The figure who emerged from the flames at Rouen in 1431 bears almost no resemblance to the icons that populate French public squares, feminist manifestos, and Catholic devotional literature today. Joan of Arc—Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orléans—has become what historians of memory call a floating signifier: a historical personage whose documented biography matters far less than the symbolic weight successive generations have draped upon her shoulders.

What makes Joan's commemorative trajectory so instructive is not merely its longevity but its contradictions. She has been simultaneously claimed by monarchists celebrating divine-right kingship and republicans rejecting ecclesiastical authority, by Catholics seeking martyrological legitimacy and anticlericals weaponizing her execution against the Church, by nationalists constructing ethnic French identity and feminists excavating gender transgression from medieval sources. Each appropriation required selective reading, strategic silence, and creative reinterpretation.

The historiographical question is not which Joan is authentic—that pursuit misunderstands how collective memory functions. Rather, we must ask what each generation's Joan reveals about that generation's anxieties, aspirations, and ideological needs. The malleability of certain historical figures to contradictory purposes tells us something profound about the relationship between historical evidence and commemorative practice. Joan of Arc offers a particularly vivid case study because the documentary record is unusually rich for a medieval peasant, yet the commemorative traditions have diverged so dramatically from that record. Her story illuminates how martyrdom, gender, nationalism, and religion intersect in the construction of usable pasts.

The Third French Republic faced a peculiar problem. After the catastrophic defeat of 1870-71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the republican government desperately needed unifying national symbols. Joan of Arc offered obvious appeal—she had driven out foreign invaders and restored French sovereignty. But she had been burned by ecclesiastical authority, her mission was explicitly religious, and the Catholic Church remained republicanism's most formidable institutional opponent.

The solution required commemorative surgery. Republican intellectuals, most notably the historian Jules Michelet, constructed a Joan who was essentially a daughter of the French people rather than a servant of the Church. In Michelet's influential 1841 biography, Joan becomes the embodiment of popular patriotism, her voices reinterpreted as expressions of collective national consciousness rather than divine intervention. The Church that condemned her becomes the villain; the peasant girl who defied ecclesiastical authority becomes a proto-republican.

This reframing was strategically brilliant. By emphasizing Joan's trial and execution, republicans could simultaneously celebrate French national identity and indict Catholic institutional power. The Rouen tribunal became a synecdoche for clerical oppression; Joan's martyrdom prefigured the secular republic's struggle against ultramontane Catholicism. When the Republic established the national festival of Joan of Arc in 1920, it was explicitly framed as a patriotic rather than religious commemoration.

The historiographical apparatus supporting this appropriation was substantial. Republican scholars emphasized the political dimensions of Joan's mission while minimizing or psychologizing the religious elements. Her voices became symptoms of pathology or expressions of folk consciousness rather than genuine mystical experience. The trial record, with its detailed interrogations about Joan's spiritual claims, was read against the grain—evidence of ecclesiastical bad faith rather than sincere theological concern.

What makes this appropriation particularly instructive is how it handled the same documentary evidence that would later support radically different interpretations. The selectivity was not dishonest in any simple sense; it reflected genuine historiographical priorities shaped by contemporary political needs. Republican historians were not fabricating evidence—they were asking questions that made certain evidence salient and other evidence peripheral. The Joan who emerged served a republic defining itself against clerical power.

Takeaway

The same historical evidence can support contradictory commemorative traditions because what counts as significant depends on questions shaped by contemporary political needs.

The Church's relationship with Joan of Arc required delicate navigation. She had been condemned by an ecclesiastical tribunal, executed for heresy and witchcraft. Her rehabilitation trial of 1456 had overturned the verdict, but that proceeding was itself politically motivated—orchestrated by Charles VII to legitimate his coronation. For centuries, Joan remained an awkward figure for Catholic commemorative purposes: a martyr whose martyrdom indicted the institution claiming authority over martyrological recognition.

The canonization process, initiated in 1869 and completed in 1920, represented a sophisticated response to republican appropriation. By formally recognizing Joan as a saint, the Church could reclaim her from secular nationalism while simultaneously presenting itself as the ultimate arbiter of her significance. The timing was not coincidental. As anticlerical legislation intensified in early twentieth-century France—the 1905 separation of church and state being the culmination—Catholic cultural politics required mobilizing historical symbols.

