St. Joan of Arc

St. Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl, born about 1412 at Domrémy on the eastern edge of France, who led French troops to break the English siege of Orléans in May 1429 and saw Charles VII crowned king at Reims that July. She was captured at Compiègne in May 1430, tried for heresy by a church court at Rouen under an English-aligned bishop, and burned at the stake on 30 May 1431 at about nineteen years of age. A second church process in 1456 annulled that verdict as fraudulent, and Pope Benedict XV canonised her in 1920.

She is one of the best documented people of the fifteenth century, because both trials produced written records that survive. We have her own words under interrogation, taken down by clerks, and the sworn testimony of more than a hundred people who knew her, gathered twenty-five years after her death.

1. The Voices

Jeanne d'Arc was an illiterate peasant girl in 15th-century France. At 13, she began hearing voices telling her to save France. Most teenagers are asked to clean their room; she was asked to lead an army.

At her trial she named them. She said the voices were those of St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret of Antioch, that she first heard them in her father's garden at about thirteen, and that they came with light. Her interrogators pressed her repeatedly on what the voices looked like, whether they had hair, what language they spoke. Her answers are in the record, and they are consistently direct and often impatient.

2. The Warrior Saint

Incredibly, she was given command of an army. Dressed in white armor, she led the French to miraculous victories, lifting the siege of Orléans in nine days. She went from farm girl to General in zero seconds flat.

The word command needs care. Joan was not a trained commander and did not direct tactics in the way a captain did. She carried a banner rather than fighting hand to hand, she was present at the front, and she was wounded by an arrow above the breast at the assault on the fortress of Les Tourelles. Her effect was on morale, on the willingness of a beaten army to attack, and on the political question of whether the dauphin's cause had God behind it. Contemporary soldiers testified later that she changed what the army was prepared to do.

3. The Trial

She was captured and put on trial. Despite being uneducated, her answers were brilliant. When asked if she was in a state of grace (a trap question), she replied: "If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me." She outsmarted the theologians and died a martyr at 19.

The question was a trap because either answer convicted her. Claiming to know she was in a state of grace was presumption; denying it conceded that her voices came from somewhere other than God. Her reply is in the trial record, and the clerks noted that the assembly was thrown by it. She was burned at the Old Market Place in Rouen on 30 May 1431. On the technical point, the Church did not canonise her as a martyr; her cause proceeded on heroic virtue and she was canonised under the title of virgin. The distinction is a canonical one and takes nothing away from how she died.

4. France in 1429

The Hundred Years' War had been running for ninety years when Joan appeared. The English held Normandy and Paris. The Duke of Burgundy, a French prince, was allied with them against the French crown. Under the Treaty of Troyes of 1420 the French king Charles VI had disinherited his own son and recognised the king of England as heir to France, so the dauphin Charles was a claimant without a coronation, holding the country south of the Loire and losing.

In October 1428 the English laid siege to Orléans, the key crossing on the Loire. If Orléans fell the road into the south was open and the dauphin's cause was probably finished. That is the situation into which a seventeen-year-old girl walked with a demand to be taken to the dauphin.

The coronation mattered as much as the fighting. A king of France was made at Reims, anointed with the oil kept there, and Reims sat in English-held territory. Joan's stated mission was to raise the siege of Orléans and to have the dauphin crowned at Reims, in that order, and both were accomplished within four months.

5. Domrémy: Who She Was Before

Joan was born to Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée at Domrémy, a village on the Meuse in a district loyal to the French crown but exposed to raiding. Her family were farmers of some standing in a small place. She could not read or write, and she signed her name later with help. She learned her prayers from her mother, went to the parish church, spun and sewed, and looked after animals.

The nullification proceedings of 1456 collected sworn testimony from people who had grown up with her, and it is unusually vivid. Neighbours described a girl who worked hard, went to confession often enough that it was remarked on, and was teased for spending time in church. Nothing in the testimony suggests any preparation for what happened.

She first approached Robert de Baudricourt, the local captain at Vaucouleurs, in 1428, asking for an escort to the dauphin. He sent her away. She returned in early 1429 and he gave her men, and she crossed several hundred miles of hostile country in men's clothing to reach Chinon. Before she was given troops she was examined by clergy at Poitiers, who found nothing against her faith and recommended that she be used. That examination is easily forgotten and it matters: two separate church panels looked at Joan, and they reached opposite conclusions in different political circumstances.

6. Orléans, Patay and the Coronation

Joan reached Orléans on 29 April 1429. The siege was lifted on 8 May, after a series of assaults on the English forts around the city in which she was present and in which she was wounded. The relief of Orléans is still commemorated in the city every year on 8 May.

The Loire campaign followed immediately, and at Patay on 18 June 1429 the French destroyed an English field army, reversing the pattern of a war in which English archers had won every major encounter for decades. The road to Reims opened, towns surrendered as the army advanced, and Charles VII was crowned in the cathedral at Reims on 17 July 1429, with Joan present holding her banner.

What came after is less often told. The assault on Paris in September 1429 failed, and Joan was wounded again. The king made a truce with Burgundy. The momentum stopped, and her position at court weakened. She kept fighting in smaller actions through the winter and spring.

7. Paris, Compiègne and the Capture

On 23 May 1430, in a sortie from the besieged town of Compiègne, Joan was pulled from her horse and captured by Burgundian troops. She was held by John of Luxembourg and then sold to the English for a large sum. The French king made no serious attempt to ransom her, which was the ordinary practice for a prisoner of value, and that silence is one of the hardest facts in her story.

The English wanted her tried and condemned by a church court rather than simply executed, because a heresy verdict would discredit the coronation she had made possible. That political requirement shaped everything about the proceedings at Rouen.

8. How the Trial at Rouen Actually Worked

The trial opened at Rouen in early 1431 under Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, a churchman closely aligned with the English administration in France. It was an inquisitorial process for heresy, conducted by clerics and assessors, and it lasted months.

Several things about it were irregular even by the standards of the time. Joan was held in a secular prison guarded by English soldiers rather than in a church prison with women attendants, which is what the law required for a woman on an ecclesiastical charge. She was denied counsel. She was nineteen, unlettered, and questioned by a room of trained theologians, often several at once. Her appeal to the pope was refused. The record of the interrogations survives, and it shows her answering with a caution that repeatedly frustrated the court, including the refusal to be drawn on the state of her soul.

The charge that finally held was clothing. Joan wore men's dress, and the court built its case on Deuteronomy 22:5, which forbids a woman to wear what belongs to a man. Joan's stated reason was practical: in a prison guarded by soldiers, a laced tunic and hose fastened together were protection. Around 24 May 1431 she signed an abjuration and accepted women's clothing. Within days she was found in male dress again, was declared a relapsed heretic, and was condemned.

She was handed to the secular authorities and burned at the Vieux-Marché in Rouen on 30 May 1431. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine, which is why there are no relics.

One distinction has to be made plainly. A church court condemned her, and the sentence was carried out by the English administration. The men who ran that court were churchmen serving a political master, and the Church itself said so twenty-five years later in the clearest terms available to it.

9. The Nullification of 1456

After the French recovered Rouen, Joan's mother Isabelle Romée petitioned for the case to be reopened, and Pope Callixtus III authorised a new inquiry. It ran from 1455 into 1456, took sworn evidence from well over a hundred witnesses, including her childhood neighbours, the soldiers who had fought beside her and clerks who had worked at the original trial, and examined the record of 1431 in detail.

The verdict, delivered on 7 July 1456, annulled the condemnation. It found the process corrupt, the articles against her falsified, and her rights denied, and it declared her innocent of the charges. The original sentence was formally torn up.

The nullification is why we know so much about her. It preserved the trial record and added a mass of testimony from people who had no reason to invent anything about a peasant girl dead for a quarter-century.

10. What the Church Says About Her Voices

The Church canonised Joan of Arc for the heroic practice of the virtues, not for the accuracy of her visions. Catholic teaching is that public revelation was completed in Christ and handed on by the apostles, and that private revelations do not add to it or improve on it; their role is to help people live the faith more fully in a particular time (CCC 67). No Catholic is required to believe that St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret spoke to a girl at Domrémy.

