As a preface I will state that many of the issues dealt with here are still intensely debated. The positions I take are my own and based upon my research; this means that there are legitimate arguments to be made against them. They are, however, carefully weighed and measured, so while I encourage responses, I do hope that other respondents will take the same care to measure their critiques.
Before exploring the issue at hand a comment needs to be made on the sources. The main body of evidence for Joan’s life, death, and eventual ‘rehabilitation’ comes from the trial records (Rouen – heresy – trial, February 1430 – May 1431; ‘rehabilitation’ 1455 – 1456). These sources are incredibly difficult to manage. Even the descriptions are loaded. French historiography leans towards the description of the second trial as ‘rehabilitation’ but this trial was anything but, to quote the final Sentence of this trial:
We say and pronounce that we judge that this trial record and sentences that contain deceit, slander, contradiction and manifest error of law and of fact, as well as the aforesaid abjuration, the execution and all that then ensured, were and are null, invalid, without effect or value.
Joan was not fully rehabilitated. The record itself, and a few of the already dead participants, were repudiated. Joan and her family, who had lobbied for the trial to take place were only given this salve to their pride, honour, and souls:
And nevertheless, as is necessary and required by reason, we quash, suppress and annul them, removing all of their strength. We declare that this Joan and the plaintiffs, her relatives, have not suffered or incurred any mark or stain of infamy because of what has been said, and that she was innocent and that she was justified in all of this. And, insofar as it is necessary, we justify her in this completely.
Both trials were the products of incredible external pressures. I shall explore the Rouen trial and its origins below and deal quickly with the Nullification (I call it such because it merely nullified the Rouen trial record and sentence) Trial quickly now. In 1455 Charles had driven the English from the continent (beyond a small enclave at Calais). France still simmered with factional tensions. Normandy especially, where the Rouen Trial had been held, was a mix of English and French supporters: most famously Jean Juvenal des Ursins, bishop and propagandist who wrote, among other texts, Audite celi (1435) in favour of Charles’s cause, abandoned fine houses, rents, land (valued at 2,000 livres), household goods of 16,000 écus. Jean Juvenal was also the lead judge in charge of the 1455-56 trial. In 1440 the French nobility had openly rebelled against Charles VII. The Nullification Trial risked bringing up bad blood and bringing the newly united kingdom into civil conflict once more. The Duke of Burgundy clearly still despised Joan and numerous depositions (both in attitude and content) represent his antipathy towards Joan. The dukes of Orleans and Alençon both utilised their depositions to indulge in some political point-scoring and general soap-boxing. Here is a quote from an exam question (‘Did Charles VII betray Joan’) I wrote as an undergraduate on the subject:
Charles VII was a pragmatic man, something dictated by necessity to ensure his survival. A defence of Joan of Arc at this point was not politically viable: it conflicted with Joan’s stated intentions of driving the English from France. Despite the faults of the Rouen trial it had been sanctioned by the papacy and the Inquisitor of France had been involved. Up until the nullification of the Rouen Trial’s sentence Joan was a heretic [more accurately a schismatic and abjurer]. Her involvement in Charles’s coronation was a political coup-de-grace for the English and problematic for his reign. Monstrelet writing in 1430 attributed to Joan the death of a Burgundian captain, ‘The Pucelle even caused Franquet to be beheaded, whose death was exceedingly lamented by his party’. This displays a hostility that Joan had engendered and, as Jean Juvenal des Ursins’s Audite celi illustrates, a need to create a historical reality in which Joan did not come between the Valois monarch and the Burgundians, (also omitting the murder of John the Fearless) at the Arras summit in 1435, when the Burgundians and Charles VII finally reconciled. Likewise the decision to nullify the Rouen Trial, as opposed to rehabilitating Joan, was a pragmatic decision that prevented Charles being forced to retract, or risk a papal overrule, of his pardons extended to those French who had remained in Normandy after Henry V’s conquest [Vale, 1974, 63]. It was the ‘false articles of accusation (...) [which were] torn out of one copy of the proceedings of 1431 and burnt by the public executioner at Rouen.’[Vale, 1974, 67] However, while this might not have satisfied the d’Arc family, who received no compensation and merely removed the ‘mark or stain of infamy’ that had lingered over the family for twenty-five years, such a pursuit of posthumous ‘justice’ would have sabotaged Joan’s desire to unite the French, drive the English from France (Alençon conspired to bring the English back into Normandy in 1455) and could have uncovered resentment between men such as des Ursins, who had given up a personal fortune of 16,000 écus when he abandoned Paris to support Charles VII, and the ‘collaborateurs’ who remained behind.
Moreover, we are dealing with the mutability of memory and a host of motivations which may have masked the true events of the trial. Accusations are made, some verifiable others not that the Rouen Record is wholly untrustworthy as a source. We hear of secret scribes hidden behind curtains, coercion, and one incident of a manifest change between the French minutes (a record kept contemporaneously to the trial) and the three Latin records which were produced after the trial.
Is this for a paper (and if so what level, uni or school)? I'm happy to help, but I'd prefer to know.