When Joan of Arc walked the Earth, she shocked and awed so many people that even Italian and German historians wrote about her deeds. As a matter of fact, she can be found in almost every chronicle of her time. Nevertheless, her memory faded. By the 18th century, there were theories that her great adventure was nothing but a fairy tale cooked up in the 16th century. At Orléans, however, she was still celebrated as she'd been for several centuries. Year after year, since 1429 and almost without any interruption, the good people of Orléans remembered the day she liberated their city from the English. It didn't stop Voltaire to mock the Maid though. He turned her into the unexpected hero of a rather pornographic poem...
Voltaire had--and still has--many admirers. His work as an Enlightenment philosopher is a treasure of literature and critical thinking. He was a man of many layers, though, and beneath the glorious light of his most acclaimed work hide a few pieces of poor and arguable taste. He was a free thinker or, as you would call it, a "libertin", after all. It meant that sex was certainly not off the table when it came to write, think and play.
Voltaire's La Pucelle has quite a rugged history. He first wrote his poem in 1738 and it was only meant, at first, to be passed along by ladies. It belonged to the genre of those stories that were meant "to be read one-handed". Joan of Arc rode a powerful flying donkey and eventually, after resisting many attempted rapes, she also "rode" him "sideways". One lady copied the text in 1744 and was about to get it published, eleven years later, when Voltaire was made aware of the danger and urgently wrote and published a less pornographic version of his poem, in 1755. That way he could posture as a victim of plagiarism. He would only recognise the paternity of the 1732 version twenty years later, in 1775. In the meantime, he published several other augmented versions of his 1755 lighter erotica. By 1762, Joan wasn't making love to her flying donkey anymore but she sure made out with the Bastard of Orléans. All in all, Voltaire kept reworking his poem until he passed away, in 1778.
Voltaire's La Pucelle proved very succesful. It was printed many times, often with lavish illustrations. From 1789 to 1799, we know at least 13 reissues of the poem. Nevertheless, when Moreau le Jeune depicted Joan in a 1786 edition of La Pucelle, he dressed her in full armor taking of the bastille des Augustins outside Orléans. This very picture is said to have influenced and inspired the earliest representations of Mariane, the allegory of Liberty and the Republic, during the French Revolution.
Joan of Arc had become a fairy tale or a joke. However, two years prior to Voltaire confusing everyone by claiming he was a victim of plagiarism, Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy published his late historical study of the Maid as he was reaching the end of his life. He rules out the fairy tale theory and considers how Joan had been convinced to go and rescue to Charles VII. He plays with the notion of auto-persuasion. Joan was convinced she heard voices, he blamed it on a storm. Her story was real, her voice were kind of fake but she believed them to be true, it all happened and it was all the mysterious work of the divine providence.
Lenglet-Dufresnoy wrote something that was more of an essay than an actual historical investigation.
Former state official, L'Averdy is the first one to have actually investigated the odd case of Joan of Arc. He published his work about the Maid in 1790 but was sentenced to death during the Terror, three years later, in 1793.
L'Averdy visited the Vatican library, travelled to Orléans, rummaged through the archives of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and explored the Trésor des chartes in the quest of manuscripts containing the trials of Joan of Arc. He inventoried 28 manuscripts and detailed them all. As an erudite, he was interested in notorious and historical criminal trials. His most original work included his findings on Joan of Arc for no one had done the work he did before him. Joan had only been known through 15th century chronicles up to that point. Her trials put her into a whole new light!
(It brings us back to the topic of "Why do history change over time?")
However, L'Averdy was more of a jurist than a historian. Jules Quicherat later praised L'Averdy works as the first one "worthy in regard of modern science" but Joan still hadn't find her biographer. Meanwhile, as the French Revolution erupted, several of her statues were taken down or disfigured as she represented the monarchy of old. The fact that she'd been a common girl from the countryside, "a young woman of the people", barely saved a few of her public effigies. At Orléans, the same year L'Averdy was sentenced to death, her bronze statue was melt into a cannon, nicknamed "La Pucelle", which later vanished from history.
In 1801, a German play writer came up with a new rendition of Joan of Arc's story. Contrary to Voltaire, Schiller conducted extensive research on Joan of Arc. Schiller hated Voltaire's Pucelle. He was a true romantic and wished to portray Joan's life and character in a very flamboyant yet accurate manner. He wanted to bring her back to life, on stage. He did change a few things in the main frame of events, though, to make up for a better story. It is all very emphatic. Yet, it encountered a magnificent success in Germany. From 1802 to 1843, we've counted no less than 240 performances.
The play was translated into French very quickly by Charles-Frédéric Cramer and Louis Sébastien Mercier. The later depicted Joan as a child of the French Revolution in the preface. She'd have helped to conquer the Bastille if she'd been alive to see it. She was faithful, he said, to the cause of the commonpeople against the treachery of the throne.
The play was staged but it was met with little success in France. It didn't obey the traditional rules of classical theater and French audiences were nauseated by the military parades, the loud noises, the costumes... The play fell into oblivion until the Restauration, in 1821, when it was staged again and fulfilled the renewed political ideology, pretty much like The Wedding of Figaro had done once the French Revolution broke out.