1. Why the abandonment variant belongs in the suite
The cases examined to this point share a common structure in which the regime that destroys the deliverer is also the regime that wields the instrument of destruction, the spear, the potsherd, the prosecution, the tablet of gold, the executioner’s sword. The regime fears, and the regime strikes. The Joan of Arc case introduces a variant in which the structure holds but the mechanism divides, in which the regime that the deliverer saved does not itself strike the blow but instead abandons her to the enemy who does, and this division is the first reason the suite gives the case a full treatment. For Joan was not killed by the French crown she had secured; she was killed by the English and their Burgundian allies, the enemy she had fought, through a tribunal of churchmen in the enemy’s service. The hand that lit the fire was not the hand she had saved. And yet the case belongs unmistakably to the phenomenon, because the regime she saved, the French crown she had crowned, abandoned her to that fire, neither ransoming nor rescuing nor making any serious effort to save the deliverer who had given the king his throne, and gained by being rid of a figure whose prestige and independent authority had become inconvenient.
The abandonment variant is analytically valuable precisely because it separates two things that the other cases combine, the regime’s fear of the deliverer and the regime’s action against the deliverer. In the abandonment case the regime does not act; it refrains from acting, and the refraining is itself the instrument of destruction. The deliverer falls into the enemy’s hands, and the regime she saved, which could ransom or rescue her, does nothing, and by doing nothing allows the enemy to destroy her. This is a subtler form of the phenomenon than the spear or the tribunal, for it accomplishes the deliverer’s destruction without the regime’s fingerprints upon the deed, and it requires the historian to demonstrate not what the regime did but what it conspicuously failed to do, and to show that the failure served the same fear and the same interest that drove the more active destructions. The case thus extends the phenomenon’s range to include the destruction by abandonment, the regime’s calculated inaction that delivers the savior to the enemy, and it shows that the fear of the deliverer’s prestige can express itself as a failure to save as readily as a determination to kill.
The second reason the case belongs is the unusually pure form in which it presents the deliverer’s prestige as the source of the regime’s discomfort, for Joan possessed a prestige and an independent authority of a kind that the French court found difficult to assimilate even while it depended on her, and her capture relieved the court of a figure who had become as much an embarrassment as an asset. The case shows the phenomenon’s fear in the form of relief rather than dread, the regime’s quiet gladness to be rid of a deliverer whose continued prominence would have been awkward, and this register of the fear, the relief at an inconvenient savior’s removal, is one the suite finds nowhere so clearly.
The third reason is the legal machinery of the condemnation, which makes the case another instance of law deployed against a deliverer, though here the law was the enemy’s law and the tribunal the enemy’s tribunal, used to destroy the savior under the forms of an ecclesiastical trial whose verdict was determined before it began. The suite attends to this machinery because it shows the same device the other cases display, the destruction of the deliverer through legal forms that serve a predetermined end, operating here in the register of a heresy trial conducted by the enemy with the abandoned deliverer in their power.
2. The deliverance: Orléans, the road to Reims, and the crowning of the king
The deliverance Joan rendered, the first criterion of the phenomenon, was the turning of the tide in a war that France was losing, the relief of the besieged city whose fall would have opened the way to the conquest of what remained of the French cause, and the bringing of the disinherited heir to his coronation, by which his contested claim to the throne was given the sanction that transformed his fortunes. France in the early fifteenth century, in the long war with England, was in desperate case, much of the country in English or Burgundian hands, the heir to the French throne uncrowned and his legitimacy in question, and the war going so badly that the French cause seemed near collapse (Pernoud & Clin, 1998; DeVries, 1999). Into this situation came Joan, a young woman of the common people who declared that she was sent to save France and to bring the heir to his coronation, and who, against all the expectations of the age, was given a place in the war and proceeded to justify it.
