Chapter 1The Old Marketplace

Foreword

The church that burned Joan of Arc in 1431 and the church that cleared her in 1456 were the same church.

Not merely the same institution in the abstract. The same profession, the same canon law, the same procedure, and in several cases the same men in the same room.

Thomas de Courcelles helped produce the Latin record that killed her, and then prospered under the king she had crowned. Guillaume Manchon wrote down the interrogation as a notary, and in 1456 testified that the articles built from it misrepresented what she had actually said. Jean Beaupère, who had conducted much of the questioning, was called to explain himself and defended his own interrogation.

Nobody was disciplined.

That roster is the organising device of this book, and it produces the argument. The church did not change its mind about Joan of Arc. France changed hands, and the church followed.

The demonstration comes early, in Chapter 7, and it is the load-bearing chapter of the whole thing.

In March and April 1429, at Poitiers, a commission of theologians examined her for three weeks and cleared her. Women of Yolande of Aragon's household examined her body. The register of that examination is lost and only its favourable conclusion survives.

Two years later, at Rouen, a court of qualified clerics using the same law, the same training and the same procedure convicted her of heresy.

The variable was never the doctrine.

Eleven chapters of this book reconstruct fifteen months of public life out of fragments, with every inference marked as one, and six more are the trial, told from the transcript.

That proportion has a reason that is uncomfortable. The only place Joan's own voice survives at any length is the record kept by the men who were killing her.

She was illiterate. She dictated letters and could sign her name. Nothing she wrote survives in her hand. What we have is five weeks of interrogation — six public sessions from 21 February to 3 March 1431, then nine more in her cell — taken down by notaries, in a proceeding designed to convict her.

She was nineteen, or thereabouts, which is her own evidence about her age. She had no counsel, no education and no allies in the building, and she held a bench of doctors of theology for five weeks, and when they set the trap — are you in a state of God's grace — she gave the answer that stopped the room.

Everything in this book that sounds like her comes out of that document, and the book says so every time.

Four chapters, not an epilogue, are given to the verdicts.

The second trial opened at Notre-Dame on 7 November 1455 on the petition of her mother, Isabelle Romée, and her brothers. Roughly a hundred and fifteen witnesses were heard. On 7 July 1456 the condemnation was annulled for fraud, calumny, iniquity and contradiction.

It was also, and at the same time, extremely convenient. Charles VII had been crowned at Reims in July 1429 by a girl subsequently burned as a heretic, and a French king whose anointing rested on a witch had a problem that only an annulment could solve.

Justice arrived, and it arrived because it was useful, and both of those are true.

Chapter 21 is the chapter no other book about her writes.

The Bishop of Orléans petitioned Rome in 1869. The cause advanced through the years in which France and the church were tearing each other apart over the separation of 1905. Pius X beatified her in April 1909. Benedict XV canonised her in May 1920, weeks before the Republic made her feast a national holiday and shortly before Paris and the Vatican restored the relations they had broken.

She was canonised as a virgin. Not as a martyr.

A martyr is somebody killed for the faith, and naming her a martyr would have required the church to name who had killed her, and the answer was a bishop, an inquisitor, a university faculty and a court of qualified clerics.

The classification avoids the only question that matters, and this book says so.

Two corrections it makes rather than repeats.

In March 1430, fourteen months before she was burned as a heretic, a letter was dictated in her name threatening a crusade against the Hussites of Bohemia. The sympathetic literature keeps postponing that fact and this book puts it in Chapter 11 where it belongs.

And the relics venerated as hers are not hers. A forensic examination in 2007 established it. They were manufactured for a saint whose ashes were thrown into the Seine precisely so that nothing would remain to be venerated, and the chroniclers are explicit that this was the reason.

There is no image of Joan of Arc made from life. The only picture drawn while she was alive is a doodle in the margin of a Paris clerk's register, by a man who had never seen her.

Every face anybody has ever put on her — Shakespeare's witch, Voltaire's joke, Schiller's heroine, Michelet's daughter of the people, Vichy's poster, the Front National's parade, the Globe's 2022 production and the argument it started — is a face somebody needed her to have.

She died at the Vieux-Marché in Rouen on 30 May 1431, at a pillar built tall so that the crowd could see, and the executioner said afterwards that he could not burn the heart.

He said it twenty-five years later, under a government that wanted him to say it.

