Joan of Arc (32 page)

One poster read: ‘Joan of Arc saved France. Women of America save your country. Buy war stamps.’ One painting shows Allied soldiers being led by the spirits of Washington, St George and Joan. Another, for Henry Van Dyke’s book
The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France
has the inscription, ‘They were also pilgrims drawn by the love of Jeanne d’Arc to Domremy’. A photograph was taken of American soldiers standing by the high altar in the nearby basilica of Bois-Chenu. A popular song, ‘Joan of Arc They are Calling You’, opens with the invocation:

Two members of the Air Ambulance posed before the statue of Joan in front of Reims Cathedral. A popular French picture emphasised the key importance of the site where Joan’s king was anointed and crowned, for, while in the background the cathedral burns, Joan herself waves her banner and confronts the Kaiser. Against him Joan was fighting at Verdun, for Lorraine, for Alsace.
¹

English speakers were Joan’s friends. Once canonised, Joan became a topic so fascinating that whatever their beliefs, dramatists wished to retell her tale. Outside France the best-known versions of this story are by non-Catholics; and in one case the writing of a play about St Joan in English revived the reputation of an ageing playwright.

George Bernard Shaw’s
Saint Joan
was staged in 1924, first in New York and then in London.
Saint Joan
was soon thought the masterpiece of a writer who had long said he was ‘the second Shakespeare’, and in this case at least he excelled his rival. Shaw’s Joan is no witch, no heroine, no martyr, just a stubborn, spirited young woman, condemned by well-intentioned judges; and this Joan made Shaw once more the darling of the theatre-going public.

An English translation of the text of Joan’s trial in 1431 and of the rehabilitation in 1456 appeared in 1902: T. Douglas Murray’s
Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, 1429-1431
. Shaw was fascinated by the story of the trial, which had never been treated in a play before. The drama was, as it were, ready-made. All he had to do was to disclose it.

Saint Joan
consists of six scenes and an epilogue, to which Shaw, as was his custom, later appended a preface. The preface provided him with an opportunity to argue the case for his interpretation of his heroine. In his survey of previous authors, Shaw was both witty and judicious. After noting the curious degeneration in the Joan of Shakespeare or ‘pseudo-Shakespeare’, he sees Schiller’s Joan as ‘drowned in a cauldron of raging romance’ and is sensible in maintaining that Voltaire’s aim was not so much to denigrate Joan as ‘to kill with ridicule everything’ he ‘righteously hated in the institutions of his own day’.
²
He noted that Quicherat’s work marked the turning point in imaginative depictions of Joan, for the availability of transcripts of the trial and rehabilitation had also given credibility to Mark Twain’s romance, which Shaw disliked for its gentility, and to the rival lives of Anatole France and Andrew Lang.

As a playwright of ideas, Shaw was attracted to the debates over the person and importance of Joan; for him she was a proto-nationalist and a proto-Protestant. But, if his preface is fascinating, it is the variety of styles within the play, its humour, its rapid dialogue that makes it such a convincing play on stage. At the climax of the play he condenses all the interrogations of Joan into one grand enquiry that sets Joan against the court; and the dialogue leads up to a magnificent speech by the Inquisitor, not Cauchon, in which he expounds the terrifying consequences of not condemning the girl he calls a Protestant. What Shaw wished to emphasise was the sweet reasonableness with which Joan was sentenced for being a ‘Protestant’. As theatre his idea is a superb invention, as history an invention. His correspondent, the abbess of the Catholic convent of Stanbrook, pointed out, ‘Joan more than once appealed from the court to Rome and a Council.’ She added graciously: ‘There are gifts of wit and wisdom everywhere . . .’
³

For generations now, some English-speaking theatregoers have known Joan through Shaw’s play, but most English speakers, like most French speakers, know her from the cinema. By the First World War Hollywood already ruled the world of film. One of the first films about Joan came in 1897 from the pioneer of silent films Georges Meliès, but the first brash director to see the potential of the subject was Cecil B. de Mille, the man of biblical epics, who adapted Schiller’s play for the screen in 1917.