What can be said is what Joan said. Under repeated interrogation, with her life at stake and every incentive to soften the claim, she maintained that the voices were real and would not be moved off it. She also refused to make grand claims about herself and answered questions about her mission in plain and limited terms.

Medical explanations have been proposed for centuries, and none can be tested on a nineteen-year-old dead since 1431. A Catholic can hold that the voices were what she said they were, and can also hold that the canonisation rests on how she lived and died rather than on settling that question.

11. Canonisation, Feast Day and Patronage

Pope Pius X beatified Joan of Arc in 1909, and Pope Benedict XV canonised her on 16 May 1920. Pope Pius XI declared her a secondary patron of France in 1922. Her feast day is 30 May, the day she was burned.

She is invoked as a patron of France, of soldiers, and of prisoners and captives. In France her memory has been claimed by political movements of very different kinds over the last two centuries, which is a reason to keep the historical Joan and the national symbol distinct.

12. Why the Church Holds Her Up

Joan is held up for obedience to conscience under an authority that was wrong.

That is a difficult virtue for the Church to praise, and it praised it anyway. Joan was condemned by bishops and theologians, and she was right and they were wrong. The Catechism teaches that a person must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience, and that conscience must be formed and enlightened so that it judges according to reason and the divine law (CCC 1778, 1783). Joan had a badly educated conscience by any academic standard and a rightly formed one where it counted.

She is also held up for courage of a very concrete kind. She rode into fighting she had no training for, was wounded twice, was abandoned by the king she had crowned, and was questioned for months by men who intended to kill her. The final scene, in which a teenager asks for a cross to be held up in front of her while she burns, is not softened by anything.

And she is a permanent warning about clerical power in the service of politics. The Church's own second verdict is the evidence, and Catholics are better off pointing at it than explaining it away. Our page on scandals in the Church takes up that pattern more broadly.

13. What to Take From Joan of Arc

Answer carefully and briefly under pressure. The state of grace reply is a model. She did not perform, did not overclaim, and gave the question back to God.

Authority can be wrong and still be authority. Joan appealed to the pope and was refused. She did not leave the Church or denounce it. She held her ground inside it and was vindicated by it.

Do the work in front of you at the age you are. She was seventeen when she went to Chinon. Nothing about her preparation qualified her, and she went.

Expect abandonment. The king she crowned did not ransom her. Fidelity that depends on being backed up is not yet fidelity.

14. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Joan of Arc?

St. Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl, born about 1412 at Domrémy, who led French forces to lift the English siege of Orléans in May 1429 and saw Charles VII crowned at Reims in July of that year. She was captured in 1430, tried for heresy by a church court at Rouen, and burned at the stake on 30 May 1431 at about nineteen. The verdict was annulled by a second church process in 1456.

Why was Joan of Arc burned at the stake?

She was condemned as a relapsed heretic by a court under Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, a churchman aligned with the English. The charge that carried the verdict was her wearing of men's clothing, argued from Deuteronomy 22:5. She signed an abjuration around 24 May 1431, resumed male dress within days, and was declared relapsed. The English needed a heresy conviction in order to discredit the coronation she had made possible.

Did the Catholic Church admit it was wrong about Joan of Arc?

Yes. At the petition of her mother Isabelle Romée and with the authorisation of Pope Callixtus III, a new inquiry ran from 1455 to 1456, heard well over a hundred witnesses, and on 7 July 1456 annulled the condemnation, finding the process corrupt and the articles against her falsified, and declaring her innocent. Pope Benedict XV canonised her on 16 May 1920.

What did Joan of Arc's voices say they were?

At her trial she said they were St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret of Antioch, and that she first heard them at about thirteen in her father's garden. Catholic teaching treats such experiences as private revelation, which does not add to the public revelation completed in Christ (CCC 67), so no Catholic is required to believe they occurred. She was canonised for heroic virtue, not for the visions.

When is St. Joan of Arc's feast day?

Her feast day is 30 May, the day she was burned at Rouen in 1431. She was beatified by Pope Pius X in 1909, canonised by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920, and declared a secondary patron of France by Pope Pius XI in 1922. She is invoked as a patron of France, of soldiers, and of prisoners and captives.