Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The painter, himself from Lorrain, depicted the moment of divine revelation in the garden of Jeanne's parents, in Domrémy. • WIKIMEDIACOMMONS History is the daughter of space as of time. And the medieval space is never conceived as uniform and continuous, but as a set of valued points or routes emerging from anonymity. However, the place where Jeanne was born was not arbitrary. If it was well located inside this kingdom of France chosen by God, it was located on a margin, a distant periphery of it. Domrémy was on the border, far from the centers of power, Paris or the Loire Valley. The word "frontier" itself appears in French in an ordinance of 1312 and remains rarely used for a long time, especially since the borders of the kingdom hardly have a linear aspect and are rarely fortified. It is therefore the old words that will be used in Joan's time:limits, steps, borders of the kingdom prevail, even if some point out that Domrémy is on the Meuse, thus implicitly proposing a linear and natural limit. This Mosan border separates, in principle since 843, France from Lotharingia (future Lorraine), which gradually swung towards the Holy Empire. However, this border is neither immemorial nor natural, even if all medieval geographers see it that way. In 843, the possessions of Lothair and those of Charles the Bald met well to the west of the river, since all the Transmosan counties depended on Lothair's share. The myth of a border on the river in 843 was born in the chronicler Sigebert de Gembloux at the beginning of the 12 th century, and it was the progress of French royalty eastward during the 13 th century which made the Meuse the natural and ancient border that it was not. The arrival of the Capetians Toul, Metz and Verdun were Empire cities in the 13th th century, but French was spoken there and people frequented the fairs of Champagne or the universities of Paris. The bourgeois did not hesitate to have recourse, when it was in their interest, to royal arbitration. Churches and abbeys demanded protection in the event of threats. A decisive step was taken when in 1284 the future Philippe le Bel married Jeanne, the sole heiress of the counts of Champagne. On the death of his father-in-law, five additional bailiwicks, including that of Chaumont-en-Bassigny, entered the royal domain. The arrival of the Capetians on a border where the various feudal powers (the three bishops, the Count of Bar, the Duke of Lorraine) were entangled and rivals upset the game.From 1301, the Count of Bar, who had inadvertently opposed a sentence of Parliament and allied with King Edward I I of England , was forced to pay homage for all his lands west of the Meuse. These lands formed the "Moving Barrois". The Dukes of Lorraine, who held fiefs in Champagne and Barrois moving, then had to, to keep them, pay homage to the King of France. Thus, in the XIV th century, if Lorraine is still a land of Empire, the Duke of Lorraine is the vassal of the King of France. Theoretically, the Empire should have worried about the rapid progress of the Capetians towards the east, but its internal difficulties prevented it from doing so. Thus, in 1299, the King of France and the Emperor met near Vaucouleurs and signed a perpetual peace. Legend has it that on this occasion golden markers were erected at the bottom of the river, unless one simply rediscovered those that Charles the Bald or Charlemagne would have planted there to separate France from the Empire. Throughout the XIV th century, imperial authority remained weak. The Emperor and the King of France are closely related (Charles V is the nephew of Charles IV) and allies against England. No hostility disturbs relations between France and the Empire. A village between two persuasions When did the Capétiens arrive in this high valley of the Meuse, between Vaucouleurs, in the north, and Neufchâteau, in the south, where Jeanne was born in 1412 in Domrémy? To the north, the castellany of Vaucouleurs, which commands the valley, was part of Champagne. The Joinvilles were lords of it and they had exchanged it with the king in 1335. An ordinance of 1365 then attached the châtellenie to the royal domain in perpetuity and granted all the inhabitants the privileged status of bourgeois du roi "for their ardent zeal and their obedience to us". Neufchâteau, to the south, is an important commercial town, founded in the XI th century by the Dukes of Lorraine on a crossroads. Indeed, the roads leading from Lyon to Trier and from Basel to the Champagne fairs crossed there. During the 13 th century, the Counts of Champagne had imposed themselves there, and the Duke of Lorraine was henceforth their vassal for Neufchâteau. When the king became count of Champagne, the bourgeois entered the movement. They skilfully played, sometimes the king, sometimes the duke, to protect their trade and pay as little tax as possible. But, from 1390 to 1412, relations deteriorated between the king, the bourgeois and the Duke of Lorraine. The king's officers were ubiquitous in town, and fleur-de-lis signs marked the houses of the king's supporters whom local lawyers advised. As for the bourgeois, they dreaded