Joan of Arc

 

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy in Rouen, France, on this date in 1431 during the Hundred Years War between France and England. When she was still a teenager, she heard the voice of God telling her to help defeat the English. At the battle of Orleans, she led the French army bearing a flag with Jesus' name written across it, and the English were defeated. She continued fighting battles until May 23, 1430, when she was captured by enemy soldiers. They turned her over to the Catholic church to be tried as a heretic, idolater, and sorcerer. Her enemies believed that the only way they could have lost in battle to a woman was if she had used witchcraft.

Her trial lasted for months. The judges hoped to trick her into saying something that would incriminate her as a witch or an idolater, so they asked endless questions about all aspects of her life. They were especially interested in her childhood. Because the transcripts of the trial were recorded, we know more about her early life than any other person of her time.

Joan testified that she first started hearing divine voices when she was 13 while working in her father's garden. When God commanded her to join the battle against the English, she told her parents she was going to help her cousin deliver a baby. The judges asked her if she felt guilty for leaving her parents, and she said, "Since God commanded it, had I had a hundred fathers and a hundred mothers, had I been born a king's daughter, I should have departed."

When she wasn't being interrogated, she was chained to a wooden block in a dungeon cell. After months of questioning, she was told that if she didn't sign a confession, she would be put to death. She finally signed it, but a few days later she renounced the confession, and on this day in 1431, she was burned at the stake. She was 19 years old.

Here is a retelling of the story in a "you are there" radio news format as part of the series CBS Is There, aired over CBS radio on February 28, 1947. The lead "reporter" is real newsman John Daly. Daly was the first to report the attack on Pearl Harbor and the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. He was in Italy and reported Gen. George Patton's slapping of soldiers suffering from what today we would call PTSD. In 1959, he was in Moscow and reported on the famous "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Krushchev.