'Reinventing Jeanne': The Iconology of Joan of Arc in Vichy Schoolbooks, 1940-44

Author(s): Eric Jennings

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Oct., 1994), pp. 711-734
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260683
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EricJennings

'ReinventingJeanne': The Iconology of Joan

of Arc in Vichy Schoolbooks, 1940-44

From the late nineteenth century onward, the female symbols of

Marianne and Joan of Arc began to be claimed by conflicting
elements of a rapidly polarizing French society. They were pre-
sented as bitter rivals -the one adopted by republican or left-
wing nationalists, the other increasingly by integral nationalists.
Originally forged by pantheon of chroniclers, from the contem-
a
poraneous view offered by Christine de Pisan to Voltaire's dispara-
ging description, to Michelet's and then Bernanos' contrasting
eulogies, the image of Jeanne d'Arc had long been exploited to
evoke sentiments and defend causes as diverse as patriotism, anti-
clericalism, mysticism, gallicanism, anglophobia, anti-semitism,
imperialism and anti-feminism.1 Ironically, Joan herself, her trial
testimony suggests, had never claimed any such complexity. The
Maid (Pucelle) or bonne Lorraine, as she was also known, had
perceived her purpose as a straightforward one: to obey Saint
Michael's voices and rid France of the English. Her dramatic death
at the stake in 1431 ensured that her myth would live on. However,
the controversy generated by the Joan legend's post-1878 anti-
republican overtones dictated that this representation of Joan
would be afforded little attention in Third Republic classrooms
presided over by a bust of Marianne - in other words, in Jules
Ferry's crucible of modern French republicanism.2 The situation
would change radically, though, after 1940, when Philippe Petain's
ultra-nationalist collaborationist regime found in Bernanos and
Maurras' vision of Joan the crystallization of a policy of sexism,
anglophobia and Catholicism, and introduced it with a vengeance
into the French educational curriculum.
Those scholars who have touched upon the role of the Joan
myth in Vichy schools have concentrated almost exclusively upon
anglophobic and religious themes, at the expense of gender con-

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New

Delhi), Vol. 29 (1994), 711-734.
712 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

siderations.3 This study will attempt to show the extent to which

the Vichy regime of 1940-44 exploited the Joan image for its
gender message. It will first trace the demarginalization of the
anti-republican Joan myth, a process which began outside the
classroom in the interwar period, and culminated in 1940 with
the advent of the Vichy regime. It will then examine how the
allegory of Joan in Vichy schoolbooks contributed to demar-
ginalizing the Pucelle, while paradoxically dissuading girls from
emulating her successes. Lastly, it will seek to consider the signifi-
cance of Vichy's Joan in a historical continuum.
The late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ultra-nationalistic
branch of the French right undoubtedly inspired the apparent
obsession with Joan in Vichy schoolbooks. Members of the royalist
Action francaise had actually desecrated images of Marianne, the
symbol of staunch republicanism, while paying homage to Jeanne
d'Arc in the same breath. Indeed, for the Camelots du Roi group -
'foot soldiers' of the Action francaise - as of the 1920s, it was
considered an honour to be invested with a denier de Jeanne d'Arc.
The monarchist Action francaise was by no means alone in adopting
a Joan 'personif[ying] anti-republicanism and rebellious activism'.
Before 1940, her representation was also embraced by genuine
fascists, to whose 'volkish' side she doubtlessly appealed. As one
scholar observes, no single league or party could claim a monopoly
on la bonne Lorraine's image: '[she] belongs just as much to the
liturgy of the PPF [Jacques Doriot's fascist party] as to that of
Vichy.'4 The extremist form of the Joan cult, long in opposition
during the Third Republic and consequently largely sustained out-
side of public schools and official national liturgy, finally acceded to
power with the advent of the Vichy regime. Ever since the late
nineteenth century, when revanchiste elements of the French right
and far-rightbegan to overtake the increasingly internationalist left
in the use of nationalist and patriotic rhetoric, the allegory of Joan
had been relegated to that of an outsider. It would see flashes of
respectability only when a few such mainstream and discernibly
republican figures as Georges Clemenceau deigned to join the
ranks of Pierre Gaxotte, Jacques Bainville, Georges Bernanos and
Charles Maurras, in eulogizing the Saint from Domremy.
At one level, it is easy to understand why Marshal Petain would
have turned to Joan's image in 1940, despite allegedly disparaging
it in private earlier.5 He held great sympathy for Joan's recent
biographers, and considered Joan's referent to stand as an outstand-
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 713

ing role-model - a shining example of the new order's virtues. Joan

had, of course, been pre-revolutionary, and had died a martyr at the
age of nineteen. Moreover, she had been willing, and in fact eager
to sacrifice; and she had certainly been saintly and pristine pure,
something to which Marianne - so often condemned for being
bare-breasted - could never have aspired.6Joan's image, however,
represented more than all these moral values dear to Vichy. She
was also associated with the supernatural. After all, implied one
Vichy textbook author Leon Cristiani, what else could explain why
a woman had been not only capable of, but actually successful in,
leading an army?7This aspect of the Pucelle was in tune with Vichy's
ideal of l'homme regenere' - no doubt paradoxically based upon
an archaic blueprint. Moreover, Joan's image served to redefine
youth along Vichyite lines: 'she exudes moral and physical health',
the hagiographer for children, Rene Jeanneret, remarked.8Further-
more, Joan conformed to the smallest detail of Petainist political
propaganda: she had been attacked, without provocation, not only
by the English (to reinforce this parallel, her celebration in 1942
conveniently coincided with the British attack on French
Madagascar)9 but also by domestic subversives in their pay. In a
natural extension of this analogy, the media under Vichy depicted
de Gaulle as a modern-day Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais and
Joan's tormentor - a French traitor sent by London to discredit
and persecute 'True France'.10 More importantly, Vichy clearly
valued Joan's fanaticism: had she too, like the Marshal himself, not
made a 'sublime gift of her person' to her homeland and to God?
Hers was a 'total devotion', supposedly comparable to that shown
by Petain to France, and undoubtedly akin to that which the Mar-
shal preached in his speech on youth issues on 5 March 1942: 'The
moral total development of a French Youth includes an engagement
without reticence and without reservation to the service of the cite
and the nation'.11
Conversely, and most significantly, however, Joan in no way
seemed to fit Petain's gender ideals: Jeanne d'Arc had been enter-
prising, childless, combatant, defiant and, even more notably, had
dared to intrude into many fields traditionally reserved for men.
She had thereby successfully blurred gender boundaries, while
Petain's regime sought not merely to 're-establish', but actually to
reinforce them. How then did Vichy reconcile its gender outlooks
with a signifier that shared many of the traits of those nascent
modern gender constructs it wished to dismantle?
714 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

