Within Daniel Bensaïd’s œuvre, there is one book that is indisputably singular: Jeanne, de guerre lasse. A theoretician and militant of the Revolutionary Communist League (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire), the philosopher here takes hold of a founding national myth, which in France has become the rallying name of an annual far-right demonstration.
Of course, many poets and artists have celebrated the figure of Joan of Arc—Péguy, Delteil, Dreyer, Bresson, among others. But in Daniel Bensaïd’s case, this celebration is a priori surprising, given on the one hand the author’s political orientation—he was a Trotskyist, or, in less dogmatic terms, a communist internationalist—and on the other hand his métèque origins (through his father, a Jew originally from Algeria).
It is true that Bensaïd had a precursor in the person of Bertolt Brecht, who himself took up the legend of Joan of Arc on three occasions: in 1931, in Saint Joan of the Stockyards, where she is incarnated as a Chicago slaughterhouse worker fighting industrial and financial capitalism; then about a decade later in The Visions of Simone Machard, where Joan becomes a young resistance fighter against Nazism; and finally, some ten years later again, in 1952, when Brecht adapted Anna Seghers’s radio play The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431. But Brecht was a German dramatist. And the nationalist inertia of the legend is not of the same nature, nor of the same force, depending on which side of the Rhine one finds oneself.
The problem posed by the legend of Joan of Arc in France is therefore evident: it is an ideologically marked cultural paradigm, a topos of the nationalist Right, a founding myth of the enemy, as it were—one that one would readily oppose to the historical figure of Manouchian, for example, or even to this joke that once circulated in militant circles: “Why isn’t Yiddish spoken at the LCR? Because of Bensaïd, who doesn’t speak it.” (Bensaïd is an Arab-Jewish, and thus Sephardic, name, as opposed to Jews originating from the Yiddish-land, Ashkenazim, such as Krivine, co-founder of the LCR.)
To invoke the incontestable poetic singularity of Jeanne, de guerre lasse is not sufficient to resolve the problem—especially since in 1991, when the book was published by Gallimard, the vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet empire opened onto a kind of nationalist recomposition of political and social forces in Central and Eastern Europe, while in France the Front National was continuing its resistible rise. What, then, drives Bensaïd to revisit the figure—both historical and mythical—of Joan of Arc?
Before becoming Jeanne, de guerre lasse, the Maid of Orléans is a French legend: a shepherdess, a girl of the people, is touched by grace; she takes up arms to drive out the English invader and restore the crown of France to the legitimate king, the king of divine right—namely Charles VII. Consulting Wikipedia, one reads:
“At the beginning of the fifteenth century, this seventeen-year-old girl of peasant origin claimed to have received from Saints Michael, Margaret of Antioch, and Catherine of Alexandria the mission to deliver France from English occupation. She succeeded in meeting Charles VII, in leading French troops to victory against the English armies, in lifting the siege of Orléans, and in escorting the king to his coronation at Reims, thereby helping to reverse the course of the Hundred Years’ War. Captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in 1430, she was sold to the English by John of Luxembourg, Count of Ligny, for the sum of ten thousand livres. She was condemned to be burned alive in 1431 after a trial for heresy conducted by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais and former rector of the University of Paris. Tainted by numerous irregularities, this trial was ordered to be revised by Pope Callixtus III in 1455. A second trial was held, which concluded in 1456 with Joan’s innocence and fully rehabilitated her. Thanks to these two trials, whose records have been preserved, she is one of the best-known figures of the Middle Ages.”
Historically, it appears that Joan was the daughter of a local notable rather than “of peasant origin,” and that she only tended sheep very occasionally. But the myth reappropriated the facts and reshaped them, notably in accordance with the Bible, where Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep when a celestial voice—the voice of the biblical God—sends him to liberate the Hebrew slaves.
Let us, however, leave the myth and return to the facts. The historical context is that of the formation of the Kingdom of France, a process that can be traced back two centuries earlier, to the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, which pitted the supporters of the King of France, Philip Augustus, against those of the Germans and the English. This was a founding moment of the identity of the French kingdom, and the matrix of the legend of Joan two centuries later.
