On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake after being convicted of heresy. Joan, who was still a teenager, had become an improbable military leader and helped to rescue France from defeat in the Hundred Years’ War. We don’t know exactly when Joan was born, but based on her own reports of her age, it was most likely sometime in 1412. When she was born, France was in utter turmoil.
Let’s set the historical stage: France and England had been at war for about 75 years. The war was fought almost entirely on French soil, and the English army had been decisively winning for the last twenty years or so. At the time of Joan’s birth, it seemed very likely that France would soon be under English rule.
The French royal family was in chaos. King Charles VI suffered from mental instability and was frequently unable to rule; the rest of the family could not decide who should serve as regent, making decisions when Charles was unable to do so. Those disagreements eventually split the French nobility into two factions, led by the Count of Armagnac and the Duke of Burgundy; in 1419, the Burgundians entered into an alliance with the English.
Under the influence of the Burgundians, the Queen of France signed a treaty in 1420 granting succession to the French throne to England’s King Henry V. When Henry V and Charles VI both died within a few weeks of each other in 1422, there were two claimants to the French throne—the infant Henry VI, whose uncle was serving as regent; and France’s Charles VII.
By the end of the 1420s, the Anglo-Burgundian alliance controlled most of France. Crucially, that control included the city of Reims, where French kings were traditionally crowned. Henry VI was still a child, too young to travel through the war to get to Reims; and Charles VII would have been putting his life at jeopardy by entering Burgundian France to be crowned. Among the few French cities still loyal to Charles was Orléans, and the set siege to that city in 1428, hoping to capture it as well.
And that takes us back to Joan. In 1425, Joan began to have visions in which she was visited by several of France’s most important saints, who told her that she must defeat the English and take Charles to Reims to be crowned. In 1428, she asked a local garrison commander to take her to the French royal court. The commander was skeptical, but after Joan predicted the outcome of an important military battle, several days before the news of the results arrived, he agreed.
Joan met Charles VII in 1429. She must have made an impression on him because he agreed to send her to Orléans. It was, in part, an act of desperation. None of his rational military strategy was working; could he really do worse by putting his army in the command of an illiterate teenaged farm girl? And after all, there had long been legends and superstitions in France that the country would one day be “betrayed by a woman”—for many, the Queen’s signing the crown over to the English certainly seemed to fit that piece of the legend—“and saved by a virgin.”
Joan arrived at Orléans in April 1429, claiming that God had commanded her to lead the army. It is unclear from the historical record how directly involved Joan actually was with military decision making, or whether she took part in the battles, but whatever the reason, the French became both more aggressive and more successful after her arrival, and the siege of Orléans ended on May 7.
The English expected that the French army would advance towards Paris; instead, Joan led them towards Reims. They faced only minimal opposition on the way, and arrived at Reims in July; Charles was crowned king on July 17.
That did not bring an end to the war, and in May 1430, Joan was captured by the Burgundians. They handed her over to the English, who put her on trial for heresy in January 1431. The trial was presided over entirely by Anglo-Burgundian clerics, and it was clear that they were violating many of the church’s own rules about such proceedings in their eagerness to convict Joan.
She was ultimately convicted of cross-dressing, which was considered a form of heresy. Joan had worn male clothing during her travels through France for the sake of safety. She had briefly returned to female clothing after her arrest, but quickly re-adopted male garments as a defense against rape. That allowed the court to add a repeat charge of cross-dressing, and a repeat charge of any type of heresy made it a capital offense, for which she could be executed.
The sentence, burning at the stake, was carried out on May 30, 1431. When the fire went out, the English raked back the ashes so that everyone could see the body, and no one could claim that she’d escaped. They then burned the body again to reduce it completely to ashes and prevent the French from taking relics.
The momentum the French military had developed under Joan continued. When the English regent died in 1435, Henry VI took full rulership at the age of thirteen. Under his weak leadership, the English were unable to regain the upper hand, and the war finally ended in 1453.
In 1452, Pope Callixtus III authorized a posthumous retrial, an investigation into whether Joan’s conviction had been fair. She was declared innocent on July 7, 1456. Over the next centuries, Joan became an increasingly important symbol for Catholics, and she was canonized as a saint in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV.
Joan of Arc has been a popular figure in literature and art, and our streaming services offer a variety of interpretations of her life and martyrdom. There are biographies by Helen Castor, Kathryn Harrison, and Nancy Goldstone; and novelistic interpretations of her story by Kimberly Cutter, Thomas Keneally, and Mark Twain.
Kanopy offers two very different film biographies, separated by more than a century. Joan the Woman is a 1916 movie from the master of the silent epic, Cecil B. DeMille; Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc is a 1917 French film, an irreverent musical.
And many classical composers have been inspired by Joan’s story. There are operas by Giuseppe Verdi (Giovanna d’Arco) and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (The Maid of Orleans); oratorios by Arthur Honegger (Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher) and Henri Tomasi (Le Triomphe de Jeanne); choral works by Paul Paray (Mass for Joan of Arc) and Richard Einhorn (Voices of Light); and Norman Dello Joio’s The Triumph of St. Joan Symphony.
Also This Week
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Dorothea Lange was born. Lange came to prominence in the 1930s with her photographs of Americans struggling through the Great Depression; her style was somewhere between portraiture and photojournalism. During World War II, she was hired by the War Relocation Authority—the government agency responsible for the internment of Japanese Americans—to document the process; her photographs were such harsh documentation that most were impounded by the Army and not seen by the public until after the war. The biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is written by Linda Gordon; Elise Hooper novelizes Lange’s life in Learning to See.
May 27, 1930
John Barth was born. Barth is a novelist who was a leader of the American postmodernist movement in the 1960s. In Barth’s writing, the reader is frequently reminded that they are reading a work of fiction, and Barth is occasionally present as a character in his own stories. His best-known work is a pair of early novels. In The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth’s fictionalized version of an actual minor English poet is sent to colonial Maryland to write an ode in praise of the colony; Giles Goat-Boy is a satirical allegory in which a university campus represents the universe, as one student comes to believe that he is meant to be the university’s savior.
May 31, 1930
Clint Eastwood was born. Eastwood’s first major success as an actor came in the TV western Rawhide. In the mid-1960s, he became a movie star, appearing in several “Spaghetti Westerns” directed by Sergio Leone; in the 1970s, he moved into Hollywood action films. He began directing early in his career and has twice won the Academy Award for Best Director, for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. In the 1971 Civil War drama The Beguiled, Eastwood stars as a wounded Union soldier forced to take shelter and recuperate at a Mississippi boarding school for girls.
May 28, 1934
Five sisters were born to Elzire and Oliva Dionne in the village of Corbeil, Ontario, Canada. The Dionnes were the first quintuplets to survive beyond infancy. About a year after their birth, the Ontario government passed a bill that made the sisters wards of the state until their eighteenth birthday; for most of their childhood, the Dionne sisters were exploited by the government as a profitable tourist attraction. Sarah Miller tells their story in The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets.