may 24, 1411 - Foreword

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On October 22, 1422, Charles VI died, bequeathing, by the Treaty of Troyes, his kingdom with the hand of his daughter to Henry V, King of England.
In the century since war devastated our country, never has our independence been so threatened.
Masters of Guyenne, united on one side with the Duke of Burgundy, on the other supported by the Duke of Brittany, the English held the north and center of France, as far as the Loire.
Orléans, besieged, presented a final obstacle to their march towards the south; but the city without help was going to succumb.
The Dauphin Charles VII had taken refuge in Bourges: a sad king, without an army, without money, without energy. A few courtiers were still competing for the last favors of this sinking monarchy, but none of them was capable of defending it, and, across the hungry countryside, the remnants of the royal army, bands of road warriors from all sources, reduced and demoralized by their recent defeats at Cravant and Verneuil, fell back incapable of a new effort.
Everything was lacking: men, resources, even the will to resist. Charles VI, despairing of his cause, thought of fleeing to Dauphiné, perhaps even beyond the mountains, to Castile, abandoning his kingdom, his rights, and his duties.
After the madness of Charles VI, the indolence of the Dauphin, and the selfishness and incapacity of the nobility, had completed the ruin of the country, our very race was going to lose its nationality.
Then, on the borders of Lorraine, in a remote village, a little peasant girl stood up. Moved with pity by the miseries of the poor people of France, she had felt in the depths of her heart the first thrill of the homeland. With her weak hand, she picked up the great sword of vanquished France, and, with her frail chest making a bulwark against so much distress, she drew from the energy of her faith the strength to raise up the lost courage and to uproot our country to the victorious English.
“I come from my Lord God,” she said, “to save the kingdom of France.”
And she added: “This is what I was born for.”
It is for this, in fact, that she was born, the holy girl; this is also why, delivered cowardly to her enemies, she died in the horror of the cruelest torture, abandoned by the King she had crowned and the people she had saved.

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