Before answering this central question, let us explore a principal

medium through which Vichy attempted to disseminate the Joan
allegory. Historians agree on the importance which Vichy authori-
ties accorded to youth policies in their effort to create a 'regener-
ated French citizen' through a 'National Revolution'. One expert
on Vichy, Jean-Pierre Azema, argues convincingly that Petain's
National Revolution was above all a cultural revolution. Historians
such as Wilfred Halls and Pierre Giolitto have contended that this
cultural revolution found its primary expression in the inculcation
and regimentation of youth. This Vichy achieved through a sig-
nificantly reformed curriculum, a wealth of new textbooks (in spite
of paper shortages due to wartime privations) and a multitude of
youth camps and organizations ranging from virtual replicas of the
Jugend SS to seemingly more benign scout movements. Surpris-
ingly, however, while scholars have dwelt at great length upon
Vichy youth camps, they have generally steered clear of detailed
studies on Vichy textbooks, this in spite of one historian's remark
that 'juvenile literature, especially when it is illustrated, fits and
reflects perfectly the many themes of Petain mythology'.l2 Surpris-
ingly, too, the education of girls under Vichy has been by and
large overlooked by historians of this period.
The National Assembly's decision to hand full powers to Mar-
shal Petain on 10 July 1940 signalled an important change in
attitude to female education. To cite but one example, Vichy
passed legislation on 15 August 1941 to prohibit girls from enter-
ing, let alone attending, boys' schools (education had already been
largely gender-segregated under the Republic, but Vichy clearly
deemed even former stringent norms insufficient).13Measures of
this sort were accompanied by an iconological changing of the
guard which would also affect girls. The bust of Petain replaced
that of the Republican Marianne in schools.
While the image of Marianne fell into disfavour, that of Joan
was rehabilitated. Orders issued from Vichy to its West African
possessions in 1942 reveal that a new balance of power now existed
between the celebration of each female figure. That associated
with Marianne, Bastille Day, previously celebrated with particular
enthusiasm in French West Africa, was to remain a school holiday,
but one with 'no rejoicing'. Conversely, parades, radio broadcasts,
a youth rally, extensive propaganda, a mass and a youth vigil were
planned for Joan day - now the official 'national day'.'4 This
iconological transition was of the highest political significance. A
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 715

journalist for the collaborationist newspaper Gringoire asserted in

February 1941, in an article revealingly entitled 'In the days of
Marianne's rotten regime': 'By an audacious falsification, his-
torians [writing Republican textbooks] used to show the reign and
practice of virtue beginning only with the coming of the [1789]
Revolution.'15 The implications of this thinking are clear. In text-
books, as elsewhere, Marianne, the most 'offensive' of republican
revolutionary symbols, must be eliminated and replaced by more
acceptable iconography. The image of Marianne, 'the old shrew
with the Phrygian bonnet' according to Gringoire, had been
dethroned - if not defenestrated - by Petainists. Its purge was
thorough, violent and sudden.16 In turn, in textbooks, this tran-
sition left the door open for representations of pre-revolutionary
heroes and a handful of carefully selected heroines.
Thus, like those revisionist Egyptian pharaohs who had all traces
of their predecessors or adversaries systematically chiselled away
from temple walls, the government at the Hotel du Parc sought
to wipe out from manuels scolaires all signs of Marianne and the
republicanism which had borne her. If, in the end, Vichy failed to
do so thoroughly, it was for lack of time and resources, but not
effort. In a sense, however, matters were not so simple. Marianne
and a secular version of Joan had actually co-existed in Third
Republican schools, though the latter had assumed a decidedly
secondary role to the former. In fact, one might contend that
Joan's figure stood as an ideal female replacement candidate under
Vichy, precisely because it could offer an illusion of continuity.
The image of 'a certain Joan' had indeed been widespread under
the Republic: under the Vichy regime it needed only to be altered
from that of Michelet and Christine de Pisan to that of Maurras
and Bainville. The demarginalization of Joan involved, before
the edification of a new myth, the destruction of all textbooks
considered unflattering towards the Pucelle. Thus, Vichy banned
P. Duprez's 1934 Histoire de France, despite singularly laudatory
passages on Marshal Petain, no doubt in part because of its depic-
tion of Joan as 'a young shepherdess from Lorraine who thought
herself designated by celestial voices to save France'.l7 The image
of Joan which Vichy was to promulgate would be altogether dif-
ferent.
Only when one accepts the multiformity of Joan's image does
it become apparent that the new regime did achieve an about-
face, or at least a breakthrough. Even though the representation
716 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

of a certain Maid had appeared frequently in late nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century juvenile literature, no single schoolbook
had ever been devoted solely to a representation of the Pucelle
until the publication in 1942 of the pedagogue Rene Jeanneret's
Miracle de Jeanne. It had clearly been unthinkable under the
Republic to take the cult of a 'sect leader'18 to these lengths in
the classroom (two editions of a 120-page cours elementaire text-
book-biography constitute an ambitious project). Nor would it
have been conceivable, prior to 1940, for a minister of education
to issue a speech on Joan to be delivered in every French school.
This was precisely what Abel Bonnard, Vichy Minister of Edu-
cation from 1942 to 1944, achieved on his first Joan day in office.
Letters sent by school principals all over France to confirm the
delivery of his address and to relate student reaction to it attest
to the pre-eminence of Joan in Vichy schools. In this sense, as
Pierre Giolitto remarks, although the presence of the Pucelle's
image in schools was by no means new, under Vichy it did reach
a level and scope 'without precedent'.19
Overall, Vichy's pantheon of heroines differed considerably from
that of the Republic. In addition to Joan, republican textbooks
had cited as female role-models: 'Jeanne d'Albert, and Madame
Roland; writers like Eugenie de Guerin, Madame Recamier, and
Madame de Stael; the painter Rosa Bonheur; and educators like
Madame Pape-Carpantier and Elise Lemonnier.' We know that
Vichy eulogized men such as Petain, Clemenceau, Mistral, Charle-
magne, Bayard, Napoleon, Peguy, Vercingetorix, St Louis and Sully.
As for its heroines, these were listed on a propaganda poster,
portraying a girl reading: 'Louise de Bettignies, Ste Clotilde, Jeanne
d'Arc, Blanche de Castille, Jeanne Hachette, Ste Genevieve,
Helene Boucher'.20Joan clearly fits the second, predominantly pre-
revolutionary, list better than the Republic's. The explanation for
her seemingly dual allegiance must once again be that - as with
Marianne's dichotomy - Joan's image was intrinsically proteiform.
This, of course, is in no way unique to the Joan legend. It would
appear to be a general property of heroines of her renown to 'evoke
multiple (and often contradictory) representations'.21
The Joan of Vichy was devout, if not fanatical, when contrasted
to that perhaps grudgingly adopted by the Republic. Her transform-
ation had begun in earnest with Petain's 15 August 1940 declaration
on education in the Revue des deux mondes, in which he revealed
his sympathy for nazi opinions on pedagogical objectivity. The
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 717

Marshal declared: '[France's school system] will no longer pretend

neutrality. Life is not neutral. There is no possible neutrality
between truth and lie, good and evil, health and illness, order and
disorder, between France and anti-France.'22This doctrine's logical
extension was the law of 6 January 1941, which officially introduced
Catholic dogma into public schools (admittedly, this measure was
mitigated a few months later, but this hardly affected Joan, who
was retained so as to promote the more moderate notion of 'Christ-
ian civilization').23From this date onwards, public school texts could
include lengthy theological writings on Joan.24La Pucelle was no
longer 'hallucinatory'. Rene Jeanneret was categorical in rejecting
the prewar secular Joan of Duprez. To Jeanneret: 'The Voices did
speak'.25Thus, Joan's image at last regained its credibility. The effect
no doubt desired was to associate the Joan myth's Third Republican
detractors - who had manifestly not believed in her voices, since
they had censored or qualified all references to them in school-
books - with Joan's other great disbelievers: her executioners. A
less desired effect might also have been realized by de-hystericizing
the Joan allegory, in other words by inadvertently effacing a gender
stereotype. Indeed, by confirming the authenticity of Joan's voices,
Vichy dispelled the secular republican view of Joan as a deluded
and mystical, albeit patriotic, woman.
This last point demonstrates once again the complexity of Joan's
representation in wartime textbooks. In order to render Joan cred-
ible as a 'stable' femme au foyer symbol, it became expedient to
reject another misogynist perception. However, on the whole,
Vichy created innumerably more reactionary gender stereotypes
in conjunction with Joan's image than it destroyed. One might
also expect several more glaring problems to emerge from Vichy's
use of the Joan legend. The first, and most obvious, has to do with
the fact that the actual bonne Lorraine had snatched a military
victory from the jaws of defeat, while Petain clearly inherited a
vanquished nation. Vichy, however, neither perceived nor pre-
sented matters in this light. To Petain, who wished above all to
vindicate the role of the French army in the 1940 debacle, modern
France had been on the verge of losing a moral, rather than a
military struggle, in which there was still time for him to save the
day (like at Verdun in 1916, no doubt). Thus, he truly considered
himself to be on a par with the Pucelle. This peculiar slant on
reality is also alluded to by an article in a local newspaper from
the Massif Central, 'Avenir:
718 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

