Saint Joan

Saint Joan

By George Bernard Shaw.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Preface to Saint Joan
   1. Joan the Original and Presumptuous
   2. Joan and Socrates
   3. Contrast with Napoleon
   4. Was Joan Innocent or Guilty?
   5. Joan’s Good Looks
   6. Joan’s Social Position
   7. Joan’s Voices and Visions
   8. The Evolutionary Appetite
   9. The Mere Iconography Does Not Matter
   10. The Modern Education Which Joan Escaped
   11. Failures of the Voices
   12. Joan a Galtonic Visualizer
   13. Joan’s Manliness and Militarism
   14. Was Joan Suicidal
   15. Joan Summed Up
   16. Joan’s Immaturity and Ignorance
   17. The Maid in Literature
   18. Protestant Misunderstandings of the Middle Ages
   19. Comparative Fairness of Joan’s Trial
   20. Joan Not Tried as a Political Offender
   21. The Church Uncompromised by Its Amends
   22. Cruelty, Modern and Medieval
   23. Catholic Anti-Clericalism
   24. Catholicism Not Yet Catholic Enough
   25. The Law of Change Is the Law of God
   26. Credulity, Modern and Medieval
   27. Toleration, Modern and Medieval
   28. Variability of Toleration
   29. The Conflict Between Genius and Discipline
   30. Joan as Theocrat
   31. Unbroken Success Essential in Theocracy
   32. Modern Distortions of Joan’s History
   33. History Always Out of Date
   34. The Real Joan Not Marvellous Enough for Us
   35. The Stage Limits of Historical Representation
   36. A Void in the Elizabethan Drama
   37. Tragedy Not Melodrama
   38. The Inevitable Flatteries of Tragedy
   39. Some Well-Meant Proposals for the Improvement of the Play
   40. The Epilogue
   41. To the Critics, Lest They Should Feel Ignored
4. Dramatis Personae
5. Saint Joan
   1. Scene I
   2. Scene II
   3. Scene III
   4. Scene IV
   5. Scene V
   6. Scene VI
   7. Epilogue
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Preface to Saint Joan

Joan the Original and Presumptuous

Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of the Chevalier D’Eon and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.

As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out of her teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising that she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital crimes which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what we call unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen Joan’s pretensions were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the haughtiest emperor. She claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on earth. She patronized her own king, and summoned the English king to repentance and obedience to her commands. She lectured, talked down, and overruled statesmen and prelates. She poohpoohed the plans of generals, leading their troops to victory on plans of her own. She had an unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion, judgment, and authority, and for War Office tactics and strategy. Had she been a sage and monarch in whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged, her pretensions and proceedings would have been as trying to the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar were to Cassius. As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous: the other that she was unbearable.

Joan and Socrates

If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly or stupid, she would have been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of the most attractive. If she had been old enough to know the effect she was producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right when they were wrong, and had learned to flatter and manage them, she might have lived as long as Queen Elizabeth. But she was too young and rustical and inexperienced to have any such arts. When she was thwarted by men whom she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her impatience with their folly; and she was naive enough to expect them to be