Anatole France, _Vie de Jeanne d'Arc_

 I SUSPECT THERE is an interesting short book to be written on Joan of Arc and the communal imagination of the Third Republic. Péguy on the one hand, the Action Française on another, and then this extraordinary production. 

When I first saw references to a book by France on Joan, I assumed it was some brief but pointed skewering of medieval superstition and the nationalist right. No...not at all. It's a full-dress biography, two volumes, close to a thousand pages all told. Its general tendency is to debunk, and France gets off several poison-tipped ironies against the church and the monarchists, but it is not dismissive. In places, he even does his best to imagine his way into the mind of a person of the 15th century. 

He must have been working on this book about the same time as Mark Twain was working on his, and as in Twain's case, it's fun to see the hard-headed, satirical de-bunker unable to stop himself from falling in love with Joan.

I am going to attempt a translation of a passage from France's generous (80-page) preface (this is on page LXV):

While under influences it is impossible for us now to identify precisely, the thought came to her to re-establish the dauphin in his rightful inheritance, and that thought seemed to her so great, so beautiful, that, in the simplicity of her naive and candid pride, she believed it had been the angels and saints of Heaven who had brought it to her. For that thought, she gave her life. And that is how she survived her own cause. The highest enterprises perish in their defeat, and perish even more thoroughly in their victory. The devotion that inspired them remains behind, an immortal example. And, if it was an illusion that surrounded her senses and sustained her, helped her to offer herself entirely, was that illusion not, without her knowing it, the creation of her own heart? Her folly was wiser than wisdom [Sa folie fut plus sage que la sagesse], for it was the folly of martyrdom, without which men have founded nothing  great and useful in this world. Cities, empires, republics, lie atop sacrifice. It is not, accordingly, without reason and justice that, transformed by imaginations of enthusiasts, she has become the symbol of the fatherland [patrie] in arms.

Whenever I read Anatole France, I am again surprised that he is not better known nowadays in the USA.What a writer. And he was Bergotte, after all.