© STEVEN EDWARDS
Joan of Arc under siege: Historian challenges French heroine’s role
The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
January 2, 2004 Friday Final Edition
SECTION: News; Pg. A13
The French have suffered a lot of bad press in the English-speaking world over the past year, most of it based on their decision to stand by as the Americans, British and Australians led the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
But at least they could always recall a mere peasant girl we have come to know as Joan of Arc once sent a mighty English army packing.
Now, however, even the identity of the woman French nationalists consider the embodiment of the French fighting spirit is under question.
Basing his arguments on a mix of new circumstantial evidence and conjecture, Serhiy Horbenko, an internationally recognized orthopedic surgeon from Ukraine, says the story of Joan emerging from poverty, answering God’s call to save France, then being burned at the stake, is a cover for intrigue and double-cross at the highest levels of the French court.
While it is well documented Joan was a real person, Horbenko says it was not she who broke the English siege at Orleans in 1429, or led the French to many other victories.
Rather it was the Dauphin Charles’s illegitimate sister, who went on to live into her 50s, he contends. He adds the woman the English burned as Joan may have been another female already destined for execution as a witch.
What has the French kicking themselves is they personally invited Horbenko to France because they considered him the best in his field.
They wanted him to reconstruct the face of Charles VII’s son and successor, Louis XI, from his skull.
Horbenko had received international acclaim for having reconstructed the likenesses of a Ukrainian monarch and a 5,000-year-old Germanic tribal leader, working from their bones.
But trouble began soon after Horbenko opened Louis XI’s tomb in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Clery, near Orleans.
He asked for permission to open other tombs in the basilica, which contains the remains of many members of the Valois dynasty to which Charles VII and Louis XI belonged.
One female skeleton shocked him. He deduced the woman had worn heavy armour and developed the muscles of a warrior.
Further deliberation led him to conclude the skeleton was that of Marguerite de Valois, the illegitimate daughter of Charles VI and half-sister of Charles VII.
Her military expertise, Horbenko says, would also have enabled her to lead the French armies against the English, and make way for her brother’s accession to the throne.
Her battlefield success, however, might also have been her downfall.
Horbenko believes nobles backing Charles VII feared Marguerite might try to press her own claim to the throne.
She was quietly removed from the scene and effectively held prisoner for the rest of her life, Horbenko suggests. The nobles then concocted the “miracle” of Joan’s deliverance of France to galvanize the French and demoralize the English, he adds. Joan was canonized as a saint in 1920.
The French, however, have reacted badly to Horbenko.
Denise Reynaud, deputy mayor of Clery, is reported to have branded him “a very difficult man to work with owing to his Slavic temperament.”
The French Culture Ministry dismisses his work as “speculation.”
