Joan of Arc in France: The Places of Her Life

Domrémy and Vaucouleurs

Joan was born at Domrémy, a village on the Meuse in the duchy of Bar, around 1412. Tradition gives January 6, 1412, the feast of the Epiphany, as her birthday, but Joan never confirmed it, and what she told her judges about her age was vague. At her trial she said that her voices first came to her when she was about thirteen, and she named them as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret.

Her family’s house in Domrémy was bought in 1818 and opened to visitors, although later alterations have left little of the original building. Beside it is the church of Saint-Rémy, where she was baptized; it still has the statue of Saint Margaret before which, by tradition, Joan prayed. On the hillside of Bois-Chenu above the village stands a basilica begun in 1881. Since 1976 its crypt has held the statue of the Virgin from the chapel of Notre-Dame de Bermont, where Joan sometimes went to pray.

On May 13, 1428, Joan went to Vaucouleurs and asked its captain, Robert de Baudricourt, for an escort to the Dauphin Charles. He sent her home. She returned in January 1429 and won his consent at a third meeting in February. She rode out through the gate now called the Porte de France, in men’s clothes, with an escort of six. Detailed chronologies give the date as February 22, 1429; the town keeps the anniversary on February 23. The crypt of the castle chapel survives from her time, with the fourteenth-century statue of Notre-Dame des Voûtes before which she prayed.

Chinon and Poitiers

The ride to the court took eleven days. At Auxerre, on February 25 or 26, she heard Mass in the town’s great church. Most detailed chronologies put her arrival at Chinon on March 4, 1429, and her first audience with the Dauphin on March 6; some give March 6 and March 9. The Touraine tourist board and the Larousse encyclopedia follow another sequence, with her arrival on February 23 and the audience two days later.

Tradition holds that Joan picked out Charles among his courtiers in the great hall of the royal lodgings, and that the two talked in front of its monumental fireplace. She lodged in the Coudray tower, which visitors can climb today.

Charles then sent her to Poitiers, where for about three weeks in March 1429 a commission of bishops and theologians, directed by the Archbishop of Reims, questioned her. They found nothing heretical in her and advised the king to make use of her and to look for the sign she promised at Orléans. Their record, the Book of Poitiers, is lost. At Tours her armor and standard were made ready, and a sword was brought to her from the chapel of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois.

Orléans and Reims

The English had been besieging Orléans since October 12, 1428. Joan entered Orléans with a supply convoy on the evening of April 29, 1429, through the Burgundy Gate. On May 7 she was wounded by an arrow during the assault on Les Tourelles, the English fort on the Loire bridge. On May 8 the English withdrew, and the townspeople went in procession to give thanks.

The festival that grew from that procession dates from 1430, and in 2018 it was added to France’s national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. On the evening of May 7 the mayor hands Joan’s standard to the bishop at the cathedral of Sainte-Croix. On May 8 a solemn Mass with a panegyric of the saint, a custom kept since the fifteenth century, is followed by a procession through the city. Ten nineteenth-century windows in the cathedral show scenes from her life.

Joan’s army defeated the English at Patay on June 18, 1429. The royal army left Gien for Reims on June 29 and reached the city on July 16. The next morning, July 17, 1429, Charles VII was anointed and crowned in the cathedral of Reims, and Joan was given a place of honor with her standard.

Paris, Compiègne and Beaurevoir

From Reims the army turned toward Paris, which the English held. On September 8, 1429, Joan led the assault on the Porte Saint-Honoré, where a crossbow bolt wounded her in the leg; she lay in the trench below the walls until she was brought back after nightfall. The Diocese of Paris records that she prayed before the attack in the old church of Saint-Denys de la Chapelle, in today’s 18th arrondissement, beside which a basilica in her honor now stands. After the failure she left her armor as an offering in the abbey church of Saint-Denis.

