Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700�855)

From Satire to Sanctity

Nora M. Heimann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351154949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In her meticulous and wide-ranging study, Nora M. Heimann follows the metamorphosis of Joan of Arc's posthumous representation during the years in which her image ascended from relative obscurity as a minor provincial figure in the middle ages through her treatment as a figure of political satire in the eighteenth century to her ultimate emergence as an image of piety and sanctity in the mid-nineteenth century. Offering the first scholarly art historical and cultural analysis of the origins of the modern Joan of Arc cult, she takes on the challenge of charting, as no previous critic has, why and how the Maid of Orl's has been all things to such a diverse public through the ages, particularly during the rapid shifts in political regimes that came in the wake of the French Revolution. Joan of Arc's image has shown a protean capacity to embody a vast and often contradictory range of qualities, from martial ascendancy to vulnerable piety, from maidenly purity to transgressive androgyny, from the power of the people to the divine right of kings. Heimann makes a persuasive case for this enduringly resonant woman as the only figure in French culture to be warmly embraced simultaneously by republicans, monarchists, feminists, and neo-fascists alike. In its recounting of the iconographic fortunes of this remarkable woman during her transformation from an image of satire to one of sanctity, Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700-1855) offers an illustrated, interdisciplinary depiction of the relationship between art and politics that will appeal not only to art historians but also to those working in literature, women's studies, cultural studies, intellectual history, and religious history.

Chapter 1
Pornography as Hagiography and the Engendering of Virtue: Chapelain, Voltaire, and The Maid of Orléans

By a strange twist of fate, Joan of Arc and the man who turned her life story into a mock epic died on the same day, three hundred and forty-seven years apart. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431, unransomed by the king she fought for and condemned by prelates of the faith she fervently embraced. On 30 May 1778, Franfois-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume Voltaire, died of old age in his bed in Paris, a venerated if controversial writer, recognized as one of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment. By then, the scandalous success of Voltaire's epic parody The Maid of Orléans had grown to international proportions, joining his memory with Joan of Arc's in posterity [Plate 10].

Circulating first in pirated manuscript and later clandestine print editions from the 1730s through the mid-1800s, Voltaire's The Maid of Orléans was banned, burned, and decried as poisonously profligate throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ Yet despite — or, perhaps, because of — its official suppression, this pornographic satire remained one of the most widely read texts on Joan of Arc for over a century after it was first released; and its notoriety catapulted a relatively neglected medieval heroine onto the center stage of French history by inciting generations of outraged and intrigued authors, artists, politicians, and prelates to produce their own response to Voltaire's Maid. Although Voltaire's The Maid of Orléans is now largely ignored by scholars and the general public alike, this irreverent and bawdy poem played a pivotal part in inspiring the birth of the modern cult of Joan of Arc. What follows, then, below is a critical analysis of this astonishing work; its political, personal, and literary sources; and the significance of the poem's proliferation in over 135 different illicit and authorized editions (many with their own distinct variations of text and illustration) between 1755 and 1860.² Finally, this chapter will close with a reflection on the poem's highly sexualized treatment of the Maid in the context of Joan of Arc's life and afterlife in France.

According to literary legend, Voltaire was induced to write his seminal The Maid of Orléans when a friend challenged him to produce a better treatment of the subject than Jean Chapelain's The Maid, or the Heroic Poem of France Delivered (Paris, 1656), a lengthy, ponderous epic that earned the scorn of the prominent seventeenth-century satirist Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.³ Chapelain's poem celebrating the liberation of Orléans, the restoration of the French throne, and the reunification of France was the product of a thirty year effort underwritten by the due de Longueville, a descendant of the comte de Dunois, one of Joan of Arc's companion-at-arms. Long awaited by the author's literary followers, the work enjoyed an immediate, but ephemeral, success in 1656, when the first twelve cantos were published in a deluxe, illustrated edition that was reprinted five times in the following eighteen months.⁴ Savaged by the critics, however, Chapelain's The Maid soon fell into disfavor; and the remaining twelve cantos of the poem (completed by 1670) remained unpublished until 1882.⁵ The scathing assessment of Chapelain's "miserable verses" by Boileau-Despréaux was cited by Voltaire in his notes on the Maid.⁶ Voltaire also lampooned Chapelain in the second paragraph of his own The Maid of Orléans'.

