Why Joan of Arc Was Acquitted—25 Years After Her Execution

When English authorities burned Joan of Arc at the stake in 1431, her critics believed they’d erased her. Twenty-five years later, a new Church court declared her trial a sham.

The push for rehabilitation had been building for years. Across medieval France, people told stories about the peasant girl who led soldiers into battle, lifted the siege of Orléans during the Hundred Years’ War and stood beside Charles VII at his coronation. They also remembered the execution of the 19-year-old, deemed a heretic by a court loyal to England.

Deborah McGrady, a French professor and director of medieval studies at the University of Virginia, says the push to clear Joan’s name began well before the Church acted. When Charles VII marched into Rouen in November 1449, he found a city still haunted by her death. 

“Charles VII was in a position to do something,” she says. “Why they decided to proceed is complicated: It was provoked by members of her family, but especially people in Orléans and in the French Catholic Church.” 

In July 1456, a papal court issued its judgment in Joan’s rehabilitation trial. In what McGrady describes as part legal inquiry, part political theater, the judges declared that the 1431 proceedings were “contaminated with fraud, calumny, wickedness, contradictions, and manifest errors of fact and law.”

Charles VII had personal reasons to push for Joan’s rehabilitation. Her conviction had been used to undermine him for years. Historian Francis C. Lowell writes in his 1896 book Joan of Arc that her condemnation “had been intended to injure Charles in the opinion of all Europe.” Once Charles obtained the trial records, Lowell adds, the king “meant to reverse the judgment which had declared him to have gained his throne by the help of sorcery.” 

McGrady, author of Joan of Arc: The Life of a French Cultural Icon, adds that rehabilitating Joan allowed Charles not only to save his reputation but also to recast himself as the hero of the story. Charles VII faced pressure to clear Joan’s name because her heresy conviction cast a shadow over the king’s victory and legitimacy.

“My personal take on it is that all of the wording and all of the documentation will make him the hero who saves the victim. She's dead, but he's going to save her reputation.
So he comes out looking really good at the end," McGrady says. "And this is a legacy that lasts.” 


But the king couldn’t simply reverse the Church’s decision. Because Joan had been convicted of heresy by an ecclesiastical court, only the Church had the authority to overturn the verdict.

The movement to restore Joan’s reputation was driven by ordinary people as much as by royalty. In Orléans, the city she had liberated, residents kept her memory alive through annual processions marking the lifting of the siege. By 1440, the city was also supporting Joan’s mother financially, according to historian Regine Pernoud in The Retrial of Joan of Arc: The Evidence for Her Vindication.

When the Church finally opened formal proceedings in 1455, Joan’s family played a central role. At the first hearing at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, her mother, Isabelle Romée, broke down so intensely that officials had to pause the session. 

“My sense is that her family was pulled in as part of a spectacle to create a performance,” McGrady says.

The performance worked. Pope Callixtus III authorized a full inquiry, and investigators traveled across France gathering testimony. 

The New York Times summarized the process in 1955: “The tribunal heard witnesses at Domremy, Vaucouleurs, Toul, Orléans, Paris and Rouen. Friends of her girlhood, traveling companions, men-at-arms of all ranks and stations, courtiers and priests brought in their testimonies.… There was little doubt in the minds of the judges in 1456 that the trial of 1431 had been grossly, cynically political.”

According to Lowell, more than 150 depositions were taken. “As was to be expected under the circumstances, the testimony was favorable to Joan,” he writes.

The rehabilitation court did not revisit Joan’s visions or military victories. Instead, it focused on the legality of the 1431 trial and found it indefensible.

Among the most serious violations was the fact that Joan had not received legal representation, something Church law entitled minors to. “She could not call a single [witness] in her defense…with a verdict of death resolved upon before the doors were opened,” Mark Twain wrote in his 1896 book Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.  

The second trial showed that Joan had repeatedly asked that her case be sent to Rome, but her requests to appeal to the pope were suppressed. The court also focused on her mistreatment in custody, noting that she was held by male guards and threatened with sexual violence. “They talked about her crying a lot… She had to wear men’s clothing because she was constantly being threatened with rape,” McGrady says. Pernoud writes that the court’s final judgment hinged on Joan’s decision to resume wearing men’s clothing, which she only did because of the threats she faced in prison.

The final verdict, issued on July 7, 1456, declared the original trial “null, without value or effect,” according to Lowell, who adds that the Church ordered public announcements in Rouen, including a sermon at the marketplace where Joan had been burned, and the erection of a cross “to keep her in everlasting remembrance.”

Yet even with the acquittal, McGrady notes that the rehabilitation emphasized her suffering rather than her military brilliance. “There is no discussion, for example, of her victories in Orléans," she says. “Their goal was to make her a victim.” Soldiers had testified that she “fought better than captains who had been doing this all of their life,” she adds, but those accounts were not included in the official record.

“The rehabilitation trial restored her reputation,” McGrady says. “But it didn’t say she wasn’t a heretic. They did not legally retry Joan of Arc. The verdict simply said, the trial was so corrupt, we are overturning it.” 

The ruling allowed Joan to enter official French history, but only as a secondary player, McGrady adds, and mostly in the context of her mistreatment. It would take more than a century before the first standalone biography of her life appeared. 

Still, the rehabilitation was essential for her eventual canonization. “A heretic cannot become a saint,” McGrady notes. The Church’s declaration that the 1431 trial was corrupt cleared the path, though Joan was not canonized until 1920.