Eyebrows up in feigned sincerity, shoulders hunched against the
damp cold, Nicolas Sarkozy glanced at a mutilated statuette of a
medieval girl warrior missing one arm and ducked through the low
door of a rundown little house in the remote village of
Domrémy-la-Pucelle, population 155. After a quick look around the
dwelling said to be Joan of Arc’s birthplace in 1412 (no matter
that it was actually built much later) the French president
unveiled a commemorative plaque, met a handful of local
dignitaries, and greeted a sparse crowd of shivering citizens. It
was the first time a sitting president had visited the village
since 1920, when the Catholic Church canonized Joan and she became
France’s patron saint.
If Sarkozy was on the hustings in this remote, little-visited
corner of Lorraine some 200 miles east of Paris, it was because he
is running for his political life as the first round of France’s
presidential election looms April 22. Lagging in the polls for
months as the most unpopular president since the founding of the
Fifth Republic in 1958, he is beating the bushes all over the
country and working every angle. In Domrémy he was exploiting Joan
of Arc to work the patriotism angle, a ploy to help counter the
growing appeal of the populist National Front’s Marine Le Pen. (Le
Pen early on identified with Joan by symbolically naming one of her
daughters Jehanne, the medieval version of her name.)
He also hoped to recuperate the right wing of his own UMP party,
many of whose disappointed members are absconding to the Front.
“There was a feeling in the last election in 2007 that Sarkozy was
a new Bonaparte, a De Gaulle or even Joan of Arc who would save
France from its problems,” says Jean Garrigues, a historian at the
University of Orleans. “That’s why the disappointment among his
followers is so great.”
Thus Sarkozy’s hurried January pilgrimage to launch the official
commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the mystical peasant girl
who symbolizes French nationalism and resistance to foreign
interference—oblivious to the fact that this is the very opposite
of the soulless European Union that he defends so ardently. In a
frigid local gymnasium he pointedly invoked France’s Christian
roots, calling her the symbol of its unity and insisting that “Joan
belongs to no party, to no faction, to no clan.” She was, he said,
“the incarnation of patriotism, which is the love of one’s country
without the hatred of others.” It was a nice try by Sarkozy at
tarring the Front with xenophobia and putting Joan on his side. But
as a political symbol she is already taken by the National
Front.
She’s been its icon since the 1980s, when it began celebrating
her every May Day as an antidote to the left’s Labor Day braying. A
life-size statue of Joan in full body armor stands guard at the
entrance to the Front’s headquarters. Its May Day rally is
invariably at the foot of the splendid gilded equestrian statue of
Joan near the Louvre—my favorite in this city of monuments—with her
right arm thrusting high her banner and her determined face the
picture of fierce resolve. And it was there the next day that the
Front’s founder and Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, shot back at
Sarkozy that Joan certainly did not belong to politicians that only
spoke of her at election time, or “parties that gave over France to
globalization, that want to dissolve it in a federal Europe, or
that have permitted massive foreign immigration.”
Touché!
It’s hardly surprising that Joan of Arc is a touchstone in a
French election marked by voters’ disoriented malaise due to
unemployment, deindustrialization, undigested immigration, rising
criminal violence, and a pervasive, confounding sense of lost
identity. It’s still another measure of the power of Joan’s
universal symbolism of gutsy valor and moral certitude. She has
long been recruited for all manner of causes, and not only in
France. At one time or another, seemingly everybody has wanted a
piece of her for their own reasons.
After the French themselves neglected her for nearly half a
millennium—the naughty Voltaire mocked her as an “unfortunate
idiot”—19th century monarchist Catholics resuscitated Joan as a
bulwark against godless republicanism. As her image gained
momentum, the U.S. put Joan, garishly painted, on a World War I
fund-raising poster. In the 1920s flappers adopted her bobbed hair
as an early symbol of women’s liberation. Later feminists in the
U.S. and Canada—not France—claimed her, ignoring that historians
note she had a girly side, requesting cloth for dresses in towns
she campaigned through. During France’s World War II occupation
both the collaborationist Vichy regime and the anti-Nazi resistance
co-opted her. Post-war, Latin American revolutionaries idolized
Joan as one of the first to resist the powers that be, a sort of
female, medieval Che.
Writers and filmmakers latched on to her and retold her story
endlessly. Her unyielding dignity in standing up to her malicious
inquisitors inspired writers from George Bernard Shaw to Bertolt
Brecht and Jean Anouilh. Mark Twain thought his Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc was his best work,
Huckleberry Finn notwithstanding. Jean Seberg and Ingrid Berman
tried to incarnate her, with varying success, but of the 15 films
about her, Carl Dreyer’s silent 1928 movie, The Passion of Joan
of Arc is still the gold standard. Today anyone can try his
hand at being Joan; the Jeanne d’Arc PlayStation game has
her fending off both attacking demons and the English army.
WILL SUMMONING THE INDOMITABLE spirit of the illiterate girl who
changed the course of the Hundred Years War suffice to win Nicolas
Sarkozy a second term? His record is actually not all that bad,
even if not comparable to lifting the siege of Orleans or booting
the Goddons (Joan’s charming pronunciation of the common English
oath) out of France. He did launch major reforms of pensions and
higher education. He reacted energetically to the financial crisis
that nearly destroyed the euro. He managed to look valorous in
supporting the Libyan uprising with military force. If voters were
policy wonks, he could squeak through.
Especially since his chief rival and frontrunner in the polls,
the Socialist Party’s François Hollande, could never be confused
with Joan of Arc. A bland party apparatchik, he has never run a
company, held a national government post, or done anything else
anyone can remember. Billing himself as Monsieur Normal in contrast
to the twitchy, impetuous, unpredictable Sarkozy, Hollande looks
and sounds on the podium like a facsimile François Mitterrand,
whose intonations and mannerisms he imitates. His Marxist-style
declaration that the world of finance is his “main foe,” and his
promise to raise the tax rate to 75 percent on incomes of more than
$1.3 million a year has many wealthy French—and most of the
country’s overpaid professional soccer players—ready to pack their
bags and join others already in Switzerland and Belgium.
Sarkozy’s problem is that most don’t vote on policy, but gut
feeling. And the French find him pushy, transparently ambitious and
calculating, and, worst in this style-conscious land, vulgar. This
is compounded by a hyperactive, media-grabbing manner that has left
him over-exposed, a complaint known as Sarko fatigue. “A majority
of the French simply cannot stand the idea of having him on their
TV screens for another five years,” says Dominique Moisi, a senior
advisor at the French Institute for International Relations. “It
will be extremely difficult for him to prevent the upcoming
election from becoming an emotional and negative referendum on his
persona.”
To be sure, a minority will favor Marine Le Pen. But she is
unlikely to overcome the third-party handicap of limited resources
and the two mutually supportive mainline parties that collude to
crowd her out. Once again, a flawed political system has produced
flawed, unappealing candidates. As this petty, unsatisfying
election campaign grinds to a close, many French, longing for a
charismatic leader they can believe in, likely feel the best
candidate would be a spunky peasant girl speaking to them with
resolute conviction.
