Voices from Domremy
Joan was born around 1412 in Domremy, a farming village on the eastern edge of a France broken by the Hundred Years War. The English king claimed the French crown, Paris lay in Anglo-Burgundian hands, and the disinherited heir Charles waited south of the Loire. From about thirteen, Joan later testified, she heard voices she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, instructing her to drive out the English and bring Charles to his coronation. Historians cannot verify or diagnose such experiences; what they can document is the astonishing conviction they produced.
In 1429 the seventeen-year-old persuaded a local captain to escort her across enemy territory to the royal court at Chinon. Charles had her examined for weeks by theologians at Poitiers, who found nothing heretical and advised that she be tried in action. That decision says as much about France's desperation as about Joan: Orleans, the gateway to the south, had been under English siege for months, and the court was willing to gamble on a peasant visionary because conventional remedies had failed.
Orleans and Reims
Equipped with armor, a banner and a place beside seasoned commanders, Joan reached Orleans in late April 1429. Within days of her arrival the English bastions fell, and the siege was abandoned on 8 May. Her precise military role is debated; she carried her standard rather than a sword in the assaults, and veterans like Dunois led the professional soldiers. But witnesses agreed she pressed for aggressive attacks and transformed morale, and the Loire campaign that followed, capped by the rout of an English field army at Patay, broke a spell of English invincibility.
Joan then drove the court toward her second objective: Charles's coronation at Reims, deep in hostile territory, accomplished on 17 July 1429 with Joan standing near the altar. It was a political masterstroke, converting a contested claimant into an anointed king. Afterward her fortunes turned. An assault on Paris failed, winter diplomacy sidelined her, and in May 1430, fighting at Compiegne against Burgundian troops, she was pulled from her horse and captured. Charles, who owed her his crown, made no recorded attempt to ransom her.
Trial, fire and rehabilitation
Sold to the English, Joan was tried at Rouen in 1431 before Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a court aligned with the occupying power. The charge sheet dwelt on her voices and her male dress, but the purpose was political: to discredit the king she had crowned. The trial transcript survives, and it preserves a nineteen-year-old answering learned interrogators with wit and steadiness; asked whether she was in God's grace, she replied that if she was not, God might put her there. Convicted of relapsed heresy, she was burned in the market square on 30 May 1431.
Twenty-five years later, after the English had been expelled, a papally sanctioned rehabilitation trial heard scores of witnesses and annulled the verdict of 1431. Joan was canonized in 1920, by which time she had become a symbol claimed by French republicans, royalists, Catholics and nationalists alike, and she remains politically contested today. The two trials left something rarer than legend: hundreds of pages in which villagers, soldiers and clerks describe a young woman they could neither explain nor forget.