the ducal fortress and its new posterns, or the soldiers that the duke wanted to put there. Twice the duke entered the town at the head of his troops, terrorized the bourgeois who had not fled, had some of them executed and subjected the others to very heavy fines. From 1390 to 1412, relations deteriorated between the king, the bourgeois and the Duke of Lorraine. The royal reaction was not long in coming. The Parliament of Paris summoned the duke, proclaimed the region fief to be returned and part of the kingdom. The duke was condemned and banished, his fiefs confiscated and royal troops sent to Neufchâteau in 1406. tail of his horse the royal signs, his decisions, though solemnly proclaimed in 1412, remained a dead letter. The people of Neufchâteau became, in the eyes of public opinion, martyrs to the royal cause. Rumors swirled around the tortures they had suffered. It was said that the duke had had a large tub filled with water and blood at the foot of a cross; to pay their fines, the fire chiefs had to deposit their gold at the bottom by plunging their head and arm into it. Jeanne is probably aware of these noises; She is very close to the inhabitants of Neufchâteau:one of her godmothers lives there, the Cordeliers whose sermons she listens to have their convent there, which houses the tombs of the Bourlémonts, lords of Domrémy. Domrémy, halfway between Vaucouleurs and Neufchâteau, is a compendium of all borders. The village is built on the left bank of the Meuse, on the kingdom side, but the parish depends on the diocese of Toul and the archdiocese of Trier, two cities of the Empire. In the center of the village and north of the church flows the Trois-Fontaines stream, which separates two feudal obediences. The northern part of the village is part of the castellany of Vaucouleurs and is therefore part of the kingdom of France probably since 1291. It is a stronghold of the Premonstratensian abbey of Mureau. The few families who live there are free. Most of the village is south of the stream, around the church and the castle of the Island. It has depended on the changing Barrois since 1301, while the state-owned north is in Champagne. The local lord was a Bourlémont until 1412. The thirty or so families residing there were made up of mainmortables, that is to say those who were not free. Jeanne's family is one of them. The "good Lorraine" Jeanne was born in Domrémy, on the Barrois side moving, in the bailiwick of Chaumont-en-Bassigny and the provostship of Andelot, say the judges of 1431, who made an administrative inquiry. But, for most contemporaries, hesitation is in order. If Jeanne had been born north of the stream, she would be from Champagne or a native of Vaucouleurs. The first solution is retained by Boulainvilliers, the second is more frequent, and the exact solution appears in Chartier or Perceval de Cagny. This recent identity, a little artificial, had a hard time finding a formulation. The most frequent solution is to recognize in Jeanne "the good Lorraine", which was not wrong since the whole region had once been part of Lotharingia. Imperial or Italian chroniclers of course, but also royal chroniclers will opt for the marches of Lorraine or the country of Lorraine. The kingdom of France is made up of around sixty countries. Champagne, Lorraine, Barrois are countries (the changing Barrois, too recent, no). Geographers such as the Herald Berry are able to enumerate them and give the characteristics of both their spaces and their inhabitants. A flat or steep, cold or hot, wet or desert space conditions the people who live there and must adapt to it. A country has a name, a more or less precise territory (here, the three dioceses of Metz, Toul and Verdun), idiomatic usages (Jeanne's French makes people laugh in the Loire Valley), legal customs and common historical memories. (Carolingians here). The country of Lorraine extends on both sides of the border and goes far beyond the duchy of the same name. It had always been a marquetry of feudal powers and a frontier when the going got tough from time to time, nothing more. But the installation, at the end of the XIV e century, of the Valois dukes in Burgundy (county and duchy) as in Flanders made the region strategic. The road which skirted the Meuse and passed through Domrémy joined the countries on this side and the countries beyond. Control of the road (and of Lorraine eventually) became a goal patiently pursued by four generations of Burgundian dukes. At the same time, the party of Orléans sought to conciliate the cities of Lorraine and to find allies on the side of the Empire. Louis d'Orléans, who already owned Vertus-en-Champagne, bought the county of Porcien and the town of Provins, then in 1402 got his hands on Luxembourg. He exerted for the king the safeguard on Toul (in 1401) and on Neufchâteau (in 1406), while maintaining many partisans in the valley of the Meuse. His assassination in 1407 by the Duke of Burgundy led to local upheavals and a sharp decline in the influence of the party of Orléans (which then took the name of Armagnac), especially since the Duke of Lorraine had defeated their troops in 1407 at Champigneulles, near Metz. In 1412, it is