O Chapelain! O thou whose violin
Produced of old so harsh and vile a din;
Whose bow Apollo's malediction had,
Which scraped his history in notes so sad;
Old Chapelain! if honoring thine art
Thou wouldst to me thy genius even impart,
I'll none of it ...⁷

By the nineteenth century, Chapelain's poem was completely obscure, read only by the most thorough Joan scholars as the source of Voltaire's more enduring succés de scandale on the same subject. Among the few who mentioned Chapelain at all in the late nineteenth century were Jules Quicherat (editor of the first modern publication of Joan's trial documents), who dismissed Chapelain's The Maid as more deadly to the Maid's memory than her procés de condamnation (or condemnation trial),⁸ and Lanéry d'Arc (editor of the definitive Bibliography of Works Related to Joan of Arc from 1894, the most extensive listing of works on this subject ever published), who assessed Chapelain's The Maid in bluntly negative terms: "Is it possible to imagine something worse than this? ... [It is] terribly bad, long and boring."⁹

Chapelain's The Maid, or the Heroic Poem of France Delivered begins with Joan receiving a visit from an angel while guarding sheep in the fields by the Meuse River. In a scene that accords loosely with historic accounts of the Maid's girlhood,¹⁰ the angel announces:

From the eternal monarch I am the ambassador,
And to you I come to announce your future grandeur ...
God, the God of combat, commands you by my voice
To leave, to attack and to vanquish the English!¹¹

Joan departs for Chinon in the company of God's messenger. There, at the French court in exile, the ardor of the Maid's faith convinces Charles VII to give her command of the French army [Plate 11]. Her subsequent discovery of the legendary sword of Charles Martel, founder of the Carolingian dynasty, endows her with superhuman strength, enabling her to lift the siege of Orléans with the aid of angels who side with the French, while demons side with the English.¹² The Maid's triumph makes her the object of universal affection among all Frenchmen.¹³ Even the comte de Dunois, who is already betrothed to Marie de Bourgogne, becomes smitten, declaring his pure, undying love for Joan.¹⁴

Ancillary figures soon come to share the stage with Joan and Dunois in inventive situations derived more from Chapelain's imagination and classical literature than from history. In Book 4, in a scene modeled on the tragic passion of Queen Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, the "sweet and sympathetic" Marie de Bourgogne despairs at being left behind at the Fontainebleau palace as her fiancé Dunois follows the Maid in battle, while Agnes Sorel, the evil mistress of Charles VII, falls into a jealous rage over Joan's influence with the dauphin. To spite Charles for leaving her to be crowned at Reims, Sorel determines to win the love of France's most bitter enemy, Philippe de Bourgogne, leader of the Burgundian alliance with the English and guardian to Marie, his orphaned niece. These events are wholly fictitious: Marie de Bourgogne (1457-82) was born more than twenty-six years after Joan of Arc's death; and Sorel (1422-50) was only seven years old when the siege of Orléans was lifted. (She did not become Charles VII's mistress until many years later.) Moreover, even though the Duke of Burgundy, "Philip the Good" (1396-1467), was well known for his many mistresses as well as his four dynastic marriages, there is no record of his having had an affair with Sorel, a woman celebrated by her contemporaries for her abiding loyalty to and affection for Charles.¹⁵

Chapelain's fictionauzations not only add romance to Joan's resolutely celibate biography, they also serve to flatter the author's contemporaries. In Book 8, for example, Chapelain inserts a long recitation on the glories of the house of Dunois and the descendants of Charles VII from the fifteenth century to Chapelain's day. Among the many inventive plot twists that ensue are a foiled attempt to assassinate Charles with a poisoned apple that results in the death of Agnes instead, and the dauphin's betrayal of the Maid while under the influence of demons and traitors during the bloody siege of Paris. In this climactic scene, Dunois is taken prisoner and the Maid is grievously wounded in battle outside the walls of Paris. Despite her injuries, Joan fights on. However, just as the flag of France is being placed on Paris's ramparts, Charles becomes persuaded by a traitorous courtier that Joan's successes are all demonic tricks, and he calls for a retreat. Joan's capture by the English near the forest of Compiégne follows her banishment by the dauphin.¹⁶ With the Maid's imprisonment and subsequent mortal condemnation by the British, the salvation of France falls to Dunois, who is released by exchange for the British captive Bedfort.

