Every year, the city of Orléans celebrates with pomp and circumstance the liberation of the city from the English yoke during the Hundred Years’ War, thanks to the victorious intervention of Saint Joan of Arc at the head of the French armies. For the occasion, a young girl from the town lends her features to the valiant fighter and is flanked by two young boys as her pages. This year, the town rejected one of the two selected candidates on the grounds that he had frequented the Action Française movement and espoused values “contrary to the Republic”. A kind of paradox: after all, didn’t Jeanne herself fight for her God and her king?
2024 sees the 595th edition of the Johannine festivities. These festivities are among the oldest in France and are now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage. Shows, re-enactments, and processions follow one another through the streets of the town, which on 8 May 1429, under siege from the English, was the scene of a spectacular liberation by the armies led by the young virgin from Lorraine.
In February, Orléans city council announced its 2024 selection of the young girl who would be the star of the festivities in honour of Saint Joan of Arc, scheduled to run from 29 April to 8 May. Joan of Arc will be portrayed by Maïlys Boët, a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old secondary school pupil chosen from eight candidates on the basis of rigorous criteria. During the ceremonies, she is to enter the town wearing a suit of armour on horseback, just like the saint did nearly six hundred years ago. Tradition has it that the young girl herself chooses her pages—two boys of the same age who will accompany her on this solemn occasion.
But nothing is simple in our world, where evil intentions are everywhere. Although the two boys had been duly chosen, the Orléans anti-fascist committee took it upon itself to investigate their pedigree. One of the boys was identified by them as having taken part in demonstrations organised by the nationalist and royalist Action Française movement. In a press release issued on April 12th, Orléans city council and the Orléans Joan of Arc Association therefore ruled that he should be expelled for “disseminating ideas contrary to the values of the Republic, contrary to the values of the association, the city and the spirit of the Joan of Arc celebrations.”
Action française is almost 130 years old and has arguably always been part of the French political landscape. The movement is no longer at the height of its glory, as it was in the heyday when Maurras, Daudet, and Bainville lent it their talented pens, but it continues to attract young people and to demonstrate a certain intellectual dynamism. But it has the disadvantage of being ‘far-right,’ and is therefore in the sights of the French government, which has tried—without success—on several occasions to have its parades and demonstrations banned on the grounds that the movement is spreading ideas contrary to the all-too-famous “values of the Republic.” And with good reason: the primary raison d’être of Action Française is to call for the return of the King. It is therefore the least this movement could do to run counter to the “values of the Republic.”
One thing leads to another and Republican modernity produces this jewel of absurdity and ideology: the symbolic heir to Joan of Arc’s page—a historically attested figure known to have played a major role in the return of the King of France to his throne somewhere in the 15th century—is forbidden to feel close to a movement that works… for the return of the King of France.
This situation leaves us in an abyss of perplexity. Wasn’t Joan of Arc a Catholic? Didn’t she give her life so that the King of France could regain his rights, in accordance with a mission entrusted to her by Heaven? On reflection, none of this seems very “compatible with the values of the Republic.” We’ll have to give it some serious thought.
The young man who was ‘cancelled’ was a friend of Maïlys Boët. Perhaps she could have been excluded too, because of her bad company, but the association and the town hall decided not to cancel Jeanne. Not this year. But let’s not celebrate too quickly. Next year, there will still be time to make sure that Jeanne and her comrades are perfectly republican.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/cancelling-joan-of-arc