The executioner at Rouen burned her body, burned what was left of it twice more, and threw the ashes into the Seine, under orders that left nothing for anyone to gather. Joan of Arc is a saint without a tomb. The one set of remains ever venerated as hers — a jar of blackened bone and cloth found in the attic of a Paris pharmacy in 1867, labelled as swept from beneath her stake, and shown at Chinon for more than fifty years — was opened to fourteen specialists in 2007, whose analysis matched the coating on it to the embalming materials of ancient Egypt. Pilgrims go instead to the font she was baptised in, the statue she prayed before, and the two pieces of ground that hold her beginning and her end.
Life & Legacy
She was born around 1412 at Domrémy, a farming village on the Meuse in what is now the Vosges, and was baptised in the village church of Saint-Rémy. She was about thirteen when she began to hear a voice she identified as St. Michael the Archangel, later joined by St. Catherine and St. Margaret. The voices told her to go to the dauphin, Charles, whose kingdom had been reduced by the English and their Burgundian allies to a rump south of the Loire, and whose coronation city lay in enemy hands.
In 1428 she walked to Vaucouleurs and asked its captain, Robert de Baudricourt, for an escort. He refused her twice. In February 1429 he relented, and she rode out of the town gate on 23 February with six companions, dressed as a man for the eleven-day ride across hostile country. She reached Chinon and was received by Charles on 25 February. Theologians at Poitiers questioned her for three weeks on her orthodoxy and her claims; she was equipped at Tours and sent to the army.
What followed took four months. The siege of Orléans, five months old, broke on 8 May 1429. The English field army was destroyed at Patay on 18 June. On 17 July, in the cathedral at Reims, Charles VII was crowned king of France with Joan standing near the altar holding her banner.
Her fortunes turned as quickly. The assault on Paris on 8 September 1429 failed at the Porte Saint-Honoré, where a crossbow bolt went through her thigh and the king's council ordered a withdrawal; she never entered the city. On 23 May 1430 she received communion at the church of Saint-Jacques in Compiègne, rode out on a sortie, and was pulled from her horse and taken by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English.
The trial at Rouen ran through the spring of 1431 under Bishop Pierre Cauchon, on charges of heresy. She was condemned and burned in the Place du Vieux-Marché on 30 May 1431, at about nineteen. Twenty-five years later Pope Callixtus III authorised a second process, and in 1456 the verdict against her was annulled. She was beatified in 1909 and canonised by Benedict XV on 16 May 1920.
Patronage
On 2 March 1922, Pope Pius XI named her a secondary patron of France, alongside the Blessed Virgin Mary as principal patroness. She is also invoked by soldiers, by prisoners and captives, and by those mocked for their faith.
Feast Day
May 30 — the day of her death. France keeps a second observance, a national feast of Joan of Arc fixed by law in 1920 on the second Sunday of May, which is the date the cities of Orléans and Rouen build their celebrations around.
Pilgrimage Sites
Joan left no relics, so the places that draw pilgrims are the ones that hold something she touched, or the ground where her life began and ended.
Domrémy-la-Pucelle, Vosges — the shrine of her birth. The church of Saint-Rémy keeps the font she was baptised in, in the south transept, and a reliquary bust by Maxime Real del Sarte, Le dernier soupir, whose base holds earth taken from the site of the pyre at Rouen. Her family's house stands beside the church. On the hillside above the village, where she said she first heard the voices, the Basilica of Saint Joan of Arc — the Bois-Chenu — was begun in 1881, finished in 1926, and raised to a minor basilica in 1938.
Rouen, Seine-Maritime — the ground of her death. A cross in the Place du Vieux-Marché marks the spot; across the same square the Church of Saint Joan of Arc, designed by Louis Arretche, was consecrated in 1979. The diocese keeps her feast over the weekend nearest 30 May, with the archbishop presiding at the church and the panegyric preached in the cathedral. The keep of the old castle, the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, and the archbishop's palace where the second trial was heard are both in the city.
Orléans, Loiret — the city she relieved. Orléans has marked 8 May every year since the siege, in a joint civic, military and religious observance that is among the oldest kept anywhere in France. The cathedral of Sainte-Croix, where she prayed, carries ten windows given over to her life, made between 1893 and 1897 and removed for safekeeping before the bombardments of the Second World War.
Vaucouleurs, Meuse — the thirteenth-century crypt of the castle chapel came through intact, and holds the fourteenth-century statue of Notre-Dame des Voûtes, before which she prayed during the months she spent asking Baudricourt for an escort.
Compiègne, Oise — the church of Saint-Jacques, where she received communion on the morning of 23 May 1430, hours before her capture outside the walls.
Reims, Marne — the cathedral where Charles VII was crowned on 17 July 1429.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin — the St. Joan of Arc Chapel on the campus of Marquette University, a fifteenth-century chapel from the Rhône valley near Lyon, dismantled and rebuilt in New York in 1927 and moved to Marquette in 1966. A stone set behind its altar is venerated as one she knelt on. The tradition linking her to the chapel is not documented in any contemporary source, and the university presents it as legend.
Quotes & Writings
Joan could not write, and signed her few dictated letters with a cross or a traced name. What survives in her own words comes almost entirely from the transcripts of the trial that killed her, where the notaries recorded her answers to men trained to trap her.
Asked whether she knew she was in God's grace — a question with no safe answer, since certainty was presumption and denial was confession:
"If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God."
On the source of what she did:
"All I have done is by Our Lord's command… I have done nothing in the world but by the order of God."
On what her voices had promised her:
"I believe firmly what my Voices have told me, that I shall be saved; I believe it as firmly as if I were already there."
— St Joan of Arc: 15 quotes from her trial and interrogations, from the Trial of Condemnation transcripts
Further Reading
Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin. Joan of Arc: Her Story — The standard modern biography in English, by the French medievalist who spent a career on the trial records, with a biographical dictionary of everyone around her. St. Martin's Griffin.
Régine Pernoud. The Retrial of Joan of Arc: The Evidence for Her Vindication — The testimony from the 1450s nullification process, where her childhood neighbours, her escort from Vaucouleurs and the soldiers who fought beside her were called to describe her. The closest thing to a portrait from life. Ignatius Press.
Mark Twain. Joan of Arc — Twain's novel, narrated by a fictional childhood companion and built on the trial records, which he considered his best book. A work of fiction, and openly devotional. Ignatius Press.
Benedict XVI, General Audience on St Joan of Arc, 26 January 2011 — The pope's catechesis on her life and her trial.
🪶 Closing Reflection
"Thus she died, her gaze fixed upon the Crucified Jesus and crying out several times the Name of Jesus."
