Joan of Arc internationale: Shaw, Brecht, and the law of nations.

Peters, Julie Stone

Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant girl, a mystic to whom Saints Margaret, Michael, and Catherine spoke directly, and a cross-dressing warrior whose mission, at the age of seventeen, was the liberation of France from English occupation in 1428 and the crowning of the dauphin Charles VII as monarch of a united France. After a number of astounding military successes in which she recaptured large parts of France from the English, she was taken prisoner, tried as a heretic by an international tribunal (run by the Rouen ecclesiastical courts but in collusion with the English), and burned at the stake in 1431, officially for heresy and witchcraft, but (as everyone knew) in reality for the political crime of revolt against the English occupation. The Church, having accidentally created a martyr, cleverly decided to make her its martyr, and so Joan of Arc was officially rehabilitated by the Church and King Charles after another international trial in 1456, which annulled the first trial on a number of different grounds: the procedure had been irregular, declared the new Court; the judges had been incompetent and partial; there had been no counsel for the defense; it had been improper to place Joan in an English prison (given that she had not been charged with violating secular law); there had been post hoc tinkering with the Articles of Accusation so that "heresy" would conform precisely to statements she had already made about her beliefs; her "confession" had been coerced and hence her "relapse"--in which she had withdrawn everything she had confessed--had been illusory; the sentence had been bizarre; and (as the archbishop of Rheims declared) her trial had been "contaminated with fraud, calumny, wickedness, contradictions, and manifest errors of fact and law. (They also, somewhat mysteriously, declared "the execution, and all [its] consequences" null and void.) (1)

So Joan was technically rehabilitated in 1456, but her real rehabilitation took place over the longue duree, not through formal legal proceedings but through cultural, literary, and (perhaps most often) dramatic representation: for instance, in the fifteenth-century Mystere du Siege d'Orleans, Shakespeare's Henry VI, Voltaire's La Pucelle, Schiller's Die Jungfrau yon Orleans. As mythic figure, she could become a leader of the religious wars of the seventeenth century, an eighteenth-century revolutionary, a nineteenth-century romantic figurehead (in Schiller, for instance, in which she tragically expires, having discovered the pangs of love). (2) But the political Joan always dominated. For the late nineteenth century, she had been the champion of nations bound together by "blood and iron," by the bonds of race (the German race as much as the French), and hence an icon not of resistance but of imperialist expansionism. (3) In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, she had served as a paradigm of the slogan France pour les francais (France for the French), seen as the antithesis of Dreyfus: the crowds protesting against Dreyfus had cried "A has les juifs ... Vive Jeanne d'Arc! Vive la France aux Francais" (Down with the Jews! ... Long live Joan of Arc! Long live France for the French!). (4)

But World War I changed her. She was a symbolic heroine of the Great War, representative of the struggle against tyranny, exemplar of courage under the dark fires of the trenches. Her suffering seemed to be reclaimed in the Allied victories of 1918 at Compiegne (the ground where she had been captured in 1430). And it was decided that her entry into official sainthood should mark an end of the War to End All Wars and the beginning of the new era. The Church had originally scheduled Joan for canonization in 1931, to celebrate the five-hundred-year anniversary of her execution. But in 1920--eleven years early--she officially became Saint Joan. It was a year after the League of Nations had been founded at the Paris Peace Conference, the year that decidedly ended the Russian Civil War in favor of the Bolsheviks, implicitly announcing a victory for International Socialism. In 1920 she was supposed to do something new for an ostensibly reunited and tolerant world.

A martyr at the hands of the intolerant Inquisition, a victim of a brutalizing and expansionist Northern European nation (Germany or czarist Russia in the role of the fifteenth-century English), she could become the antithesis of the nationalist spirit, the symbol of those who stood up to emperors and tyrants, of those who could transcend parochial national interests in the service of the larger truths of the spirit, truths that could unite nations and help to establish a new international order. She became a Soviet icon, imago of a new international socialism, (5) Her rehabilitation trial of 1456 became a model for what trials at the new Permanent Court of International Justice (established in 1920) could be, places for rectifying old wrongs. Oddly, for many, the warrior-girl became the "lark," a symbol of peace and conciliation, transcendence of differences, liberal harmony. She became the symbol of the new international world order: nations within their own boundaries, peaceably leagued together to combat aggression (even while, of course, the Allies were trading pieces of southern Europe).

Even before her official canonization she had occasionally played this role. One Joseph Fabre, revising the Mystere du Siege d'Orleans at the brink of World War I, has Joan cry out (contrary to all historians' accounts of the real Joan's views):

 Soit Anglais, soit Francais, n'est-ce pas des humains?
 Oh! puisse un jour venir, au lieu de ces tueries,
 La fraternite des patries!
 Que tout peuple, sans guerroyer,
 Rentre paisible a son foyer.

 (Whether English or French, are they not humans?
 Oh! that the day would come, when instead of this slaughter,
 The brotherhood of nations!
 When all peoples, waging war no more,
 Would return peaceably to their hearths). (6)

Such images of Joan became commonplace after the war, reflected in titles like The Soldier Virgin of France: A Message of World Peace (1926). (7) As the Dutch legal historian Joseph van Kan put it apologetically in 1925, "She was a soldier [only] from stern necessity, a soldier 'toute pr[e]ste a faire paix' ('completely ready to make peace'). The soldier was--I say it emphatically ...--an angel of peace." (8) She still served for some as proto fascist nationalist, for instance for the Action francaise, the far-right French royalists who adopted her as incarnation of the purity of French blood. But oddly even they could not fully resist the peace-loving domestic Joan: "Jeanne d'Arc, c'est la Renaissance, c'est la paix'feconde apres la guerre cruelle; c'est la Pattie qui reprend ses destinies" (Joan of Arc is rebirth; she is the fertile peace after a cruel war; she is the motherland once again taking charge of its destiny). (9)

