How did an illiterate peasant that never sat on a horse in her entire life, much less have military training of any kind, march to war at seventeen years old, change the entire fate of France, and then defy the learned authorities of the Church for six months before being executed at nineteen?
In many ways, Mark Twain was the ultimate cynic. Though he is most famous for two novels about childhood in the antebellum south, he was also the man of million quips, who first rose to international fame by skewering what he considered hypocritical Christians on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Innocents Abroad and late in his life, repeatedly toyed with the idea of publishing a book of conversations with the devil, skewering religion as a whole. While in Europe, he claimed “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred – and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.” Of the devil himself, he once wrote “I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but evidence for the prosecution and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English. It is un-American; it is French.” At points, he event went so far as to recommend suicide, claiming those who sought to prevent someone from taking their life are on the wrong side of the issue. “I would not be a party to that last and meanest unkindness, treachery to a would-be suicide. My sympathies have been with the suicides for many, many years. I am always glad when the suicide succeeds in his undertaking. I always feel a genuine pain in my heart, a genuine grief, a genuine pity, when some scoundrel stays the suicide’s hand and compels him to continue his life.”
There was, however, one topic, or rather one person that transformed him into a believer, at least for a time: Joan of Arc, ironically considering his comment on the country earlier, the Patron Saint of France. When Twain wrote her story and her story alone, all his cynicism fell away, replaced with an almost childlike adoration of everything about her, describing her in nearly angelic terms. In his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, he lavished praise upon praise from the very opening lines, claiming “To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours. Judged by the standards of one century, the noblest characters of an earlier one lose much of their luster; judged by the standards of to-day, there is probably no illustrious man of four or five centuries ago whose character could meet the test at all points. But the character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.” He proceeds to describe her as “truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both.”
At the same time, the novel itself is far from a puff piece. Considered meticulously detailed and researched for that era, Twain tells Joan of Arc’s life story from the perspective of a fictional secretary (inspired by a real life personage) beginning with her childhood in Domremy, a small village east of Paris and ending with her being burned at the stake as a heretic on May 30, 1431 in Rouen. While he takes some artistic liberties, the vast majority of what he describes appears to be accurate from all we know about her life. As incredible as it seems, Joan of Arc was born a peasant in a backwater village towards the end of the Hundred Years’ War, when England appeared to be triumphant after Henry V swept through France. She had no formal education, could not read or write, and spent her formative years doing basic household chores such as spinning wool and helping her father in the fields. While she was growing up, France became obsessed with a prophecy attributed to Marie Robine of Avignon, who claimed that a virgin warrior would arise to save the country from the hands of the English, and though we cannot say for sure, Joan appears to have become convinced she was that virgin hero at some point in her youth. At 17 years of age, she set off for Vaucouleurs and petitioned the garrison commander, Robert de Badricourt to raise an armed escort on her behalf to travel to an audience with the Dauphin, Charles VII, whose crown was stolen by a corrupt deal in the eyes of many that would make Henry V’s heirs the kings of both England and France. She was rebuffed twice, but returned a third time in February 1429 and was given an escort of six soldiers and the license to wear men’s clothing to make the dangerous journey to Chinon, more than a third of way across the country, through enemy territory, to meet with Charles in person about saving France. No one knows what they discussed, but after speaking in private, Charles had her examined by a council of theologians in Poitiers and a physician to confirm her virginity, then gave a seventeen year old girl permission to travel to Orleans to relieve the English siege. Once there, she was smuggled into the city and took up arms against the English, known for being where the fighting was fiercest and for ability to inspire beleaguered French troops. By May 8, she had pushed France’s top military commanders towards a more aggressive strategy to relieve the siege, urging them to attack, attack, attack despite suffering a severe wound, when an arrow hit her between the neck and the shoulder the day before, though it didn’t prevent her from leading the charge.
After freeing Orleans from the clutches of the British, she continued to press north and east towards Rheims, where Charles VII could be officially crowned as king of France. On the way, she participated in the liberation of the Loire region, recapturing Jargeau, Meung-sur-Loire, and Beaugency, and was injured once again. This time, she was scaling a siege ladder up a castle wall with her banner, only to be struck by a stone that cracked her helmet. Following the Battle of Patay, which crushed the English in the region though Joan herself arrived too late to really participate, the French were able to advance on Rheims largely unopposed, entering the city on July 16, 1429. Charles was crowned the next day with Joan of Arc by his side, holding the banner of France, but afterwards, internal strife in the French ranks began to drive a schism between the two. Joan believed they should immediately march on Paris and effectively eject the English from the country, aside from a few coastal areas, but Charles’ advisers signed a truce with the Duke of Burgundy, who had aligned himself with the British. When the Duke broke the truce, Joan proceeded to Paris with a much weaker force, assaulting the city on December 8. She was wounded yet again, this time by a crossbow bolt through her thigh and remained trapped in a trench for hours before she could be rescued. Regardless, the attack was a failure, resulting in some 1,500 dead on her side. Charles called off future assaults, but ultimately sent her back into the field in Perrin Gressart that fall and winter, where she was victorious, and then onto Compiegne in the spring (to be sure, there is debate over whether or not this campaign was authorized). Alas, on May 23, 1430, she was captured outside the city gates by the French faction that was aligned with the British and never entered the field again. After two attempts to escape, she was abandoned by Charles, sold to the English, and put on trial for heresy on January 9, 1431, where she was accused of blasphemy, having demonic visions, and wearing men’s clothes. The trial itself was rigged by the English with the goal of having her burned at the stake and removed as a threat, but still dragged on for months because of the skill and control she showed in dealing with her interrogators. For example, she was asked a loaded question about whether or not she was in God’s grace. Because church doctrine held that we cannot be certain of that, it was a trap. If she said yes, she was a heretic; if she said no, she would be confessing she was in league with the devil. Her reply? “If I be not in a state of Grace, I pray God place me in it; if I be in it, I pray God keep me so.” According to a scholar who was there, even her interrogators were stunned by the subtlety of the answer.
