Joan of Arc: Maid of (New) Orleans

Joan is the patron saint of France, but she has no official status in Louisiana, despite its founding as a French colony. Still, she has made her mark on the Crescent City beyond the annual parade. Here are objects from HNOC’s holdings that illustrate the region’s enduring reverence for the icon known as the Maid of Orléans.

The Krewe de Jeanne d’Arc is a secular group, but some of its throws are inspired by traditional Catholic prayer cards. This card from the 2015 parade includes an original entreaty (or special plea to God or a saint) by a krewe member asking Joan to work with other saints to protect New Orleans. “Ride with us through thick and thin as you rode to save France. . . . Help us remember always to march toward our heavenly home.”

The local population near Convent, Louisiana—about halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River—was still largely French-speaking in 1809, when a new Catholic parish was founded there. The church’s name has since been Anglicized, to St. Michael the Archangel, but the community’s French roots are still on display. The church’s hand-carved wooden altar was imported from Paris after the 1889 World’s Fair. Its Lourdes Grotto was modeled after the cave in France where a teen girl saw visions of the Virgin Mary in the 1850s, and it includes a decorative window honoring a pair of children who had their own Marian apparition in the French Alps. In the cemetery on the church grounds, a memorial is “dedicated to the memory of our courageous Acadian ancestors.” In front of St. Michael’s stands a statue of St. Joan. She is dressed in armor and holds a banner, recalling her role as a military hero.

The Catholic community of LaPlace, Louisiana, showed their devotion to Joan in 1947, when they dedicated a newly formed parish to her, complete with a statue of the Maid atop the church steeple. As is standard, Joan wears a suit of armor and holds a banner. In this likeness, the saint wears no helmet and has long, flowing hair. Depictions like this one emphasize Joan’s maidenhood but sacrifice historical accuracy: The real Joan cropped her hair short and likely wore an open-faced combat helmet called a bascinet. Today, the statue sits at ground level outside her namesake church.

During World War I, the federal government created the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense to coordinate women’s war work. Across the country, the Committee worked with local groups to place volunteers on farms and ranches, organize food drives, and educate children. In September 1918, the Committee sponsored Play Week as part of a national campaign to instill patriotic values in young people. In New Orleans, the week’s festivities began with a children’s pageant procession in City Park. Both Joan of Arc and Lady Liberty (seen at right in image) made appearances—further evidence of how locals connected the French saint with patriotism and civic duty.

Aside from her height—5 feet 2 inches—and dark hair, contemporary accounts do not go into much detail about Joan’s appearance. The impression they leave is that she was a sturdy peasant girl, reasonably good-looking, but not beautiful or attractive. At a rehabilitation trial held after her death, intended to appeal her heresy conviction, soldiers who had served with her took great pains to clarify that they did not have “carnal desire” for her. Still, depictions of Joan tend toward the romantic, and she often upholds the beauty standards of whatever time the artwork is made. That’s definitely the case in this 1918 illustration by William Haskell Coffin, who specialized in images of ideal women and gave Joan a simliar treatment as the portraits he made for popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s.

The statue featured on the above postcard is one of many duplicates of a piece created in 1875 by the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet at the request of Napoleon III. Napoleon, hoping that the statues would spark national pride at home in Paris and abroad, gifted the duplicates to cities around the world—but not to New Orleans. This particular duplicate didn’t arrive in the US until 1958, when it was purchased by a New York company that offered to sell the statue to New Orleans. When Mayor Chep Morrison couldn’t come up with the funds, French President Charles de Gaulle partnered with the cities of Orleans, Paris, Reims, and Rouen to buy the figure and gift it to la Nouvelle-Orléans.

More cash-flow problems kept the city from installing the statue at its intended site—the foot of Canal Street—and it sat in storage until 1972, when it was finally erected. Harrah’s proposed moving the statue to the Warehouse District in 1995, but local courts intervened. By that time it had become the epicenter of local Bastille Day ceremonies, and the public demanded that it stay.

In 1999, the casino proposed a new plan: Move the statue to the French Quarter, where it could be flanked by antique cannons (delivered along with the statue in 1958 but never installed), and surround it with US, France, Louisiana, and New Orleans flags. The statue now resides on the 900 block of Decatur Street and includes a collection of plaques celebrating—and strengthening—the connections between New Orleans and France.