In May 1430 she was at Compiègne, on the Oise, which the Burgundians were besieging. On May 23, 1430, during a sortie against the Burgundian camp at Margny, she was pulled from her horse and surrendered to Lyonnel de Wandomme, of Jean de Luxembourg’s company. The town held out until the siege was lifted on October 25, 1430.

Jean de Luxembourg held her at Beaulieu and then at his castle of Beaurevoir, near Cambrai. In September or early October 1430 she leapt from a tower there into the dry moat, a fall that sources put at 40 to 60 feet, and survived with injuries. In November she was moved to Arras, and the English agreed to pay 10,000 livres tournois for her. By way of Le Crotoy and the bay of the Somme she reached Rouen on December 23, 1430.

The trial at Rouen

Rouen was the main English headquarters in France, and Joan was held in its castle by English guards. The trial opened on January 9, 1431. Its judges were Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, and the Dominican Jean Le Maître, vicar of the inquisitor of France.

The first public session met on February 21, 1431, in the chapel royal of the castle. On February 24 she was asked whether she knew she was in God’s grace, and the record gives her reply: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” Seventy articles of accusation were later reduced to twelve. On May 9 she was threatened with torture in the great tower of the castle, which survives as the Tour Jeanne d’Arc.

On May 24, in the cemetery of the abbey of Saint-Ouen, she made a public abjuration. Within days she was again found in men’s clothing; the sources give May 27 or May 28. Condemned as relapsed, she was burned alive in the Old Market Square on May 30, 1431, at about nineteen. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine near the site of today’s Boieldieu bridge.

The trial record is the main source for Joan’s own words. Three notaries led by Guillaume Manchon took down the proceedings in French, and about four years later Manchon and Thomas de Courcelles prepared the Latin text. Five official copies were made, and three survive. W. P. Barrett’s English translation of 1932 can be read in Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook.

In Rouen a tall cross marks the site of the stake. On the same square, the church of Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc, completed in 1979 to designs by Louis Arretche, holds the stained glass of the church of Saint-Vincent, saved during the Second World War. The cathedral has a chapel of Saint Joan with Georges Saupique’s statue of her at the stake. The Historial Jeanne d’Arc, opened in 2015 in the archbishop’s palace, presents both trials with films.

Rehabilitation and canonization

Charles VII entered Rouen on November 10, 1449, and ordered an inquiry into the trial on February 15, 1450 (one chronology gives February 13). Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, and her two sons later appealed to Pope Callixtus III, who authorized a new process. It opened at Notre-Dame de Paris on November 7, 1455, when Isabelle presented her petition in person. About 115 witnesses were heard at Domrémy, Orléans, Paris and Rouen. On July 7, 1456, in the great hall of the archbishop’s palace in Rouen, the court declared the trial of 1431, its sentence and the abjuration null.

Pope Leo XIII introduced her cause on January 27, 1894. Pope Pius X beatified her in Saint Peter’s Basilica on April 18, 1909, and Pope Benedict XV canonized her there on May 16, 1920. Her feast is May 30. In 1922 Pope Pius XI named her secondary patroness of France, with Our Lady of the Assumption as principal patroness. France also honors her with a national day on the second Sunday of May.

The anniversaries of 2029 to 2031

The years 2029 to 2031 mark six hundred years since the main events of her life: Orléans and Reims in 2029, the capture at Compiègne in 2030, and the trial and death at Rouen in 2031 (see Joan of Arc 2029). Via Ioannae follows her road in eight days, from Domrémy through Vaucouleurs, Auxerre, Chinon, Orléans, Reims and Compiègne to Rouen. Orléans holds its Joan of Arc festival every spring, opening on April 29, and the city publishes the program on its website.

Our ways that go there

• Via IoannaeJoan’s Way, eight days
• Via CathedralisThe Cathedral Way, seven days

Holy places: Domrémy, Vaucouleurs, Auxerre, Chinon, Orléans, Reims, Saint-Denis, Compiègne, Rouen. Saints: Saint Joan of Arc, Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Denis.