Joan of Arc, a Saint for All Reasons by Goy-Blanquet Dominique;

Author:Goy-Blanquet, Dominique;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Because she follows a higher goal than that of survival, Joan ‘undergoes a destiny rather than living a life’.132 Bernanos poetically punctuates citations from the trial transcript and contemporary chronicles with his own summations, and thematic refrains like the repeated pronouncement: ‘Notre église est l’église des saints’ (Our church is the church of the saints) — that is, the Church belongs to pure believers, not calculating functionaries. Bernanos’s highly personal contribution, much like Péguy’s, eventually became reduced and absorbed by right-wing propagandists into fanatical Catholic patriotism.

Speaking of calculating and clever, Jean-Jacques Brousson, that onetime secretary to Socialist Anatole France, as if to atone for his part in the latter’s sceptical biography of the Maid, in the years 1928 through 1940, wrote three books lauding Joan in reactionary yet cloyingly devout terms.133 Even in these we discern a sequel to his filial rebellion against the Master, from a philosophical angle. In the preface to one, Les Fioretti de Jeanne d’Arc, a sort of Franciscan pastiche, he openly attacks the Vie de Jeanne d’Arc’s intellectual rigour, likening it to one strolling through a ‘medieval garden, armed with secateurs and a watering can full of vinegar’. Brousson indirectly insults the Master when he dedicates the Fioretti to Pierre Champion, for his ‘probity’ as an historian, recognizing him, not France, as the ‘protector’ of his ‘first steps in literature’. In reply, Champion deployed this probity to rebuke Brousson for maliciously misrepresenting the patriarch (Mon vieux quartier, 205-6). Brousson’s talents bloomed more fruitfully in scathing satire than in goodhearted praise.134 His volumes worshipping the Maid thus achieved less acclaim than his memoirs lampooning Anatole France, although the third volume on Joan did receive the papal imprimatur in 1939 — despite an inexcusable error (a ‘non-secateur’?) in dating her canonization as ‘1923’.

Brousson resurfaces on the eve of World War II, writing for the right-wing press. Ever the barbed-penned sycophant for the cause du jour, he extols Joan’s quintessential Frenchness in Je suis partout (I Am Everywhere), on 15 May 1937, to rebut the leftist outcry, similar to that discussed above, reappearing for that year’s Joan festival: Obviously our country’s saint is not in good odor with the Pasionaria’s [left-wing] fanatics. A virgin who believes in both God and country! Ah! Perhaps had there been a demonstration favouring that Judith who slipped into Holofernes’s tent and sweetly sliced off his head!’135 In the anti-Semitic climate that would soon harbour the Collaborationist government of Vichy, Judith is not recalled to validate Joan, as she was in medieval times, but as an anti-Joan, a (typically) deceitful, promiscuous Jew, like her Communist co-religionaries. For rightists like Brousson, Joan was the saint of an especially bigoted, xenophobic France: anti-Semitic, anti-Freemason, and Anglophobic — harking back to the anathematized triad of Cauchon-Dreyfus-Thalamas of 1904-1909.

The right found a more useful spokesperson in the long term than Brousson, the gifted polemical chameleon: Robert Brasillach (1909-45) was a profoundly brilliant apologist — an academically rigorous counterbalance to the lyrical, spiritual Bernanos. Born in southern France

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