This is a story that's circulated in my family since I can remember. I'm a dual citizen of France and the US that was raised in America (my father is a native French citizen). My grandmother was raised in a rural, eastern-central French town called Rigny-le-Ferron. So during the German occupation, our family owned one of the nicer homes in the city, and, as a result, had to house the officers of the German unit that occupied the town. In the courtyard of this home was a statue of Joan of Arc clutching a "French" (period) flag. So the story goes that any time the German soldiers stationed in the town came to speak with the officers staying at the house, they would stop to salute the statue of Joan of Arc. My question is: Is there a historical basis for these soldiers' actions? Or is this some random inexplicable act, as my family has always assumed?
This is somewhat of a complex answer and she stretched far beyond German homage.
[…] there were different versions of Joan; two or three images, sometimes complementary, sometimes concurrent, prevailed: the Saint and the patriot always, the daughter of the people sometimes. The leftist republican and radical preferred the second and the third; the rightist favored the first while honoring the second.(1)
#2 Édouard Adolphe Drumont
Drumont was the founder of the Antisemitic League of France. Throughout Drumont's writings, would use Arc as a symbolic hero for his cause.Joan of Arc was described as a baptized Aryan by Drumont, an “aryenne baptisée” in La Libre Parole, May 30, 1894. (2) As she had already become a symbolic figure in many European societies,her believed Aryan qualities allowed her to be a cookie cutter icon.
The figure of Joan was exploited by anti-Semites in Algeria , with Drumont drumming up the troops. The anti-Semitic rioting that broke out in Algiers and Oran during the Dreyfuss Affair was carefully prepared: influenced by Drumont’s book La France Juive, which saw a ray of hope in Algeria’s anti-Semitism
It is important to keep in mind that since the Dreyfuss affair led to a spark in this anti-semitic movement, it also reignited upon his death in 1935. With his death, Drumont's attack on Dreyfuss was reignited although he had been writing about Joan of Arc for years.
If the roots of the nazi genocide of Jews can be found in the anti-Semitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, as Drumont’s newspaper Libre Parole so deftly states on the front page of the Sunday, May 15, 1938 issue (“De fait, Hitler est venu bien après Drumont… [et] l’Antisémitisme ne sauraît donc être un terme synonyme d’hitlérien”), one might also suppose that the roots of Vichy’s Joan could be found with Edouard Drumont, Charles Maurras, and even Hilaire Belloc in translation, as well as in some of the Joan propaganda used during World War I. Posters attest to that fact: there is one with Joan in chains standing over churches in flames (representing Rouen), with the slogan: “Les assassins reviennent toujours… sur les lieux de leur crime”56. But a better conclusion might be the idea that Propagandists always come back to the strong symbol, and Joan of Arc is one of the strongest symbols available to the French people and the rest of humanity. (3)
1 Robert Frank, Collaboration and Resistance, Images of Life in Vichy France 1940-1944, tr. Lory Frankel, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2000, 213.
2 Drumont’s article was entitled “Les dernières fêtes de Jeanne d’Arc” (La Libre Parole, May 30, 1894), quoted by Neil McWillliam, “Conflicting Manifestations: Parisian Commemoration of Joan of Arc and Etienne Dolet in the Early Third Republic”, French Historical Studies 27.2, Spring 2004,
3 Reproduced in Laurent Bonnet and Louis-Marie Blanchard, En chemin avec Jeanne d’Arc, Rennes: Ouest France, 2004, 121.