Desperately Seeking Joan

Three grimy Englishmen with cockney accents and rotten teeth burst into a medieval French cottage. One assaults a young woman against a cupboard door, impaling her on his sword when she tries to fight him, then raping her as she bleeds to death. The blood-covered blade protrudes into the cupboard where a child is hiding, and the child sees and hears the atrocity through cracks in the wood.

The girl hiding in the cupboard is Joan of Arc; the victim of the English soldiers is her older sister Catherine. The sack of Domremy village in Lorraine takes place at the beginning of French director Luc Besson's new film, Joan of Arc. The scene will reappear to Joan later in her battles with the English, and Besson implies that the heroine of the Hundred Years War was given to hallucinations and driven by the desire for revenge. He is not the first to suggest she may have been unhinged, but a mere psychiatric disorder was not enough to explain Joan's recklessness, courage and determination, so Besson invented the murder of her sister.

Yet, even in the film, Joan's communion with a mystical voice precedes the apocryphal rape scene. In 1425 she is 13 years old, blonde, blue-eyed and freckled, running euphorically through fields of mustard, red poppies and lavender, drunk with the love of God. Six years later, at her trial for witchcraft and heresy, Joan would describe the voice as "beautiful, gentle and humble, and speaking the language of France".

Besson's Joan has visions rather than voices, and the male character she sees repeatedly, first as a boy, then as a Christ-like man and finally as a black-robed and bearded figure (played brilliantly by Dustin Hoffman) turns out to be not God but her own conscience. The voices she heard, Besson concludes, were her own. "You did not see what was," Hoffman tells her in her prison cell at Rouen. "You saw what you wanted to see."

Besson's former girlfriend, the Ukrainian model and actress Milla Jovovich, joins the long line of women, including Ingrid Bergman (twice), Jean Seberg, Hedy Lamarr, Michele Morgan and Sandrine Bonnaire, who have portrayed Joan of Arc. Over the past 100 years, at least 50 films have been made about her.

By coincidence, Besson's film opened at the height of the "mad cow war" between France and Britain. All of the Englishmen in it are brutes, and Besson follows the preferred French version that, although French clerics led by Bishop Cauchon of Beauvais found Joan to be a heretic, it was the English who actually burned her. But in soul-searching similar to France's re-evaluation of the second World War, at least three newly published French books and several magazine and newspaper articles have placed the blame squarely on the French.

"How could French troops turn a French saint who had offered her life to the King of France over to French clerics so that she would be burned at the stake?" the writer Jean-Francois Kahn asks in Marianne magazine.

The English of the early 15th century were every bit as Catholic as the French. French was the language of the English court, and the English king was a descendant of Saint Louis. Although Besson minimises the civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians, in which Joan increasingly fought against Frenchmen - not the English - his film nonetheless shows how the Armagnacs for whom she fought betrayed her. She liberated Orleans from the English for the self-doubting dauphin, Charles VII, then fulfilled her own prediction of seeing him crowned at Reims. Yet Charles lost interest in supporting Joan once he became king. When the Burgundians capture her in the film, Charles cynically raises £10,000 from Joan's soldiers to pay her ransom, then pockets the money.

It is one of the great ironies of French history that virtually every modern French political party has claimed Joan of Arc as its own. Because the kings of France did not want it said that they owed their throne to a woman (much less a witch), she was all but forgotten until after the French Revolution. The 1815 Restoration made her a symbol of monarchy, dotting France with her statues. In reaction, republican historian Jules Michelet portrayed her as a rebellious woman of the people who fought religious and aristocratic elites.

By the end of the 19th century, the rightwing, nationalist Catholic, Monsignor Dupanloup, began campaigning for her canonisation. The church could not find the church guilty of killing a saint, so the English made convenient culprits. Joan was proclaimed "venerable" in 1894 and beatified in 1909. French soldiers in the first World War trenches prayed to her, and in 1920 she was canonised. Two years later, Pius XI declared her the second patron saint of France, after the Virgin Mary.

No other figure has been so many things to so many French people. For writer Charles Peguy, Joan was a socialist heroine. When the RAF was bombing occupied France in the 1940s, Marechal Petain's collaborationist regime used her memory to inflame anti-British feeling with the hackneyed slogan, "the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime." In London, where he organised resistance against the Germans, Charles de Gaulle made Joan's Cross of Lorraine his symbol. And, in 1945, French communist leader Maurice Thorez claimed Joan had been the first communist. More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen's extreme right-wing, racist and xenophobic National Front has tried to appropriate her.

For some, Joan of Arc was the first feminist, for others, a precursor of the Reformation who advocated direct communication with God. Philosopher Daniel Bensaid, author of a book on Joan, believes that her defiance of social convention and authority endear her to contemporary France. "Her trial, recorded by scribes," he says, "is the prototype and archetype of all trials for heresy, dissidence and insubordination. Her resistance, her faithfulness to her voices . . . is the model for all resistance."

Opinion polls rank Joan of Arc, Napoleon and Charlemagne as France's most popular historical figures. She is, says the tabloid France-Soir, "the expression of a people who have difficulty accepting that they live in a country that has become a middle power. In the present context of globalisation, this nostalgia . . . seems a cultural antidote to a world where everything is changing." The success this season of Robert Hossein's De Gaulle, The Man Who Said No, apparently stems from the same need.

Luc Besson says he made his film because "the Americans were going to take her over". Two Joan of Arc films, one by Warner and the other for US television, were in production. "It annoyed me," Besson says. "The history of France belongs to us." His film, lavishly financed by the French studio Gaumont, is France's answer to US blockbusters, released in the same month as Star Wars.

The medieval weapons in Besson's extravagant battle scenes wreak terrible carnage. The violence is so raw, the severed limbs and decapitations so disturbing, that the film is banned to children under the age of 12. But, for a man so possessive of French history, Besson made big concessions to attract foreign audiences: the film was shot in English, and most of the key roles are played by Americans - Dustin Hoffman as Joan's conscience, Faye Dunaway as Yolande of Aragon, John Malkovich as Charles VII.