Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc is one of the few figures the Church first burned and later made a saint, and the reversal is the heart of her story. A peasant girl from Domremy, she reported hearing the voices of Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret directing her to drive the English from France and see the dauphin crowned. Against every expectation she was given troops, relieved the siege of Orleans in 1429, and stood beside Charles VII at his coronation at Reims, a run of successes that turned the Hundred Years' War.

Captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English, she was tried by a pro-English ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy and witchcraft, the decisive count being her wearing of men's clothing and her claim of direct divine guidance over the Church's authority. She was burned at Rouen in 1431, aged about nineteen. A retrial ordered by the papacy in 1456 annulled the verdict; she was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920. The same voices that a court called demonic the Church later recognized as holy, a case study in how heresy and sanctity can be verdicts on the identical life.

Joan of Arc was formally judged twice, by two different courts reaching opposite conclusions, and the gap between them shows plainly how much her case turned on politics rather than settled fact. The 1431 trial that condemned her as a heretic and led to her burning at the stake was conducted at Rouen under English and Burgundian political control, by clergy working within an occupied territory with every institutional incentive to discredit the woman who had turned the military tide toward the French crown. Roughly twenty five years later, with the political situation reversed and Charles VII secure on the French throne, a nullification trial authorized by Pope Callixtus III examined the original proceedings and annulled the verdict in 1456, finding the original trial procedurally corrupt and its judgment void.

Even this rehabilitation did not immediately produce sainthood: canonization did not come until 1920, nearly five hundred years after her death, following a long process of beatification and renewed French national interest in her memory, particularly around the First World War. The distance between a heretic's execution and a canonized saint, with a formal legal reversal roughly halfway between the two, is a documented sequence of institutional verdicts rather than a gradual popular change of heart, and each verdict reflected the interests of whoever controlled the court that issued it.