how Joan of Arc became the heroine of the new generation

Friday July 26, opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games: a rider emerges out of the night, and gallops down the Seine. If we did not see her face, hidden by a mask, the whole world recognized the figure of Joan of Arc in metallic leather armor, created by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Friot. “When Thomas Jolly and Daphné Bürki contacted me, they immediately spoke to me about Joan of Arc,” says the designer, who had already included her in her spring-summer 2025 fashion show entitled Idols. “The idea was to ask ourselves how to reinterpret it in 2024.”

Questions that the young American singer Chappell Roan also asked herself: on September 11, at the MTV Music Awards, she performed her hit Good luck babe she also in armor and sword in hand, accompanied by brave knights frolicking in front of a burning castle. A few days later, it was in a similar outfit that Angèle posed on the cover of the magazine Photo. While director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Elvis) announces that his next film will be devoted to the life of the French heroine, “the ultimate story of a young girl emerging from adolescence”; Jenna Ortega has already come forward for the role, stating that The Passion of Joan of ArcCarl Theodor Dreyer's silent classic (1928), is one of his favorite films: “Renée Falconetti's performance is absolutely crazy. Playing Joan of Arc would be a dream.”

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She would be far from being the first to play the Maid of Orléans: in addition to the unforgettable Falconetti, her crown of thorns, her homespun dress and her face bathed in tears, Joan of Arc was played in the cinema by Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Sandrine Bonnaire, Milla Jovovich and Clémence Poésy. And by Marion Cotillard on stage, in Joan at the stakeoratorio by Arthur Honneger. On the fashion side, she inspired Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier (who created a coin bearing her image), Balenciaga and Julien Dosséna at Paco Rabanne.

A romantic destiny

What is so fascinating about Joan of Arc? His destiny, romantic as can be. Both mystical tale (the young girl who hears holy voices), war fresco (Joan at the head of the armies of Charles VII) and tragedy (her trial and execution, burned alive in 1431 at age 19), it brings together all the elements of an epic saga which gives rise to endless readings.

Long hidden from official accounts (a peasant woman in direct line with God overshadowing the monarchs “by divine right”), her story was rehabilitated in the 19th century: “Her figure then found itself torn between a conservative Catholic current, who claimed a sainthood in the making (Joan of Arc was only canonized in 1920, Editor’s note). And a republican left who saw in her a patriot, but also a woman of the people,” explains Valérie Toureille, historian and author of a biography (Perrin, 2020).

Two currents which are becoming more radical: over time, Joan of Arc becomes both a nationalist symbol, taken up by the French far right taking up the idea of ​​“kicking” foreigners out of France, and a feminist icon. The first to consider it this way were the British suffragettes. Today, this aspect of the character fascinates Jeanne Friot: “Few women have marked history as warriors, claimants of political positions. While researching her, many details inspired me: she refused to marry so she could leave her family, become a nomad and convince the king to raise an army when he couldn't do it.”

The designer, who imagines committed, non-gendered fashion, also highlights the queer aura of the character: “She played with gender, at a time when it was above all clothing that defined it. We know today that she was burned because she was accused of wearing men's clothing.” What Valérie Toureille confirms: “At the time, there was no better method for defeating a political opponent than a heresy trial which allows rhetorical arguments to be manipulated. The first examinations conducted by prelates initially found nothing wrong with Joan's masculine outfits, because it is inconvenient to wage war in petticoats and the end justified the means. But the men of the Church rallied to the English recalled during the trial of Joan of Arc that cross-dressing contravened divine laws.”

In her prison, Jeanne first agrees to wear women's clothes, which are stolen from her. Forced to put on her old outfit, she is considered “relapsed”, twice a sinner. And therefore definitively condemnable, and condemned.

A queer heroine

Joan of Arc, queer character? The thesis has been around for a long time, from the novelist Vita Sackville-West who, in Saint Joan of Arc (1936), maintains that she is a lesbian, to the historian Clovis Maillet in a recent essay, Gender fluids – from Joan of Arc to trans saints (Arkhe, 2020). Besides his song Joan of arc in 2015, Madonna featured trans rapper Mikky Blanco in a homespun dress and crown of thorns in the music video for Dark Balletin 2019. As for Angèle or Chappell Roan, they claim their fight for LGBTQ rights.

And if these versions of Joan of Arc give rise to sometimes heated debates, they fit perfectly with the period, just like its paradoxes. “what defines Joan of Arc is her ambivalence,” as Vincent Grégoire, trends director at Nelly Rodi, explains: “We are living in a dual period, where everything mixes: the real and the virtual, the young and the old, the masculine and the feminine… We don't know which way the wind is blowing: in this sense, Joan of Arc calls many things into question.” And would bring a glimmer of hope in our anxiety-provoking world, an echo of the Middle Ages often described as a “dark age”.

A “newstalgia”, according to Vincent Grégoire, a tendency to draw on the past for weapons for the future which would also explain the medieval headdresses of Chappell Roan or the crinoline dress worn by Angèle in the pages of Photo magazine. But also our need to dig, in France, the soil of our culture to contemplate its roots: “We are in a year of great national romance: commemoration of the Landing, dissolution of the assembly, Olympic Games, reopening of Notre-Dame …In the era of globalization, we wonder what French identity is. And when we don’t know where we’re going, we cling to where we came from.” Even if it means, why not, adopting other perspectives, also taking other paths. More adventurous, perhaps risky, but innovative. Like Joan of Arc, in her time.