Sproles focuses on one example of the secular, feminist Joan of Arc: a 1936 biography by the acclaimed Bloomsbury author, frequent cross-dresser, and Virginia Woolf lover, Vita Sackville-West. She was also the protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s feminist play of 1926, Saint Joan, and a Berthold Brecht drama with the proletarian title Saint Joan of the Stockyards.Īround the time she was canonized, in fact, suffrage activists even mounted elaborate parades featuring costumed equestrian “Joans.” DeMille directed a 1916 silent film epic about her, Joan the Woman.

But it was in the arts that Joan’s image as an ambiguously gendered warrior solidified. In one war poster, American women were urged to emulate Joan and lead their country to victory-by buying war stamps. Meanwhile, Joan was blowing up among secular figures outside France as a symbol of transgressive female power. New right-wing movements, however, would repeatedly use Joan as a symbol of purity, Catholicism, and “Frenchness.” By the time she was canonized, Action française was being eclipsed by other proto-fascist groups. Joan of Arc’s patriotic popularity inside France took off, and not just on the right republicans who’d been suspicious of her cult embraced her too. Joan’s feast day as a reactionary alternative to Bastille Day and rewarded young thugs who beat up secular academics with prizes named after her.Ĭhanges came with the outbreak of World War I.

Although she had been emerging as a nationalist hero among poets since the early nineteenth century, she became especially important to Action française, who wanted to smash the secular government of the Third Republic and bring back the French monarchy. When she was just a graduate student, historian Martha Hanna published an influential essay looking at why the extreme-right group Action française venerated St. Second, during World War I, there was a strong appetite in France and among its allies for a figure symbolizing an unlikely commander of a beaten-down army who won the fact that Joan was a woman showed that strength and power didn’t belong only to men.

So how did the late-medieval heretic turn into two very different symbols in modern times? Scholars suggest that to answer that question, you need to understand first how proto-fascist elements tried to undermine the democratic government and promote a “true” France-one without Jews, immigrants, or academics. The fact that Joan was a woman showed that strength and power didn’t belong only to men.

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