The English claimed many offenses against Joan of Arc. But when they burned her at the stake in Rouen, France on May 30, 1431, they not only immortalized the 19-year-old, but made her a national symbol for the French cause during the long-fought Hundred Years’ War.
Born a peasant in a small French village, the illiterate girl claimed to hear divine voices and see visions of St. Michael, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret of Antioch from the age of 13. Their message: Help Charles VII, heir of Charles VI, be named the rightful king of France.
Convincing Charles to let her fight—and dressed as a man—Joan led the liberation of Orleans, triumphed with other victories against the English, and soon Charles VII was crowned. But a series of missteps, including her failure to liberate Paris followed, and on May 23, 1430, she was captured by the Duke of Burgundy’s men, jailed for more than a year and put on trial for charges including heresy, witchcraft and violating divine law for dressing like a man.
The trial itself was an ecclesiastical procedure covered under canon law—a heresy investigation carried out as an inquisition, according to Hobbins.
“Joan of Arc was tried as a heretic not because she was a woman, though that factor played an important part, nor because she heard voices, but because she heard voices telling her to attack the English,” Hobbins writes. “Joan believed that God favored the French: God was on her side. … As long as she insisted … that her voices were saints telling her to attack the English, she was doomed.”
Hobbins adds that the motivation for the trial was political, because Joan’s claims were political.
“We say and determine that you have falsely imagined revelations and divine apparitions, that you are a pernicious temptress, presumptuous, credulous, rash, superstitious, a false prophetess, a blasphemer against God and his saints, scornful of God in his sacraments, a transgressor of divine law, sacred doctrine, and ecclesiastical decrees; that you are seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic, straying in many ways from our faith; and that in these ways you have rashly sinned against God and his Church.”
On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.
The Hundred Years’ War waged on until 1453, with the French finally beating back the English invaders.
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“If true,” he writes, “they would have invalidated the English claim to legitimate rule in France. Of course, exposing Joan as a fraud, or as someone deluded by evil spirits, would also have struck at the legitimacy of Charles VII.”
Death, Then Sainthood
On May 24 Joan signed a retraction, and, on the condition she would dress as a woman, her death sentence was reduced to life in prison. But four days later, she said the voices had returned and she was again found dressed in men’s clothing. All 27 trial masters pronounced her a relapsed heretic.
According to Hobbin’s trial translation, they declared: “Whenever the deadly poison of heresy infects a member of the Church, who is then transformed into a member of Satan, utmost care must be taken to keep the contagion of the disease from spreading to other parts of the mystical body of Christ.”
