Joan of Arc

Okay okay okay. It’s Drunk Friday and I’mma subject you to Joan of Arc, ’cause I’ve been thinking about her all day for some reason. Okay? Okay.

So the French, they’re just real fucked up right? In a real mess. Their king is crazy – like, thinks he’s made of glass kind of crazy – and so there’s basically a civil war, and the English, they think it’s Their Time To Shine. Because they have a claim to the French throne, okay? Through a woman, which the French made illegal because they hated vaginas, whatever. So the French are fucked up. And the French queen, while the king is making sure nobody breaks him, she signs a treaty saying that the English king will also be the French king. And the French king’s son he’s like whoa what the fuck??? And some other French guys, they think this is proof that the French king’s son isn’t actually the French king’s son but a bastard and it’s a whole thing. So when the French king dies, nobody can decide who the new French king should be. And so they fight.

Enter Joan.

Joan is the daughter of some peasants. Okay? She’s illiterate, she can’t read or write, but that doesn’t matter to God or the saints, they talk to anybody they fucking feel like, and they decide to talk to Joan. And the saints, they appear to Joan when she’s 13, and eventually they tell her yo, you’re supposed to fight for the French king’s son, it’ll help him be the next French king, get to fucking work. And she’s like cool.

So off she goes, after hearing from God and the saints for awhile about this Super Special and Extremely Important Mission, and she rocks up and is like hey let me talk to the prince you guys. And they’re like well you are crazy, why would we let a 16 year old peasant girl talk to the rightful King of Fucking France? And she’s like, because God said so. So Charles (his name was Charles), Charles decides you know, this whole civil war and war with the English has NOT been going well, maybe I should talk to this chick, what is honestly the worst that could happen? So he talks to her, and she tells him about her visions, and then he sends her to some Religious People so they can determine if her visions come from God or Satan and eventually they determine well, we can’t PROVE they come from God, but they definitely don’t come from Satan, so we’re gonna give this our stamp of approval.

Okay. So the Future French King is like fine, go prove that you have the approval of God, and Joan says fine, I predict that your men will win this battle or whatever – which they do, which is weird, because Charles and his men have been fucking losing A LOT – and then they’re like okay, go to Orleans, which has been under siege for like 6 months or something, fix that shit. And she goes. An illiterate teenaged girl who claims that God is talking to her goes to fucking Orleans, which has been under brutal siege for a long-ass time in siege-time and has just refused to surrender. She shows up, she inspires the troops, and lo, Orleans surrenders. Because Joan.

And this keeps happening, okay? The men, they believe her. The prince, who is eventually crowned king, he believes her. The church, they believe her. And she KNOWS THINGS. Things she legitimately should not know. Some historians have tried to rationalize what happened, they argue that the French believed in her because they were desperate and that might be true, but it doesn’t explain how she KNEW THINGS.

And eventually the English got ahold of her, and they burnt her at the stake and that’s horrible, but that’s not why I think about her fairly regularly, okay? I think about her because she makes no sense. She was a peasant. She had no formal education. She said to others that she didn’t even want to be doing what she was doing, she wanted to stay home, but she couldn’t, she was getting messages from God. She couldn’t read or write, but she was able to convince educated clergy, hardened soldiers, and the fucking King of France that she had extensive knowledge of theology and that her visions came from God. She KNEW THINGS. Things she should not and could not have known. Like, of all the stories you read about, Joan’s is the one where you come up against the wall. Maybe she got lucky with some of her predictions, maybe people followed her because they were desperate, but at some point, there is no rational explanation. And so what was it? Who was she? What talked to her? I DON’T KNOW.

And so I think about Joan of Arc, far more often than is probably necessary, and you should too because WHAT THE FUCK. They burnt her for heresy but she’s like the one story that I’ve read where the person may have legitimately tapped in to a higher power. Whatever you want to call it. Joan fucks up the paradigm. All Hail Joan.