Her first and greatest deliverance was the relief of Orléans, the city whose siege was the focus of the war and whose fall would have been a catastrophe for the French cause. Joan came to the besieged city, raised the spirits of its defenders and the French forces, and in a series of assaults broke the siege and drove off the English, a victory that astonished France and Europe and that marked the turning of the war’s tide (Pernoud & Clin, 1998; DeVries, 1999). The relief of Orléans was a deliverance in the strict sense the suite requires, the turning aside of a threat whose realization would have been disastrous, accomplished through Joan’s leadership and the spirit she gave to forces that had been losing, and it made her at a stroke the most celebrated figure of the French cause.
Her second deliverance, no less consequential though political rather than purely military, was the bringing of the heir to his coronation. After Orléans, Joan urged the march to Reims, the traditional place of the coronation of French kings, deep in territory that had to be crossed or taken to reach it, and she carried the heir and the army there through a campaign that secured the route, so that the heir was crowned king at Reims as Charles VII, his contested claim given the sacred sanction of the coronation that transformed him from a disputed pretender into the anointed king of France (Pernoud & Clin, 1998; DeVries, 1999). This was the deliverance that gave the case its title, for Joan crowned the king, secured for the heir the throne whose legitimacy had been in question, and made him, by the coronation she brought about, the king he had not securely been before. The first criterion is met fully, for Joan turned the war and crowned the king, delivering the French cause from the collapse it had faced and giving Charles the throne he owed to her.
3. The turn: the inconvenient deliverer and the failure of the crown
The phenomenon’s third criterion, the regime’s fear as the operative factor in the destruction, takes in the Joan of Arc case the particular form of the court’s growing discomfort with a deliverer whose prestige, independence, and continued military ambition had become as much a liability as an asset, and whose capture the court received with a relief that expressed itself in the failure to save her. The fear here is not the dread of a rival to the throne, for Joan claimed no throne and threatened no one’s position; it is rather the discomfort of a court with a figure too prominent, too independent, and too much a reminder of how much the king owed to a peasant girl, a figure whose continued presence had become awkward and whose removal would be a quiet convenience.
After the coronation, the relation between Joan and the court cooled. The king and his advisers, having gained the coronation and the turning of the war, were inclined toward negotiation and caution, while Joan pressed for continued vigorous campaigning, for the recovery of Paris and the prosecution of the war to victory, and her ambition increasingly diverged from the court’s policy (Pernoud & Clin, 1998; DeVries, 1999). An assault on Paris, which Joan urged and led, failed, and the failure diminished her standing and gave the cautious party at court reason to set her aside. The court’s enthusiasm for the deliverer waned as her usefulness seemed to pass and her independence and continued military ambition became inconvenient, and Joan found herself increasingly marginalized, supported less, given less of a part in the policy she wished to pursue. The deliverer who had crowned the king had become, within a year of the coronation, a figure the court was content to see diminished, her prestige now an awkwardness and her ambition a complication.
It was in this state of cooled relations and diminished support that Joan was captured. In a skirmish at Compiègne, Joan was taken prisoner by the Burgundians, the French allies of the English, and the manner of her capture, with the gates of the town closed behind her and no rescue mounted, has raised the question, never resolved, of whether she was simply unlucky or whether the closing of the gates reflected the indifference or worse of those who might have saved her (Pernoud & Clin, 1998; DeVries, 1999). Whatever the truth of the capture itself, what followed is the heart of the abandonment case, for once Joan was in enemy hands the French crown that owed her its throne did nothing to save her.
4. The abandonment: the ransom not paid and the rescue not attempted
The abandonment is the case’s defining feature and the form the phenomenon takes here, and it consists in the conspicuous failure of the French crown to ransom, rescue, or make any serious effort to save the deliverer who had given the king his throne, a failure that delivered Joan to the enemy who destroyed her.
By the custom of the age, a prisoner of war of standing could be ransomed, and Joan, the most celebrated figure of the French cause, the woman who had crowned the king, was a prisoner whose ransom the French crown could have sought and very possibly secured. The Burgundians who held her sold her to the English, who wanted her destroyed, and at no point in the long process by which she passed into English hands and was brought to trial did the French crown make any serious effort to ransom her, to rescue her, or to intervene on her behalf (Pernoud & Clin, 1998; DeVries, 1999). The king she had crowned, who owed his throne to her deliverance and his coronation to her insistence, did nothing. He raised no ransom, mounted no rescue, made no diplomatic effort to save the deliverer from the enemy who meant to burn her, and his silence and inaction through the months of her captivity and trial are the abandonment that the suite identifies as the phenomenon’s form in this case.