Joan-as-Pollyana, Joan proclaiming the world now safe for democracy: It was this portrait of Joan (in addition to the prelates' irksome glee at her canonization) that provoked Shaw and Brecht to offer their own versions (Brecht in fact wrote three different Joan of Arc plays). Shaw's and Brecht's Joan plays are all quite different from one another, but each offers a critique of the sanguine belief that world peace really meant world peace--that it meant justice or equity or freedom from terror. In choosing the Joan of Arc story, with an international trial at its center, Shaw and Brecht were deliberately choosing a story that offered a false villain: Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, the principal judge at the trial, with his sidekick, the Grand Inquisitor. In so doing, they could show that, however illegal the proceedings, it was not, in fact, the illegality that was responsible for the miscarriage of justice, but rather the legal system itself. They could show not the exceptional perversion of justice in the law, but the law itself as a perversion of justice. To attack only the "illegalities" of the trial, as so many others had done, would have been to suggest that the legal system itself was not at fault, but merely plagued by corrupt and malevolent judges. To attack directly the laws of the Inquisition would have been to attack a historical relic, to suggest, as so many others had, that a world made safe for democracy would now be safe for its saints and saviors. (10) Both Shaw and Brecht were attempting, through their refigurations of the Joan of Arc myth, more fundamental critiques of the legal system itself, both national and international.

II. George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan

Shaw's Saint Joan (first performed in 1923, three years after the canonization) is based largely on historical sources. In fact, a good deal of Shaw's trial scene follows the transcript of the actual trial, with Joan's clever evasion of the traps set for her by her interrogators. When, for instance, Cauchon asks her whether she believes herself to be in a state of grace, she answers, "If I am not, may God bring me to it: if I am, may God keep me in it!" (p. 131, scene 6) When Thomas de Courcelles, one of the judges from Paris, asks her whether Saint Michael appears to her naked, she responds, "Do you think God cannot afford clothes for him?" (p. 130, scene 6). But if he follows historical sources, in his long preface Shaw makes it clear that he is also drawing parallels between the events surrounding Joan's trial and contemporary events. (11) He compares Joan, for instance, to the

 Thousands of women, each of them a thousand times less dangerous and
 terrifying to our Governments than Joan was to the Government of her
 day, [who] have within the last ten years been slaughtered, starved
 to death, burnt out of house and home, and what not that Persecution
 and Terror could do to them, in the course of Crusades far more
 tyrannically pretentious than the medieval Crusades which proposed
 nothing more hyperbolical than the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from
 the Saracens. (36)

Contemporary legal events, argues Shaw, compare badly with Joan's trial--in which she was not tortured, in which her judges insisted that they were bound by the law, in which there was no summary justice, no rush to the slaughter. Nothing in Joan's trial, Shaw writes, convicts Joan's judges of "as much anti-prisoner, pro-police, class and sectarian bias as we now take for granted in our own courts" (44):

 Can any of the modern substitutes for the Inquisition, the Special
 Tribunals and Commissions, the punitive expeditions, the
 suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, the proclamations of martial
 law and of minor states of siege, and the rest of them, claim that
 their victims have as fair a trial, as well considered a body of law
 to govern their cases, or as conscientious a judge to insist on
 strict legality of procedure as Joan had from the Inquisition and
 from the spirit of the Middle Ages even when her country was under
 the heaviest strain of civil and foreign war? From us she would have
 had no trial and no law except a Defence of The Realm Act suspending
 all law. (36-37)

As evidence, Shaw offers two cases: that of Roger Casement, the Irish revolutionary who exposed the exploitation of rubber gatherers in the Congo and South America and was eventually hanged for treason by the British; and that of Edith Cavell, the English nurse shot by a German tribunal in 1915 for releasing soldiers from the hospital without asking which side they were on. (12) "The modern military Inquisition was not so squeamish [as Joan's]" he writes. "It shot [Edith] out of hand" (27). (13)

Whether medieval or modern, whether in conformity with the law or not, trials, Shaw argues, serve merely as window dressing for political expediency, and this inevitably determines their outcomes. "The Church cannot take life," says Judge Cauchon piously (p. 92, scene 4), and then hands Joan over to the secular arm of the law, which has the pyre burning in full view. The honest Brother Martin, who has been working to have justice done ever since Joan's execution, comments to King Charles after her rehabilitation trial in 1456: "The ways of God are very strange.... At the trial which sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a sorceress, the truth was told; the law was upheld; mercy was shewn beyond all custom; no wrong was done but the final and dreadful wrong of the lying sentence and the pitiless fire" (p. 145, epilogue). Worse, perversion of the law and perjured testimony are as likely to bring about just outcomes as conformity with the law and true testimony are likely to bring about unjust outcomes. There is no correlation between law and justice. "At this inquiry from which I have just come," continues Brother Martin describing the 1456 rehabilitation trial,

 there was shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny of the dead
 who did their duty according to their lights, cowardly evasion of
 the issue, testimony made of idle tales that could not impose on a
 ploughboy. Yet out of this insult to justice, this defamation of the
 Church, this orgy of lying and foolishness, the truth is set in the
 noonday sun on the hilltop; the white robe of innocence is cleansed
 from the smirch of the burning faggots; the holy life is sanctified;
 the true heart that lived through the flame is consecrated; a great
 lie is silenced for ever; and a great wrong is set right before all
 men. (p. 145, epilogue)

Charles's response suggests the extent to which the law has been his instrument all along: "My friend: provided they can no longer say that I was crowned by a witch and a heretic, I shall not fuss about how the trick has been done" (p. 145, epilogue).

