udal 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 lands if need be to raise troops for the cause.33 Clearly, Joan’s moral inspiration turned an army of sullen professional mercenaries into a cross-social class army of crusaders.
Joan’s moral impact, both in arousing the will of the French soldiers -- of all social ranks -- to fight, and in igniting the first blaze of patriotic national feeling in the French people, was the one quality of hers that did the most to change history. In a few days at Orléans, she inverted what had been the established moral order on the battlefields of the Hundred Years’ War. She made an army of habitual losers believe in themselves as winners. For the French army with Joan, the belief in victory and the fact of victory became mutually reinforcing. Renewed belief in victory brought with it a new will to fight and the will to fight brought the first victories -- and those victories stoked ever hotter will to fight. Only the folly of Charles in freezing his victorious army in place while he carried on fruitless negotiations, only his shortsightedness in disbanding his army at the height of its power, broke the cycle of belief and victory that Joan had started.
Joan’s military role as an inspirational creator of the will to fight is obvious and indisputable. Establishing to what degree she was more than just a "super cheerleader" --to what degree she was a true commander who made decisions and gave orders concerning the strategic and tactical conduct of the war -- is much more problematic. What complicates this question is that the French army of Joan’s day had nothing that modem military professionals would call a chain of command. Whether it was a case of strategic decisions made at the royal court, or of tactical decisions made in a tent in the field, decisions seem to have been made in an extremely loose committee fashion with the most forceful speaker present able to make his or her view carry the others along.34 These ad hoc "committees," to use a modern term, could consist of the Dauphin-King and a mix of more or less coequal co