This victory, which the battlefields refused us, we will win over ourselves. Joan
of Arc reminds us how much we must sacrifice and suffer because, today like
then, our country has slipped along the paths of divisiveness and selfishness.
Enthusiasm and faith remain the necessary virtues from which will emerge our
moral and social rebirth. French youth will hear sacred voices. If it were not
to, the nation's last chance at salvation would be lost forever.26

This passage not only illustrates a desperate need to salvage a

moral victory, it also reflects the prevailing post-debacle national
mood, which Robert Paxton has aptly termed one of 'self-flagel-
lation'.27The image of a woman, it was felt, could best embody
this spirit of sacrifice.
Here, too, Vichy invoked Joan, presenting her as supremely
altruistic and ascetic - sometimes bordering on masochistic. She
admirably fitted Petain's maxim, singled out for schoolchildren by
Rene Jeanneret: 'You suffer and will suffer much more yet, for
we have not yet finished paying for our errors.' Not only had Joan
been eager to attend mass, to the point that her friends had teased
her about being too pious, Jeanneret tells his young readers, but
also: 'Up since dawn, living, on a day of battle on a bit of bread
dipped in wine, lying on the hard stony earth at night, she herself
tore out of her shoulder the arrow which wounded her.'28This
conforms to several aspects of Petainist - and largely Catholic -
morality. To give one example, a Vichy public school morality
textbook instructed students not to show pain, even if it became
unbearable.29This was an old lesson, to be sure. The Spartan boy
who had kept quiet while his entrails were devoured by a wolf
had long served as a model for youngsters. Vichy pedagogues,
however, deemed this Hellenic reference inappropriate; to Pierre
Rouable, the author of this Vichy re-edition of a republican school-
book, it seemed antiquated, in other words pre-Christian.30Thus,
Vichy sought a new candidate with Revolution nationale qualifi-
cations. Joan, of course, presented an outstanding model of Christ-
ian suffering and sacrifice: she had faced adversity, privations,
injury, betrayal, persecution, imprisonment, the threat of torture,
a jump out of a tower window and, finally, the stake. Vichy text-
books insist: 'You know that it was her mission which saved France
from oblivion.' One cannot help but conclude, as does A. Gallego,
a hagiographer writing in Vichy French Indochina in 1941, that
Joan stood as a female and nationalistic Christ figure, who had
gladly paid for the sins of others.31She had voluntarily suffered
and died so that France might live.
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 719

These were by no means the only transformations which the

Joan image underwent in 1940. Whereas interwar children's books
had generally played down the anglophobic potential of the Joan
legend - sometimes going so far out of the way to do so as to
sound unconvincing32 - Vichy's juvenile literature exploited it
to the fullest. Naturally, Etat Franqais textbooks dwelt upon Joan's
martyrdom and the cruelty of the English. In a play which the
cultural indoctrination organization Jeune France recommended
for youngsters, entitled 'Le Mystere de Jeanne et de Peguy', the
bonne Lorraine declared: 'Poor Goddams! So sad really to have
left behind their beer, their fog and sea.' Rene Jeanneret expressed
his anglophobia less benignly. He explained:

Once [the peasant] had finished cultivating his field, the English came and stole
his wheat. The English king was rich, the little Dauphin Charles was poor. The
English [king] had a great many soldiers because he possessed much money.
The French had neither money, nor soldiers.33

This stress on wealth should be understood in terms of Vichy's

preoccupation with alleged Anglo-Saxon greed, both territorial
and pecuniary. This passage also relates a widely-held notion that
interwar France - an inherently rich nation - had been sapped
by pernicious foreign influences, often operating out of, or at least
supported by, London.
One could logically deduce, however, that the Petain regime
selected Joan more for gender motives than for temporal, religious
or even xenophobic considerations. After all, male models of
youth, anglophobia, virtue, sacrifice and suffering abounded (Du
Guesclin or Napoleon, for instance). These might well have been
preferable for a governing class which espoused misogynist fascist
or proto-fascist concepts of aesthetics. However, in the short term
at least, a female figure was needed to replace Marianne, for
France had always been semiotically associated with femininity.
Jules Michelet had already stated as much a century earlier:
'France's saviour had to be a woman. France herself was a woman.'
This message did not fall upon deaf ears in Vichy. A 1943 textbook
entitled Notre France, son Histoire paraphrased Michelet to
schoolchildren: 'Remember French students, that here in France
the nation was born from the heart of a woman.' This notion was
echoed in a 1942 tract distributed by the Ministry of Information,
the central agency for all propaganda pertaining to Joan. It affirms:
720 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

That it was a young woman, a 'Pucelle' with the innocence of youth, who was
chosen to save France is profoundly symbolic. When she was still a child, a
strange prophecy, which she had heard about the village, foretold that the
Kingdom of France, sold by a lecherous woman. Queen Isabeau of Bavaria,
would be saved by a virgin from Lorraine.34

No doubt the author of this propaganda intended the reader to

associate Petain with Joan, and the 'decadent' Third Republic and
its iconology, in other words Marianne, with Isabeau. Here, Vichy
exploits for its own ends the dichotomy between virgin and whore,
Mary and Eve, and transposes it to a political framework signified
by Joan and Marianne. More revealing yet is the rendition pro-
vided by P. Hallynck's 1943 textbook on the Middle Ages which
states: 'The Kingdom, lost by a woman (Isabeau) would be saved
by a girl.'35Here, the author makes explicit the assumption widely
held in Vichy textbooks that Joan derived her power not merely
from her voices, but also from her virginity.
There can be little doubt that Joan's cult under Vichy was
directed primarily at girls. The Maison Mame, prolific publisher
of children's propaganda books in the second world war, clearly
targeted boys with its Philippe Petain, Marechal des Jeunes, and
girls with its Miracle de Jeanne.36 It seems fair to ask, however,
whether Joan was truly meant to be taken as a literal model for
Vichy girls.
Here again, potential stumbling blocks emerged. Surely, the
Etat franqais did not wish to see its future mothers emulate Jeanne
to the point of taking up arms. The era's repulsion at the very
idea of women fighting is best illustrated by an article in Gringoire.
In a column customarily devoted to denigrating allied troops, a
journalist ridiculed the Red Army's recruitment of women.37Yet,
in the pages of subsequent issues, one finds eulogies to Sainte
Jeanne d'Arc - the consummate woman warrior. Vichy attempted
to minimize this flagrant contradiction of ideals by several means.
The first is summarized by an article published in Indochina under
Vichy, which suggests that Joan's combativeness derived from her
will to defend her simple 'feminine' world - the 'comfort of the
home'.38 The second involved simply stressing certain aspects of
the Joan legend, while conveniently disregarding others. Joan, the
Miracle de Jeanne argues, had never killed or even sought to kill.
What is more, she supposedly much preferred her banner to her
sword. Jeanneret manifestly sought to create an exaggeratedly and
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 721