What is true of the national sphere is true of the international sphere, only the farce is usually less well played. In fact, Shaw stresses the internationalism of the Church and feudal authorities and their collaboration with the English precisely in order to highlight the collaboration of international law with state brutality. "Joan's trial was not" he writes in the preface to Saint Joan, "a national political trial. Ecclesiastical courts and the courts of the Inquisition ... were Courts Christian: that is, international courts" (27). Nationalism may be nasty at times. It may be "narrow and bitter in country folk" (p. 99, scene 4). (14) But international law underwrites precisely the conception of nations that permits them to serve as an excuse for that legalized form of murder called war." [God] gave us our countries and our languages, and meant us to keep them" says loan brightly. "If it were not so it would be murder to kill an Englishman in battle" (p. 60, scene 1). Furthermore, international power acts as a check not on the dangers of nationalism but on the liberating potential of nationalism. In Saint Joan, Shaw shows the great popular emancipators of the fifteenth century--nationalism and the nascent Protestantism inextricably intertwined with it--trying desperately to free themselves from the hegemony of the international Church, in league with an equally international feudalism. Cauchon, the representative of the Church International, sees the implications of (as he puts it) this "most dangerous idea": "Call this side of loan's heresy Nationalism if you will.... I can only tell you that it is essentially anti-Catholic ... for the Catholic Church knows only one realm, and that is the realm of Christ's kingdom. Divide that kingdom into nations, and you dethrone Christ" (p. 98, scene 4). The Nobleman, representative of Feudalism International, explains it to the English Chaplain from his perspective: "Men cannot serve two masters. If this cant of serving their country once takes hold of them, goodbye to the authority of their feudal lords, and goodbye to the authority of the Church. That is, goodbye to you and me" (p. 87, scene 4). But the tyrannical international order of the Church and the feudal aristocracy has not, after all, melted into air, but simply been replaced with another one, the tyrannical international order of colonialism. Britain's repression of Irish resistance, Shaw points out in the preface, is as violently intolerant as the Inquisition's repression of those who resisted its supremacy. "In 1920" writes Shaw, "the British Government slaughtered and burnt in Ireland to persecute the advocates of a constitutional change which it had presently to effect itself" (36). (15) When the English Chaplain explains why Joan must be put to death, Shaw turns him into a modern British colonial administrator. "This woman" says the Chaplain, "denies to England her legitimate conquests, given her by God because of her peculiar fitness to rule over less civilized races for their own good" (pp. 99-100, scene 4).What Shaw suggests about the international order in Saint loan he says more explicitly elsewhere. In his farce Geneva (published in 1939 and revised in 1945), for instance, the League of Nations is a doddering body run by a maniacal British minister, an Anglican bishop from another era, a corrupt Soviet delegate, and an American who thinks the world arena is the "Wild West" But it is not merely League incompetence but general principles of the international law of war and general notions of the "New World" order that are hopelessly inadequate. He notes, for instance, the international legal justification of British and American "liberation" of French cities, Dutch cities, Belgian cities, Italian cities. "That is" he writes, "they were destroying them exactly as they were destroying German cities, and having to house and feed their surviving inhabitants after wrecking their water mains, electric power stations and railway communications. From the national point of view this was conquest, glory, patriotism, bravery, all claiming to be necessary for security. From the European wider angle it was folly and devilment, savagery and suicide." (16) After the "Utopians carried the day triumphantly at the end of the War, the New World proved the same as the old one." (17) We may hope for evolution: "It is conceivable even that the next great invention may create an overwhelming interest in pacific civilization and wipe out war. You never can tell." (18) But "meanwhile here we are, with our incompetence armed with atomic bombs" (19)

The critique of the international legal order (seen as a mere buffoonish facade for the play of power), in conjunction with Shaw's Fabian socialist politics, implicitly suggests an alternative, a legal system that might enforce social equity, if not egalitarianism (a concept hard for a social Darwinist to credit). But, in Shaw's more cynical moments, the rejection of international-law-as-it-is means a flirtation with totalitarianism that has disturbing ramifications. While on the one hand Shaw could protest racist colonialist police power and object to the Allied blockade of Germany on humanitarian grounds, on the other he could half-seriously champion "liquidations" hold up the Inquisition as a model, (20) and insist that if anything was to be done one had to get rid of the Parliamentary system. In a pamphlet written soon after Germany's invasion of Belgium in World War I, Common Sense About the War, and in Peace Conference Hints, he speaks favorably of Germany's violation of Belgium's neutrality. More disturbing still, Shaw's view that all regimes are to some degree totalitarian and that only totalitarianism can effectively resolve social and economic crises allowed him not only to praise Stalin unequivocally, but, all the way to 1941, to embrace most of Hitler's domestic and international policies as well (though he mercilessly attacked Hitler's anti-Semitic program and his ideas about eugenics). It allowed him to proclaim in a letter to fellow Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb, "We are National Socialists!" (21) It allowed him to sanction Hitler's most flagrant flouting of international law, for instance the German withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, which he terms "a masterstroke, which completely changed his standing in Europe." (22) He commented on the Anschlul [beta] that Germany and Austria were bound to become one nation anyway, and that this was the logical consequence of the "criminal conditions" of the Versailles Treaty. (23)

