Joan of Arc Trial Begins: Judges Start Investigation

The trial was rigged from the start, and everyone involved knew it. Joan of Arc, a nineteen-year-old peasant girl from Domremy who claimed God had sent her to save France, sat in chains in a Rouen courtroom on January 9, 1431, facing a tribunal of pro-English clergy assembled specifically to destroy her. Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais, who presided over the proceedings, had been handpicked for his loyalty to the English crown. The assessors were almost exclusively Burgundian sympathizers. Joan was given no legal counsel. The English needed Joan destroyed not just physically but spiritually. She had turned the Hundred Years'' War in France''s favor by lifting the siege of Orleans in 1429 and leading the dauphin Charles to his coronation at Reims. If she was truly sent by God, then the English occupation of France was an act against divine will. The trial''s purpose was to prove she was a heretic and a sorceress, thereby discrediting the French monarchy''s claim to divine favor. Joan confounded her interrogators. Illiterate and unschooled in theology, she parried sophisticated doctrinal traps with answers that stunned the assembled clergymen. When asked whether she knew if she was in God''s grace, a question designed to trap her either way since claiming certainty of grace was heresy while denying it was self-condemnation, she replied: "If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there." The notaries recorded that the judges were stupefied. They moved on. The trial dragged through months of interrogation. The charges eventually focused on Joan''s refusal to submit her visions to the judgment of the Church and her insistence on wearing men''s clothing, which was framed as a violation of biblical law. A forged confession document was introduced as evidence. Joan was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, in the Rouen marketplace. She was nineteen years old. The execution was meant to end the French cause. Instead, it created a martyr whose legend strengthened French resolve. Charles VII retook Rouen in 1449. A retrial in 1456 declared Joan innocent. She was canonized as a saint in 1920.