stereotypically 'feminine' Joan: 'Typical French girl, she loved

beautiful clothes, silk and furs; as a warrior she liked pretty
armour, but still she preferred her banner to her sword, and could
outsew any woman in Rouen...'.39 Hence, it should come as no
surprise that Joan's iconographers under Vichy often depicted her
unarmed. The astonishing implication of this viewpoint, actually
stated in a 1941 issue of Le Republicain du Centre, is the portrayal
of Jeanne d'Arc as 'she who detested war'.4 Once again, to the
Marshal, Joan was of use only as a moral martyr. What France
lacked were social warriors, not anciens combattants.
Joan's transvestism was potentially more subversive to Petain
than her militarism. Understandably, cross-dressing was the last
activity which the Etat francais wished to promote. The androgyny
it symbolized was equally frowned upon, not just by Vichy, but
generally among insecure members of a generation striving for
'respectability' - ever since the end of the first world war, or
perhaps even the turn of the century. Jeanneret confronted the
challenge of androgyny directly: 'Out of a sort of warrior coquett-
ishness, Jeanne wore above her armour a dainty fabric, a sleeveless
dalmatique.'41According to Marina Warner, the expert on Joan's
gender implications, through androgyny Joan had sought to escape
from socially imposed gender constructs, while remaining intrinsi-
cally female. Only dressed as a man could she inspire respect and
achieve 'virtue' itself derived from the Latin term for man.42
In the above excerpt, Jeanneret appears determined to relegate
the representation of Joan to a stereotype: he presents her not
just as 'coquette', as we shall see, but also as maternal, frail and
vulnerable. An issue of the Vichy magazine for youth leaders,
MattrisesJeune France, devoted to Joan day celebrations, provides
more convincing evidence yet of a revisionist effort to de-androgy-
nize Joan- to destroy what rendered her 'special'. Its suggestions
for Joan costumes include depicting her as a little girl, a warrior,
and at the stake. As is to be expected, she is dressed 'in a skirt'
as a girl and 'in a dress' at the stake. Significantly, however, she
also appears 'in a skirt' as a warrior. Not since Joan's day had her
androgyny been challenged; even then, the allegation had been
the contrary one - that she was male.43
Joan's virginity also posed a dilemma for Vichy. On the one
hand, like fascist governments, Vichy employed 'a rigorously
chaste discourse', which Joan fitted admirably. On the other
hand - and this too holds true for fascist regimes - the Etat
722 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

franSais also placed fertility on a pedestal. In the words of one

scholar:

The Petainist heroine is either a virgin like Joan of Arc or rabbit-like, such as
Mrs Roger Jacquier, who at 21 years of age gave birth to her 7th child without
ever bearing twins, and whose model fertility was lauded by the entire French
press in January 1942.44

Interestingly, Joan would be accommodated to both ideals. Her

'purity' had long been extolled. The 1904 edition of Le Tour de
la France par deux enfants already referred to her as 'one of the
purest glories of our nation'. Albert Troux and Albert Girard's
1942 textbook, Histoire de la France, brought this assertion to an
unequivocal superlative: 'She is the purest... figure in our history.'
At the same time, though, the Joan image was moulded to fit other
Vichy virtues. Indeed, if chastity was encouraged: 'Femininity and
maternity were [also] key attributes of [Vichy's] promotion of
gender identity.' Consequently, Rene Jeanneret presented his Joan
as a marraine, almost a surrogate mother - a type of Virgin Mary
to whom children flocked: 'At [her home town of] Domremy,
Jeanne loved to be surrounded by children.'45In this way, divinely
inspired suppression of her 'maternal function' constituted another
suffering she had to endure. Where the annexation of Joan as an
example of maternity and fertility might have appeared contrived,
Vichy persisted, and resorted to the image of Joan's mother. Equi-
pes et Cadres, an information brochure for Vichy youth leaders,
affirmed in an issue devoted to the role of women in the new
French state: 'One only learns the sign of the cross properly on
one's mother's lap: "I derive my faith from my mother", Joan of
Arc declared at her trial.' Thus, hesitating perhaps to invoke Joan
directly in a tract aiming to condemn 'dreadful garconnisme'
Vichy's ministry of youth stressed her upbringing, her youth, her
mother - in effect her story prior to her military achievements.
Vichy's Commissariat General a la Famille utilized the image of
Joan's mother even more explicitly to promote natalism. In a
booklet to be distributed to teachers, it recommended: 'It is wise
to observe in front of your students that Joan of Arc was the fourth
child in her family.' Thus, each of Vichy's ministries employed the
image of Isabelle Romee, Joan's mother, for its own subtly differ-
ent ends: to the ministry of youth it symbolized morality, feminin-
ity and 'maternal transmission', while for the Commissariat
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne 723

General a la Famille it represented a more clinical model for

repopulation.46
Contrary to the themes of militarism, transvestism and chastity,
Joan's illiteracy - a salient point in most textbooks dealing with
the Pucelle, did not pose great difficulties for Vichy. In fact, Joan's
image was employed as a device to denigrate intellectuals -
especially female ones. A certain Henry de Sarrau, in a speech
delivered at the boys' school of Libourne in 1941, drew a clear
contrast between Joan 'the genius of action' and common sense
on the one hand, and her tormentors at her trial, described as
'pedantic scholars' on the other.47Vichy accommodated the Joan
legend to the collaborationist ideal for the education of girls,
outlined in 1941 by Rene Benjamin, Vichy's 'court writer' at the
time. He contended that girls needed only minimal schooling, and
that the stress in female education should lie primarily on technical
skills and morality - since further schooling would only be wasted
(female lawyers ended up as prostitutes anyhow, he argued). Simi-
lar themes can be found in a 1943 pamphlet for girls issued by the
Catholic Feminine Student Youth Organization (JECF). Besides
reproaching girls with using homework too often as an excuse to
avoid household chores, and asserting that Joan stood as the best
possible model for girls, this source asked outright: 'Can a true
woman be a pure intellectual?' Vichy's textbooks adopted a similar
line: not only had Joan saved the nation without a formal edu-
cation, they maintained; she had in fact benefited from being
taught to place sweeping before learning.8 Thus, Joan's represen-
tation was employed by Vichy to promote ignorance, docility and
ultimately subjugation for girls. The few years that girls attended
school were to be spent idealizing one who never did and, text-
books argued, had been better off for it.
For the image of Jeanne d'Arc, the logical, albeit extreme,
extensions of Vichy's gender perceptions were two-fold. Either
the Pucelle represented a humble housewife, or she was masculin-
ized. This last conclusion merits an explanation. To Chanoine
Glorieux, writing for an audience of young Catholic girls in
France's occupied zone, Jeanne d'Arc exemplified 'male virtues'.
Likewise, a reviewer for Gringoire termed Joan, 'the virgin with
the virile heart'.49This gender scrambling makes sense only if one
conceives Joan as incapable of accomplishing her feats because
she was a woman. Two Vichy textbook writers, Pierre Jalabert and
Rene Jeanneret, held this very conviction. The former's ultra-
724 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