There is a good deal of irony here--of desire to shock--but there is also an underlying political conviction. Perhaps Shaw, now in his eighties, could see no alternative to the "rule of law" that was still allowing tribunals to send modern Joan of Arcs to the stake. As he writes in the preface to Saint Joan, "We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance" (35). He may have been right that (as he writes), "we may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime" (35), but the assertion allowed him to minimize the difference in degree between regulation and totalitarian coercion. For Shaw, the only argument against extreme intolerance is that it breeds revolution: "We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is ... to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence" (36). (Here Shaw sounds astonishingly like Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Holmes's essay Natural Law and in his letters to Learned Hand, in which Holmes argues that the law must sometimes "kill the other fellow when he disagrees" but that if it does so too readily, it represses social evolution.) (24)

Mitigation of the dangers of persecution so as to avoid igniting revolution, however, hardly seems a redemptive alternative to the judges (as he describes them) "in the blindness and bondage of the law" (p. 157, epilogue), or to the police state, or to the corrupt collaboration of the authorities (national and international) in the suppression of the great spirits. As Cauchon says, when he has returned from the dead after the rehabilitation trial in which he has been vilified and, he claims, unfairly found guilty of perversion of justice, "I arraign the justice of Man. It is not the justice of God" (p. 149, epilogue). Joan is less surprised: "Still dreaming of justice, Peter? See what justice came to with me!" (p. 149, epilogue).

When Joan reappears again in Shaw's epilogue, mightily pleased at the news of her canonization in 1920 and asking to be unburned so she can carry on with her work, those who have rehabilitated her are horrified at the thought. The English Chaplain who had most vigorously attacked Joan (threatening that "eight hundred men at the gate ... will see that this abominable witch is burnt" whatever the law might say [p. 134, scene 6]) had ended up in an anguish of remorse. But he is nevertheless dismayed at the thought of her resurrection, lamely crying out no, no, "peace in our time!" (p. 158, epilogue) at the end of the play, in an odd premonition of Neville Chamberlains famous claim on his return from Munich in the fall of 1938 that, in negotiating with Hitler, he had in fact brought "peace [in] our time." (25) In the preface to Saint Joan, Shaw quotes approvingly the letter of a priest who writes that he sees in Shaw's play "the dramatic presentation of the conflict of the Regal, sacerdotal, and Prophetical powers, in which Joan was crushed. To me it is not the victory of any one of them over the others that will bring peace ... but their fruitful interaction in a costly but noble state of tension" (32). Shaw explains that "we must accept the tension, and maintain it nobly without letting ourselves be tempted to relieve it by burning the thread" (32). Seen one way, this is an insistence on toleration for the sake of a dialogue between the status quo and the future--the "Prophetical powers:' But the echo between this passage and the Chaplain's plea that Joan stay properly dead suggests that the promise of "peace in our time" is the promise that the law will continue to uphold the collusion between the leaders of states, the Church, and the agents of terror at the cost of the suppression of the great spirits of liberation.

III. Bertolt Brecht's Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe (Saint Joan of the Stockyards)

Brecht shared Shaw's skepticism about the law as a tool of justice, but he was driven, unlike Shaw, by a Marxist program that offered, through a negative dialectic, at least an implicit image of what the national and global state might do while it was getting ready to wither away. In his first Joan of Arc play, Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe (Saint Joan of the Stockyards, written in 1929), (26) he places "Johanna Dark" (Joan Dark) in the Chicago meatpacking plants. There, she works for a Salvation Army-type outfit, the "Schwarze Strohhtite" (Black Straw Hats), doling out the pablum of religion and weak soup to the half-starved workers. Life in the plants is gruesome: every once in a while a worker is sucked into the machinery and ends up in the tins of bacon and lard. The workers' destinies are ruled by the coterie of owners (in fierce competition with one another), by the wild fluctuations of the stock market, which often result in massive layoffs and wage decreases, and by invisible forces in New York, which are mysteriously controlling international trade treaties. When the workers try to strike, the sentimental Pierpont Mauler, who weeps over the plight of the mooing cows on their way to the slaughter and swears to give up his murderous occupation, calls in the army, which brings in its tanks and machine guns, firing into the crowd, just as Brecht had seen the German police do at a communist rally in Berlin in the year he wrote Die heilige Johanna. (27)

The law of international trade and the army are allied with the international "Gesetze der Wirtschaft" (laws of economics; 2:704, 735, 752, scenes 5, 9b, 9g), (28) Brecht's recurrent phrase throughout the play. This is war, less a civil war than a world war, in which the Chicago stockyards are only one theater of battle. The lesson that Johanna must learn is the inverse of the lesson that conventional twentieth-century portraits tried to place in her mouth: just as "patriotism is not enough" (as Edith Cavell said about her nursing of enemy soldiers), (29) pacifism is not enough in a world armed to the teeth to keep the poor poor. The soup she's been serving is, like religion, an opiate of the people. As the leader of the Black Straw Hats gleefully tells his sponsor, who turns out to be the capitalist Mauler:

 Eine Kapelle in der Hand und anstaindige Suppen, aber
 Wirklich fetthaltig, und Gott hat ausgesorgt
 Und auch der ganze Bolschewismus
 Hat ausgelitten.

 (2:761, scene 10)

 (If only we can scare up a band and some decent soup
 With some body to it, all God's worries are over
 And Bolshevism will give up the ghost. [88-89])

Through the play, then, Brecht faces one of the central problems of the law, national and/or international, a problem both for those creating it and for those deciding whether or not to violate it: When does the individual or the individual's freedom have to be sacrificed for the greater good? are there any absolute limits on that sacrifice? Johanna torments herself over the problem of violence, essentially the sacrifice of the individual under the banner of the greater good: "Nicht durch Gewalt / Bekampft Unordnung und die Verwirrung" (2:753, scene 9g; "Force is not the answer to / Disorder and confusion" [82]), she cries to herself. One who uses force, she muses, stands

 Voller Arglist gegen den Mitmenschen
 Auberhalb aller Abmachung
 Die unter Menschen gewohnlich ist.
 Nicht mehr zugehorig, fande er
 In der nicht mehr vertrauten Welt sich
 Nicht mehr zurecht. Uber seinem Haupte
 Liefen jetzt die Gestirne ohne die
 Alte Regel. Die Worter
 Anderten ihm ihren Sinn. Die Unschuld
 Verliebe ihn, der verfolgt und verfolgt wird.
 Er sieht nichts mehr arglos.

