Joan of Arc in Folk Tradition

The historical Joan of Arc, born in Domrémy around 1412 and burned at the stake at Rouen on 30 May 1431, was a peasant girl of Lorraine who, at the age of about seventeen, persuaded the Dauphin Charles to give her a small army, led the French to a stunning victory at Orléans in 1429, and accompanied the Dauphin to be crowned Charles VII at Reims. She was captured a year later, sold to the English, tried as a heretic, and burned. The figure of folk tradition is something different: a saint, a saviour of France, the daughter of a king or a fairy, the virgin warrior of Lorraine, and the subject of a great cycle of legends that grew up around her in the years and centuries after her death.

This article is part of the wider survey of the Legendary Women of folk tradition and of the larger survey of Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures. It follows Joan of Arc from her trial and rehabilitation through her canonisation and her appearance in folk art, folk drama, and the modern rhetoric of French identity, and it connects to the wider currents of the Celtic saint tradition, the Medieval European Hero tradition, and the European Folklore of the medieval west.

The Historical Joan

The historical Joan is known from the trial at Rouen of 1431, in which the English-backed Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, presided over a court that asked Joan about her voices, her dress, her visions, her virginity, her submission to the Church. The transcript of the trial is one of the great documents of the late Middle Ages, and it gives us, in Joan’s own words, a picture of a young woman of extraordinary intelligence, courage, and theological subtlety. She was condemned to death as a relapsed heretic, and on 30 May 1431 she was burned at the stake, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine.

The rehabilitation trial of 1456 examined the evidence of the original trial and found it gravely irregular, clearing her name and making her a heroine of the French church and of the French crown. Joan’s canonisation came only in 1920, after the long campaign of Bishop Dominique-Auguste Fournier, and she was declared a saint by Pope Benedict XV. She has since become one of the three patron saints of France, alongside Saint Denis and Saint Martin of Tours.

The Folk Legends of Joan

The folk legends grew up around Joan in the years and centuries after her death. Some versions of the legend made her the daughter of a king, others the daughter of a fairy, others the daughter of a witch. The oak tree of Domrémy, the Arbre des Dames or Arbre de Bourlemont, is one of the central images: according to local tradition, the young Joan was sitting in its branches when she first heard the voices of her saints. The tree, of great age, was cut down in 1840, but its wood was carved into devotional objects that are still venerated in the village.

The Lorraine saint tradition is the larger body of legends and cults that grew up around Joan in her home region. The saints of her visions — Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Margaret of Antioch — were remembered in the local tradition as protectors of the region. The image of Joan as the saviour of France was the dominant image from the late Middle Ages onwards, and the great Catholic shrines of Orléans (where the main civic festival is still held in her honour on 8 May) and Rouen became important pilgrimage sites.

Joan in Folk Art and Folk Drama

Joan was a major subject of folk art and folk drama from the fifteenth century onwards. The Mystery Plays of the late Middle Ages included plays devoted to her: the Mistère du siège d’Orléans of c. 1450 was one of the great theatrical works of the period, and it presented Joan as a figure of divine inspiration leading the people of Orléans to victory. The folk image of Joan in the popular art of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period was a young woman in armour with a banner, sword, and helmet — an image that has been reproduced in countless paintings, statues, engravings, and devotional objects ever since. The most famous paintings are Ingres’s Jeanne d’Arc au siège d’Orléans of 1841 and Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc of 1879.

The Political Joan

The figure of Joan has been used, in the centuries since her death, in a great many political ways. The French monarchy used her as a symbol of the divinely-sanctioned French monarchy, and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims was a powerful image in the royal iconography. The French Revolution of 1789 rediscovered her as a figure of the people. The Third Republic of the late nineteenth century, in its long campaign against the Catholic church, made Joan a national heroine of secular France.

The modern political use of Joan is more complicated. The far-right of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in France and elsewhere, has appropriated Joan as a symbol of the true, Catholic, white, European France, in opposition to the secular, multicultural, modern France. This appropriation has been contested by French historians and by the French church, and it has produced an extensive debate about the proper use of the Joan figure in modern political rhetoric. The feminist appropriation, in works such as those of Marina Warner, Charles Péguy’s Mistère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc of 1897, and Paul Claudel’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher of 1939, has presented Joan as a model of female strength and vision.

The Celtic and Medieval European Context

The figure of Joan belongs to a wider pattern of medieval European folk heroism. The comparison of her with the other Medieval European Heroes is a small study in itself: the comparison of Joan with Robin Hood is particularly interesting, as both are figures of humble origin who rose to national prominence, both were tried by an unjust court, and both have been used in modern political rhetoric in complicated ways.

The figure of Joan also belongs to the wider Celtic saint tradition. The medieval Celtic world produced a great many folk-saints — Brigid, Patrick, Columba, David, Kevin — and these figures, like Joan, often combined pre-Christian and Christian elements. The folk Joan is the figure of the people, the figure of the village, the figure of the small and the poor. She is also the figure of the great and the powerful, the figure of the nation, the figure of the high political rhetoric. The two are inseparable.

Sources and Further Reading

Régine Pernoud. Joan of Arc: Her Story. Translated by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams. St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War, Vol. 4: Cursed Kings. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Pernoud, Régine, and Clin, Marie-Véronique. Joan of Arc: Her Story. St. Martin’s, 1998.
Wheeler, Bonnie, and Wood, Charles T., eds. Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc. Garland, 1996.