The historian must consider whether the failure to save Joan reflected mere incapacity rather than calculated abandonment, for it might be argued that the French crown lacked the means to ransom or rescue her. The argument does not hold. The French crown was capable of diplomacy and of raising funds, and the woman in question was the most valuable prisoner of the war on the French side, the deliverer of Orléans and the maker of the king; had the crown wished to save her, it had means to attempt it, and its complete failure to make any serious effort cannot be explained by incapacity alone. The failure is better explained by the court’s diminished attachment to the deliverer, by the convenience of her removal, and by the awkwardness that her continued prominence had come to represent. The court that had cooled toward Joan, that found her independence and ambition inconvenient, that was content to see her diminished, was a court for which her capture by the enemy was a quiet relief, the removal of an embarrassment by a hand other than its own, and its failure to save her was the expression of that relief, the calculated inaction that allowed the enemy to do what the court itself would not have dared and need not now trouble to prevent. The operative cause of Joan’s destruction was, on the French side, this abandonment, the failure of the regime she saved to save her, and the abandonment served the same fear and the same interest, the discomfort with a too-prominent deliverer, that drove the more active destructions in the other cases.
5. The destruction: the trial, the threat of torture, and the fire
The destruction itself was accomplished by the enemy, through a tribunal of churchmen in English service, and though the hand was the enemy’s the suite attends to the legal machinery because it is another instance of law deployed against a deliverer, the destruction accomplished through the forms of a trial whose verdict was determined in advance.
Joan was tried by an ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy and related offenses, a tribunal presided over by a bishop in the English interest and composed of churchmen who served the enemy’s purpose, which was to destroy the deliverer and, by convicting her of heresy, to discredit the king she had crowned by tainting his coronation with the condemnation of the witch or heretic who had brought it about (Tisset & Lanhers, 1960–1971; Pernoud & Clin, 1998). The trial was conducted with the forms of legal and ecclesiastical process, the examinations, the articles of accusation, the deliberations, but its outcome was determined by the interest of those who had convened it, and the records of the condemnation trial, preserved and edited, show a proceeding in which the deliverer, held in harsh conditions and worn down by relentless examination, was maneuvered toward a condemnation that had been intended from the first (Tisset & Lanhers, 1960–1971). Joan was held not in the church’s custody, as was proper for an ecclesiastical prisoner, but in a secular prison in chains, guarded by enemy soldiers, denied the conditions and the counsel that the proceeding’s own forms should have afforded her, and she was threatened with torture to extract the confession the tribunal sought (Tisset & Lanhers, 1960–1971; Pernoud & Clin, 1998).
The end came through a condemnation for relapse. Joan, worn down and momentarily induced to a recantation, afterward resumed the conduct the tribunal had condemned, and was declared a relapsed heretic, the condemnation that carried the sentence of death, and she was burned at the stake, the deliverer of France destroyed by fire at the hands of the enemy she had fought, abandoned by the king she had crowned (Tisset & Lanhers, 1960–1971; Pernoud & Clin, 1998). The destruction was complete, accomplished through the forms of a trial whose verdict served the enemy’s purpose, with the French crown that owed her its throne standing by in silence, and the deliverer who had turned the war and crowned the king died in the flames while the king she had made did nothing to save her.
6. The afterlife: the rehabilitation and the verdict reversed
The Joan of Arc case, like the Yue Fei case, is distinguished by a moral reversal that followed the deliverer’s death, the rehabilitation that cleared her name and the eventual elevation that made her one of the supreme national symbols of France, and the suite attends to this afterlife because it bears, as in the Yue Fei case, on the closing argument about the verdict of history reversing the verdict of the regime.
