France celebrates Joan of Arc's 600th birthday

The normally tranquil city of Orleans is buzzing with festivities over the next two weeks to mark the 600th birthday of one of France's best cultural exports: Joan of Arc.

Looking appropriately cinematic, the Loire River swarmed with wooden boats carrying locals in medieval garb last week, re-enacting Joan of Arc's famous entry into the city in 1429.

The day that saw Orleans liberated from English invaders has been dramatized in film the world over, most famously in 1948's Oscar-winning epic of the French martyr with Ingrid Bergman, and more recently, in Luc Besson's award-winning 1999 blockbuster with Milla Jovovich.

Joan's place in the history books has not only been sealed through cinema, but also through myriad novels, poems, rock songs, operas and plays over the centuries — making her one of the most talked-about figures in history.

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The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc

Mark Twain’s obsession with Joan of Arc has to rank among the most baffling and least talked about enigmas in American literature. Even for those entrenched within the competitive world of Twain scholarship, stories like the one above are usually treated as interesting, but ultimately trifling, anecdotes, illustrative of the eccentricities of a predictably unconventional man.

 The same might also be said of his book about the French heroine. Published in 1896, when its author was 61, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc has long been viewed as something of an aberration, a curio—the type of genre-bending work that a bored, established writer often undertakes in order to buck audience expectations. Narrated by a fictionalized version of Joan’s servant and scribe, Sieur Louis de Conte, the book spans the majority of Joan’s life, beginning with her childhood in eastern France and ending with her questionable trial and execution. While other Twain novels such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and the Pauper are also set in medieval Europe, far from the author’s more familiar milieu of mid-19th century Missouri, Recollections is unique in its somber tone.

Click here to read this article from The Awl

Celebrating the real Joan of Arc

On January 6, people around the world will come together to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the birth of St. Joan of Arc, the brave peasant girl from the French countryside who in 1429 lifted the English siege of Orleans, walloped the enemy army and led her king to be crowned at Reims. French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans a special visit to the village of Domremy, her birthplace. There will be a parade at 6 o'clock in New Orleans, a French pilgrimage retracing the route that led to Joan's martyrdom at the stake in Rouen, prestigious classical music concerts and ceremonial viewings of Carl Theodor Dryer's silent-screen masterpiece, "The Passion of Joan of Arc."

And how typical of the magic of Joan's story that she should have been born on so important a Christian holiday, the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrating Christ's baptism and the coming of the Magi. Just another wonder in the life of the transcendent young woman who heard the voices of angels and presented the dauphin of France with a secret sign that only he would know, a sign that convinced him of her authenticity as a messenger from God.

Except that, like so much of the irresistible mystery surrounding Joan, this date, accepted by so many for so long as fact, was almost certainly created six centuries ago as a deliberate fiction for political purposes.

Click here to read this article from the Kansas City Star

Joan of Arc: Enduring Power

Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father’s flocks. But type her name into Amazon’s search engine and you get more than 6,000 results. France’s national archives include tens of thousands of volumes about her. She has been immortalized by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Twain, Shaw, Brecht, Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Rubens; more recently, her life was fodder for the CBS television series “Joan of Arcadia.”

What is it about Joan of Arc? Why is her story of enduring interest more than a half a millennium after her birth?

By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin warrior sent by God to deliver France from her enemies, the English, she had been receiving the counsel of angels for three years. Until then, the voices she said she heard, speaking from over her right shoulder and accompanied by a great light, had been hers alone, a rapturous secret.

Click here to read this article from the New York Times

Nicolas Sarkozy, far-right leader Marine Le Pen in tug-of-love over Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc painted in 1854.

President Nicolas Sarkozy and far-right leader Marine Le Pen this week embark on a tug-of-love over the French patron saint Joan of Arc, a surprise player in the upcoming presidential election.


The two leaders are to stage rival celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the birth of the 15th-century Catholic martyr who has been appropriated by the far-right partly for her booting out of medieval English “immigrants.”

The teenage peasant led the French army against the English after experiencing religious visions and was later burned at the stake, but her broad appeal to French of all political colours has ensured her immortality.

France is officially a secular state, but the story of Joan’s struggle against the English and Burgundians on behalf of the French crown has often served as an inspiration in patriotic causes.

She is regularly wheeled out as a symbol of French unity, alongside such Gallic icons as general Charles de Gaulle or Vercingetorix, who defied the Romans like a real-life Asterix.

Her broad appeal is key: French Catholics see in her a saint, nationalists see her as a royalist warrior who kicked out the English, while Socialists can hail her humble origins, although she was the daughter of a landowner.

Click here to read this article from the National Post

Remembering Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans

No one knows for sure when Joan of Arc was born in the village of Domrémy. But many believe the date was Jan. 6, 1412 — six centuries ago today.

After all this time, the tale of Joan of Arc remains a strange one. A peasant girl who never learned to read or write, she answered a call from God by leaving her family and travelling across France on a personal mission.

Although just 17 when she left home, with no training beyond spinning wool and sheep-herding, Joan’s goals were ambitious. She planned to lift the siege of Orleans, free France of its English occupiers, restore the Kingdom of France and see its leader, Charles VII, crowned King.

Joan began her mission about 1429, having been guided by interior voices for about two years. When she set out for Chinon, where Charles the Dauphin was staying, much of France, including Orleans, was occupied by English armies. For anyone considering it, the prospect of restoring the French monarchy must have seemed slim.

Click here to read this article from the National Post