Joan’s public life was divided into two parts, the first centring on her time at the French court, at sieges and on the field of battle, the second centring on her imprisonment, trial and death. The first involved external conflicts, the second inner ones. As in Shaw, it is her passion and her death at the stake that have elicited the most impressive work of art-house film directors drawn to Joan’s story, the best of whom have worked in France. The greatest of all Johannic films was made in the 1920s by a Dane from a Lutheran background, Carl Theodore Dreyer. For
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
(1927–8), Dreyer developed a minimalist technique, not just by concentrating the whole story into the final stages of the trial at Rouen, by using almost no furniture and by eschewing glamorous costumes, but above all by restricting the action largely to the expressions on people’s faces. The silence of a silent film is turned into this film’s strength. There is just enough dialogue to make sense of the action, and the action is emotional reaction. The heads, with cunning or confused expressions, could come from an etching by Rembrandt; and at the film’s heart is the extraordinary acting of the protagonist. Maria Falconetti, the actress who played Joan in her only film role, conveys only a small range of feeling – rapt attention, deep suffering, quiet resignation – but each with almost unbearable intensity. Her judges rail and smirk. At the close, with flames flickering over her body, Joan’s face is shown for the last time, her arms clutching a cross, until her face is destroyed by fire.

Dreyer’s historical adviser was Pierre Champion, the man who had helped Anatole France. His scholarship, Dreyer’s direction and Falconetti’s acting set a standard no other early film could approach. At the time it was not a commercial success but with time it has been recognised as a great work of art. In 1995, on the centenary of the invention of cinema, a journalist for the papal paper
Osservatore Romano
named it one of the ten best religious films of all time.

Joan of Arc had become a heroine with universal appeal, accessible to those from Protestant as well as Catholic backgrounds. The papacy, however, although won over to the view of the French Church that Joan was a saint, was unhappy about those who regarded her purely as a political symbol. Pius XI used his training as a librarian and soon had a study full of books by Action Française writers. Of Jacques Bainville, the historian of France, he noted that the chapters on Joan of Arc and the Crusades were inadequate from a religious point of view. Of Maurras himself he said, ‘he has a fine mind, one of the finest of our age . . . but he is only a mind. Christ is alien to him . . . [he sees] the Church from outside, not from inside’.
⁴
His conclusion was that the movement valued politics above religion; and this made its influence insidious. In 1927 he placed the movement under the ban of the Church and its paper on the Index of forbidden reading matter. When, on the national holiday in honour of Joan, Action Française staged its procession, Monseigneur, later Cardinal, Baudrillart, Rector of the Institut Catholique in Paris (one of the most prestigious Catholic institutions of higher learning in France), found it impossible to prevent his students from joining in and so thought of resigning. Soon, however, he had the chance to put forward his own views on Joan. Just before the quincentenary of Joan’s execution in Rouen in May 1931, he was one of nine members of the Académie française, along with Marshal Foch, who wrote an essay in a volume called in its 1930 English version
For Joan of Arc
. Baudrillart focused on Joan the Saint.

Baudrillart is impressive on the issue that made Shaw think Joan was a Protestant, her condemnation for seeming to oppose her own, private revelations to the authority of the Church as represented by one ecclesiastical court. Baudrillart counters: ‘It suffices that these revelations contain nothing contrary to Catholic doctrine or unworthy of true wisdom. The soul thus favoured, after being sufficiently enlightened, is bound to give them the assent of faith.’
⁵
He adds that, if normally the Christian ought to consult his or her confessor, it is not an obligation so to do if the Christian soul is morally certain that it is inspired by the Holy Sprit. The Rouen judges had no right to condemn Joan, for her voices commanded nothing against faith, saying only that ‘Charles VII’s cause was right’, nor against morals, since male costume was ‘a practical matter, not a rule of conduct’.
⁶
Finally, if her opinions involved doctrine, Cauchon should have allowed an appeal to the pope.

