What about Joan? A fierce woman in combat? Medieval gender bender? Sandra Miesel has the inside scoop on Joan of Arc

Women's Quarterly, Wntr, 2002 by Sandra Miesel

Joan's heroic reputation endured, surging with Romanticism in the nineteenth century. After the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, anticlericals and Catholics fought over Joan's significance as patriot or saint, even erecting rival statues at her birthplace. Socialists put up one of Joan the warrior inspired by La France while Catholics showed her as a pious peasant with her saints. The atheist-led nationalists of Action Francaise promoted her canonization as strongly as devout Catholics. During World War II, the Vichy government used her for anti-British propaganda while the Free French made her Cross of Lorraine their emblem.

To provide a rallying point against French secularism, the Church that once had burned her beatified Joan in 1909. She was canonized in 1920. She was not, however, declared a martyr or put on the universal calendar of saints.

Pure, sober, simple, young, and impetuous-yet stubbornly loyal--Joan is a heroine for the ages. Moderns will see in her all victims of unjust trials, but in her own day this woman of pity was an agent of hope to people ravaged by generations of war. She stands for the weak overturning the strong.

Hope is the key, not the victory. As Joan's contemporary, the poet Alain Chartier declared: "She raised all spirits toward the hope of better times."

Sandra Miesel is a writer living in Indianapolis.