Joan of Arc

Simone de Beauvoir invokes Joan of Arc as both an exemplary heroine and evidence of the exceptional conditions under which women could act in history. She appears among women whose conspicuous destinies made them notable, but whose greatness, in comparison with male political leaders, was often treated as primarily subjective. The example reveals the tension at the heart of Beauvoir’s account: women could demonstrate their capacities, yet the social order made sustained participation in the construction of public life extraordinary.

Historical Visibility and Constraint

Beauvoir places Joan beside Judith, Charlotte Corday, and Vera Zasulich, women whose interventions took the form of assassination, and alongside women who fought against established authority during the Revolution and the Commune. Such acts of refusal and revolt could be permitted even where women were barred from positive, institution-building action. The contrast makes Joan’s prominence legible not as proof that women generally possessed equal historical power, but as an exceptional opening within a structure that restricted them.

That structure, Beauvoir argues, helps explain why heroines such as Joan were often regarded as adventurers or eccentrics, defined by unusual destinies rather than by their capacity to shape events. Compared with figures such as Richelieu, Danton, or Lenin, their greatness could be judged mainly in subjective terms. Men, in her account, emerged from the mass and were carried forward by circumstances; women remained at history’s edges, where circumstances were more likely to impede than enable them. Joan’s exceptional standing therefore throws into relief the conditions that made women’s public agency rare.

Action, Revelation, and Purpose

Beauvoir distinguishes women of action, including Joan, Saint Catherine, and Saint Teresa, from religious narcissists such as Mme Guyon and Mme Krüdener. The women of action know what goals they are pursuing and lucidly devise means to reach them. Their revelations do not substitute for plans: they give objective form to certainties and encourage paths already carefully chosen. In this account, Joan’s religious experience is associated with purposeful action rather than an indefinite impulse to perform a sacred role.

The comparison also clarifies the limits Beauvoir assigns to inward salvation. Mystical fervor may coexist with active and independent life, but, by itself, an attempted individual salvation can leave a woman confined to subjectivity, in relation either to an unreal double or to God. Authentic freedom, she concludes, requires projection through positive action into human society. Joan’s placement among women who act gives her a particular significance in that argument: religious conviction is not presented as a replacement for agency, but as something that can accompany deliberate worldly intervention.

Public Memory and Significance

A note on monuments in Paris supplies a concrete measure of Joan’s unusual visibility. Among one thousand statues counted there, excluding queens represented as architectural decoration, only ten were raised to women; three of those ten depict Joan. The disproportion makes her public commemoration striking, while the larger count shows how rarely women were granted comparable recognition. Her repeated appearance in the book thus carries two meanings at once: she is remembered as a heroine, and that exceptional remembrance marks the historical scarcity of women’s access to action and public honor.