England and France were now at peace over Joan: it was only the French who quarrelled about her. On the 500th anniversary of Joan of Arc’s death in Rouen, on 30 May 1931 the Archbishop of Westminster, head of the English Catholic Church, went to the city to express his great admiration of her virtues. Hilaire Belloc, the leading literary historian among English Catholics, had written a moving life of Joan for English readers that could have been written for his French relations. From 1931 dates an eirenic lecture by an Anglophile French scholar Louis Cazamian, who was asked to deliver the Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrews University. Cazamian was at pains to emphasise the involvement of both nations and their institutions in Joan’s fate. ‘England and France join in the guilt; they are at one in the homage of admiration and regret. I may be excused if I claim here as a burden of solidarity what is otherwise an honour, membership of the University of Paris: the Sorbonne took the lead among the abettors of the crime, and showed itself, as Andrew Lang puts it, “
capable de tout
”.’
⁷

In the same year Maurras gave to his followers an Action Française version of Joan’s life. Maurras was correct to stress Joan’s loyalty to her king, which he admired, but he downplayed her faith, which he did not share. He was also unrepentant in rejecting the papal view of Joan. His essay on Joan for the ‘Association of Young Royalist Ladies’ aimed to be political and divisive.

‘This heroine of the Nation,’ he insisted, ‘is not the heroine of Democracy. Was she just a daughter of the people in the sense that she was ignorant and ill educated? Joan stood for three ideas held by the common people of France: the land saved; the country saved; both saved by royalty re-established.’
⁸
Maurras contends that these truths of French politics were part of the story of Joan of Arc, but generally they were ignored at every feast day of Joan of Arc. Her essential mission was to save the nation by the office of kingship. She was not ungrateful to the founding dynasty, whereas those now claiming to be devoted to her are ungrateful. At the moment the authorities exclude from her career its political element, the cinema starts to leave out of her story its religious element. Soldiers admired her fighting capacity. The principles of her conduct were religious, but her aim was patriotic. Had circumstances been different, she might have been a pure republican, but as it was she acted at a time when kings ruled, when it was important to know who was the true heir of the Capetians. As a patriot she was a legitimist, and so also the heroine of the dynasty. She spoke of the sacred rights of the crown and of holy warfare, she stood above all for the king. She was a soldier in her reactions, not a liberal, nor a democrat. ‘The example of Joan of Arc leads us to ask for a king who reigns and who governs.’
⁹

Maurras was right to maintain that Joan had believed in the divine authority of her king, but this was a normal belief at the time. By 1931, however, the regime she took for granted was irrelevant to France’s situation. Joan could not have believed in the Third Republic, just as she could not have understood what a modern scholar might tell her, that there is no reliable reason for believing that ‘saints’ Margaret and Catherine ever existed. Maurras and other members of Action Française lived in the past.

Another more profound voice saw in Joan a good reason for not conforming. If any thought Joan staid in her virtue, then Georges Bernanos, novelist and polemicist, invoked a fiery heroine. In 1908, during the heady days of Action Française, Bernanos had taken part in the scuffles of the Camelots du Roi but, having left the movement, he made a point of showing how awkward Joan had been. He wrote a brilliant pamphlet that could be read as a defence of Action Française against Pius XI’s ban but should be read as a defence of nonconformity.

Jeanne, relapse et sainte
(1929) takes as its subject the woman, Joan, who was condemned for heresy, submitted, retracted her submission, was condemned again as a ‘relapsed’ heretic and is yet a saint. Bernanos enjoyed upsetting people; he found it easier to quarrel than to make up. His tract hammers home one simple message: with ruthless logic he exposes the evasions of both Joan’s enemies and her friends. After the unjust trial nobody dared to defend her until it was safe to do so. Then, over and over again, he says: ‘Our church is the church of saints.’
¹⁰
The subtext is, ‘but our church also condemns saints’ – Bernanos found the idea of being a conventional Catholic unappealing. While in Majorca in 1936, he witnessed the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and he saw how anti-Christian was the behaviour of Catholic nationalists towards their political enemies.

In the same year, the anti-Semitism that had flourished during the Dreyfus affair set on a new target in France, since the new Prime Minister, Léon Blum, was a Jew. The Right saw evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. In Orléans, Joan’s city, some leading officials were Jews, so a cruel cartoonist pictured a stained-glass window filled with stars of David.