7.49 Michelet — Histoire de France: Joan of Arc — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read two passages from Jules Michelet's Histoire de France : the childhood and the voices of Joan of Arc, and her death at Rouen. Recognise the style of romantic history: the historian who comments, exclaims and takes sides, and who writes history as a story. Follow the way Michelet weaves the testimony of witnesses, quoted in their own words, into his narrative. Understand why Joan became, through historians like Michelet, a figure of the French nation and not only of the Church. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Le bon huissier Massieu et frère Isambart firent tant, qu’on la lui apporta de la paroisse Saint-Sauveur. The good usher Massieu and Brother Isambart did so much that it was brought to her from the parish of Saint-Sauveur. ce n’est pas tous les jours sans doute l’assaut et le pillage, mais bien plutôt l’attente, le tocsin, le réveil en sursaut, et dans la plaine au loin le rouge sombre de l’incendie… it is not, no doubt, assault and plunder every day, but rather the waiting, the alarm bell, the sudden waking, and far off on the plain the dark red of a fire… C’est justement ce qu’annonçait une prophétie de Merlin ; This is exactly what a prophecy of Merlin foretold; Un jour d’été, jour de jeûne, à midi, Jeanne étant au jardin de son père, tout près de l’église, elle vit de ce côté une éblouissante lumière et elle entendit une voix : One summer day, a fast day, at noon, when Joan was in her father's garden close to the church, she saw a dazzling light on that side and heard a voice: Les pieux parents donnèrent à l’une de leurs filles le nom plus élevé de saint Jean. The pious parents gave one of their daughters the loftier name of Saint John. Oui, selon la Religion, selon la patrie, Jeanne Darc fut une sainte. Yes, according to Religion, according to the homeland, Joan of Arc was a saint. Prerequisites : 7.48 — this reading follows 7.48 Reading . The vocabulary of history and periodisation in 5.26 Vocabulary and the literary forms of 5.28 Vocabulary will help. About this text Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was the great romantic historian of France. His Histoire de France appeared in many volumes between 1833 and 1867; the volume on Joan of Arc came out in 1841 and was later printed on its own as a small book for a wide public. Michelet wanted history to be a résurrection of the whole life of the past, and he wrote it with the passion of a novelist and the conviction of a believer in the people. Joan, born around 1412 at Domrémy on the border of Lorraine and Champagne, heard voices that told her to save the kingdom of France, then largely in English and Burgundian hands. She raised the siege of Orléans in 1429, led Charles VII to be crowned at Reims, was captured, sold to the English, tried for heresy by a church court presided over by Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, and burned at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Some twenty-five years later a second trial annulled the first; its witnesses are the voices Michelet quotes. This lesson gives about 3,000 words: the passage on Joan's childhood and voices from the third chapter of Book X, and the account of her death and Michelet's reflection on it from the end of the fourth chapter. Michelet writes her family name as Darc . The text is that of the edition of the Histoire de France published in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in 1893 (volume V), as transcribed in French Wikisource; one evident misprint, Ouclle for Quelle , has been corrected. Reading Michelet The historian speaks. Michelet does not hide behind his sources. He comments, exclaims, asks questions: Quelle légende plus belle que cette incontestable histoire ? He uses the first person, nous devons y voir , and addresses his readers and even foreign nations. Modern historians write very differently; read him as a great writer whose facts are mostly sound and whose interpretations are his own. The witnesses. Michelet quotes the testimony given at the second trial: the childhood friend Haumette , a farmer Joan nursed, the two friars who stood by her at the stake. These quotations, in guillemets, keep some old forms, like estoit and françois for était and français . The passage on her death is built almost entirely from such words, linked by Michelet's commentary. Rhythm and suspension. Michelet's sentences often stop on … , leaving the reader to finish the thought, or pile up short phrases: l'attente, le tocsin, le réveil en sursaut . At the end of the death scene the sentences grow short and solemn: Elle restera. L'avenir n'y contredira point. The saint and the nation. For Michelet, Joan is both a Christian saint and the first figure of the nation: En elle apparurent à la fois la Vierge… et déjà la Patrie. This double reading, religious and patriotic, made her a figure claimed by every side of French political life afterwards. Reading it a second time, part by part The family. Joan is the daughter of a farmer; her mother keeps her at home, sewing and spinning, and teaches her religion as a story. The witnesses of her childhood. Her friend Haumette and a farmer remember her piety and her care for the sick and the poor. A living legend. Michelet sees in her a power of creation: her ideas became, for her, real beings. The fairy tree. Near the village is a wood with a fountain and a beech where, it was said, fairies once gathered. The war. The border country suffers raids; Joan's family flees and returns to a ruined village. She hopes for a liberator, and a prophecy speaks of a maiden from the Marches of Lorraine. The voices. At noon on a summer day she sees a light and hears a voice; later Saint Michael tells her to go to the help of the king of France. She weeps, because her life has changed. The stake. Abandoned by the Church, Joan asks for a cross; the soldiers grow impatient and drag her to the executioner. From the top of the pyre she pities Rouen, defends her king and affirms her voices