Chapter 1 · The Old Marketplace

On the morning of 30 May 1431 the old marketplace at Rouen was cleared of the trade it was named for. The Vieux-Marché was a working square in a working city, and the name says plainly enough what it was for on every other day of the year. That spring it was a square in an English city. Normandy was held by an English administration; the costs of the proceeding that had condemned her were paid by the English; the keys to the place where the prisoner was kept belonged to an English earl. The court that had condemned her, however, was not English. It was a French ecclesiastical court, sitting at Rouen under Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and it had found her a heretic and an idolater.

A pillar had been raised in the square, built up in plaster, and made tall so that the crowd at the back could see whatever was fastened to it. A placard had been prepared setting out her crimes. The executioner was a man named Geoffroy Thérage, and what has kept his name in circulation for six centuries is not anything he did that morning but something he is reported to have said afterwards: that he could not burn the heart.

It is a superb detail. It is the kind of detail a biography wants at its opening, because it does the work of an argument without making one — the machinery of the state applied to a body, and a component of that body declining to comply. It has been quoted in book after book about Joan of Arc. It appears in this one on the first page for a reason that has nothing to do with its power, which is that almost every word of the paragraph above reaches us by the same route, and the route is the problem this book is about.

The pillar, the placard, the executioner's complaint, the confessor at the foot of the fire, the cross improvised from two sticks, the last word she is said to have cried out: none of it was written down that day by anyone who was standing there. It comes from depositions taken twenty-five years later, in a second proceeding, in a France that by then had thrown the English out of Normandy, before commissioners appointed to establish that the first court had got it wrong, from witnesses who had been officers of that first court and who were, in several cases, explaining their own conduct at it. The men who describe the death sympathetically are men who had reason to be described sympathetically themselves. This does not make them liars. The cross of two sticks and the last cry are probably true; they are simply not contemporaneous. But it does mean that the most famous scene in the life of Joan of Arc survives in the form of testimony given a quarter of a century afterwards, under a government that wanted it, by people with something at stake in how it sounded — and that a biography which reports it as simple fact is not reporting a fact. It is reporting a deposition and hoping the reader will not notice the difference.

There is a hostile record of the day as well, in the Burgundian and Anglo-Burgundian chronicles, and it is worth saying what those chroniclers were explicit about, because it explains why so little physical evidence exists to test anything against. What the fire left was disposed of in the Seine, and the chroniclers give the reason without embarrassment: so that nothing should remain to be venerated. There is no grave. There is no body. There was never going to be one, by design.

The other thing missing from that morning is her face. No portrait of Joan of Arc was made from life. Not one. Every painting, statue, stained-glass window, film still and commemorative stamp that has ever carried her features is an invention, and the inventions tell you a great deal about the centuries that produced them and nothing whatever about her. The nearest approach the record permits is a marginal sketch made by Clément de Fauquembergue, a clerk of the Parlement de Paris, in his register, dated 10 May 1429 — the year of Orléans, while she was alive and at the height of her fame. It is the only image made in her lifetime. Fauquembergue had never seen her. He was in Paris, in a city that was on the other side of the war, working from report; he drew, in the margin of an official register, his idea of what a girl in armour who was said to be leading the French army might look like. The doodle of a clerk who never laid eyes on his subject is the entire visual record made while she lived.

Nor do we know how old she was. The book will use c. 1412 for her birth, and it will use it because that is the least dishonest formula available. The date usually printed derives from a letter written later, and its attribution is not secure enough to build on. What survives in her own evidence is an answer she gave her judges at Rouen: she was, she said, nineteen or thereabouts. That is the closest thing to a birth certificate that exists for her, and it is an approximation offered under interrogation by a young woman who had no obvious reason to have counted. The record does not fix her age, and this book will not pretend otherwise.

To all of which must be added an obstacle that sits in the reader rather than in the record: nobody comes to this subject empty-handed. Joan of Arc arrives in the mind already assembled, and the assembly is very old and very tidy. A peasant girl hears voices, saves France, is betrayed by the king she crowned, and burns. Only the last clause of that is secure. That she said she heard voices is documented beyond argument; what they were is unknowable, permanently, and this book will say so early and will not come back with a verdict, because there is no verdict to be had at this distance. That she saved France compresses a genuinely open question — whether she commanded anything, or was a standard-bearer and a morale instrument whom professional captains humoured — into a conclusion, and the evidence on both sides of that question is testimony given by interested men a quarter of a century after the events. That she was betrayed assumes we know what Charles VII was thinking, and we do not: there is no record of a ransom offer, a threat of reprisal or a diplomatic protest, and no explanation from him of why there was none. His abandonment of her is real. It is documented by absence, which is not the same thing as being accounted for.

