The Peasant Girl Born to Save a Kingdom

Tradition holds that on January 6, 1412 — the feast of the Epiphany — a baby girl was baptized in the village church of Domrémy, in northeastern France. Her parents, Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée, were peasant farmers, poor but not destitute. Nothing about the child suggested destiny. Yet within nineteen years, that girl would wear armor, lift the siege of Orléans, stand beside a crowned king — and burn at the stake for it.

France in 1412 was a kingdom coming apart. The Hundred Years' War with England had dragged on for generations; the English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and much of the north; the uncrowned French heir, the Dauphin Charles, was a discouraged young man sheltering in the south. Domrémy itself, though surrounded by Burgundian territory, stayed loyal to Charles.

Joan was, by all accounts, a devout and serious child — not the shepherdess of legend, but a skilled spinner and seamstress who loved the poor and spent hours in prayer. When she was about thirteen, she said, the voices began: Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, speaking to her in her father's garden. At first their messages were personal. Then they became a command: drive the English from France and bring the Dauphin to Reims to be crowned.

At sixteen she walked to the fortified town of Vaucouleurs and demanded that its commander, Robert de Baudricourt, escort her to the Dauphin's court at Chinon. He laughed at her — the first time. She returned, and this time she came with a prediction: a French defeat at the Battle of Rouvray, near Orléans, which news confirmed days later. Baudricourt, shaken, gave her an escort.

At Chinon, the seventeen-year-old peasant girl convinced the Dauphin that her mission was real. Given armor, a banner, and a place with the relief army, she marched to Orléans in the spring of 1429. The siege was lifted in nine days. Victory followed victory, and in July 1429 Charles VII was crowned king at Reims, with Joan standing beside him holding her banner. French morale, broken for a generation, was transformed.

It could not last. In May 1430, at Compiègne, Burgundian troops captured her and sold her to the English. Her trial at Rouen, run by the pro-English Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais, was a political proceeding dressed as a heresy case. On May 30, 1431 — not yet twenty — Joan was burned at the stake in Rouen's marketplace.

The verdict did not survive her. In 1456, a new church court examined the trial, debunked its charges, and declared her innocent. Over the centuries she became the national symbol of France itself. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized as a saint in 1920.

Joan of Arc remains one of the most studied figures of the Middle Ages — a peasant teenager who, for one blazing year, bent the course of a hundred-year war. Whatever one makes of the voices she heard, the facts of what she did are beyond dispute: she arrived when France was losing, and she left it with a crowned king.

Photo: Pierre Roche, CC0 (via Wikimedia Commons / Paris Musées). An 1889 photograph of the birthplace house of Joan of Arc in Domrémy, France — illustrative rather than contemporary with her life.