In the book he devoted to the Sunday of Bouvines, Georges Duby evokes a modality of political identity in the process of construction: the secularization of power, which is also a sacralization of secular power. It is this movement—or “transfer”—from Church to State, discernible in the chronicle of the Battle of Bouvines, that constitutes the matrix both of the historical fact and of the legend that would emerge two centuries later:
“In the royal entourage, the victory indeed appeared immediately to be of such importance that, in order to satisfy his patron, Guillaume composed on the spot an excessive account. More than that, he undertook to situate his narrative in the direct continuation of Rigord’s chronicle, which another monk had briefly carried forward to 1210. He obtained the text from Saint-Denis. He abridged it. He filled in the interval by recounting several salient events that he remembered and of which the master could boast. Thus he composed an entire history of the reign. A transfer was thereby accomplished that deserves close attention: the historiographical enterprise passed from monastic hands to those of a cleric, and from an abbey to the king’s household. A sign of the firmness of a power that was freeing itself somewhat from liturgical celebrations and beginning to secularize itself. […] The text is in Latin, the language of scholars, the language of priests—for the household of the king, the Lord’s anointed, consecrated like a bishop, is above all a chapel. It was in this ecclesiastical form that the monks of Saint-Denis collected it in order to insert it into the great compilation whose crafting they pursued reign after reign. A sign of another cultural mutation, this new concern to offer to a broader public, to all curious people who had not attended the schools, this official history of royalty” (17–18).
In this light, the legend of Joan is a narrative that obeys the requirements of a State apparatus in the process of construction—one that seeks to impose its stamp, to mark bodies and minds, in order to produce faithful subjects. It is therefore indeed a founding national myth.
That such a myth has long since lost its power, retaining this function only at the margins of the State apparatus, does not make it a revolutionary myth—far from it. Let us insist further. In The Immanence of Truths, Alain Badiou evokes a poem by Brecht, “The Unknown Worker,” which he comments on as follows:
“One sees that there is not only, in the passage from the ‘unknown soldier’ to the ‘unknown worker,’ the transformation of a closed identitarian symbol into a figure of the universal, not only the dialectical shift from the cult of death and the past to that of life and the future. There is also the restitution of popular actions to their true destination: in place of the false strike, the false minute of silence imposed by the State, there appears the idea of a worldwide working-class solidarity celebrating its own generic value. In truth, in place of the finitude of the triad—death, nation, State—there is substituted, by this variation on the adjective ‘unknown,’ a potential infinity, of which ‘worker’ is the provisional name, and which is like humanity’s invention of its immanent truth” (213).
Joan of Arc, at least in France, would seem to belong more to a cult of death and the past than to a historical or legendary figure that is potentially revolutionary. Hence the question: how can Bensaïd, a communist internationalist living in France, appropriate the national myth of Joan of Arc? Readers of Jeanne, de guerre lasse will answer that precisely Bensaïd’s Joan is a communist internationalist avant la lettre; and they will cite, in particular, the following passage (p. 243):
“[Voice of Joan:] A secularism from above would therefore be nothing but the cassock of reason of State. A tolerance from above, the civil disguise of Élise’s ambitions. A diabolical whirligig.
[The author:] Christianity had set in motion a marvelous dream of universality. The Great Revolution believed it had realized it. To chase away a jealous and authoritarian God in favor of a pure and abstract Reason resolved nothing. The struggle against privilege and the despotism of fortune relayed the struggle against tyranny and the privileges of blood. Attached to the borders that protect its markets, to the enclosures that delimit its properties, the bourgeoisie could not go beyond the particularism of its own interests. Universality and reason were not behind us, inscribed in an originally good and generous nature, but in the very movement of effective universalization and rationalization. This movement required a vector and a force. One race can exterminate another. One religion can persecute another; one nation can crush another. The proletarians alone, having neither property nor homeland, could go to the end of the universal without stopping at the color of skin or of flag. Class struggle put reason into unreason. Threatened by the conflagration of ethnicities, tribes, and sects, its lights dimmed, its logic grew obscure. Its principle weakened.
[Voice of Joan:] If it has weakened, it will recover. If it has given way, another will have to be found.”
Joan thus embraces the cause of the theoretician and militant Bensaïd. She is no longer a nationalist and warlike legend, a cult of death and the past; she is like a poem by Brecht. But precisely—how is this possible? By what operation does Bensaïd achieve this dialectical shift from the cult of death and the past to that of life and the future?