 (2:754-55, scene 9 g)

 (moved by malice
 Against his neighbour, and closed
 To all the understandings
 Customary among men.
 Cut off from all community, he would find
 No bearings in
 A world grown unfamiliar. The movement of the stars
 Over his head would no longer be governed by
 The old rule. Words
 Would change their meaning for him, innocence
 Forsake him, the pursued pursuer
 His vision would lose all candour. [83])

Brecht was repeatedly confronted with the problem of violence, as a committed pacifist who wrote a poem called "Legende vom toten Soldaten" (8:285) (Legend of the Dead Soldier) that got him a rank of No. 5 on the secret Nazi blacklist before even the Munich Putsch, (30) but as a committed Marxist who recognized violence as necessary to the revolution to come. Embracing it where necessary, he nonetheless recognized the losses that even necessary violence entails--losses not merely physical but moral and spiritual: the embrace of arglist (malice) necessary to self-justification in war; the (at least temporary) refusal of negotiation and peaceful settlement; the alienation from the familiar comforts of settled order, from society, and hence the self-alienation (merely an intensification of the necessary alienation of the modern world); the loss of innocence; the entry into the bestial world of pursuer and pursued. But as Die heilige Johanna shows, the workers (who have become the stock of both stockyards and stock market) are already in the world of pursuer and pursued, long dehumanized, little different from the steer going to the slaughter. As in the world of Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper(Three-Penny Opera), the play asks and answers the fundamental ontological and ethical question about the nature of the human: "Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? Indem er stundlich / Den Menschen ... fribt" (2:458, scene 6; On what does Man live? he feeds on others [translation mine]).

Johanna comes to realize that wordless oppression does not equal peace. As she says:

 Noch eine solche Nacht und noch eine solche
 Wortlose Bedruckung, und niemand
 Vermag ruhig zu bleiben ...
 Freilich, es sammelt sich auch
 Gewalttat zu Gewalttat im Dunkeln
 Schwach zu schwach und das Unerledigte
 Sammelt sich.

 (2:753, scene 9g)

 (Another night like this, another day of this
 Oppressive silence and no one
 Would hold himself back ...
 True, violence builds up in the darkness
 Weakness and weakness build strength and
 Unfinished business accumulates. [82])

As she comes to realize, her "traume waren unzahlige" (dreams were countless), and as a result she was "den Geschadigten ... ein Schaden / Nutzlich war ich den Schadigern" (2:779, scene 12; one who "brought injury to the injured and was useful to the injurers" [105; translation modified]). The crowd of Workers cries, "Dab es nur durch Gewalt geht und / Wenn ihr es selber macht" (2:753, scene 9g; "Force alone can help you and / ... you yourselves must wield it" [82]), Having learned her Leninist lesson, she reluctantly leaves the "army of peace" and joins the war. But it is too late. The factories have started up again with two-thirds of the workers at two-thirds pay (101). The pacifist Johanna is, grotesquely, sainted by the plant owners, who intend to hold forth their "Heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe" (Saint Joan of the Stockyards) doler of soup, as proof "dass die Menschlichkeit bei uns einen hohen Platz einnimmt" (2:778, scene 12; "that with us humanity comes first" [104]). Liberal humanism is victorious and, as she says, "Wieder lauft / Die Welt die alte Bahn unverandert" (2:779, scene 12; "The world is back on its old course, unchanged" [104]). A third of the workers will die in the streets or the shelters.

As Mauler's hold on the police makes clear, the law is a tool not of the people but of those who rule through the state. As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia defines it, law is "the will of the state cast in legal form." (31) In the early 1930s, this must have seemed painfully obvious to anyone watching the Third Reich entrench its power precisely through what it claimed was a legal revolution, first using emergency powers under Article 48, then consolidating this in the Enabling Act of March 1933, subsequently transforming the requirements for judges and the hierarchies of the legal system, instating the Nuremburg Laws in 1935. During this period, Brecht's attacks on the legal system and its collusion with capital intensified. In Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930), for instance, the main character's creditors sentence him to death, while a placard above the stage reminds the audience that the law courts of Mahagonny are not worse than those elsewhere. In Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 1941) Ui recognizes that the law's purpose under a dictatorship is to legitimize the regime's crimes. (32) In Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (The Private Life of the Master Race, 1938), a portrait of Nazi Germany, the legal profession has a motto, "Recht ist, was dem deutschen Volke niitzt" (3:1103; Law is, what the German people need [translation mine]).

IV. Brecht's Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc zu Rouen 1431 and Die Geschichte tier Simone Machard

Only a few years after he had written Heilige Johanna, Brecht clearly felt that he needed to revise the Joan of Arc story to resonate with the legal realities of the Third Reich. In Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc zu Rouen 1431 (The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431, which he adapted in 1934 from a radio play by Anna Seghers), he interspersed material from the actual trial with commentary by French onlookers in order to address simultaneously (if only implicitly) both the questionable socialism of "National Socialism" and the questionable legality of the Third Reich. When a young boy says in perplexity that the French have no grounds for bringing charges against Jeanne and no reason to put her on trial, the worldlier Dr. Dufour says, "So viele Doktoren werden schon einen finden" (6:2505, scene 2; "All those doctors ought to be able to find one"). (33) At the trial itself, Cauchon protests that he must proceed strictly according to law, which means suppressing questions that might demonstrate Jeanne's innocence, and insisting on the paramount importance of speed (161). When Jeanne cries out, "Ihr fuhrt einen faulen Prozetss" (3:2521; "This trial of yours is crooked" [166]), she is silenced.