Even so, she was tried several times, interrogated even more, threatened with torture, threatened with burning at the stake, and then forced to sign a false confession. During this period, Twain describes her with an adoration that goes beyond anyone else, writing “If you would realize how great Joan of Arc was, remember that it was out of such a place and such circumstances that she came week after week and month after month and confronted the master intellects of France single-handed, and baffled their cunningest schemes, defeated their ablest plans, detected and avoided their secretest traps and pitfalls, broke their lines, repelled their assaults, and camped on the field after every engagement; steadfast always, true to her faith and her ideals; defying torture, defying the stake, and answering threats of eternal death and the pains of hell with a simple ‘Let come what may, here I take my stand and will abide.’ Yes, if you would realize how great was the soul, how profound the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan or Christian. She was great in battle—we all know that; great in foresight; great in loyalty and patriotism; great in persuading discontented chiefs and reconciling conflicting interests and passions; great in the ability to discover merit and genius wherever it lay hidden; great in picturesque and eloquent speech; supremely great in the gift of firing the hearts of hopeless men and noble enthusiasms, the gift of turning hares into heroes, slaves and skulkers into battalions that march to death with songs on their lips. But all these are exalting activities; they keep hand and heart and brain keyed up to their work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these do not exist. Yes, Joan of Arc was great always, great everywhere, but she was greatest in the Rouen trials. There she rose above the limitations and infirmities of our human nature, and accomplished under blighting and unnerving and hopeless conditions all that her splendid equipment of moral and intellectual forces could have accomplished if they had been supplemented by the mighty helps of hope and cheer and light, the presence of friendly faces, and a fair and equal fight, with the great world looking on and wondering.”
On May 30, 1431, following a year of captivity and almost six months of trials and tribulations, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake after being accused of violating her oath to no longer wear men’s clothing, even though she was forced to do so by her captors. All she asked before her horrific death was to view a cross, which an English soldier touched by her bravery made with a stick before a real one was provided. She embraced and kissed it one last time before her hands were tied behind the stake, and watched it before her as she burned to death and her remains thrown into the river like garbage. Thirteen years later, however, a formal inquest into the nature of her trial and her visions, known as the Rehabilitation, was conducted by Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville, a relative of Charles himself. Ironically, it was at the request of Charles, but rather than a moral, there was a political motive because his reign was threatened by the notion that he was crowned by a heretic. Three more years passed and she was finally exonerated. Almost 500 years from then, in 1909, she was canonized by the church and made into a saint. In 1922, she became the Patron Saint of France, but even today, no one really knows what to make of this story. How did an illiterate peasant that never sat on a horse in her entire life, much less have military training of any kind, march to war at seventeen years old, change the entire fate of France, and then defy the learned authorities of the Church for six months before being executed at nineteen? Even threatened with death, she insisted she had divine visions of the Archangel Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret that both urged her to action and guided her actions. While Twain does not say this is the case himself, given descriptions of those visions are provided by the narrator, he seems to imply they were real, though he likely wouldn’t have said the same in any other circumstances. Though it’s possible the master of satire was playing a double game, using a credulous narrator to make a point about the credulous in general, there’s no evidence of that in the text, no cynicism at all, nothing counter the idea that he held Joan to be a truly beatific creature, especially after he opened it with a stirring preface of her perfection. Perhaps needless to say, modern scholars have attributed her visions to all manner of scientific phenomena including hallucinations caused by epilepsy or a temporal lobe tuberculoma, ergot poisoning, schizophrenia, delusional disorder, or creative psychopathy arising in childhood. A more modern telling of the tale – 1999’s The Messenger: Joan of Arc, an uneven, yet intriguing film by Luc Besson with some truly incredibly sequences – seems to suggest she’s afflicted by a form of madness, while leaving the door open to the idea that she was divinely inspired.
Me? As a non-believer, I am inclined to believe that much of what we know about her isn’t accurate given the period, her birth as a peasant, and that her tale was mostly told by others, who embellished aspects of her life to suit their purposes. While I don’t doubt she existed, at least some of the details are accurate, and I wish I had a time machine to see for myself, it’s hard to fathom otherwise. Regardless, this doesn’t make it any less unbelievable of a story.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 