collaborationist Vive la France! (in which he depicted France as

threatened by 'judeomasons' and argued that the ancient
Romans - read the nazis - were harsh but 'friends of Order')
presented Joan as 'feeble and gentle... meek and frail' before
she began hearing voices. Rene Jeanneret for his part described
Joan at the moment when she was struck by an arrow, as follows:
'She is but a girl suddenly, crying and whining. But then her Voices
restore her courage.'50By portraying Joan as deriving her bravery
solely from her voices, Jeanneret and Jalabert accomplish more
than stripping their Pucelle of any agency. They also imply
more specifically that women on their own are incapable of achiev-
ing the virtue most extolled by Rouable in his morality text -
the masking of pain. Consequently, if the Pucelle managed to do
so, it was either because she was divinely inspired, or somehow
male. Marina Warner affirms that androgyny represented a middle
path between genders - one which could elevate a woman to be
the equal of a man.51 Either alternative proposed under Vichy,
then, relegated Joan to something less and certainly other than
what she had been.
Joan's dualism is all the more apparent in another context.
Vichy pedagogues clearly valued Joan's supernatural dimension.
However, they also went to great lengths to depict her as perfectly
ordinary. Hence, Jeanneret presented Joan as 'a well-behaved girl,
as so many French girls used to be, as they are today, and as they
always will be'. Indeed, if Joan was portrayed as exceptional in
the field of battle, she was described as average and 'typical' in the
home. Anne-Marie Hussenot, in a workshop on women and mar-
riage offered at Vichy's elite training centre for young men at
Uriage, spelled out the primacy of Joan's domestic dimension: '[a
woman should remember that, in the case of Joan of Arc, or of
other illustrious women] throughout the exceptional mission that
was confided to them, they first of all performed humbly and
simply their woman's role'.52Joseph Fabre's Pucelle asserts, even
more specifically: 'I would rather my creator disarm me and leave
me to go back to my parents, so that I could take care of the
lambs with my siblings.'53In other words, Joan had not wished to
be singled out in the least. In reality, Jeanneret tells his readers,
her cause itself represented a sacrifice, for it deprived her of a
'normal', stable existence. According to Jeanneret, she would show
flashes of this 'normality' before and then throughout her mission.
He observes: 'Joan cannot read... But she sews, cooks, washes,
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 725

sweeps, makes the beds and prepares the soup, for men like to
have the soup ready when they return from the fields.' Rarely is
Vichy's blueprint for gender identities as clear. Jeanneret asserts,
even regarding the military campaign of the bonne Lorraine:

If Joan inspires respect it is because she thinks of everything. And the soldiers
like her because she cares for them, primarily by cooking... Her [mother]
would be so proud of her tending to household chores while on military
campaign.54

In this way, Rene Jeanneret metamorphosizes into a model

housewife she who had once been considered France's foremost
female fighter. This, it would seem, stands as the true 'Miracle' of
his textbook.
Still, this miracle was predictable. Joan's very grandeur might
have been seen as a potential threat to a 'Kinder, Kache, Kirche'
type of order. Rouable clearly sets out to bring her down to earth,
and more importantly, warns that her example should not be
followed, or even taken literally:

Some of the most notable heroes in our history have been women. But never-
theless, girls should preferably exercise the virtues of patience, persistence and
resignation. They are destined to tend to the running of the household.... It
is in love that our future mothers will find the strength to practise those virtues
which best befit their sex and their condition.55

This passage is highly significant, for it seeks to dissuade girls from

truly considering Joan a role model for success; instead they were
to emulate what was arguably Joan's only failure: her lack of
education. In the words of George Mosse: 'If woman was idealized,
she was at the same time put firmly into her place.'56 This is
precisely the effect achieved by Rouable. By elevating Joan's rep-
resentation, he simultaneously discourages modern girls from
matching her deeds in any field. In so doing, he manifestly con-
demns them to a life of 'resignation'.
In a sense, however, this betrays a Vichy trait which transcends
gender barriers. One of the Etat franqais' many contradictions
involves its ambivalent worship of heroes. On the one hand, Vichy
wished to instil its youth with 'a heroic sense of life'.7 On the
other hand, in a paradox reminiscent of that inherent in military
virtues, it also sought to foster 'team spirit' and conformity. Hence,
Rouable's Morale reads, enigmatically: 'True distinction consists
726 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

of not being noticed', and 'one must in life avoid standing out in
any possible way'. Vichy Education Minister, Abel Bonnard,
applied this logic to Joan, who, he maintained, 'shines because she
was forgotten'.58Here, Vichy's rejection of individualism is made
plain. The bonne Lorraine reflects this dichotomy: in Vichy texts
she appears alternately as a superwoman (when divinely inspired)
and a common woman (in her 'natural' state). Furthermore, Joan's
referent fitted this role superbly, for she herself had insisted on
her simplicity and humility, while claiming simultaneously that she
could personally read God's intentions - effectively supplanting
Church and Pope in the process. What was a child to draw from
Joan's contradictory lesson? Heroism constituted a burden; those
who desired it were dangerous individualists, while those who had
it thrust upon them (read Petain and Joan) were true tragic leaders.
In the final analysis, can we determine whether the cult of
Joan among the youth of Vichy represented anything new? Gerd
Krumeich, the expert on Joan's image in history, plays down the
rift between the vision of the Pucelle presented under the Republic
and that promulgated under Vichy by suggesting that the only
significant distinction lies in her post-1940 anglophobia. Others
seem inclined to agree. Alain-Gerard Slama, pointing to pre-1940
French anti-semitism and to certain 'republican' legacies under
Vichy, contends much more generally that the break between the
Republic and the Etat franqais itself has been overstated. Some
historians of women under Vichy echo these thoughts: the official
condition of women under Vichy was not markedly worse than
under the Republic they argue, minimizing, for instance, the
administration of capital punishment for abortions under Vichy.59
Admittedly, this continuity theory applies to Joan to a degree. As
has been mentioned, another representation of the Pucelle had
been honoured well before the debacle, and even the anti-republi-
can Joan symbol had been widely diffused outside of an increas-
ingly shrinking mainstream political culture before 1940.
The above 'continuity theory' also holds that Vichy's Joan was
heavily influenced by prewar Catholic representations of the
Pucelle. A 1909 Catholic Joan biography for youngsters does pres-
ent many traits which Vichy's Joan would inherit. The following
excerpt clearly shows signs of utilizing Joan's figure to promote
anti-secularism and hence anti-republicanism:

At this time when the very concepts of God and the Nation are boldly chal-
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 727

lenged by... sectarians you will learn, by reading the admirable life of your
pious and valorous compatriot, to love... and encourage others around you
to love all that Joan of Arc herself cherished until her death: God, the Saviour
Jesus, the... Virgin Mary, the Church and France.60

These lines also attest to the fact that Joan had naturally been
considered a model for youngsters well before 1940. Moreover,
the Church had long worshipped a 'volkish' and nostalgic rep-
resentation of Joan akin to Vichy's. This particular convergence
of traditional Catholic and Petainist visions of the Pucelle is illus-
trated by an article in a Catholic newspaper under Vichy, which
reads: '[Joan's] lesson is that of the existence of honour and purity
for a nation of chevaliers.' Invocation of Joan by the Catholic
Action and scouts was by no means novel either: in May 1938
French scouts had retraced on foot Joan's itinerary from Domremy
to Rouen. A similar continuity - postwar this time - can be
found among the JACF, the French Rural Catholic Girls' organiz-
ation, which continued to celebrate Joan day after the Liberation
in much the same spirit as it had under Vichy.61
Notwithstanding these parallels, however, it seems apparent that
Vichy did in fact reinvent Joan - albeit a composite Joan, shaped
by a number of prewar influences - not unlike Vichy itself. To
be persuaded that Vichy and Catholic Joans need not intersect,
one has only to contrast Jeanneret's Miracle de Jeanne with Cha-
noine Glorieux's biography of Joan, also written under Vichy
but intended for the female Action Catholique, rather than for
schoolgirls. Glorieux, like Jeanneret, stresses Joan's docility. How-
ever, the former draws two un-Vichyite conclusions from Joan's
life. Firstly Glorieux comments: 'Had Joan been English or
German, we would still have to love her.' Secondly, he suggests
that Joan's obedience to and love for God had always superseded
her patriotism.62Jeanneret, or Vichy itself for that matter, sought
neither a cosmopolitan Joan nor one so devout as to challenge
civil leaders. Further evidence of a rift between Catholic and Vichy
Joans can be found in Catholic dissent over Vichy's perceived
failure to stress Joan's saintliness sufficiently. A clergyman, Abbe
G. Girault, insists in a 1942 editorial in the Catholic daily La
Croix:

