Joan of Arc
(1412 – 1431 ce)
THE GIRL WHO BURNED FRANCE
BACK TO LIFE
“If God talks to you, they call it faith.
If you answer back, they call it heresy.”
Rouen, 1431.
The air smells like wet hay, piss, and fear. A nineteen-year-old girl in a white gown stands barefoot on a platform stacked with kindling. Around her, clerics chant Latin like bored vultures waiting for the meal to start. The soldiers are whispering bets—how long she’ll scream, whether she’ll faint before the flames climb to her hair. Joan of Arc looks straight at the sky, blinking through the smoke, as if the Almighty’s about to send down a rainstorm just to prove a point.
He doesn’t.
God, as it turns out, takes smoke breaks too.
The Virgin, the Voices, and the Very Bad War
France in the early 1400s was a drunk man in a gutter—half-dead, robbed, and still muttering about his crown. The Hundred Years’ War was in its “this-should’ve-ended-decades-ago” phase, with England playing the role of that smug cousin who won’t leave your house after a family feud. The French nobility, meanwhile, were too busy backstabbing each other to notice their kingdom collapsing like wet cheese.
Enter Joan: born around 1412 in Domrémy, a nobody from nowhere. Her father farmed, her mother prayed, and the English were burning villages like they were collecting stamps. She claimed she began hearing “voices” at thirteen—St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret—telling her to save France.
Imagine being a medieval teenage girl in rural Lorraine, milking cows one moment and then declaring divine military orders the next. In any other century, that gets you a swift exorcism or a career as a TikTok medium. In the fifteenth century, it got her an army.
She cut her hair short, put on men’s armor, and marched into history like someone who didn’t read the part about humility in the Bible. She was eighteen, illiterate, and absolutely convinced she was on God’s speed-dial.
The Girl in Plate Mail
Joan convinced the desperate Dauphin—Charles, the sad Frenchman still auditioning for the role of king—to let her lead a relief force to Orléans. Everyone thought it was lunacy. A peasant girl commanding troops? That’s like sending your intern to run the Pentagon.
But Orléans was bleeding. And France had tried everything else—bribes, prayers, and really fancy mustaches—so why not holy insanity?
The English had surrounded the city for months, smugly waiting to starve it out. Then came Joan—this teenage whirlwind waving a banner and shouting divine threats like a prophet on horseback. The French soldiers, starved and half-mutinous, suddenly started believing again. Not in victory. In her.
And that’s when the miracle happened.
Under Joan’s command (and, to be fair, several very competent French captains), the French launched assault after assault on the English forts around Orléans. She took an arrow to the shoulder, yanked it out, prayed, and charged again. Witnesses swore she glowed on the battlefield—not metaphorically, but literally gleamed in the dawn light, like God’s own torchbearer in a tin can.
Within nine days, the siege broke. Nine days. After months of stalemate, the English ran. The city erupted in cheers. Joan became the Virgin of Orléans. France had its first real win in years, and suddenly this farm girl was rewriting military textbooks and national morale at the same time.
Coronation by Firelight
Her next move? March straight to Reims for the coronation of Charles VII. Everyone told her it was impossible. The English and their allies controlled most of northern France. But Joan didn’t do “impossible.” She did “inconvenient to England.”
The march became a pilgrimage of redemption. Every town she passed joined her. By the time they reached Reims, she wasn’t just a commander—she was a living saint, a teenage general in shining armor, dragging a broken nation to its knees before God.
On July 17, 1429, Charles was crowned king. Joan stood beside him, her banner higher than the royal flag. The French crown was reborn under the gaze of a farm girl who hadn’t even hit twenty.
And that should’ve been the end. The perfect ending: the miracle maiden who saved her country and went home to live happily ever after.
But history, like war, doesn’t do happy endings.
The Fall of the Saint
Joan wanted to keep fighting. She wanted Paris. She wanted to push the English back into the Channel and drown them in their own piss. But Charles—now crowned and cautious—decided diplomacy was safer than a sword-wielding teenager who heard angels.
