r 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. Feudal privilege depends for its survival on the peasants passively accepting that they and the land, are, in effect, the personal property of the nobility. But, because of Joan, the peasants began to sense that the soil of fair France belonged to them and not to the nobles. Even though nobles and peasants alike were French and ostensibly shared the goal of driving out the English, Charles and the soft nobles of his court could easily come to see Joan, and the excessive patriotism of the masses who were devoted to her, as a greater threat than the English. Lucie-Smith implies that this was one reason among several that, after Charles’ coronation, Charles and his advisors sought to thwart and undercut Joan in every way they could, even though she was sincerely attempting to carry on the war in their behalf. His fear of Joan may have been one reason among several that Charles locked his victorious army in inaction while he pursued barren negotiations with the English and Burgundians and why he ordered the army disbanded when there was still so much English-occupied French soil to take back by force of arms.
If the soft political nobles of the royal court feared and loathed Joan, the stalwart warrior nobles who formed the leadership and striking power of the army adored her and gave their loyalty to her with an ardor that equaled that of the peasants. Great fighting nobles such as Dunois and d’Alençon stood at the front of such men. Lesser ranking fighting nobles of all degrees came to follow Joan’s banner with burning enthusiasm. Perceval de Cagny wrote in his chronicle that Charles had no money to pay the army --nonetheless, nobles and commoners of all ranks "did not refuse to go with and serve him for that journey in the Maid’s company, saying that wheresoever she went they would go, ."32 A young French knight named Guy de Laval wrote a letter home to his mother saying that in the army "nor ever did men go with a better will to a task than they go to this one." He went on to tell his mother to sell and mortgage his