Joan Of Arc

Jules Michelet’s Joan of Arc was extracted from his enormous Histoire de France, the multi volume history of France that occupied him from the 1830s until shortly before his death in 1874. Michelet was the great French romantic historian, and his treatment of Joan is one of the most influential portraits of the saint produced in the nineteenth century.

Michelet had access to the surviving records of the two trials, the 1431 trial that condemned Joan to be burned at Rouen and the 1456 nullification trial that rehabilitated her memory. He read the testimony in the original medieval French and Latin, including the cross examinations conducted by the English aligned tribunal that found her guilty and the witness statements gathered twenty five years later when her family and supporters pressed for her name to be cleared. The result is a portrait built largely from the actual surviving words of the people involved, including Joan herself.

Michelet’s Joan is a peasant girl from Domrémy whose visions, military leadership, and trial all stand at the centre of a particular moment in French national history. He treats her religious experience seriously but reads her larger meaning as a national one, with Joan as the figure in whom the French people first recognised themselves as a nation rather than a collection of feudal territories. The reading shaped much of the later nationalist French interpretation of Joan and influenced everything from Anatole France’s biography to the way the modern French Republic eventually appropriated her image.

The extracted book runs about two hundred pages in most English editions. It is one of the most readable starting points for anyone approaching Michelet, who is otherwise locked inside multi volume French histories that few non specialists ever finish. The portrait of Joan herself is one of the strongest things he ever wrote and pairs naturally with George Bernard Shaw’s later play Saint Joan, with the surviving trial transcripts that Régine Pernoud edited in the twentieth century, and with the more recent biographies by Helen Castor and others.