So he left her hanging. Literally.
In 1430, during a raid near Compiègne, Joan was thrown off her horse and captured by the Burgundians—Frenchmen loyal to England. Charles didn’t ransom her. Didn’t send an army. Didn’t even send flowers. She was sold to the English for ten thousand francs, which is what you pay for a very good horse or a very bad conscience.
Her captors couldn’t just kill her. Not when half of France thought she was God’s chosen. So they tried to unmake her instead.
They dragged her before an English-backed ecclesiastical court in Rouen. Sixty learned men—bishops, inquisitors, and professional hypocrites—spent months interrogating a teenage girl about the voices in her head. She sparred with them like a holy barrister, turning their questions inside out with wit and courage that made them look like fools.
But reason never wins against politics.
On May 30, 1431, they led her to the marketplace, tied her to a stake, and set the faggots alight. Witnesses said she asked for a cross, then for Jesus’ name on her lips as the smoke rose. The crowd wept. The English soldiers pretended not to. When the fire died, they raked the ashes and burned her heart again—because even the English didn’t trust that it would stop beating the first time.
They scattered what was left in the Seine. Just to be safe.
Resurrection by Propaganda
You’d think that was the end. Wrong century for that.
Within twenty-five years, the same Church that roasted her like a heretic declared her innocent. Then, five centuries later, the same institution canonized her. God’s favorite arsonist was now Saint Joan of Arc.
France, meanwhile, turned her into everything: a holy martyr, a nationalist mascot, a proto-feminist icon, a poster girl for the Resistance, and eventually a political Rorschach test. The monarchists saw divine legitimacy; the republicans saw rebellion. The feminists saw a warrior of conviction; the fascists saw a patriotic saint. Everyone wants a piece of the girl who caught fire and didn’t scream for mercy.
Even Hollywood took a swing—usually with disastrous results. In one film she’s a visionary; in another, she’s one sword short of a psych ward. The French still argue over who “owns” her: the left, the right, or God Himself.
Joan, if she could see it, would probably roll her eyes and ask for another horse.
The Truth Beneath the Halo
Strip away the myth, and what’s left is something harder, purer, and far more uncomfortable. Joan of Arc wasn’t a symbol. She was a freak accident of faith, timing, and desperation—a nobody who believed so completely that she forced reality to keep up. She didn’t fight for feminism or politics; she fought because she was certain she had to.
And that certainty terrified everyone. The English burned her because she humiliated them. The French abandoned her because she reminded them how weak they’d become. The Church condemned her because her direct line to heaven made priests look redundant.
She was, in every sense, uncontrollable.
And maybe that’s the secret: she burned because no one could own her flame.
Legacy of the Fire
When the smoke finally cleared from Rouen, France was a nation again. The war dragged on another twenty years, but the English never recovered the swagger they lost to that girl in armor. Joan’s name became a weapon sharper than any sword.
Her banner, white and gold, bearing the names of Jesus and Mary, still flies in the French imagination. Artists paint her in radiant armor, poets call her “the Maid,” and generals whisper her name before hopeless battles. She has become a paradox: a holy soldier, a saint of violence, a virgin drenched in gunpowder and light.
The woman they tried to erase ended up immortal.
Because the thing about fire is—it never asks permission to spread.
warrior Rank #186
They called her a witch, then a saint, then a symbol. But all she ever really was, was right—and that’s what terrified them most.
Sources
Pernoud, Régine. Joan of Arc: Her Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
DeVries, Kelly. Joan of Arc: A Military Leader. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999.
Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Taylor, Larissa Juliet. The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc. Yale University Press, 2009.
Hobbins, Daniel. The Trial of Joan of Arc. Harvard University Press, 2005.
“Medieval Teenagers and Their Imaginary Friends,” Ye Olde Psychology Today, 1431 Edition.
Cooking with the Inquisition: 101 Ways to Roast a Heretic. (Unpublished manuscript, hopefully).
Voices in My Head: A Commander’s Guide to Divine Chain of Command. Clerical Press, 1432.