The canonization reframed Joan's execution as institutional error rather than institutional malice. The Rouen tribunal became a local aberration, influenced by English political pressure, rather than representative of Catholic teaching. This interpretation protected ecclesiastical authority while acknowledging historical injustice. Joan's vindication became evidence of the Church's capacity for self-correction rather than grounds for anticlericalism.

Devotional literature following canonization emphasized Joan's mystical experiences, her obedience to divine command, and her virginal purity. The republican Joan—the daughter of the people who defied institutional authority—was replaced by the saintly Joan who submitted to divine authority even unto death. Her trial testimony about voices and visions, minimized by secular interpreters, became the evidentiary core of her sanctity.

The commemorative competition between republican and Catholic Joans played out in public space. Both factions commissioned statues, organized festivals, and produced hagiographical literature. The same historical figure served contradictory ideological purposes, with each tradition claiming authentic access to the real Joan. The documentary record supported both readings—or rather, both readings selected from the documentary record according to their respective interpretive priorities.

Takeaway

Canonization and commemoration are not neutral recognitions of historical significance but strategic interventions in ongoing cultural politics.

Joan of Arc's cross-dressing—she wore male military attire throughout her campaign and refused to abandon it even when ecclesiastical authorities demanded compliance—has made her irresistible to feminist interpretation. But which feminism? The answer reveals how different feminist theoretical frameworks construct radically different Joans from identical historical evidence.

First-wave feminists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed Joan as a proto-feminist heroine: a woman who demonstrated female capability in domains monopolized by men, who refused male authority over her body and mission, who died rather than submit to masculine institutional power. This Joan anticipated suffragist demands by five centuries. Her achievement proved women's capacity for leadership, courage, and political agency.

Second-wave feminism complicated this celebration. Joan's mission was to restore a king—hardly a feminist objective. Her authority derived from claims of divine command, not assertions of female equality. She never challenged gender hierarchy as a system; she claimed exceptional status as God's instrument. Some feminist historians argued that celebrating Joan reinforced the exceptional woman trope, implying that ordinary women required divine intervention to escape subordination.

Contemporary gender theory has produced yet another Joan. Scholars examining medieval gender categories note that Joan's cross-dressing was not mere disguise but identity claim—she insisted that her voices commanded male attire, that abandoning it would be sinful. The trial records reveal persistent interrogation about gender presentation, suggesting that her judges recognized something more threatening than military costume. Was Joan asserting masculine identity? Refusing the gender binary? The medieval conceptual vocabulary cannot answer questions posed in contemporary theoretical terms.

The feminist historiographical debate illuminates broader problems in memory studies. Each feminist framework privileges different evidence, asks different questions, and constructs different significance. The same trial transcripts support Joan as feminist pioneer, Joan as exceptional woman reinforcing patriarchy, and Joan as gender-transgressive figure. The historical evidence does not resolve interpretive disputes because the disputes concern which questions matter—and that determination is made by present concerns, not past documents.

Takeaway

Historical figures cannot adjudicate contemporary theoretical debates because those debates determine what counts as significant about historical figures in the first place.

Joan of Arc's commemorative career demonstrates that martyrdom produces not fixed meaning but interpretive opportunity. The documented biography—the trial records, the rehabilitation proceedings, the chronicles—provides raw material that successive generations have processed according to their own ideological needs. Republican nationalists, Catholic apologists, and feminist theorists have all found their Joan in the same archive.

This does not mean historical memory is arbitrary. The documentary record constrains interpretation; not every claim about Joan can survive evidential scrutiny. But constraint is not determination. The archive tells us what happened; it cannot tell us what matters about what happened. That determination emerges from the questions interpreters bring, and those questions reflect contemporary concerns.

What makes certain historical figures—Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Napoleon—particularly susceptible to contradictory appropriation is not documentary poverty but symbolic richness. They embody tensions their own times could not resolve: faith and politics, gender and authority, national identity and institutional power. Each generation finds its unresolved tensions prefigured in these figures, discovers ancestors for its own struggles, and constructs usable pasts from unusable presents.