Set against all that absence is a fact that ought to be incompatible with it. Joan of Arc is one of the best-documented people of her century who was neither royal nor a churchman — very probably the best-documented illiterate teenager in the whole of medieval Europe. This is not because anyone thought a farmer's daughter from the eastern frontier was worth recording. It is because two courts wanted to know things about her, and courts write everything down. The trial at Rouen produced day-by-day minutes of the interrogation of a nineteen-year-old girl by a bench of doctors of theology. The proceeding that annulled that trial produced depositions from roughly 115 witnesses: her childhood neighbours, the men who escorted her across Burgundian country, her confessor, the Duke of Alençon, Jean de Dunois, and the surviving clerks and notaries of the court that had killed her, questioned in detail about how the minutes had been made. There is no comparable pairing anywhere in medieval Europe: the record of an interrogation, and then, a generation later, an interrogation of the men who kept the record.

So the material is not thin. The material is overwhelming. What it is not is neutral, and it is not neutral in two directions at once, which is the specific difficulty this book has to work in. The condemnation record was compiled by the prosecution. The notes were taken in French as she spoke and afterwards rendered into Latin; five authenticated copies were produced and signed by the notaries, of which three survive, in Paris, along with a French version known as the Orléans manuscript. It is the only place her voice survives at any length — and it belongs to the men who were killing her. One of those notaries, Guillaume Manchon, testified in the later proceeding that pressure had been applied to what he wrote. The nullification record, on the other side, was assembled by a court convened under papal authority at the urging of a king who needed the verdict overturned, and it collected the recollections of people who by then knew exactly what the girl in question had become. One archive is hostile and contemporaneous. The other is friendly and late. Neither was made to tell us the truth about her, and the biography that emerges from putting them side by side is not a photograph. It is closer to a shape seen through two panes of coloured glass, each of which tints, and neither of which can be removed.

Between those two panes there is a life, and it is short enough to state in a paragraph. She came out of Domrémy, a village on the Meuse in the Duchy of Bar, in a kingdom that had for practical purposes stopped functioning. Between February 1429 and May 1430 — roughly fifteen months — she talked her way into the presence of an uncrowned dauphin at Chinon, was examined and cleared by a commission of churchmen at Poitiers, rode to Orléans and watched the English abandon a seven-month siege nine days after she arrived, took the field at Patay, and stood beside Charles VII in the cathedral at Reims while he was anointed king of France. Ten months after that she was captured at Compiègne, sold to the English for 10,000 francs, and delivered to Rouen. She was tried through the winter and spring, and burned in the Vieux-Marché at nineteen or thereabouts. That is the whole of her public career. Every commander she is customarily set beside had an army, a title, a treasury and a state behind him. She had none of those things, and produced a comparable strategic result inside fifteen months, which is either the most interesting military anomaly of the period or evidence that the standard account of her role is wrong. This book takes that as a question rather than settling it by admiration.

But the argument the book is built on is not military. It is the sequence that follows the fire, and it starts with something that happened before it. In 1429, at Poitiers, a commission of churchmen examined this girl for three weeks and cleared her. In 1431, at Rouen, a court of churchmen examined her for rather longer and condemned her. The Poitiers register is lost, which is the largest single hole in the evidence and one this book will return to. But the essential comparison survives the loss, because it does not depend on the contents of the register. Both bodies were staffed from the same profession. Both were trained in the same faculties. Both worked from the same canon law, by the same inquisitorial procedure, asking the same category of question about the same young woman making the same claims. The doctrine did not move between 1429 and 1431. The theology did not move. What moved was the political position of the people convening the examination.

Then it happened again, in the other direction. Charles VII ordered an inquiry under Guillaume Bouillé on 15 February 1450. Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville and the Inquisitor-General Jean Bréhal took it up in 1452. A formal trial opened at Notre-Dame on 7 November 1455, on the petition of her mother, Isabelle Romée, and her surviving sons, and on 7 July 1456 it annulled the sentence of 1431 as tainted with fraud, calumny, iniquity and contradiction. That finding is almost certainly correct on the procedure. It is also a finding that the king of France urgently required, because he had been crowned at the urging of a woman whom a church court had convicted of heresy and idolatry, and the English had spent 1431 saying so in writing. Justice arrived. It arrived because it had become useful, and the honest way to write that sentence is to write both halves of it.