The question is all the more pressing given that Bensaïd elsewhere reproached Badiou for having a “miraculous” conception of the event—that is, one that falls from the sky rather than being laboriously extracted from a down-to-earth class struggle. What, then, is Bensaïd’s operation with regard to Joan, it being understood that it is not that of the Holy Spirit?
By alluding to the operation of the Holy Spirit, I am also indicating that this is a question that touches, of course, on love—the dialectical shift from the cult of death and the past to that of life and the future. Is it therefore love that transforms Joan of Arc into a militant of communist internationalism? Yes and no.
Yes, because Bensaïd’s dialogue with Joan is that of a man—revolutionary and poet—who is evidently consumed by love, hence the sensible presence of the beloved woman in a book that is also, in this sense, a kind of canticle.
No, because what animates Joan, by contrast, is not love for the poet Bensaïd, nor for the King of France Charles VII, but a feminist grace. And to begin to see this singular grace of the so-called “weaker sex” appear, let us cite another passage from Duby’s book on the Battle of Bouvines:
“For Guillaume and for those who listen to him, Bouvines is indeed a serious matter, a battle, a solemnity, a kind of sacred ceremony. Its image, like that of high liturgies, can only be virile. For Guillaume and all the writers who first fixed the memory of the event are churchmen. For them, woman is nothing but an ornament of worldly trivialities, a minor piece in a game, in the amusements that please youth. Or else she is a perilous lure, a trap set by the demon, the instrument of temptation, the occasion of a fall. No female figure, consequently, on the side of good—that of victory—that of the King of France” (21).
Joan of Arc revolutionizes the presence of women in history. This is the guiding thread drawn by Bensaïd, the angle through which he universalizes the legend from the very outset of Jeanne, de guerre lasse:
“Where to begin? One would have to traverse the anachronisms, go back to the sources, understand how an eighteen-year-old commoner could become a war leader and command captains; how an illiterate adolescent could outwit the traps of a tribunal of prelates and theologians chosen among the most devious in Christendom; how a young girl alone made this world of men tremble” (51).
“How a young girl alone made this world of men tremble.” It is from this angle that Joan is immediately legible from the point of view of the militant of the Revolutionary Communist League; indeed, to his eyes as an internationalist fighter, she is sensibly self-evident: the feminine shakes a world of men. It is therefore because she is a woman that Joan cannot be reduced to a national myth; her cause shelters that of all women oppressed by a world of men.
This is why, if it is in our view pertinent to grasp what made Bensaïd a political theologian, it is through the essential feminism he extracts from the mythology of Joan of Arc, in the wake of a Spinoza who mocks, in his Correspondence (Letter 54 to Hugo Boxel), “the imagination of the vulgar who maintain that God is a man and not a woman,” or in that of a Kabbalistic tradition theorizing the bisexuality of the name of God—an approach that Charles Mopsik, among others, has called “the two faces of the One.”
In conclusion, I would like to emphasize three points:
- In Theory of the Subject, Badiou evokes “our real,” which he grasps in two propositions: “there are two classes; there are two sexes.” This is what Bensaïd explores in his Joan of Arc, in a mode that is both poetic and theoretical: poetic, because writing about Joan reorients Bensaïd toward literature; and theoretical, because what is at stake is the clarification of a doctrinal point, namely that feminism, if it is truly feminism, is immediately internationalist—just as class struggle, if it is truly class struggle, is.
- Historically, the facts validate the legend on this crucial point: Joan was indeed a combatant touched by grace, inasmuch as she was a generic singularity in a world of men, a singularity attested both on the level of chivalric confrontation and on that of theoretical confrontation. The trial records bear witness to this. In this regard, one must see—or see again—The Trial of Joan of Arc by Robert Bresson, the artist who, while scrupulously adhering to the words historically spoken by Joan during her trial, surpassed and in a sense transcended the legend.
- Only a woman, according to Bensaïd, could respond, with regard to the “principle”: “If it has weakened, it will recover. If it has given way, another will have to be found.” Of course, one may object that this statement—whatever the italics suggest—was written by none other than Bensaïd himself, the author of the book, who was a man. But who is to say that Daniel, when he withdrew into the desert of writing, did not hear voices…
