The
itinerary of Joan of Arc's two-year military career is well-documented enough, and the transcripts of her
heresy trial in
1431 are sufficiently intricate and contradictory to tell devout Catholics and radical feminists alike what they most want to hear. Six centuries later, the verifiable details of the girl from
Domrémy's life have come to matter less than the assortment of often-incompatible icons they have been used to construct.
Warrior Maiden
Even her name is disputed; or at least, the last thing she would have called herself is Joan of Arc. At her trial, she gave her given name of Jeanne as Jhenne, the spelling then common in her home region of
Lorraine. When the grateful Dauphin granted her brothers a
coat of arms, they chose two lilies - standing for purity - and a raised sword in her honour, and took the noble name
du Lys, the name by which the sixteenth-century essayist
Michel de Montaigne referred to her. Joan herself liked to be known as the Maid, or
La Pucelle.
The surname d'Arc appears to be a later corruption of Darc (the name she gave to the tribunal on her second appearance), perhaps attributed to her after she began to be associated with the
Amazons of antiquity, renowned for the bows they carried and prominent in
Renaissance epics such as
Orlando Furioso and
The Faerie Queene. Conversely, had her family name suggested so obvious a play on words for a
warrior maiden, it would most likely have been reflected in 'her' coat of arms, according to the
heraldic custom of the time.
Joan's conflation with an abstract personification of
virtue has persisted to this day, but others have been more inspired by her personal heroism or by her decision to
cut her hair and wear male clothing - taken as a symbol of her courage, perhaps. The essentials of her story offered
Friedrich Schiller enough material to turn her into a nineteenth-century
Romantic's
poster girl in his
1801 play
The Maid of Orleans.
The
rural connection and the
mysticism are all there in
The Maid, but Schiller saw fit to give her an English lover called
Lionel on the other side of the lines and a full-scale battlefield death scene.
Giuseppe Verdi's opera
Giovanna d'Arco, premiered in
1845, closely follows the Schiller.
Daughter of the Nation
Modern French nationalism, in its conservative variant at least, found new uses for Joan, although the
French revolutionaries had little time for her, finding her Catholicism too reminiscent of the
ancien régime they were striving to destroy, and the entirely fictional
Marianne was created as their replacement icon.
The
Third Republic, however, was born in
1871 after France had lost Joan's home province in the
Franco-Prussian War, and her legend was recycled as an emblem of defiance to
Berlin. Joan became a constant figure in French propaganda during
World War I which, for France, revolved around the defence of her northern territories and the recovery of
Alsace-Lorraine.
Joan's most famous monument, her gilded statue in the
Place des Pyramides in
Paris, dates from the early years of the Third Republic. The sculpture was made in
1874 by
Daniel Frémiet, who chose as his model a fifteen-year-old girl,
Valerie Laneau, from her home town.
During the
Dreyfus Affair, which divided the liberals and conservatives of the Republic in the 1890s, both sides found themselves able to take up Joan of Arc as a figurehead. Dreyfus' defenders, of whom the most prominent was
Émile Zola, drew parallels with the
anti-Semitism from which Dreyfus had suffered and the way in which the fifteenth-century
Church Militant had denounced Joan's activities as
witchcraft.
Yet the right-wing nationalists of
Action Francaise, which grew out of the extremist wing of the
anti-Dreyfusards, were also able to use Joan to reflect their own
royalism, even though its leader
Charles Maurras had little attachment to Catholicism beyond its value as an instrument with which to mobilise the French right.
In
1904, street-fighting broke out after youths from the
Camelots du Roi, a royalist organisation, objected to lectures given by a staunch republican professor,
Amédée Thalamas, putting forward the liberals' version of Joan.
After Joan was canonised by the Vatican in
1920, nationalist groups made it their custom to hold rallies on her
feast day by her statue in the Place des Pyramides. In
1988,
Jean-Marie Le Pen of the
Front National changed the date to
May Day so that it would compete with socialist demonstrations.
Le Pen is a particular admirer of Joan of Arc, and has filled his house with various devotional statues of the saint. Curiously, or perhaps not, the right-wing Joans seem almost without exception to have long, golden hair, despite the charge laid against her by the
Rouen tribunal that she wore '
her hair cropped round, in man's style.'
Search For A Star
Le Pen and Maurras, however, are far from the only ones to impose their own preoccupations on a woman whose legend seems to turn her, at times, into an
empty vessel, no more or less real than the
epic Balkan battles fought and re-fought in poetry and national memory. The British
suffragette Christabel Pankhurst depicted herself as Joan on her movement's badges, and
Vita Sackville-West's essay on Joan dropped very strong hints that she, like Sackville-West, had been a
lesbian.
George Bernard Shaw, whose play
Saint Joan is one of his most famous works, emphasises the confidence of a simple peasant girl against the political establishment of the time, directing the actress to speak her lines with a somewhat incongruous
West Country accent. When
Otto Preminger filmed the play in
1957, he thankfully dropped the accent, but conducted a nationwide search for an unknown girl to represent Joan.
His eventual choice,
Jean Seberg, became one of the cinema's most recognisable Joans, with vulnerable
doe eyes and a
Mia Farrow crop eleven years too early. The role of Joan has, only naturally, attracted some of the best-known actresses of their time, including the Third Republic's darling
Sarah Bernhardt, who won acclaim for portraying a string of national heroines from Joan to the
Jacobin Théroigne de Merincourt. It was a juxtaposition of which Théroigne would surely not have approved.
The very first film to do with Joan of Arc appears to have been made as early as
1895, and
Cecil B. DeMille made her life his subject in one of his early silent efforts, which starred
Geraldine Farrar in the
title role. One may or may not wish that he had revisited the girl at the
peak of his career.
Carl Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc (
1928), is accounted one of
silent film's finest hours, and featured another then-amateur actress,
Renée Falconetti. Unlike Seberg, Falconetti never made another film.
Second to Dreyer's masterpiece in the
artistic merit stakes is most probably
Robert Bresson's
1962 reconstruction of Joan's trial in
Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc, in which Joan was played by
Florence Delay.
Ingrid Bergman played Joan twice: in
1948 for
Victor Fleming, and in
1954 for
Roberto Rossellini. Rossellini's film,
Giovanna d'Arco al rogo, was a dramatisation of an
oratorio based on medieval
mystery plays. The international relations expert
Jean Bethke Elshtain credits the 1948 movie, which she saw as a girl of eight, with first awakening her interest in
women and war, although she transmuted her initial identification with Joan into her trademark argument that women should reject
militarism.
Two Joans competed in
1999:
Leelee Sobieski, supposedly descended from the royal Polish house of
Sobieski, took on the role for a
TV movie eclipsed in ambition and budget by
Luc Besson's labour of love starring
Milla Jovovich. Besson never quite seems to light upon one coherent Joan, and Jovovich literally chops and changes to match. How Joan managed to have
strawberry blonde highlights in the fourteenth century, or for that matter turn up at the stake as a dead ringer for
Lisa Stansfield, is presumably another
divine mystery.
Besson variously presented Joan as a borderline
schizophrenic, the avenger of her {fictional) sister raped and murdered by the English invader, and a religious zealot whose
fervour seems,
now, even more chilling than Besson could have intended. Almost unintentionally, her individualism and strength of character appear to shine through nonetheless when she tells her squire in
Rheims cathedral of the saints' voices that she hears: '
And you can hear them, if you really want to', perhaps the most truly heroic message that can be extracted from her many
afterlives.