french kiss-off

The skeptical court examined her jealously, but Charles VII, in private conversation with Joan of Arc, was convinced of her probity and place her at the head of an army. Joan believed herself sent from God to drive the English from France. Her later trial and execution were only the beginning of many fluctuations in the Joan story that have fluctuated from anger to adoration, skepticism and awe…

The trial…In the last analysis, however, the mainspring of the whole procedure was that redoubtable personage, Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. No one, in his time or later,could challenge Cauchon’s claim to great ability, or to thorough legal and theological training; he was one of the brightest lights of the University of Paris. His letters, inserted at the beginning of the record of the trial proceedings, reveal him to be an able man of business and of large affairs- precise, direct, authoritative. He was no brute; he showed both humanity and good judgement in opposing the use of legally permissible torture upon Joan, upon the ground that it was neither ” necessary or expedient.”

—Joan interrogated in prison by His Eminence Henry Beaufort,
Cardinal-Bishop of Winchester
(Paul Delaroche)
“God takes great pity on the people of France. It is necessary that you, Joan, that you go to France,” her voices repeated to her unceasingly. She said it time and again, both to her brothers in arms as to her judges: she would rather a thousand times to return to the house of her parents than to enlist in such a trying adventure. But God had entrusted to her a mission to which she would remain forever faithful during the two decades of her earthly existence. She was obedient to the point of death, and death at the stake. Before a life that is so brief, so oriented towards God, how to avoid seeing in her a Christlike figure, a bearer of lessons for our times?—Read More:http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/01/600-joan-of-arc-ii-danger-of-ill.html

It is one of the ironies of history that this man should have gone down, alike in popularity and in literary tradition, as one of the blackest villains of all recorded time, worthy of comparison only with Pontius Pilate, because of his leading part in the trial of a peasant maid from Lorraine whom, we must believe, he regarded sincerely as a heretic and a witch. Nothing could illustrate better than the fate of Cauchon’s reputation, the fickleness of fortune and popular favor, the vanity of human ambition. But, in any case, we must recall Cauchon’s weight and repute in the eyes of his contemporaries in order to understand clearly the prestige of the trial he conducted, its legal rigor, and its great impact upon his time.

—Dryer doesn’t give a damn about Joan’s military exploits. No one plays the Bastard of Orléans or Charles VII. The Hundred Years’ War could be the Twenty Minutes’ Disagreement for all the difference it makes to this film. Of course, you wouldn’t have needed much context, in France, in 1928. Joan’s ecclesiastical rehabilitation was finally complete; excommunicated in her lifetime, she had been canonized in 1920. Joan’s status as military hero had been used as a call to arms throughout France during World War I, particularly after the Germans bombed Reims cathedral. —Read More:http://criterioncollection.blogspot.ca/2006_11_01_archive.html

And yet, is spite of her disgrace, there exists a good deal of evidence that Joan was not completely forgotten. The upper classes, many of whom in her lifetime had viewed her claims with jealousy, scepticism, suspicion, or fear, were glad to forget her; but the common people, who had acclaimed her in life, did not forget her so readily. They felt instinctively that she was one of them, sent for their succor and consolation. Marvelous stories of her exploits continued to circulate.