And then, four hundred and eighty-nine years after the fire, the same institution made her a saint. Benedict XV canonised her on 16 May 1920, at the end of a cause that had been petitioned from Orléans in 1869 and had crawled through half a century in which the French Republic and the Catholic Church had torn at each other and finally severed diplomatic relations in 1904, and had then discovered, in the aftermath of a war, that they had need of a saint they could share. She was canonised as a virgin. She was not canonised as a martyr. That distinction is a technical one in canon law and it looks like a footnote, and it is in fact among the sharpest pieces of evidence in this book, because to declare a martyr is to declare a persecutor, and the persecutors in this case were bishops, doctors of theology and an inquisitor, acting under a procedure the church had itself designed. The classification avoids the only question that matters. Whether that was theological caution or institutional self-protection is arguable, and it has been argued; this book will put the question sharply and leave it standing as a question.

The received story about Joan of Arc is that a girl was murdered by a corrupt court and that the church later saw its error, corrected it, and eventually raised her to the altars: a tragedy followed by a correction followed by an honour. The documents do not support that shape. The 1431 court, the 1456 court and the 1920 congregation were the same institution, operating the same law with the same tools, and reaching whatever conclusion the political situation in France made necessary at the time of asking. The variable was never the doctrine. It was who held Normandy, whose legitimacy needed underwriting, and, in the twentieth century, which two governments had reasons to want a shared French saint. The church did not change its mind about Joan of Arc. France changed hands, and the church followed. Twice.

None of which makes her a token in somebody else's game, and a book that leaves the reader with that impression will have failed at the only task that matters. This one examines an institution's conduct across five centuries and reaches a critical conclusion about it, and that is a different exercise from writing about a girl. Under three verdicts and all the French politics stacked on top of them there is an actual person, and the evidence for her is better than the evidence for most people of her century: a young woman who was funny under interrogation and knew it, who was tactically aggressive to the point of recklessness, who was physically brave in a way that is documented rather than asserted, who was ambitious for herself and her family and accepted the rewards, who was wrong about her own timetable and said so out loud, and who was abandoned without explanation by the king she had made. Recovering her is the job. It requires reading two partisan archives against each other, marking every inference as an inference, and saying so on the page each time the record stops — which it does, repeatedly, and at the places where the story is most often told with the greatest confidence.

Those places can be named in advance, so that nobody waits for answers that are not coming. We do not know what happened in the room at Chinon when she gave the dauphin whatever it was she gave him; her own answers about it were evasive, then shifted, and the version she finally produced under interrogation is almost certainly a construction manufactured by the pressure of being asked. We do not know what the clergy at Poitiers put to her, because the register of that examination is lost and only the favourable conclusion survives, quoted at second hand — which is inconvenient, since that examination is load-bearing for everything this book argues. We do not know what she signed when she abjured, or whether she understood it: witnesses recalled a short paper of a few lines, and the trial record carries a substantially longer text, and the two cannot be reconciled. We do not know by what mechanism she came to be wearing men's clothes again four days later, which is the thing that killed her. We do not know whether she could read; she said she could not, and she signed her name, and both of those can be true at once, so this book will leave them both standing. And we do not know what she heard in her father's garden. That last one is not a gap the passage of scholarship will close. It is closed permanently.

The trial record is now readable in English, in Daniel Hobbins's translation of the condemnation and in Craig Taylor's collection of the surrounding documents, and one consequence is that a book written today can let the reader hear the exchanges instead of summarising them. That is what the middle of this book does. It is worth saying in advance what the reader will find there, because it is not what the legend leads anyone to expect. Seventy articles drawn from her interrogation were compressed into twelve and sent to the University of Paris, which returned the condemnation the court needed. Manchon, who had written the original notes, testified afterwards that the twelve did not represent what she had said. Those twelve articles are what this book is named for. They are the point at which a proceeding stopped being an inquiry and became a drafting exercise — and they are also, inconveniently for anyone who wants a simple villain, the work of qualified men following a recognised procedure in daylight. When the sentence was annulled a generation later, nobody was disciplined for having passed it, and at least one of the clerics who had helped produce the Latin record that killed her went on to prosper under the king she had crowned. Naming those men individually, and establishing exactly what each did in each of the two proceedings, is the organising work of this book; it is also the part most easily got wrong, and it will be done with the sources cited rather than asserted. That is the shape of the story, and it is a worse shape than corruption, because corruption can be identified and removed, and a procedure working exactly as designed cannot.

That is the shape of it. A death in a market square, reported to us by men who were not free to report it any other way. A face that does not exist. An age given as an approximation by the girl herself. And behind all of it an institution which killed her, cleared her and canonised her, and which has never once said which of its verdicts was the mistake.