“Joan’s king had won, and it was necessary to declare that she was not a heretic after all”
Both the purpose and content of Joan of Arc’s retrial give it lasting historical significance. What Joan believed to be her mission from God was, in fact, a partisan campaign within a brutal civil war, in which the opposing French faction – the Burgundians, enemies of Joan’s Armagnacs – had allied themselves with the English. Although it was the English who executed Joan in 1431, they did so on the judgement of an ecclesiastical court composed almost entirely of French clerics.
By 1456, the war was over – and Joan’s king had won. It was necessary, therefore, to declare that the woman who had led him to his coronation back in 1429 was not, after all, a heretic. Not only that, but the divisions of the civil war had to be papered over. History therefore had to be rewritten to pin Joan’s death wholly on the English – and the retrial was highly successful in doing so.
If the retrial made it possible for Joan of Arc to become a national heroine, it also gave us many of the ingredients of her now-familiar story. The investigators recorded admiring testimony from people who had known her: family, friends, comrades-in-arms, even some of her former judges (who had miraculously changed their minds about her guilt). Without this evidence, Joan might never have become an icon – nor, almost 500 years after her death, a saint.