One must call things by their real name - and people too. One does not say
Remi, bishop of Reims, but rather St Remi... One must not secularize Saint
Joan of Arc. She is a saint. That is a fact.63
728 Journal of ContemporaryHistory

Girault's remarks betray a disappointment with Vichy's exploita-

tion of the Joan image for non-religious ends. It seems safe to
conclude, therefore, that Vichy's Joan differed from traditional
Catholic representations in several respects. An article in the
staunchly collaborationist Parisian newspaper Les Nouveaux
Temps on 10 May 1942 provides some insight into perceptions at
the time of the novelty of Vichy's state-endorsed Joan cult:

Nearly five centuries were needed for the French to decide to pay homage to
Joan of Arc. But the events which are transpiring [today] (the Anglo-Gaullist
attack on Madagascar) render her cult more and more pertinent, her lesson
increasingly moder, and her presence more and more needed. Because she
endured defeat and triumphed she represents the very conscience of France's
destiny. Because she reconciled common sense and exaltation, she appears as
the incarnation... of the qualities of our race.64

Les Nouveaux Temps manifestly saw the newfound value of Joan's

image as lying in her anglophobia, her 'race' and her 'common
sense'- an expression the newspaper's staff frequently employed
to justify collaboration with Hitler.
In this sense, the ultra-nationalistic dimension of Joan's image
can be said to have reached its apogee under Petain. The pervas-
iveness of her cult from 1940 to 1944 must be underlined; in every
corner of the Empire, from Indochina to Madagascar and Senegal,
populations assimilated Vichy's Joan to their pantheons, paying
tribute to her in various local ritualistic fashions. In Languedoc,
meanwhile, youths of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, an obligatory
state paramilitary organization created in lieu of military service -
atheists and Catholics alike, it would seem- joined to construct
a chapel dedicated to Joan, the style of which reflects the plurality
of Vichy aesthetics:

The facade and pillars were of carved stone. The floor... was made of wood.
The mark of the group leader Guillemard, chief architect of this sanctuary...
could be found everywhere. It was he who sculpted out of the pediment a
warrior Joan of Arc, of measured modernism. The [chapel's] interior was
inspired by the first Christian churches.6

This chapel also epitomizes Vichy's use of the Joan symbol: her
figure stood at the vanguard of an official change in sensibilities
which harked back as far as early Christianity, while simul-
taneously promoting 'modernity'. Between 1939 and 1944, the
image of the bonne Lorraine underwent another metamorphosis
Jennings: 'ReinventingJeanne' 729

which historians have ignored. Rouable's 1943 Cours de Morale

underscores this transformation. In the same breath, it asks
students: 'Why is Joan of Arc a Saint?', 'How is learning about
the life of great men [sic] a powerful tool toward achieving moral
perfection?', and 'Do you not love France more since 1940?'66
Invocation of Joan, like concern over the messages of textbooks,
misogyny in these same textbooks, obsession with natality, rejec-
tion of modernity, or anti-semitism, was nothing new. Nevertheless,
contextually, Vichy brought these themes to new levels, by blat-
antly inserting them into a Revolution nationale agenda, and bring-
ing them to radical, profoundly anti-republican ends.
There can be little doubt that Vichy utilized the Joan image
strategically as part of an overall cultural indoctrination project
to conquer and convert French youth. Indeed, Vichy fashioned an
already polyvalent Joan into the anglophobic, pious, reactionary,
ultra-nationalist and misogynist symbol of a regime seeking to
break with the avowed neutrality and supposed decadence of that
preceding it. Rene Benjamin, writing in 1941, hinted at one of the
Joan symbol's central purposes when he suggested that invocation
of pre-revolutionary Christian figures constituted an effective bul-
wark against bolshevism.67The anti-soviet function of Benjamin's
Joan was very much a product of its year: violent anti-communist
rhetoric was only let loose in the hotels and spas of Vichy with
the launch of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa. While anti-commu-
nism may have represented a prime motive behind Vichy's use of
the Joan image, in textbooks neither it, nor even relgious themes,
match the insistence with which Vichy promulgated its gender
constructs through its Pucelle. Joan of Arc, previously endowed
with agency under the Republic - thanks to the lois laiques which
dismissed divine intervention - was recast under Vichy into an
obedient servant to her father, her King, the Archangel Michael
and God. Where elements of the existing Joan legend stood in the
way of Vichy gender perceptions they were either minimized,
rewritten or eliminated altogether. Thus, Vichy textbook writers
stressed their Pucelle's timidity over militarism and femininity
over transvestism. Ultimately, the resulting portrait was one of an
average Joan - a typical French girl. It is perhaps a characteristic
of regimes which strive to accentuate the differences between
their inhabitants ('French'/Jews, 'cadres'/followers, whites/'native
colonials', men/women, family/enemies of the family) to draw,
chiefly through textbooks, but also through other forms of incul-
730 Journal of Contemporary History

cation, first a series of counter, then of common identities.68The

former all stand diametrically opposed to the portrait of a 'super-
man' - in this case Vichy's 'homme regenere' - at once 'French',
leader, white and male. The multiformity of Joan's image under
Vichy also led it to be held up as representative of the 'French'
category, in binary opposition to the 'Jew'.69 Thus, Joan's image
was invoked to illustrate four of the five oppositional structures
listed above. Interestingly, it was sometimes cited in relation to
both variables: male when inspired from above, and female in her
'natural' condition, as well as alternately follower and leader. The
Joan image, perceived today as representing female heroism, stood
under Petain as a protean model for ultra-traditional gender roles.
Her representation was employed by Vichy schoolbooks to pro-
mote uniformity, subservience and resignation for French girls.