In the last half of Chapelain s The Maid, Dunois assumes the role of central protagonist, while Joan is reduced to a passive figure scarcely mentioned as she languishes in captivity. Meanwhile Charles, grief-stricken at his mistress's poisoning, determines to join Agnes in death. His suicide is prevented by an angel, who encourages him not to forsake his realm. His contrition is rewarded with victory; the English are driven from Paris by Dunois, whose own determination is fueled by his undying love for the Maid. Chapelain's The Maid concludes with Charles's triumphal entry into Notre Dame Cathedral, where he offers a magnificent Te Deum of gratitude to God in a scene that Voltaire borrowed in the last canto of his 1762 rendition of the Maid's life.

The thirteen folio-sized illustrations drawn by Claude Vignon and engraved by Abraham Bosse for Chapelain's lavish first edition were as grandiose and fictitious as the verses they embellished.¹⁷ And like the epic narrative they accompanied (which incited Voltaire to write The Maid of Orléans), Vignon's fanciful designs helped to promulgate a wide range of subsequent iconography from tapestry designs and monumental sculpture to book illustration and perfume advertisements through the early nineteenth century. The illustration for Book 1 [Plate 11] exemplifies the grand, ahistorical manner in which the Maid's stoiy is retold in Chapelain's epic: Joan arrives at the court in Chinon on a billowing cloud illuminated by a radiant aureole of light. Clad in the costume of an ancient Roman, the Maid wears sandals, a girdled tunic, and a stolla with a staff in her hand and a wreath of flowers adorning her long unbound hair. While the flowers and staff serve to signal Joan's rustic origins as a provincial shepherdess, her antique dress ennobles her by implying a classically heroic and virtuous character. Her appearance bears no resemblance, however, to the short masculine haircut and men's tunic, hose, leggings, and boots that Joan actually wore when she arrived in Chinon in the winter of 1429.¹⁸

In Vignon's scene of battle at Orléans [Plate 12], the Maid again stands haloed by beams of light, now at the summit of a bulwark with her sword raised over her head, wearing a suit of plate and mail armor with sleeves puffed and slashed at the shoulder, and her long hair flying out from beneath a plumed helmet. This anachronistic, distinctly sixteenth-century costume is — as before — wholly unlike the actual armor that Joan wore.¹⁹ Rather, it is modeled in large part on the venerable but no less anachronistic Aldermen painting of Joan from the 1580s [Plate 8], and on the image of the Maid as a "femme forte" — an illustrious woman — in a gown and a plumed hat with a cuirass and a coat of mail by Philippe de Champaigne, First Painter to King Louis XIII [Plate 9].²⁰ Like Chapelain's artists Vignon and Bosse, Voltaire's many illustrators — Gravelot, Desrais, Moreau, Duplessis-Bertaux, and Drake, to name only the most prominent — later turned to these same sources in visually interpreting his Maid of Orléans.²¹

While Chapelain's poem enjoyed only the briefest literary success, Voltaire's rendition of the Maid's life remained an unflagging, albeit illicit, bestseller into the nineteenth century. Its popularity — or rather notoriety — may be measured by its police records. Burned in Geneva and condemned by the Court of Rome, Voltaire's The Maid of Orléans became one of the most confiscated clandestine texts in France and Switzerland during the ancien régime, despite the severe punishment (pillorying and three-year banishment) inflicted on those caught defying the poem's official suppression.²²

In Voltaire's comic, ribald text, the virtuous grandeur and patent evil of Chapelain's starkly contrasted protagonists and antagonists gives way to an inelegant and often dubious cast of characters, ranging from a coarse and stupid stable girl (the central protagonist), who is protected by a sunbeam-riding saint and his monstrous auxiliary, to a host of unchaste and unscrupulous clergy, an array of lusty, ineffectual, and often foolish French and British nobility and their minions, and a bevy of weak, vulnerable women subject to the unbridled desires of these men. Perhaps most important in Voltaire's retellin...