Scott Alexander (author/host)

Bedford was a competent statesman trying to protect his family.

Philip the Good was one of the finest princes of the Renaissance, and with Cochon they all carried out Joan's destruction.

You can be an ordinary good person and suddenly find yourself face to face with a hero you never believed you'd ever see, and murder her because she's politically inconvenient, and having done so, not even get the benefits you sold your soul for.

And that's a lesson that no men, at any time, can ever hear too much.

Second, that in a maze of backstabbing politics, ineptitude, brutal criminality and betrayal within and without the government, of authorities who act like bandits and bandits who act like Huns, a saint can suddenly appear with the strength to rewrite history.

When everything looks hopeless, you're probably screwed, but you might not be.

A saint might appear.

It's happened before.

It can happen again.

And third and finally, if you're looking at these sources and seeing stories grow and change, seeing how the sources 20 years later are just slightly more polished than the contemporary sources, seeing how second-hand accounts distort the story and contemporary chroniclers include exciting incidents that never actually occurred, and you're panicking, then I have a dreadful, doleful warning for you.

This is just about as good as it gets.

There are a few modern cases, the World Wars, say, where we have better information, where the participants published newspapers and kept diaries and sent each other letters and even didn't burn most of the letters.

But if you go back very far, or pass into a country without cheap paper and the printing press and an extremely literate population, you will quickly discover that the evidence for Joan of Arc is stronger than the evidence for everything else.

All of our historical sources before the printing press and most afterwards have gone through the same evolution as the evidence for Joan of Arc.

And the difference between the life of Augustus and the life of Joan is that with Joan we can see the evolution captured in amber.

The life of Alexander the Great, that we have now, shouldn't be compared to Jean Chantier's narrative.

Chronologically, it's closer to the Fixfic written 70 years later, in which, after the coronation at Reims, Paris surrenders without a fight and they march into Normandy and Charles VII promises to listen to Joan forever and orders the army to always do what she says.

Footnote, this exists.

Back to the text.

If you want to know the truth about Joan of Arc, you can read the chronicles of the time, or the modern histories that laboriously try to disentangle the evidence from the invention and the reality from the superstition.