Notes

The author is grateful to Anthony Adamthwaite, Susanna Barrows and Peter

Sahlins for their advice and encouragement concerning this article.
1. See Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au Pouvoir. L'imagerie et la symbolique
republicaines de 1880 d 1914 (Paris 1989), 327. For an example of Joan's image
being exploited for imperialist ends see 'Jeanne au bicher', L'Express, 21 Septem-
ber 1961, 7, which refers to a pro-OAS vision of Joan. Regarding anti-semitism,
see note 10 below.
2. Philippe Contamine demonstrates to what extent 1878 stood as a watershed
date for the cult of Joan. Prior to then, the image of the Pucelle had been the
preserve of the political left. However, the centennial of Voltaire's death reversed
allegiances, by bringing to the fore the inherent enmity between those republicans
favouring the philosophe and monarchists despising him as an 'insulter' of Joan of
Arc. See Philippe Contamine, 'Jeanne d'Arc dans la memoire des droites' in Jean-
Francois Sirinelli (ed.), Histoire des Droites en France, 2 (Paris 1992), 408-9.
3. See Nick Atkin's many contributions dealing almost exclusively with the
religious aspects of the Joan legend. Of note here is the succinct: 'The Cult of Joan
of Arc in French Schools, 1940-1944', in Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin,
(eds), Vichy France and the Resistance, Culture and Ideology (Totowa 1985), 265-8.
Also see Gerd Krumeich's interesting historiographical piece: 'The Culture of Joan
of Arc under the Vichy Regime', in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh (eds),
Collaboration in France, Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation,
1940-1944 (Oxford 1989), 92-102.
4. See Martha Hanna, 'Iconology and Ideology: Images of Joan of Arc in the
Idiom of the Action frangaise, 1908-1931', French Historical Studies, 14 (Fall
1985), 222-3; Pierre Milza, Fascisme franfais: Passe et present (Paris 1987), 248-9
(translations and italics are mine throughout this article).
5. See Nick Atkin, 'Reshaping the Past. The Teaching of History in Vichy
France', Modern and Contemporary France, 42 (1990), 12.
Jennings: 'Reinventing Jeanne' 731

6. Agulhon, op. cit., 56.

7. Leon Cristiani, Histoire de France, des origines d 1453, Cours preparatoire
(Lyon 1942), 159.
8. Ren6 Jeanneret, Le Miracle de Jeanne (Tours 1942), 100.
9. Vichy's colonial ministry cabled the following message to its governor in
Madagascar on 9 May 1942: 'At the moment when mainland France and the
faithful Empire celebrate with fervour our national Saint, our thoughts go out to
our tormented colony and its heroic defenders. Against this same invader this
French island is demonstrating the same courage. It is the most fitting homage
which can be made to Joan of Arc: sacrifice to the nation and confidence in its
destiny.' Archives Nationales, Centre d'Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence,
(hereafter ANCOM) Affaires Politiques 636 (1) telegram 1426.
10. This comparison is made explicit in a political cartoon. See Gringoire, 8 May
1942, 1. In earlier years, a certain de K6rohant had gone so far as to assert that
bishop Cauchon was a Jew. Cauchon was manifestly perceived as Joan's opposite;
he was considered, to use Petain's expression: 'antifrance'. For de K6rohant, see
Michel Winock, Edouard Drumont et Cie. Antisemitisme et fascisme en France
(Paris 1982), 79.
11. 'La Fete nationale de Jeanne d'Arc', quoted in L'Action francaise, 6 May
1941. Jean-Claude Barbas and Antoine Prost (eds), Philippe Petain, Discours aux
Francais (Paris 1989), 236.
12. Jean-Pierre Azema, 'Vichy, l'Heritage Maudit', L'Histoire, 162 (January 1993),
104-7; Wilfred Halls, The Youth of Vichy France (Oxford 1981), 268, and Pierre
Giolitto, Histoire de la Jeunesse sous Vichy (Paris 1991), 496-609. Gerard Miller,
Les pousse-au-jouir du Marechal Petain (Paris 1975), 55.
13. See the Journal Officiel, 1941, 3694.
14. ANCOM Affaires Politiques 636 (1) telegram dated 15 May 1942. Regarding
Bastille day in West Africa prior to 1940. See Marc Michel, '14 juillet et 11
novembre au S6engal entre les deux guerres', Revue francaise d'histoire d'outre
mer, 2 (1990), 145-57.
15. Gringoire, 20 February 1941, 2.
16. Gringoire, 10 April 1941, 3. Literal defenestration of Marianne was already
a pastime of anti-republicans immediately prior to the first world war. Maurras
affirms that it became in vogue again in 1940. See Agulhon, op. cit., 326, and
Charles Maurras, 'Le Buste du Marechal', L'Action francaise, 29 March 1941, 1.
For a more graphic illustration, see Gringoire, 16 January 1941, 1. In June 1942,
the mayor of Bordeaux, Tounay-Boutonne, was stripped of his office for having
retained 'a Marianne painted in red', while only displaying a small portrait of the
Marshal next to her. See Jean Guehenno, Journal des annees noires, 1940-1944
(Paris 1947), 303.
17. See P. Duprez, Histoire de France, cours elementaire (Paris 1934), 114. Regard-
ing the ban, see the Journal Officiel, 1 April 1943, and 'Contre les manuels qui
deforment l'histoire', Gringoire, 9 April 1943, 2.
18. Rosemonde Sanson, 'La fete de Jeanne d'Arc en 1894. Controverse et cele-
bration', Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 20 (September 1973), 461.
19. Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN) F13335; Giolitto, op. cit., 293.
20. Linda Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Sociali-
zation of Girls in Modern France (Albany 1984), 52; Laurent Gervereau and Denis
Peschanski (eds), La Propagande sous Vichy, 1940-1944 (Paris 1990), 155.
732 Journal of Contemporary History

21. Agulhon, op. cit., 283-5; Joan Scott, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical
Analysis', American Historical Review, (December 1986), 1067.
22. Reprinted in Philippe P6tain, L'Education nationale (Paris n.d.), 15. It is
worthwhile comparing this quotation to a nazi one: 'Objectivity in the teaching of
history is but one of the many errors of liberalism. We will never approach history
with impartiality, but as Germans', Die deutsche Schule (September 1933), cited in
L'enseignement de l'histoire contemporaine et les manuels scolaires allemands, Soci-
ete de l'Histoire de la Guerre (Paris 1938), 101.
23. Convincing evidence of Joan's retention under the heading of 'Christian
civilization' can be found in Jer6me Carcopino, Souvenirs de sept ans, 1937-1944
(Paris 1953), 305.
24. This was the case of a textbook on medieval history: H. X. Arquillere, Moyen
Age. Classe de 3eme (Programme du 6 mai 1943), 313. The author cited a blatantly
theological excerpt of his own work for this version published under Vichy. A
post-liberation edition of what is ostensibly the same work simply discarded the
quotation.
25. Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 98. Although this work was published by a
Catholic printing house, it was also to be distributed in secular schools. See Nick
Atkin, Church and Schools in Vichy France, 1940-1944 (New York 1991), 79.
26. Maurice Vallet, L'Avenir, quoted in 'Jeanne d'Arc et la Jeunesse d'aujourd'-
hui', L'Action Francaise, 11 May 1941, 2.
27. R. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order (New York 1982), 21.
28. Rene Jeanneret (ed.), Marechal Petain. Pour chaque jour de l'annee. Maximes
et Principes extraits des Messages au peuple Francais, choisis et classes pour servir
t l'education morale et civique de la jeunesse (Tours 1941), 14; Ren6 Jeanneret,
Lectures francaises. Lecture courante et morceaux choisis d'auteurs classiques. Cours
moyen et superieur (Tours 1943), 73. Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 102.
29. Pierre Rouable and Leon Gauthier, Cours de Morale (Paris 1943), 67-8.
30. Ibid., 7.
31. Ibid., 252; A. Gallego, 'Jeanne d'Arc, la Sainte' (Haiphong 1942), and Christ-
ian Amalvi, Les Heros de l'Histoire de France: recherche iconographique sur le
pantheon scolaire de la Troisieme Republique (Paris 1979), 167.
32. The fact that Joan had combated a current ally seems to have posed certain
obvious difficulties in interwar France. Collette Yver's history of Joan for children
attempts to resolve these by claiming that Jeanne had wanted all along not just
warmer relations, but an actual alliance with the English; 'once they had gone
home', Colette Yver, Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc (Paris 1936), 28.
33. Maitrises Jeune France, 2 'Jeanne d'Arc', 19; Rene Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op.
cit., 10-11.
34. Jules Michelet, Jeanne d'Arc (Paris 1974), 151; E. Audin, L. Baerembach and
L. Dechappe, Notre France, son Histoire (Paris 1943), 99. Concerning the Ministry
of Information, see AN F13335. 1: Jeanne d'Arc, sa mission, son exemple
(Secretariat General de l'lnformation 1942), 10.
35. P. Hallynck and M. Brunet, Le Moyen Age et les debuts des Temps Modernes
(Paris 1943), 164.
36. A small overlap did exist. The author of Phillippe Petain, Le Marechal des
Jeunes asserts: '[Petain] helped you to become boys with pure hearts once again,
boys just like the companions of Joan of Arc .. .'. Alain Bussieres, Philippe Petain,
le Marechal des Jeunes (Tours 1942), 163.
Jennings: 'Reinventing Jeanne' 733

