The teenage peasant who, in 1429, convinced the heir to the French throne that God had sent her to save France — and briefly did. She helped lift the English siege of Orléans, stood beside Charles VII at his coronation, was captured, tried for heresy by a pro-English church court, and burned at Rouen at roughly nineteen. A posthumous retrial annulled the verdict in 1456; she was canonized in 1920. The trial transcripts survive unusually complete, yet the distance between the historical record and her mythic afterlife — martyr, nationalist emblem, feminist icon, far-right mascot — has never closed.
In May 1429, a seventeen-year-old farmer's daughter from a village most people had never heard of stood on the walls of a relieved Orléans and was recognized by soldiers who had just followed her into battle. She had arrived at the dauphin's court nine weeks earlier, unknown, carrying nothing but the claim that God had sent her. She left it with an army. No military rank, no noble title, no formal authority of any kind — and yet the siege broke.