# France's Joan: sincere testimony, suspected perception

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH03.P027](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH03.P027/#char=1142,1189): "It is called "Jeanne d'Arc," by Anatole France."

The book is *Vie de Jeanne d'Arc*, published in 1908. Its French preface gives a more specific target for Chesterton's objection than simple unbelief. France calls Joan's trial answers heroically sincere and generally lucid, yet argues that her continuing hallucinations often prevented her from distinguishing truth from falsehood. He separates honesty from reliability: a witness may sincerely report an experience without correctly identifying its cause. His preface also inventories trial records, chronicles, rehabilitation testimony, and correspondence. Thus Chesterton's charge that natural explanations have 'no foundation' is his polemical judgment, not France's declared indifference to documentary evidence. The disagreement concerns what those documents license an historian to infer about inward experience.

The inspected French witness is the Calmann-Lévy 1908 volume I, preface pp. I–III. The accessible Winifred Stephens translation is John Lane, 1909: its added English-edition preface and corrections postdate *Orthodoxy*. They should not be attributed to the copy Chesterton glanced through.

## Sources

- [Anatole France, Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, tome I (Calmann-Lévy, 1908)](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33692/pg33692-images.html), Title/copyright leaf; Préface, pp. I–III
- [Anatole France, The Life of Joan of Arc, translated Winifred Stephens (John Lane, 1909)](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19488/pg19488-images.html), Title page; Preface to the English Edition, pp. v–vi, dated January 1909

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