THE RETRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 5

THE RETRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

HE ashes of Joan of Arc, sorceress; witch, relapsed heretic, were thrown into the Seine from the bridge at Rouen on May 30, in the year 1431. But that, however much her judges, the Bishop of Beauvais and others, may have wished it, was not the end of the affair. Less than 20 years after Joan’s execution began the process which was to culminate, nearly 500 years later, in her admission to the calendar of saints. Like many another "rehabilitation" process, the retrial of Joan of Arc had its political purposes. Doubts as to the King’s legitimacy, which Joan had effectively quashed in her lifetime, revived with her death, and in the process of clearing her name, Charles VII undoubtedly hoped to clear his own. For a man with so little to his credit, however, it may be kinder to allow some place for a simple loyalty which the King owed the girl who had saved France and made him monarch. The inquiries preceding Joan’s retrial began in 1450. The retrial proper opened at Notre Dame, in Paris, on November 7, 1455, and judgment was given at Rouen eight months later, on July 7, 1456. A condemnation which took five months to achieve required more than five years to undo. Some 1500 witnesses were examined, and the court records were distinguished as much by their weight as their clarity. Unlike the suspect court which had originally tried Joan, the new court heard evidence in her favour as well as evidence against. To the witness rail came what Régine Pernoud describes as "the most surprising procession of priests and peasants, soldiers and lawyers, princes of the blood and plough-

men." They established beyond reasonable doubt these points: Joan’s original trial stemmed from English determination to discredit and destroy her; the judges and officers of the court, therefore, were mostly under English constraint; Joan had no defending counsel and was detained in a secular prison, both illegal; underhand methods were employed to demonstrate her opposition and conceal her true submission ‘to Church and Pope; texts of the proceedings differed and threats were made to ensure that the scribes omitted material favourable to Joan; the judges were incompetent; no secular sentence was passed before execution; and, a surprising anomaly, Joan, a convicted heretic, was granted the Last Sacraments before execution, But, above all, what the voluminous evidence revealed was a simple, devout girl, temperate and kindly, whose standards of conduct and _ military prowess were none the less admirable for coming to her in the form of visions. As Bernard Shaw wrote in his preface to St. Joan: "If Newton’s imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such an illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor Newton’s general sanity." Joan herself, only 19 when she died, put it with a fresher simplicity: "A voice came to me from God. I was thirteen." The sentence of the court which condemned Joan had pronounced: "We say and decide that thou has most gravely

sinned by falsely pretending to revelations and apparitions, by leading others astray, by believing lightly and carelessly, by prophesying superstitiously, by blaspheming God and the Saints, by sinning against the law, Holy Scripture,

and canonical decrees, by slighting God in his sacraments, by starting sedition, by apostatising, by falling into the crime of schism, and by going widely astray in the Catholic faith." The 1456 court, appointed by the Pope, presided over by the Archbishop of Rheims, and conducted by the Inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, declared this trial and sentence to ‘be. "contaminated with fraud, calumny, wickedness, contradictions and manifest errors in fact and law." It concluded: "We do now formally expunge, annul and deprive of all force and -validity that trial and sentence, and declare that to Jeanne d’Arc there shall attach no single blot of ill fame." "Many a woman," says G.BS., "has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into the drawing season --- ma

room fireplace, but. getting canonised is a different . matter, and a more important one." Those who "are interested in the beginning of the ‘process will be able to hear next week a BBC dramatisation of the rehabilitation trial, ("La Bonne Lorraine": 1YC, Tuesday, June 4; 3YC, Friday, June 7; 2¥C and 4YC, Sunday, June 9.)