Joan of Arc was born around 1412 in the small village of Domrémy, nestled in the Meuse valley in the northeast of France, in a region now encompassed by the modern department of Vosges. She was the daughter of a propertied peasant family of modest but respectable standing. Her father, whose name appears in trial records variously as Tart or similar variants, was a village official of sorts, and Joan grew up in a household that was devoutly Catholic and keenly aware of the political turbulence engulfing France. The Hundred Years' War, which had ground on since 1337, had left the kingdom fractured, exhausted, and partially under English occupation. A dynastic crisis following the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 had disinherited the French dauphin, the future Charles VII, in favor of the English king, and much of northern France, including Paris, was under Anglo-Burgundian control.
Joan herself was never taught to read or write, and she dictated her letters rather than composing them personally, though some of her later correspondence bears what appears to be her own signature, suggesting she may have learned to sign her name and perhaps even to read in some limited capacity. She referred to herself consistently in her letters as Jeanne la Pucelle, meaning Joan the Maiden, placing great emphasis on her virginity as a mark of divine favor and moral integrity. The name by which history would remember her, Jeanne d'Arc, was not used during her lifetime; the first written record of that designation appears only in 1455, nearly a quarter century after her death. Her family name was spelled in a variety of ways before the sixteenth century, including Darc, Tarc, Dart, and Day, without the apostrophe that modern usage inserts.
Beginning around 1425, Joan reported hearing voices accompanied by intense light, which she later identified as those of the archangel Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret. These experiences intensified over the following years, and by 1428 the voices had given her a specific mission: to present herself to the dauphin Charles, secure his recognition, and lead the French forces to victory over the English. Joan sought out Robert de Baudricourt, the French captain at Vaucouleurs, who initially dismissed her as a young peasant girl with delusions. After she persisted through the winter, Baudricourt relented and arranged for her to make the long and dangerous journey across enemy-held territory to the royal court at Chinon, where Charles received her in February or March 1429.
The encounter with Charles VII was pivotal. Joan reportedly identified him among his courtiers despite his attempts to conceal his identity among the assembled nobles, and she shared with him a private communication that theologians and courtiers of the day regarded as persuasive evidence of her divine mission. Charles subjected her to an extended ecclesiastical examination at Poitiers, where learned clerics questioned her faith, her theology, and her claim of supernatural guidance. Convinced of her sincerity and purity, Charles authorized her to join the relief expedition heading to Orléans, a city on the Loire River that had been under English siege since October 1428. Joan was equipped with white armor, given a banner embroidered with images of Christ and angels, and dispatched as part of the force in April 1429. She was approximately seventeen years old.
Joan arrived at Orléans on April 29, 1429, and her impact on the morale of the battered French garrison was immediate and extraordinary. The English had constructed a ring of fortifications around the city and had been systematically strangling it into submission. Within nine days of Joan's arrival, the French launched a series of aggressive sorties that overwhelmed the English strongholds one by one. Joan was wounded by an arrow during the assault on the fortress of Les Tourelles but returned to the fighting after her wound was dressed. By May 8, the English had abandoned the siege entirely, a deliverance that the people of Orléans celebrated for centuries afterward and still commemorate each year. Joan became known by the epithet that would follow her through history: the Maid of Orléans.
The Loire Campaign that followed the relief of Orléans unfolded with remarkable speed. Joan urged the French commanders to pursue the retreating English aggressively rather than pausing to consolidate their gains. The campaign culminated at the Battle of Patay on June 18, 1429, where the French routed an English army under Sir John Fastolf, killing or capturing a significant portion of the force. The victory at Patay opened the road northward to Reims, the traditional site of French royal coronations, and Joan pressed Charles to march there without delay. The army swept through Burgundian-held territory with little serious resistance, and Charles VII was crowned King of France at Reims Cathedral on July 17, 1429, with Joan standing at his side bearing her banner. The coronation was the fulfillment of Joan's stated mission and represented an enormous symbolic blow to the legitimacy of the English claim to the French throne.
The months that followed were less triumphant. Joan participated in an assault on Paris in September 1429 that failed after a day of intense fighting, during which she was again wounded. A later attempt to relieve the town of La Charité in November also ended in failure. These reverses diminished her standing at court, where factions had always viewed her with suspicion or sought to limit her influence. In early 1430, Joan organized a company of volunteers and set out to aid the town of Compiègne, which was besieged by Burgundian troops allied with the English. On May 23, 1430, during a sortie outside the walls, she was unhorsed and seized by Burgundian soldiers. Her own men failed to hold the gate open for her retreat, and she was taken prisoner.
Joan's captors eventually sold her to the English for ten thousand livres. She was tried in a church court at Rouen under the presidency of Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a French cleric firmly aligned with the English cause. The charges against her included heresy, sorcery, and the wearing of men's clothing, which the court construed as a violation of biblical injunctions. The trial, conducted in 1431, was irregular in several important respects: Joan was denied access to legal counsel, the court was packed with English sympathizers, and procedural safeguards were systematically ignored. Despite her lack of formal education, Joan defended herself with remarkable clarity and intelligence, parrying difficult theological questions and resisting intense psychological pressure over many weeks of examination.
Joan initially recanted her claims under threat of immediate execution but then retracted her recantation, returning to male dress and reasserting the divine origin of her voices. This relapse gave the court the pretext it needed to condemn her as an obstinate heretic. On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen. She was approximately nineteen years old. Witnesses reported that she called on the name of Jesus repeatedly until the flames silenced her.
The verdict did not stand unchallenged. In 1456, following a painstaking inquisitorial reinvestigation ordered by Pope Calixtus III, the trial was declared tainted by deceit, judicial bias, and procedural violations, and Joan's condemnation was formally overturned. The nullification restored her honor posthumously and classified her as a martyr of the Church. After the French Revolution, she became an emblem of French national identity, invoked by figures across the political spectrum. In 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized her as a saint of the Catholic Church, and two years later she was named one of the patron saints of France. Her image has been reproduced in countless paintings, sculptures, theatrical productions, and films, making her one of the most represented figures in Western cultural history, a young peasant girl who briefly changed the course of a war and paid for it with her life.
