Joan of Arc was a peasant girl from Domremy who said that saints spoke to her and told her to save France. She was thirteen when the voices started. She was seventeen when she convinced the French court to let her lead an army. She was nineteen when the English burned her alive. The entire arc of her public life lasted approximately two years. In that time, she reversed the course of the Hundred Years' War.

She Convinced a King by Telling Him Something Only He Knew

In 1429, Joan presented herself at the court of the Dauphin Charles, the uncrowned heir to the French throne. France was losing the war. The English controlled Paris and most of northern France. Charles was hiding in Chinon, running out of money and allies. He had no reason to listen to a teenage peasant girl who claimed God had sent her. According to contemporary accounts documented by historians at the Centre Jeanne d'Arc in Orleans, Joan told Charles something in a private audience that convinced him she was genuine. Nobody knows what she said. The secret was never revealed. Whatever it was, it worked. Charles gave her armor, a banner, and command of troops. She led the relief of Orleans, which had been under English siege for months. The siege was broken in nine days. She then led the French army through a series of victories that cleared the path to Reims, where Charles was crowned king in July 1429. She stood beside him at the coronation, holding her banner. She was seventeen years old.

The Trial Was the Crime

Joan was captured in 1430 by Burgundian forces allied with England and sold to the English. The English turned her over to an ecclesiastical court that charged her with heresy and witchcraft. The trial was conducted by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a man whose loyalties to the English crown were well documented and whose interest in theological accuracy was secondary to his interest in producing a conviction. Legal historians at the Sorbonne have studied the trial transcript, which survives in remarkable detail, and concluded that it was procedurally corrupt from the beginning. Joan was denied legal counsel. She was questioned for days without rest. She was asked trick questions designed to make her contradict herself on theological points that professional theologians found difficult. She answered with a directness that astonished her interrogators. Asked whether she was in a state of grace, a question designed to trap her either way, she replied that if she was, God would keep her there, and if she was not, God would put her there. The notary recording the trial wrote in the margin that the judges were stupefied. They convicted her anyway. She was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, in the marketplace of Rouen. She was nineteen. Twenty-five years later, the Catholic Church reviewed the trial and declared it invalid. Five hundred years after that, they made her a saint. The voices she heard have never been explained. The courage she showed has never been equaled. She heard something, she believed it, and she acted on it, and the world bent.