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 JOAN
OF ARC (Jeanne d'Arc), the wonderful girl who recalled France
to life from the lowest abyss of her sufferings in the fifteenth
century, was the daughter of Jacques d'Arc and Isabeau Romée,
poor peasants, of a family of serfs established at Domremi, on
the left bank of the Meuse, some miles from Vaucouleurs, between
Champagne and Lorraine. She was born there, 6th January 1412;
and legend has surrounded her early life with presage of a saintly
career. The frightful war which had dismembered and desolated
France since the fatal day of Agincourt, 1415, was at its acme;
France was torn in fragments by factions and treason; the feeble
voluptuary, Charles VII, was only nominally King of the south
and center, and had withdrawn behind the Loire in despair; Orleans,
besieged by the English under the Regent, Duke of Bedford, alone
held the invaders at bay. The girl Jeanne had been brought up
in the midst of the horrors of war and the misery of the people;
and had long seen visions and heard voices from heaven, summoning
her to save France.
At length, early in the year 1429--she was then in her 18th
year--she broke away from her parents, assumed man's clothes
and armour, and, persuading a few gentlemen and a crowd of the
towns-people of Vaucouleurs to believe in her mission, set forth
to the King at Chinon. There her sublime confidence, her simple
purity, and instinctive sagacity won admiration in a debauched
and cynical court. She was sent forth at the head of a force
of cavalry, threw herself into Orleans, and within two weeks
routed and drove off the English armies. Town after town was
recovered, and the invaders defeated in a series of encounters.
Within two months Rheims was recovered, and the King crowned
in the ancient cathedral. This secured the throne to the native
King as against the claims of the infant Henry VI of England,
roused patriotic enthusiasm throughout the divided nation, and
created a profound belief in the supernatural mission of the
Maid. From Rheims she urged on the recovery of France and of
the capital. Before Paris she was wounded and repulsed (September
1429); the King listened to the counsels of jealousy, treason,
and despair; withdrew again behind the Loire, and disbanded his
army.
The short military career of the Maid was practically over;
her martyrdom remained. In spite of her entreaties and exhortations,
the unwarlike King and his counsellors wasted her genius and
her ardour in trivial and hopeless expeditions. After a series
of petty exploits she was taken prisoner by the Burgundians,
at Compiègne, on the Oise, May 1430; was sold for 10,000
pieces of gold to the English, who looked on her as equivalent
to an entire army. The plan of the invaders was to destroy the
glory and degrade the reputation of the national heroine. In
this they were seconded by the infamous fanaticism of the jurists,
theologians, and ecclesiastics of France, who made themselves
the tools of the tyrants of their country, and were directed
by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. For five months the inspired
girl held her own with martyr-like nobility of soul against the
venomous artifices of the priests, the ferocity of the English
soldiers, and the infernal malice of her captors, who exhausted
their skill in plots to crush her by physical, moral, and spiritual
tortures, and to dishonour her in person and in character before
they consigned her to a horrid death.
History and martyrology present no nobler picture than that
of the saintlike girl who confronted, alone, the apathy of those
she had saved, the cruel abandonment of her own nation, the savage
arts of churchmen, and the brutality of soldiery and populace.
After a long-drawn sacrifice, she was solemnly condemned as a
heretic and apostate, and burned alive in the old market place
of Rouen, May 30, 1431, with every circumstance of brutal ferocity.
The heroine of France, the greatest martyr of the people recorded
in history, died in her 20th year, after a public career of two
years. The Church, which was the instrument of her martyrdom,
finally canonized her many years later. She was beatified locally
in 1908, not for her services to her country but for alleged
miracles in healing the sick; and France only recognized, after
the disasters of 1870, that the Maid was the greatest of her
popular heroes. It would be a complete misreading of history
to regard Jeanne d'Arc as a mere enthusiast and visionary. It
was natural that the restoration of France from despair amidst
the effete corruption of Monarchy, Church, and Feudal aristocracy
should come from the depths of the people, and should be personified
in a woman. All that was sublime in the Catholic religion, all
that was heroic in the French race, and all that was self-devoted
in woman was incarnate in Joan of Arc. Her passionate patriotism
was equalled by her womanly piety, her courage by her faith,
and her inborn rectitude of nature by her genius for affairs.
In all great things, civil and military, her judgment was the
true one; and her vision of the possibilities was that of unfailing
genius. Her consummate skill in war was attested by the greatest
soldiers of her time. And as strategy was in its infancy, and
the conditions required only daring and self-confidence, no miracle
is needed to explain her success. Her marvellous story and her
boundless ascendancy over the minds of men are natural effects
of a heroic nature working in a situation of intense passion
and excitement. Her genius is all her own. Her faultless bearing
under persecution and treachery places her beside the greatest
martyrs of the world's history.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
