Jeanne d’Arc, sometimes known as Jeannette, was born in 1412 at Domremy, a village in the Meuse valley.  Contrary to romantic legend, she was neither a shepherdess nor beautiful; her father was a locally prominent peasant-farmer, and she was irremediably plain.  Her country was split between two factions—in the north, the English and their allies the Burgundians, who supported the Plantagenet claim to the French throne; and south of the Loire, the followers of Charles the Dauphin, whose father was defeated at Agincourt when Joan was three years old.
      Beginning in her thirteenth year, saints appeared to her in visions—St. Michael, St. Catherine, St. Margaret—instructing her to prepare for a military destiny.  In 1429, dressed in male clothing, she arrived at the Dauphin’s court in Chinon and told him that she had been sent by God to liberate Orleans, where his army was besieged; to see him crowned in Rheims cathedral; and to drive the English out of France.  Four months later she had raised the siege and led the Dauphin to Rheims, where he was crowned Charles VII.  She was seventeen years old.
      In December, 1429, Charles raised her to the ranks of the nobility; he wanted a negotiated peace and hoped that she would not abandon her crusade.  In 1430, against his wishes, Joan took up arms again and was captured by the Burgundians at Compiégne.  They sold her to the English, who handed her over to an ecclesiastical court in Rouen. After a trial lasting more than three months, she was condemned to death by burning, in the late spring of 1421, her twentieth year.
      A quarter of a century later the church changed its mind and declared that the verdict had been unjust; but Joan was not canonized until 1920.  During the First World War, France had no diplomatic relations with the Vatican, which was thought to be pro-German.  Less than two weeks after the (rest of material missing).

  Joan in the Theatre
Joan made her debut on the English stage at a time when politics and religion were virtually inseparable.  In the 1590’s, a Protestant patriot offered a partisan view of a militant French Catholic. Some modern historians have supported Shakespeare’s Joan in her claim to be of royal birth.  One theory suggests that she was the illegitimate half sister of the Dauphin, discreetly farmed out of the d’Arc family, and carefully groomed for the role of the virgin savior suddenly erupting from obscurity. The English fiction of Joan the demon witch was booed off the stage of Covent Garden in 1789, when a play called ‘The Mystery of the Maid of Orleans’ ended with Joan being dragged down to hell by howling devils.  On the second night, she went to heaven under angelic escort, and the audience cheered.  Her exploits against the English were forgotten; all that mattered was that she was a martyr. Not until the age of reason, ironically, did Joan become an international heroine. Formerly, men had believed that everything belonged to Caesar or God, the State or the Church; now they were beginning to believe that the essential part of a man was that which belonged to neither. Accordingly, writers started to focus their attention of Joan the individualist, the upholder of inner truth against official truth.  There was a spate of romantic Joans.  In 1801 she appears as a lyrical rebel in Schiller’s tragedy, ‘Die Jungfrau von Orleans,’ which moves so far towards fantasy that it omits the trial altogether; Schiller’s Joan dies in battle, with her boots on.  Fact reasserted itself in 1841, when the transcript of the trial was published in full for the first time. As the power of the modern state grew, one of the great themes of twentieth-century drama began to emerge:  the individual versus authority.  Joan was a perfect symbol of this conflict, and that is how Shaw used her in ‘Saint Joan.  His model for the saint was a middle-aged woman who organized summer schools for the Fabian Society.  Shaw inscribed her copy of the play; ‘To Mary Hankinson, the only woman I know who does not believe that she is the model for Joan and the only woman who actually was.’   Letter from Shaw to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, September 8, 1913:

  ‘I shall do a Joan play some day, beginning with the sweeping up of the cinders and orange peel after her martyrdom, and going on with Joan’s arrival in heaven.  I should have God about to damn the English for their share in her betrayal and Joan producing an end of burnt stick in arrest of Judgment.  “What’s that?  Is it one of the faggots?” says God.  “No,” says Joan, “it’s what is left of the two sticks a common English soldier tied together and gave me as I went to the stake; for they wouldn’t even give me a crucifix; and you cannot damn the common people of England, represented by that soldier, because of poor cowardly riff raff of barons and bishops were too futile to resist the devil.”
‘That soldier is the only redeeming figure in the whole business.  English literature must be saved (by an Irishman, as usual) from the disgrace of having nothing to show concerning Joan except the piffling libel in “Henry VI”, which reminds me that one of my scenes will be Voltaire and Shakespeare running down bye streets in heaven to avoid meeting Joan.  Would you like to play Joan and come in on horseback in armour and fight innumerable supers?’