In Die Geschichte der Simone Machard (The Visions of Simone Machard, his third Joan of Arc play, written in collaboration with Lion Feuchtwanger in 1942-43, in response to the occupation of France), Brecht transports Joan back into the twentieth century as a young French girl who, dreaming she is Joan of Arc, begins working for the Resistance by stealing food for the refugees and, when the Germans arrive, burning a storehouse of gasoline to prevent their access to it. At the end of the play, Simone (Joan) undergoes a "trial" in which Monsieur Soupard, the owner of the hostelry in which she worked and Colonel Fetain (in a thinly disguised reference), the neighborhood fascist who has welcomed the Germans with open arms, after cursory questioning that takes the form of ornate legalism, send Simone permanently to an insane asylum. Here, the illegal invasion is central to the constitution of the new legal system. But the invasion depends on those who see that they can protect their already substantial interests by collaboration, by capitalizing on the new market: the German occupiers. "Sie verkaufen Frankreich wie ihre Delikatessen" (5:1887, scene 3; "They're selling France the same as they sell their wine and hors d'oeuvres!") (34) says the elderly Pere Gustave with disgust. The consumers of French food are cannibals, consumers of the refugees who line the streets. The war machine, similarly cannibalistic, lives on those who, in the end, get crushed by it. When Georges, a wounded French soldier, points out that "ihre Festungen sind auf Rader gebaut und rollen uber uns weg" ("their forts are on wheels, they roll over us") and that "nichts kann ihre Tanks aufhalten, solange sie Ol haben" ("nothing is going to stop their tanks as long as they have gas"), Pere Gustave comments: "Die Tanks konnen durch jeden anderen Sumpf, aber in dem menschlichen bleiben sic stecken. Die Zivilbevolkerung hat sich als ein grotsses Ubel fur den Krieg herausgestellt" (5:1845, scene 1; "Tanks can get through any swamp, but in a human swamp they bog down. The civilian population has turned out to be a terrible nuisance in wartime" [5]). If Brecht hated war as a pacifist by inclination, he hated it all the more as the unholy alliance of states with capitalism he conceived it to be. Precisely what was wrong with international law was that it finally implicitly sanctioned wars between states (by acknowledging them and reinforcing the will of the victors through treaties), and so implicitly sanctioned the capitalist war machine whose purpose was to trade human lives for the propping up of the economy (just as the stockyard owners do). If the central purpose of the law was to protect property interests, in international law it did this by protecting states and hence dividing the international worker's movement, establishing the rules for a perpetual game of imperialist conquest that successfully diverted the masses from mobilization. As Brecht points out in works like Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage) and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), even if a country loses the war, its war marketeers nearly always come out better than before. At the same time that international law implicitly sanctioned war, it refused to recognize the one unequivocal international right: as Engels puts it, the "right to revolution." (35) Hence, the uprising of the masses never rose to the level of war (justified violence) but remained at the level of crime, not within the purview of international law and hence subject to the unmitigated violence of the state.

In both Der Prozes der Jeanne d'Arc and Simone Machard, the stripping of the country for the pursuit of war is as criminal as the German violation of legal norms--that is, there is a parallel between fascist violation of the law of nations and the more ordinary capitalist violation of the law of justice. When, in Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc, a Well-Dressed Gentleman observes that Joan claims to be doing what she is doing for "her country," Dr. Dufour says (in characteristic Brechtian antinationalism): "Land! Ist es dem Land nicht egal, wer auf dem Apfelschimmel sitzt, der es staubig stampft? Der Herzog von Bedford oder der Herzog von Orleans? Ist es dem Land nicht egal, in wessen Kehle sein Korn und sein Wein, sein Wildbret und Obst rutschen, Abgaben und Zehnten? In die des Herrn von Beauvais oder die des Herrn yon Gloster?" (6:2505, scene 2; "Country! What difference does it make to the country who's on the white horse that's trampling it into dust? The Duke of Bedford or the Duke of Orleans? What difference does it make to the country who gobbles up its wheat and its wine, its venison and fruit, its taxes and tithes? The Lord of Beauvais or the Duke of Gloucester?" [153]). As Shaw explains more cheerfully, "adventurers" interested in using the legal system "must come to terms with the captains of finance and industry, the bankers, and the Conservatives who really control the nations." (36) The collaborators in Simone Machard use the rhetoric of peace, law, and order as a shield against the threat of popular resistance. As a wounded French soldier points out, "das erste, was sie im Radio verkundet haben, war: 'Wer Ruhe und Ordnung halt, hat nichts zu furchten'" (5:1882, scene 3a;"The first thing they announced over the radio was: 'No one who observes law and order has anything to fear'" [37]). In the last scene of the play, the owners of a hostelry who have welcomed the Germans lecture Simone: "Wir sind ganz fahig, euch zu sagen, wann Krieg notig ist, und auch, wann der Friede besser ist... Wir sind Frankreich, verstanden?...Vergesst nicht, daft jetzt Friede ist" (5:1909-11, scene 4; "We're quite capable of telling you when war is necessary, and we can also tell you when peace is better.... We are France. Understand?... Don't forget, we're at peace now!" [59-61]).

