French Peasant Girl Who Led the Army to Lift the Siege of Orléans in the Hundred Years’ War
Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431) was born to an ordinary peasant family in northeastern France and claimed that from her teens she repeatedly heard the voices of angels and saints directing her to save a France near collapse in the Hundred Years’ War. She succeeded in persuading the dauphin Charles (later Charles VII) to grant her an army, and in 1429 led it to lift the months-long English siege of Orléans, turning the whole course of the war, and thereafter escorted Charles VII to Reims for his coronation. The next year she was captured by Burgundian forces at the Battle of Compiègne, handed over to the English side, tried on charges of heresy by a church court in 1431, and burned at the stake at Rouen at only nineteen. Some twenty years later the papacy retried the case and cleared her name, and in 1920 the Catholic Church formally canonized her as a saint; she had long since become one of the most representative symbols of the spirit of the French nation.
In 1429 Joan of Arc, only seventeen, arrived in armor at the head of an army before Orléans, long besieged by the English; her coming greatly heartened the garrison and townsfolk, and the French forces at once launched a counterattack, forcing the English to lift the siege and withdraw in only a few days — a victory seen as the key turning point that reversed the course of the Hundred Years’ War, after which French morale and fortunes both began to improve markedly.
After her capture Joan was handed to the English side, and, under English manipulation, was tried and convicted by a pro-English church court on charges of heresy and of wearing men’s clothing, and in May 1431 was burned alive in the market square of Rouen. Twenty-five years later the papacy reinvestigated the case, declared the original verdict void, and fully cleared her name; nearly five hundred years later, in 1920, she was formally canonized a saint by the Catholic Church.
The religious visions Joan claimed to experience are recorded in detail in her own trial testimony, but the specific nature of such experiences (religious experience, psychological phenomenon, or other explanation) is analyzed from differing angles in modern scholarly discussion; what this site presents is her own testimony and the official church narrative.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
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