 French national consciousness that had never existed before. To her own discomfort, during her lifetime and at the same time as her military victories, she became the center of a personality cult that embraced all France.
Joan was a low-born peasant who rose, apparently with God’s help, to the heights of power and prestige in the space of a few weeks, thereby making a mockery of centuries of ingrained notions of feudal privilege. As such, she instantly became the focus of frenzied adoration by the masses of her fellow peasants. The chronicle known as the Journal of the Siege of Orléans, written within a generation of Joan’s death, asserts that when she first entered the city of Orléans to begin her campaign to break the English siege, the people were "making such rejoicing as if they had seen God descend in their midst;. And there was marvelous crowd and press to touch her or the horse upon which she was."23 At Joan’s retrial, Jean Barbin, a Doctor in Law serving the French Parliament, quoted a Master Pierre de Versailles who said that when Joan visited the town of Loches "the people seized her horse by the legs and kissed her hands and feet."24 A noblewoman named Marguerite La Touroulde testified that when Joan had been her house guest for a period of several days, "women came to my house.. . bringing holy objects for her to touch."25
Joan, commendably, was made uncomfortable by this sort of adulation as these same pieces of testimony make clear. De Versailles said that Joan told him that she was counting on God to help her protect herself from being made into an idol.26 La Touroulde gave an indication of Joan’s sharp wit when she said that Joan had told her with a laugh, referring to the holy objects brought by the women, "You touch them! They will be as good from your touch as from mine."27 Joan’s displeasure at her own personality cult notwithstanding, it was a fact that during her public career of a year and a month, ordinary people all over France revered her as a living saint and priests said masses in her honor before their congregations. They did the same with redoubled ardor during the year of her captivity.28
The power of Joan’s hold on the devotion of the peasantry went far beyond mere displays of enthusiasm and piety. She incited the masses to take action and fight for a country that, thanks to her, they were beginning to consider their own. In parts of France occupied by the English, the previously docile peasants rose up in partisan resistance warfare as word of Joan’s exploits spread.29 In those parts of France under the rule of the Dauphin and eventual King, Charles VII, peasants came in droves, of their own volition, to join an army that ostensibly belonged to Charles but that in its soul belonged to Joan. Popular eagerness to fight for France became so acute that a force of peasants attempted to storm the walls of Jargeau even before Joan arrived with the army. The peasants were routed, but when Joan came on the scene, so did victory.30
Almost certainly unintentionally, Joan had the effect of starting the beginning of the end of the passionless, chess-game-like political relationships of feudalism. She was the first spark of the French common people’s emotional loyalty -- not loyalty to their privileged feudal lords who ruled over peasants and land as personal property -- but rather, loyalty to their idea of a nation that they, the common people, could call their own. She turned what had been a dry dynastic squabble that left the common people unmoved except for their own suffering into a passionately popular war of national liberation.
Modern-day scholar Edward A. Lucie-Smith, in his psychological biography Joan of Arc, asserts that this unprecedented swell of popular national enthusiasm alarmed Charles and his circle of high-born, scheming, manipulative court advisors.31 Until Joan put the crown on Charles’ head, he needed her. After she had placed the crown securely on his head, he and his palace circle saw her, and the peasant mass loyalty she inspired, as threats to their privileged positions. Fe