Here, Brecht is offering a mocking echoing the Vichy government's version of loan of Arc. In Germany during this period, Joan was portrayed as the peasant hero of the national Volk, a natural fuhrer to be followed into battle to save the nation (never mind that it happened to be France). (37) In France under the Occupation, on the other hand, she was used to remind schoolchildren of the perfidy of the English and became, for the Vichy government, a renewed symbol of a unified and peace-loving nation, this time (as it so happened) unified in conciliation with its new German ally. As General Petain proclaimed in declaring a national Joan of Arc day, "Martyr of National Unity, Joan of Arc is the symbol of France." The Vichy loan was a peculiar conjunction of humility and obedience (the government stressed her domestic work on her father's farm in Lorraine at the same time that it stressed her fascist iron will), but she served as an excellent tool. One play, for instance, performed throughout Vichy France in youth camps, had a decayed Englishman repeating over and over, "Les Francais sont pourris, pourris, pourris" (The French are rotten, rotten, rotten), and recommended that the entire camp recite in unison, "Comme Jeanne, nous croyons en la resurrection de la France" (Like loan, we believe in the resurrection of France [translation mine]). (38)

If Brecht is offering a mocking echo of the Vichy loan in Simone Machard, he is also, in facing the Occupation and Resistance, returning to the more general question of resistance in a coercive legal system, whether that of the German occupiers or that of the capitalist occupiers. The international workers' Joan is, with the rise of Hitler, necessarily transformed for Brecht into a resistance fighter, one who again comes to realize the necessity of violence in the face of the exploitations of war and, in so doing, may bring about the revolution. If the world remains for the moment unchanged, if the legal system remains a pawn of international capital and the spokespersons of "peace and order" (39) remain those who use it in the service of oppression, Brecht hints at a higher legal order, one that might declare the holding pens for slaves that are stockyards an "ungesetzlicher Raum" (2:752, scene 9g; a "lawless... world" [81]) (as he himself calls it) and that might actualize the "laws of justice" (84) in just laws. In Brecht's Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc, Joan recants not in terror at the thought of being burnt alive but in the mistaken conviction that the people of France have lost faith in her--that they have yielded up in spirit and become blindly obedient to the unified forces of Church and nobility, the representatives of the coercive state. But, as one observer recounts after her death, after hearing of people's distress at her recantation, her courage came back and "sie erkannte, dass das Tribunal kein schlechteres Schlachtfeld ist als die Laufgraben vor Orleans" (6:2546, scene 16; "she realized that a law court is as good a battleground as the earthworks before Orleans" [186]).

V. Conclusion

If Shaw did not have that faith, both Brecht and Shaw were saying to the international Joan, the pacifist and harmonious and conciliatory Joan, all is not right with the new international world order. In the decades that followed, international treaties and the development of customary international law tried to deal with some of the problems that Shaw's and Brecht's critiques raised: identifying the nature of aggressive warfare; establishing norms for fundamental economic rights in addition to political and civil rights; actualizing a right to self-determination; establishing higher standards for the protection of civilian populations in wartime; establishing increased protections for labor. While the great human rights treaties of the postwar period were created largely in response to the horrors of World War II, in a world coming face to face too with the brutalities of colonialism, they were also created by those who realized, with Shaw and Brecht, that absolute pacifism and principles of nonintervention were not always enough, and that if states were not always the best guardians of their citizens' interests, an international law whose only subjects were states (or, an international law that was, like loan's tribunal, the mere tool of states) could never be such a guardian either. For Shaw this meant a comic resignation to the extremes of coercion and intolerance, to the temptations of fascism, which, when translated into real-world terms, had consequences for which the word tragedy is insufficient. For Brecht this meant an impossibly utopian vision to be brought about by violence that might never achieve its aim, an ideology which had consequences equally unspeakable. But each nonetheless offered a critique of the international sphere order that saw past its subterfuges to the possibilities beyond.

Columbia University

NOTES

(1) Regine Pernoud, The Retrial of loan of Arc: The Evidence at the Trial for Her Rehabilitation, 1450-1456, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 245, 247. An early version of this essay was presented at the 1997 American Society of International Law conference, and a summary published in the American Society of International Law Proceedings 91 (1997): 120-26.

(2) For a discussion of the literary loan from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, see Ingvald Raknem, Joan of Arc in History, Legend and Literature (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1971).

(3) Pierre Marot, "De la rehabilitation a la glorification de Jeanne d'Arc: Essai sur l'historiographie et le cure de l'heroine en France pendant cinq siecles," in Memorial du VE centenaire de la rehabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc 1456-1956 (Paris: J. Foret, 1958), 85, 138.

(4) Marie-Claire Bancquart, Les ecrivains et l'histoire: d'apres Maurice Barres, Leon Bloy, Anatole France, Charles Peguy (Paris: Nizet, 1966), 298; translation mine.

(5) See Anatole Levandovsky, "Jeanne d'Arc dans l'historiographie sovietique," in Jeanne d'Arc: Une epoque, un rayonnement (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982), 287.

(6) Bancquart, 311-12 (quoting Rent Doumic, "Theatre imprime. La Delivrance d'Orleans, mystere en trois actes, par M. Joseph Fabre," Revue des Deux Mondes [15 September 1913]); translation mine.

(7) William Paul Yancey, The Soldier Virgin of France: A Message of World Peace (Gainesville, 1926).

(8) J. van Kan, "Bernard Shaw's Saint loan: An Historical Point of View," in Stanley Weintraub, ed., Saint Joan: Fifty Years After, 1923/24-1973/74 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 49. See similarly Pierre Lanery d'Arc, Jeanne d'Arc et la Guerre de 1914 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1916).

(9) "Fete de Jeanne D'Arc," Action francaise, 9 May 1920; translation mine.

(10) Shaw rejects such smug progressivism outright--arguing that today she would have been executed with hardly a trial or law at all. George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (London: Penguin, 1957), 57 (hereafter cited in the text). Brecht would have agreed--in fact, his two modern Joans are essentially executed summarily.