Years after Joan’s death, when the war had turned decisively in France’s favor and the king she had crowned had recovered his kingdom, a process was opened to reconsider the condemnation, and the original trial was examined, its irregularities exposed, its witnesses re-heard, and its verdict overturned, so that Joan was declared to have been wrongly condemned and her name was cleared (Pernoud & Clin, 1998). It is not lost on the historian that the king who had abandoned her had an interest in the rehabilitation, for the condemnation of Joan as a heretic had tainted his coronation, and the clearing of her name served to cleanse the title that her condemnation had stained; the rehabilitation that vindicated the deliverer also served the interest of the regime that had abandoned her, removing the stain that her condemnation had placed on the king she had crowned. But whatever the mixed motives of the rehabilitation, its effect was the reversal of the regime’s, or rather the enemy’s, judgment, the declaration that the condemned heretic had been wrongly condemned, and over the centuries that followed Joan rose to become one of the supreme symbols of France, venerated as the maid who saved the nation, eventually canonized, her memory honored as that of the deliverer betrayed and vindicated.
The afterlife of the Joan of Arc case differs from that of Yue Fei in that the regime’s abandonment, being a failure to act rather than an active destruction, did not leave so clear a villain to be condemned by posterity as the minister Qin Hui, and the verdict of history fell more heavily on the enemy who burned her than on the king who abandoned her. But the verdict reversed the destruction nonetheless, declaring the deliverer innocent and elevating her to honor, and the king’s abandonment, though less remembered than the enemy’s fire, stands in the historical record as the failure it was, the silence of the crown that owed her its throne. The suite holds that the abandonment was the phenomenon’s form in this case, and that posterity’s vindication of the deliverer is the reversal of the judgment, the enemy’s and the abandoning crown’s alike, that had allowed her to be destroyed.
7. The phenomenon analyzed: the four concepts in the abandonment case
The four analytical concepts of Paper 1 are present in the Joan of Arc case, though the abandonment variant gives several of them a distinctive form.
The convertibility of capability into threat appears in the Joan of Arc case in an altered register, for Joan’s capability did not threaten the king with displacement, since she claimed no throne, but it threatened the court’s control of policy and its comfort, for her military success had given her an independent authority and a prestige that made her difficult to direct and her continued ambition an obstacle to the court’s preferred course of caution and negotiation. Her capability had made her a power in her own right, a figure whose prestige rivaled the influence of the court’s own counsels, and the court’s discomfort with a deliverer it could not fully control is the form the convertibility takes here, the capability that won the war becoming the independence that the court found inconvenient. When her capability seemed to wane, after the failure at Paris, the court found it the easier to set her aside, and when she was captured the court found her removal a convenience rather than a loss.
Prestige as a rival source of legitimacy appears in the awkward fact that the king’s throne rested, in part, on the deliverance of a peasant girl, and that Joan’s prestige was a standing reminder of how much the king owed to her and how little to his own power. A king whose coronation had been brought about by a young woman of the common people, whose throne had been secured by her deliverance, held a legitimacy that was in a sense indebted to her, and her continued prominence kept that debt visible. The removal of the deliverer removed the reminder, and the court’s relief at her capture was, in part, relief at the removal of a figure whose prestige complicated the king’s own claim to have won his throne. The rehabilitation’s service to the king’s title, the cleansing of the coronation from the stain of the condemnation, shows the same concern from the other side, the regime’s interest in managing the relation between the deliverer’s prestige and the king’s legitimacy.
The asymmetry between the irreplaceable individual and the self-preserving institution appears in the divergence between Joan’s interest and ambition, which was the vigorous prosecution of the war to victory, and the court’s interest, which was the consolidation of what had been gained and the pursuit of negotiation, and in the court’s readiness to set aside the deliverer once her usefulness seemed to pass. While the war hung in the balance and the coronation was to be won, Joan’s capability was indispensable and her prominence was tolerated; once the coronation was achieved and the court turned toward caution, her capability was no longer needed and her independence became an obstacle, and the institution, acting on its preference for its own preferred policy and its comfort, was content to set her aside and, when she was captured, to let her go. The asymmetry was resolved, as always, in favor of the institution, here through the abandonment that allowed the enemy to remove the deliverer the court no longer wished to accommodate.
