May 30, 1431: Joan of Arc is burned at the stake.
Like Jesus Christ before and Kurt Cobain after her, Joan of Arc the mythic figure precedes by many steps her historical counterpart. Historians agree on the fundamental(s): She was a peasant girl who played some role in fighting the English during the Hundred Years’ War, and then the mythical Joan emerges at the suture where sparse historical fact and the legend that eclipses it pull together an image of the saint. So the mythistory goes, Joan conversed with angels and dead saints and, divinely inspired, led French military campaigns to triumph in the name of God and Charles VII during the war before being captured by a pro-English French faction. The Dauphin was crowned, but Joan was convicted of heresy (as evidenced by her sorcery and male clothing) and burned, aged nineteen, at the stake. Twenty-five years later her name was cleared; five hundred years after that the martyr Joan became Saint Joan, and in between the European Romantics drew on her story and image for inspiration.
The immortalized Jeanne, like Jesus, has maintained a certain allure over centuries to Western creatives and politicians alike. And there are many claimants to her myth. Lush 19th-century paintings of the wide-eyed maiden warrior, whether encased in armor or white dress set ablaze, emphasize her goodness, duty, and martyrdom. Romanticism and European nationalisms historically went hand in hand, of course, but in these works she exists on a more divine plane than that of street-level political struggle. Later on, Latin American groups both on the Left and Right, from Mexican soldaderas to Brazilian nationalist reactionaries, claimed Joan of Arc for any number of her endless virtues. Only one in a long line of woman leaders to have drawn comparison, former Brazilian president and guerrilla leader (somewhat like Joan herself) Dilma Rousseff was once branded the “Joan of Arc of the guerrillas” by a martial prosecutor. Whether this was begrudging praise or meant to insult only further obscures Joan’s modern meanings. Modern feminist movements and the feminist-minded are drawn either to her revolutionary fervor, or to her psyche, for embodying the misunderstanding and hysteria that seem to define postmodern womanhood.
On the other hand, consider Joan’s recent cameo in a presidential campaign ad of National Front candidate and right-wing heroine Marine Le Pen. In this brief shot a statue of Joan atop her horse rides in full armor to confront France’s enemies, be they enemies across the Channel or the Mediterranean. The camera venerates Joan, and Le Pen declares herself “truly, proudly, faithfully, obviously French.” One need not understand the annals of 15th century European warfare and political diplomacy to understand Joan here, reduced - plate with no filigree - and then elevated in this simplest of incarnations: defender of France against foreign hordes of insignificantly inexact origin, waging a war of irrelevant context.
Le Pen would cast herself in the same stripped-down mold: she is by her followers’ estimations steely and capable, and ready to go to war. Unlike other famous female leaders in history, she is not genderless but wishes to govern France like a tough mother. Both Le Pen and Joan’s modern young female adherents, with whom Le Pen would not otherwise overlap much politically, both agree then - Joan was a great woman. As far as nationalist symbols and heroes go, there is a French delicacy to this imagining of a crossdressing teenage girl as national savior against barbaric outside threat. (French civilizing colonialism, too, was refined; in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, French colonial military forces carry out an operation to root out and destroy Algerian rebels which they codename “Champagne.”)
Le Pen and others on the French right-wing’s enchantment with - and possessive claim on - the powerful, malleable symbolism of Joan far predates the ad. For one, Le Pen once staged a speech in front of a similar (possibly the very same) statue years before the most recent French presidential campaign began. Even in her own time, Joan and her victories helped to nurture the nascent French nation as much as it could be said to have existed in the 1400s, though her place in this narrative obviously amplified as a coherent national fervor flared further over the course of the 19th century.
Carl Theodor Dreyer, who directed Joan’s most famous celluloid dramatization The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), was neither Catholic nor French but Danish. This was not a petty biographical detail to the French nationalists who objected to his helming a film on the very great and very French saint; it was, rather, a cultural insult. Dreyer, on his part, captured both the plain peasant and posthumously divine Joan. His film introduces her as “not the military genius who inflicted on the enemy defeat after defeat, but a simple and natural young girl;” however, the film eventually concludes on the familiar mythic note:
As the sun went down Joan’s heart was sunk in the river, the heart which from that time became the heart of France, just as she herself was the incarnation of the eternal France.