -- her common sense, her trenchant speech, her indomitable courage, before the judges of Rouen as in the moat at Orleans. (259)

Joan of Arc has long fascinated me, beginning when I read about her in my seventh-grade world history book. A girl of fourteen, leading the French army to victory and ending a century-long war? She remains of interest to me, and so when in the course of hunting my next Gies read I saw Joan of Arc,  of course I wanted to read it. Frances and her husband Joseph Gies are both medieval historians who collaborated on a series of “Daily Life in the Medieval Ages” books,  but each have their pet interests. As is characteristic of the Gies, Joan of Arc is both readable and thorough.  Details abound, but Gies sets those details within the larger context . She explains the course of the war to that point -- now dominated more by the civil war betweens the houses of Orleans and Burgundy than by English territorial ambitions -- and smartly gives the reader background on aspects of French medieval culture  that are pertinent to the biography.

Gies draws on many primary and secondary sources, which she identifies and analyzes at the book’s outset.  These sources sometimes conflict, especially when judging Joan’s character and integrity. Some of the sources are biased to the point of being farcical, providing a laugh here and there.  Although Gies is sometimes protective of her subject, she makes a strong effort to portray a less romanticized Joan -- a human hero.  The book does not end with Joan’s death or even the Rehabilitation trial that followed it twenty years later, overturning the English sentence that she was a heretical witch who deserved her fate at the stake:  instead, Gies examines the ways Joan has been received as history has progressed. This historiography of Joan does not extend far past the late 19th century, though: no mention is given of Joan's use in the propaganda war between the Vichy government of occupied France and the Resistance.

All told, Joan of Arc is certainly a worthy read for those interested in her life, although I would recommend reading it alongside a history of the Hundred Years War. (I would recommend Desmond Seward’s  treatment of the war, having used it for several term papers.)