37. 'Les femmes dans l'armee rouge', Gringoire, 30 July 1943, 2. Women resistors,
effective as they proved to be as informants, and in a number of other capacities,
were also dissuaded from wielding arms. The grounds for their exclusion are
particularly noteworthy: 'In some circles women were regarded with suspicion
because they were said to gossip.' Thus, stigma of this sort also appears to have
been quite strong outside Vichy's milieu. See Paula Schwartz, 'Partisanes and
Gender Politics in Vichy France', French Historical Studies, 16 (Spring 1989), 139.
One must go as far as Quebec to find contemporaneous examples of Joan being
used to recruit women for the army. See the poster: 'L'inspiration des femmes du
Canada', Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada.
38. Christianus, 'Style propre du patriotisme chez une Fille de Dieu', Indochine,
hebdomadaire illustre, 15 May 1941, 3.
39. Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 101.
40. Quoted in Gerd Krumeich, Jeanne d'Arc in der Geschichte. Historiographie,
Politik, Kultur (Sigmaringen 1989), 227.
41. George Mosse affirms that as early as 'the fin de siecle [,] the androgyne was
perceived as a monster of sexual and moral ambiguity, often identified with other
"outsiders" such as masochists, sadists, homosexuals, and lesbians'. Nationalism
and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, (New
York 1985), 104. Regarding the backlash against the gender role reversals of the
first world war, see Marie-Louise Roberts, ' "This Civilization No Longer Has
Sexes": La Garconne and Cultural Crisis in France After World War I', Gender
and History. 4 (Spring 1992), 49-66: Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 51.
42. See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London
1981), 140, 147.
43. Maitrises, op. cit., 23. For a fifteenth-century account relating popular disbelief
that Joan was a woman, see Michel Zinc (ed.), Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris
(Paris 1990), 297.
44. Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi, 'Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology', Feminist
Review, 1 (1979), 74. Miller, op. cit., 159.
45. G. Bruno, Le Tour de La France par deux enfants (Paris 1904), 61; Albert
Troux and Albert Girard, Histoire de France des origines a 1919 (Paris 1942).
Miranda Pollard, 'Women and the National Revolution', in Kedward and Austin,
op. cit., 43; Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 71.
46. Hoover Institution Archives, Jean Delage files. Equipes et Cadres, 'Role
civique de la Femme et de la Jeune Fille', Tract 25-A-7, 1944, 1. Also at the Hoover
Institution is the booklet by the Commissariat General a la Famille, 'L'Instituteur et
son role dans la restauration de la famille franqaise', France, Commissariat General
a la Famille, Box 1.
47. H. de Sarrau, La lecon de Jeanne d'Arc. Allocution prononcee au college de
garcons de Libourne i la Fete nationale de Jeanne d'Arc le lundi 12 mai 1941, 4, 10.
48. Halls, op. cit., 67; Ren6 Benjamin, Verites et reveries sur l'education (Paris
1941), 185-8; Secretariat g6enral, JECF, Notre Jeunesse (Lyon 1943), 9, 12; Jean-
neret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 13-14.
49. Chanoine P. Glorieux, Jeanne d'Arc. Fille de Dieu (Lille 1941), 4, and Colonel
de Lapomarede, review of Jeanne d'Arc, chef d'armee, in Gringoire, 2 July 1943.
50. Pierre Jalabert, Vive la France! (Paris 1942), 17, 79-80, 188. Jeanneret, Le
Miracle, op. cit., 68.
51. Warner, op. cit., 152.
734 Journal of Contemporary History

52. John Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940-1945

(Montreal 1993), 89.
53. Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 12. Jeanneret, Lectures, op. cit., 97.
54. Jeanneret, Le Miracle, op. cit., 13, 59.
55. Rouable, op. cit., 120-1.
56. Mosse, op. cit., 90.
57. Wladimir d'Ormesson, 'Jeunesse', Le Figaro, 2 March, 1942.
58. Rouable, op. cit., 73, 132; AN F13335.
59. Krumeich, 'The Culture of Joan', op. cit., 102. Alain-G6rard Slama, 'Vichy
6tait-il fasciste?', Vingtieme Siecle, Revue d'Histoire, 11 (July-September 1986), 44;
Helene Eck, 'Les Fran9aises sous Vichy', in Francoise Th6baud and Georges Duby,
Histoire des Femmes en Occident, V (Paris 1991), 194.
60. Chanoine Alphonse Bleau, Jeanne d'Arc presentee d la jeunesse (Paris 1909),
preface.
61. La Croix, 9 May 1942; La Croix, 29 May 1938, 5. Regarding the JACF, see
Germaine Prat, L'Action Catholique Rurale dans l'Herault (Montpellier 1977), 147.
62. Glorieux, op. cit., 7, 246-7.
63. Abb6 G. Girault, 'La Lecon de Sainte Jeanne d'Arc', La Croix, 8 May 1942.
64. Les Nouveaux Temps, 11 May 1942, 4.
65. Regarding Joan festivities in Madagascar, see ANCOM, Madagascar, Affaires
Politiques PT141. Jeanne d'Arc seemed to fit Indochinese cultural and religious
beliefs especially well, for she was associated with the celebration of the Trung
sisters, heroines who had repulsed the Chinese invasion of the first century AD.
See Charles-Robert Ageron, 'Vichy, les Fran9ais et l'Empire', Jean-Pierre Az6ma
and Franqois B6darida (eds), Vichy et les Francais (Paris 1992), 129, 134. For the
Chantiers de la Jeunesse, see P. Mazier, L'Espelido. Histoire des Chantiers de la
Jeunesse en Languedoc-Roussillon (Nice 1989), 55-6, 85, and Carcopino, op. cit., 311.
66. Rouable op. cit., 254.
67. Benjamin, op. cit., 227.
68. Regarding pedagogical inculcation, see Louis Althusser, 'Id6ologie et ap-
pareils id6ologiques d'etat', Positions (1964-1975) (Paris 1976), 92-7. Althusser
ignores gender considerations altogether. For a children's book which draws a
prototype of the 'cadre', and contrasts it with 'followers', see Bussieres, op. cit.
The inviolability of the gender barrier under Vichy is outlined in Equipes et Cadres,
op. cit. The distinction between 'family men' and enemies of the family is spelled
out in the propaganda of the Commissariat G6enral a la Famille: one tract in
particular depicts the honourable pere de famille in contrast to the evils allegedly
threatening his reproductive function - prostitution, sloth and alcohol. Another
pamphlet clearly labels feminism as the main menance. Hoover Institution
Archives, France, Commissariat, op. cit.
69. Winock, op. cit., 73-8.

EricJennings
is a doctoral student at the University of
California at Berkeley. He is preparing a
dissertation on French colonial policy
under the Vichy regime.