In real life, she broke her sword (possibly a Dark Ages relic of Charles Martel) by whacking prostitutes on their backsides to drive them from her army camps: we must wait for the next world to see what she has done to her literary hijackers. Yet again, poor Joan was made into an ideological hobby-horse. His epic, multi-volume, Histoire de France treats “Joan of Arc as the very soul of France and the living symbol of his own patriotic and democratic ideals” that culminate, curiously enough, in the secularist Revolution and Reign of Terror. The French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) may have been among the first to contaminate his craft with his own Romantic Age feelings and personality, rather as dubious film-makers now write themselves into their documentaries ahistorically. Only the Valkyrie’s tin brassiere seems to have been omitted. Schiller leaped to her rescue in 1801, but the commercial and cultural demands of High Romanticism made him turn her into a pre-Wagnerian, giving her a magic helmet, playing down religion and killing her off in battle instead of at the stake. She was again abducted, this time by the Enlightenment in 1756 as The Maid of Oranges (instead of Orleans), in an anti-religious satire by Voltaire. By 1590 and renamed Joan le Pucelle, Shakespeare wrote her into Henry VI, Part 1 as a falsely pious witch put to death, doubtless popular among Tudor England’s Francophobe, Protestant, ticket-buying audiences. Within Joan’s lifetime Christine de Pizan penned an elegiac poem to her. But her celebrity accelerated in the mid-Nineteenth Century, thanks partly to a now-forgotten historian and a famous American author, Mark Twain. Her recent canonisation may seem surprising for she seems to have been among us forever, and in some ways she has been popular and venerated for almost 600 years. Her corrupt, politicised conviction, at the hands of foreign invaders, was overturned a quarter-century later by Pope Callixtus III, but she was beatified only in 1909 and canonised just within living memory in 1920. Her basic story is legend: how during little more than a year of hearing her holy “voices,” the scarcely-educated farm-girl led her nation and her faith to repeated victories on the battlefield and how only a year after that, at age 19, she was burnt alive. Saint Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the Maid of Orleans, virgin and martyr, patron saint of soldiers and one of the patron saints of France… But they always missed the face-the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful girl.” “I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years,” Mark Twain said, “and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her.
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