Joan of Arc Internationale: Shaw, Brecht, and the Law of Nations

Abstract

Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant girl, a mystic to whom Saints Margaret, Michael, and Catherine spoke directly, and a cross-dressing warrior whose mission, at age of seventeen, was liberation of France from English occupation in 1428 and crowning of dauphin Charles VII as monarch of a united France. After a number of astounding military successes in which she recaptured large parts of France from English, she was taken prisoner, tried as a heretic by an international tribunal (run by Rouen ecclesiastical courts but in collusion with English), and burned at stake in 1431, officially for and witchcraft, but (as everyone knew) in reality for political crime of revolt against English occupation. The Church, having accidentally created a martyr, cleverly decided to make her its martyr, and so Joan of Arc was officially rehabilitated by Church and King Charles after another international trial in 1456, which annulled first trial on a number of different grounds: procedure had been irregular, declared new Court; judges had been incompetent and partial; there had been no counsel for defense; it had been improper to place Joan in an English prison (given that she had not been charged with violating secular law); there had been post hoc tinkering with Articles of Accusation so that heresy would conform precisely to statements she had already made about her beliefs; her confession had been coerced and hence her relapse--in which she had withdrawn everything she had confessed--had been illusory; sentence had been bizarre; and (as archbishop of Rheims declared) her trial had been contaminated with fraud, calumny, wickedness, contradictions, and manifest errors of fact and law. (They also, somewhat mysteriously, declared the execution, and all [its] consequences null and void.) (1) So Joan was technically rehabilitated in 1456, but her real rehabilitation took place over longue duree, not through formal legal proceedings but through cultural, literary, and (perhaps most often) dramatic representation: for instance, in fifteenth-century Mystere du Siege d'Orleans, Shakespeare's Henry VI, Voltaire's La Pucelle, Schiller's Die Jungfrau yon Orleans. As mythic figure, she could become a leader of religious wars of seventeenth century, an eighteenth-century revolutionary, a nineteenth-century romantic figurehead (in Schiller, for instance, in which she tragically expires, having discovered pangs of love). (2) But political Joan always dominated. For late nineteenth century, she had been champion of nations bound together by blood and iron, by bonds of race (the German race as much as French), and hence an icon not of resistance but of imperialist expansionism. (3) In wake of Franco-Prussian War, she had served as a paradigm of slogan France pour les francais (France for French), seen as antithesis of Dreyfus: crowds protesting against Dreyfus had cried A has les juifs ... Vive Jeanne d'Arc! Vive la France aux Francais (Down with Jews! ... Long live Joan of Arc! Long live France for French!). (4) But World War I changed her. She was a symbolic heroine of Great War, representative of struggle against tyranny, exemplar of courage under dark fires of trenches. Her suffering seemed to be reclaimed in Allied victories of 1918 at Compiegne (the ground where she had been captured in 1430). And it was decided that her entry into official sainthood should mark an end of War to End All Wars and beginning of new era. The Church had originally scheduled Joan for canonization in 1931, to celebrate five-hundred-year anniversary of her execution. But in 1920--eleven years early--she officially became Saint Joan. It was a year after League of Nations had been founded at Paris Peace Conference, year that decidedly ended Russian Civil War in favor of Bolsheviks, implicitly announcing a victory for International Socialism. …