The voices and the war
Joan was born around 1412 in Domrémy, on the war-chewed eastern marches of a France that was losing the Hundred Years War catastrophically: after Agincourt and the Treaty of Troyes, an English infant was proclaimed king of France, Paris and the north obeyed the Anglo-Burgundian regime, and the disinherited Dauphin Charles held a rump court south of the Loire. From about thirteen, Joan later testified, she heard voices — St Michael, St Catherine, St Margaret — which resolved into an instruction of insane specificity: go to the Dauphin, raise the siege of Orléans, and have him crowned at Reims.
That an illiterate seventeen-year-old talked her way through garrison commanders, a royal court, and a board of theologians into armour and an army remains the biography’s first miracle of persuasion; France’s desperation and prophecy-primed politics supplied the opening. At Orléans — the strategic hinge on the Loire, besieged for months — her arrival in late April 1429 electrified the defence; within nine days the English siege forts were stormed and the siege abandoned, Joan wounded by an arrow and back in the fight the same day. The Loire campaign and the rout at Patay followed; on 17 July 1429 Charles VII was anointed at Reims with Joan standing by with her banner — the legitimacy transplant the voices had prescribed, executed in under six months.
Rouen
Fortune then reversed with dynastic speed: a failed assault on Paris, royal truces that idled her, and capture at Compiègne in May 1430 by Burgundian troops, who sold her to the English. The trial at English-held Rouen was war by canon law: a heresy prosecution engineered to prove Charles VII’s coronation the work of a witch, turning on her voices and — the charge finally leveraged for her death — her male dress. The trial record preserves her against her judges: unlettered, alone, and repeatedly outmanoeuvring doctors of theology (“If I am not in God’s grace, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there”). Broken briefly into abjuration, she relapsed within days, and was burned in the Rouen marketplace on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen; her ashes went into the Seine against relic-hunters.
The retrials
Every verdict was eventually reversed. In 1456, with the English expelled, a papal commission — hearing her childhood neighbours and old comrades — nullified the trial as fraudulent; in 1920 Rome canonised her; and every French faction since — republicans and royalists, Resistance and its opposites — has marched behind some version of her banner. The peasant girl burned as a heretic ended as patron saint of France, and as the rarest thing in medieval history: a teenaged woman whose own recorded words — two trials’ worth — outtalk everyone who judged her.