very likely that the Armagnacs supported the Neufchâteau revolt. Joan was 8 years old in 1420, the year of the Treaty of Troyes, which promised the King of England the succession of Charles VI. Now Domrémy was an Armagnac village. There was only one Burgundian, whose departure Jeanne would have liked. But the village of Maxey, where the school was located, less than 2 km away, had Burgundian sympathies. The boys of Domrémy confronted the kids of Maxey in gangs and came back covered with wounds and bumps. The margin had become a center, that of partisan clashes. Dreaded borders The border is a special place, not only in reality, but also in minds. On the black side, the border is the place of precariousness, margin and disorder that threaten, since it is far from the center and from the control of the royal government as well as that of the clerics. On the border, it is said, heretics and sorcerers multiply. For the former, the Cathars had been numerous in Champagne and ferociously pursued in the 13 th century. For the latter, the danger is signaled as soon as Jeanne appears by the bishop of Embrun, Jacques Gélu. She comes, he points out, from the Burgundian border, a dangerous place where a sect of sorcerers prevails. Many cases of witchcraft have been investigated there. The argument was obviously taken up by the judges in 1431. Article 4 denounces these villages of the Meuse river which were known in antiquity as practicing evil spells, namely "spells, divinations and superstitious or magical works". /P> But all the borders of the kingdom are, to tell the truth, the object of the same suspicion. In the case of Jeanne, it seems indeed to be partly a question of an argument of circumstance. Lorraine does not belong to the Alpine arc, reservoir of almost all known sorcerers of the first half of the 15th th century. The great witch hunts date from the 16th century century. A protective circle On the white side, the border is a protective circle with its natural obstacles as well as its fortresses. The king expects its inhabitants to actively participate in the common defence. In exchange, city dwellers and rural dwellers can expect tax relief, even tax exemptions. Consideration is necessary when it is so easy to go and establish yourself opposite. Royal safeguards are granted there with more liberality than elsewhere. And who attacks a person, a city or a church under safeguard is guilty of lèse-majesté. The king must here more than elsewhere inform about his decisions or his victories. On the defeats, we abstain, it is necessary to consolidate the loyalties. And the border is, like the capital, one of the high places of dynastic and national attachment, simply because the latter is not self-evident. It is a matter of choice, to be constantly reaffirmed. From the eastern border come many thurifers of the monarchy like Jean de Joinville, seneschal of Champagne and companion of Saint Louis, or Jean de Montreuil, secretary of the Chancellery of Charles VI and author of most of the anti- English at the beginning of the 15th th century and also patented Armagnac. The latter is from the same borders between Champagne and Lorraine as Jeanne. Between 1350 and 1450, almost all the prophets and prophetesses who went to find the king to transmit a divine message to him came from the frontiers. A paradoxical and Christian solution Accepting a young girl from the Marches of Lorraine to save the kingdom was a paradoxical and profoundly Christian solution. Young people, in fact, had no access in medieval society either to economic independence or to political or ecclesial power. Access to offices or the priesthood was subject to strict age conditions. Power presupposed experience. Those who exercised it were most often in their fifties and they kept it until their death. In medieval society, young people had no access to economic independencenor to political or ecclesial power. If the youth could be granted a symbolic role, a place in the festivals, the denunciation of deviations from the norm by the hullabaloo, everyone knew that the Bible affirmed:"Woe to the city whose prince is a child. And the beginnings of the reign of Charles VII had rather confirmed the words of Ecclesiastes. Young people were the future, on the condition of being nothing in the present, except a virtuality. The border was a margin of the same order. The best or the worst came from it. If we look at where the officers of the royal administration or the clerics of the ecclesial hierarchy are recruited, the superiority of those who come from the Paris Basin or the Loire Valley is overwhelming. The proximity of universities, royal power and formerly structured family networks usually ensures promotions. The officer or the bishop coming from the border is always combined at the level of the exception. But God loves children, the humble and those who come from elsewhere do not scare him. Wasn't Jesus born among them? The downside was that Joan's adventure implicitly exposed the inadequacy of those entrusted with the kingdom:the adult, wealthy, and powerful men the king continued to need. In this solution of necessity lay a structural weakness, once the emergency had passed.