The use of legal form to legitimate the destruction appears in the heresy trial, though here the form was the enemy’s and the tribunal the enemy’s, used to destroy the deliverer under the appearance of an ecclesiastical proceeding whose verdict served the enemy’s purpose. The trial clothed the destruction in the forms of law and religion, the examinations and articles and deliberations of a heresy proceeding, but the outcome was determined by the interest of those who had convened it, and the records of the trial show the forms manipulated toward a predetermined condemnation. The French crown’s part in this was not the wielding of the legal form, which was the enemy’s, but the abandonment that allowed the enemy to wield it, the failure to save the deliverer from the tribunal that the enemy had convened to destroy her, and so the legal form’s function in this case was served by the regime’s inaction as much as by the enemy’s action, the destruction through law made possible by the abandonment that delivered the deliverer to the law’s enemy hands.
8. The abandonment variant and the standard of the suite
Read against the cases that precede it, the Joan of Arc case confirms the phenomenon’s structure and contributes the abandonment variant, the destruction of the deliverer accomplished not by the regime’s own hand but by the regime’s calculated failure to save her from the enemy who destroyed her. As in Saul’s pursuit of David, in Athens’s exile of Themistocles, in Rome’s persecution of Scipio, in the Chinese executions, in the late Roman murders, in Justinian’s suspicion of Belisarius, and in the judicial murder of Yue Fei, a genuine deliverer is destroyed in consequence of the regime’s fear of and discomfort with the prestige and independence the deliverance created. The Joan of Arc case is distinguished by the division of the mechanism, the regime fearing and abandoning while the enemy strikes, and by the register of the fear as relief and convenience rather than dread, the court’s quiet gladness to be rid of an inconvenient deliverer expressing itself in the failure to save her.
The abandonment variant extends the suite’s range in an important way, for it shows that the phenomenon does not require the regime to wield the instrument of destruction, that the regime’s fear of the deliverer can accomplish her destruction through inaction as readily as through action, by allowing the enemy to do what the regime itself wished done but would not do with its own hand. This is a subtler and in some ways a more insidious form of the phenomenon, for it accomplishes the destruction without the regime’s overt guilt, the deliverer destroyed by the enemy while the regime that abandoned her preserves the appearance of innocence, and it requires the historian to read the destruction in the regime’s silence and inaction rather than in its deeds. The suite holds that the abandonment is the phenomenon nonetheless, that the regime that fails to save its deliverer from the enemy, having the means and refraining from the act, has destroyed her as surely as if it had struck the blow, and that the fear and the interest served by the abandonment are the same fear and interest that drove the active destructions.
The case differs from the late Roman cases in that the regime that abandoned Joan did not at once collapse, for France went on, under the king she had crowned, to win the war and recover the kingdom; the self-defeat in this case is the moral one, the stain that the abandonment and the condemnation placed upon the king’s title and the dishonor that the failure to save the deliverer fixed upon the crown, a stain that the rehabilitation sought to cleanse but that the historical record preserves. The king won his kingdom, but he won it having abandoned the woman who gave it to him, and the verdict of history, which elevated Joan to the honor of a national symbol and remembered the abandonment as the failure it was, rendered against the regime the moral judgment that the suite finds in every case, the deliverer vindicated and the regime’s treatment of her condemned. The king she crowned let her burn, and history crowned her in her turn, the deliverer abandoned by the throne she made becoming, in the long verdict of the nation, greater than the throne and the king alike.
References
DeVries, K. (1999). Joan of Arc: A military leader. Sutton Publishing.
Pernoud, R., & Clin, M.-V. (1998). Joan of Arc: Her story (J. D. Adams, Trans. & Rev.; B. Wheeler, Ed.). St. Martin’s Press.
Tisset, P., & Lanhers, Y. (Eds.). (1960–1971). Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc (Vols. 1–3). Société de l’histoire de France.