(11) Shaw writes in the preface to Saint Joan: "The question raised by Joan's burning is a burning question still.... If it were only an historical curiosity I would not waste my readers' time and my own on it for five minutes" (34-35).

(12) Cavell was tried according to German military law as a spy. Under that law, she was not allowed to see or speak to her defense counsel before the trial and not allowed to see the evidence on which the prosecution founded its case. See James M. Beck, The Case of Edith Cavell: A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916), 9-10, 33-34. Beck discusses extensively the issues of international law that Cavell's case raised.

(13) "Well might Edith have wished that she could bring the Middle Ages back, and have fifty civilians, learned in the law or vowed to the service of God, to support two skilled judges in trying her case according to the Catholic law of Christendom, and to argue it out with her at sitting after sitting for many weeks" (26-27).

(14) Nationalism is merely risible to the established feudal powers, and it's unclear whether Shaw is mocking the mocker or the mocked, for instance in the following exchange between "The Nobleman" and the provincial English Chaplain:

 The Nobleman: Oh! you are an Englishman, are you?
 The Chaplain: Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman, still,
 like your lordship, I was horn in England; and it makes a
 difference.
 The Nobleman: You are attached to the soil, eh?
 The Chaplain: It pleases Four lordship to be satirical at my
 expense.... But your lordship knows very well that I am
 not attached to the soil in a vulgar manner, like a serf. (86-87,
 scene 4)

(15) Lest Shaw should be seen as attacking only the British, he reminds us that "Later on the Fascisti in Italy did everything that the Black and Tans did in Ireland, with some grotesquely ferocious variations," and that "in the United States an incredibly savage persecution of Russians took place during the scare spread by the Russian Bolshevik revolution after 1917. These instances could easily be multiplied" (36).

(16) George Bernard Shaw, Plays Political: The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, Geneva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 316. See also Glenn R. Cuomo, "'Saint Joan before the Cannibals': George Bernard Shaw in the Third Reich," German Studies Review 16, no. 3 (October 1993): 435.

(17) Shaw, Geneva, 323.

(18) Ibid., 339.

(19) Ibid., 338.

(20) Shaw, preface to The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. See the discussion in Arland Ussher, "Joan as Unhappy Trotzkyist," in Saint Joan Fifty, Years After, ed. Stanley Weintraub, 119, 123.

(21) Cuomo, 439, 444, 440, 450, 453.

(22) "G.B.S. and Europe" Observer 432 (5 November 1933), 19.

(23) Cuomo, 439. See also Shaw, Geneva, 331, on "the national benefactor who began by abolishing unemployment, tearing up the Treaty of Versailles, and restoring the selfrespect [sic] of sixty millions of his fellow countrymen," but unfortunately became "the mad Messiah."

(24) Learned Hand is quoting Holmes in a letter to Holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935, ed. Mark De Wolfe Howe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1:159, n. 2 (22 June 1918).

(25) Matthew Melko, Peace in Our Time (New York: Paragon, 1990), 1, points out that what Chamberlain actually said was "I believe it is peace for our time," but the phrase is always quoted as "peace in our time." Shaw may have been thinking of Benjamin Disraeli's claim in 1878, after the Congress of Berlin, that he had brought "peace, I hope, with honor" and, in a letter to Queen Victoria after the Congress, that the settlement would "secure the peace of Europe for a long time" (Melko, 1).

(26) All references to the German texts of Brecht's plays are to the Gesammelte Werke, ed. Elisabeth Hauptmann, 8 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967) (hereafter cited in the text).

(27) Claude Hill, Bertolt Brecht (New York: Twayne, 1975), 75.

(28) Bertolt Brecht, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, trans. Ralph Manheim, in vol. 3 of Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1970), 38, 67, 81 (hereafter cited in the text). All references to the English text of this play are to this edition.

Shaw quotes this line admiringly (Saint Joan 26). See also Beck, 32.

(30) Keith A. Dickson, Towards Utopia: A Study of Brecht (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 162.

(31) Great Soviet Encyclopedia, ed. A. M. Prokhorov, 3rd ed., 31 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1973-83), s.v. "Law."

(32) Dickson, 148-49, 150.

(33) Bertolt Brecht, The Trial of Joan of Arc of Rouen, 1431, trans. Ralph Manheim and Wolfgang Sauerlander, in vol. 9 of Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1970), 152 (hereafter cited in the text). All references to the English text of this play are to this edition.

(34) Bertolt Brecht, The Visions of Simone Machard, trans. Ralph Manheim, in vol. 7 of Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1970), 41 (hereafter cited in the text). All references to the English text of this play are to this edition.

(35) Dickson, 152.

(36) Shaw, Geneva, 330.

(37) Cuomo, 445. In Emil-August Glogau's The Gottesmagd Jeanne d'Arc (1939), for instance, Joan is the figure for national socialism, martyred in the fight against traditional privilege. On Die Gottesmagd Jeanne d'Arc, see D. Barlow, "The Saint Joan Theme in Modern German Drama" German Life & Letters: A Quarterly Review 17 (1963-64): 250-258.

(38) Gabriel Jacobs, "The Role of Joan of Arc on the Stage of Occupied Paris;' in Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology, ed. Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 106-22, 108.

(39) Mauler calls for the return of "Ruhe und Ordnung" (2:772, scene 10; "peace and order" [98]). A broker cries, "In die Zuchthauser geworfen die Verbrecher, die Ruh und Ordnung frevelhaft gestort" (2:772, scene 10; "The criminal desecrators of law and order have been thrown in jail" [981).

Julie Stone Peters

Columbia University