Saint Joan recap

Joan, a teenage peasant who says heavenly voices guide her, persuades Baudricourt to send her to the French Dauphin. She recognizes Charles in disguise, inspires his demoralized court, helps lift the siege of Orleans, and drives the campaign to his coronation at Reims. Her victories strengthen both royal authority and a developing sense of French nationhood, but she presses on after the court, commanders, and clergy withdraw support. Captured and sold to the English, she is tried at Rouen under church authority. The judges regard her refusal to submit her private revelation as heresy; the English fear the political power she represents. Joan briefly signs a recantation to escape execution, then repudiates it when she learns she will spend her life imprisoned and must deny her mission. She is burned. Twenty-five years later her conviction is annulled, and a dreamlike epilogue gathers allies and enemies to praise or apologize to her. Once canonization is foretold, however, none welcomes her proposal to return alive, leaving her to ask when humanity will be ready for its saints.

At Vaucouleurs, Captain Robert de Baudricourt is troubled by military setbacks and by a strange domestic failure: his hens have stopped laying. A teenage peasant named Joan has waited persistently to see him. She says saints have ordered her to lift the siege of Orleans and have the Dauphin crowned at Reims, and she demands soldiers, armor, and a horse for the journey. Baudricourt initially calls the claim madness, but Joan already has the confidence of Bertrand de Poulengey and other men who volunteer to escort her. Her direct assurance, the men's loyalty, and the sudden report that the hens are laying again overcome his resistance. He grants her request and sends her toward the royal court.

Joan reaches the Dauphin's court at Chinon, where Charles is weak, indebted, and unsure of his right to rule. The courtiers disguise another man as the Dauphin, but Joan identifies Charles and speaks with him privately. She gives him enough courage to accept her mission, overcoming resistance from political and church advisers who doubt either her voices or the practicality of her plan. At Orleans, she meets the commander Dunois while French forces wait for a favorable wind to cross the Loire. Joan insists on immediate action and rebukes the caution that has settled over the army. When the wind changes, Dunois accepts the event and her effect on the soldiers as grounds to follow her. The French attack with renewed confidence, placing Joan at the center of the campaign.

Joan's campaign lifts the siege of Orleans and carries Charles to Reims, where he is crowned king. With that central task achieved, Charles and his advisers favor negotiation and consolidation. Joan wants to press on against English-held Paris and then return home. The Archbishop warns that her certainty is becoming pride, while Dunois explains that military support depends on circumstances and Charles refuses to commit money to another offensive. Joan realizes that the court's gratitude does not mean its leaders will follow her indefinitely. She nevertheless chooses to continue the struggle, even as church, crown, and army each distance themselves from responsibility for what may happen to her.

Joan is captured by Burgundian forces and transferred to English control. Warwick wants her removed because her victories and her appeal to French loyalty threaten English rule. Bishop Cauchon regards her insistence on obeying personal revelation over the institutional Church as heresy. Their interests meet in a church trial at Rouen. Joan answers a long interrogation with courage and common sense, but the judges demand that she submit her voices and choices to church authority. Threatened with immediate burning, she signs a recantation and is sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. On learning that she must live confined and deny the mission that gives her life meaning, she tears up the submission and accepts death instead. She is burned as a relapsed heretic. The sight breaks Stogumber's certainty and exposes the cruelty behind his earlier demands for punishment.

Twenty-five years after Joan's execution, Charles VII dreams of the people involved in her rise and death. Ladvenu brings news that a new church inquiry has annulled the judgment against her, and Joan appears. One by one, allies, accusers, and beneficiaries of her work return. Dunois honors her courage; Cauchon discovers that history has disgraced him despite his belief in his own religious duty; and the English soldier who fashioned a cross for Joan at the stake receives a brief reward for that kindness. A cleric from the twentieth century arrives to announce Joan's canonization. The company enthusiastically praises a safely dead saint. When Joan asks whether she should come back to life, however, each person finds a reason to retreat. Alone again, Joan recognizes that later honor has not made the world ready to live with a person who challenges its institutions as she did.

After Joan is burned at Rouen, the epilogue moves to Charles VII's bedroom twenty-five years later. Ladvenu reports that a formal review has overturned the verdict against her, and Joan appears in Charles's dream. The dead and aging people connected with her case arrive in turn. Some praise her, some apologize, and Cauchon learns that later generations condemned him despite his conviction that he served the Church. An English soldier is briefly released from hell because he gave Joan a small cross at the stake. A modern cleric announces that Joan will be canonized in 1920. When Joan asks whether she should return to life now that the world calls her a saint, her admirers recoil from the practical cost of having her among them again and disappear. Left alone, she asks when the world will be ready to receive its saints. Her reputation has been repaired, but the final scene shows that admiration after death does not mean society would tolerate the living independence for which she was destroyed.