Why Did God Favor France?
The results resemble past encounters between skeptical authors (Mark Twain is a notable example) and the historical record around the Maid of Orleans: Her story is one of the most extensively documented cases of a miraculous-seeming intervention into secular history, calculated to baffle, fascinate and even charm like almost nothing else in Western history.
Everything in the story sounds like a pious legend confabulated centuries after the fact. A peasant girl with zero political or military experience shows up at a royal court, announces a divine mission and makes a series of prophecies about what God wants for France that she consistently fulfills — a fulfillment that requires not merely some fortunate happenstance, but her taking command of a medieval army and winning an immediate series of victories over an intimidating adversary with Alexandrine or Napoleonic skill.
Then after the mission is accomplished (with some miracles thrown in), some of the prophetic and military capacity seems to be withdrawn and she is captured and dies a martyr's death — but not before undergoing a religious trial with a bravura performance that likewise looks like the invention of a theologically trained novelist. And through it all she appears to be extraordinarily lovable, displaying piety and kindliness without any of the fanaticism or delusions of personal grandeur that normally shadow people who think they're supposed to take up arms on God's behalf.
The review essay considers some of the more persuasive non-supernatural explanations for all these strange events. But the reviewer's strongest reaction is an understandable one, I think, for any reader who approaches the evidence with an open mind:
I talk about 'God stretching down His hand to alter history,' and I'm really not sure I believe it happened, but Joan feels like a giant middle finger to all the people who talk about history being deterministic. Sometimes you get a Great Woman and then history does something really weird.
I also kind of feel called out by God. 'So, you say you're a rationalist? You're dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won't consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a mere two eyewitness and five contemporary reports? You won't believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could avoid recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you're not a Christian because you're a rationalist?'
But if Joan challenges skeptics to explain how a career like hers could be possible without supernatural aid, she also challenges Christians and her other religiously inclined fans to explain why, exactly, God sent her to save France. Indeed, the best skeptic's argument probably rests there: not in trying to deny the miraculous-seeming record, but in challenging the believer to explain why God wanted or needed these specific events to happen.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that some version of the Catholic theory of miracles is correct. In that case history seems to yield three broad categories of supernatural happenings. First, the 'big miracles' of the Old and New Testaments, associated with major events in the history of God's plan for humanity, from the crossing of the Red Sea to the Resurrection. Second, the signs and wonders associated with the special holiness of specific saints — healings, visions, stigmata, the remarkably well-documented Reformation-era levitations discussed in Carlos Eire's recent book, 'They Flew: A History of the Impossible.' Finally, the miracles and signs and supernatural encounters that happen on a personal level, to ordinary people, as answers to their prayers rather than as manifestations of their sanctity.
The story of Joan of Arc doesn't fit neatly into any of these categories. The strange events of her life are clearly more than just a personal sign of God's presence, since all of France is implicated in the drama. They're also clearly more than just a manifestation of her holiness, since the effect isn't just to convert people in her orbit to a deeper Christian faith; it's also to change the outcome of a major war.
But was that military outcome, then, somehow a major event in God's unfolding plan? One analogue to Joan's career might be the stories in the Old Testament where God takes an active part in Israel's military conflicts; another might be Constantine's vision at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that supposedly inspired his conversion to Christianity. But in those cases the alleged divine help was being supplied for an obvious spiritual purpose — the survival of God's chosen people, the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Whereas in Joan's case, the divine help turned the tide in a war where both sides were Christian and Roman Catholic, and where the resolution had no major religious consequences. It was a dynastic triumph for the French kings and a national triumph for their people, but it's not obvious how it was a spiritual one.
So why did God raise up a saint to save the French from defeat? No theory seems all that satisfying, but let's consider a few candidates.
Because God showed mercy on the French people. A hundred years of war is a lot of war. Undoubtedly a lot of people were praying for relief, and maybe Joan was just the divinely anointed answer to their prayer. Why didn't God send a similar figure to expedite the Thirty Years' War or World War I or any other mass-casualty disaster in human history? Well, maybe he did send saints in some of those cases and people didn't listen to them. (Joan's miraculous career did require a lot of political cooperation.) Or maybe it's just the usual divine inscrutability: Just as most sick people who pray for help don't receive miraculous healing but some people do, most wars don't end by divine fiat but once in a while (once in 2,000 years?) God puts an obvious finger on the scale.
Because God wanted to teach Christians what a just war looks like. There is no Joan of Arc figure in Christendom's wars of conquest, no miraculous figure who made the difference in the First Crusade or the Spanish Reconquista or the conquest of the Americas. (The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe involves the divine manifesting itself to the conquered, not to the conquistadores.) Instead, a martial and miraculous saint shows up only in a situation where she's ending a foreign occupation and vindicating a beleaguered nation against an invader. So the fact that she does appear, armed and militant, suggests that maybe God was teaching a lesson in just war theory — giving the faithful a clear example of a saint-soldier to prove the pacifists wrong, while making sure that her example can be legitimately invoked only in wars waged in self-defense.
Because the Reformation was coming and it was necessary that France remain Catholic. In the timeline where Joan doesn't appear and the Hundred Years' War ends with England retaining a strong hold on France, maybe the English Reformation still happens, France as well as England flips to Protestantism, and suddenly you have a Protestant Anglo-French bloc with command of the seas and soon the world. In which case you could suggest that Joan was necessary either because of specific divine protection for Catholicism or, more subtly, because it was important that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism win a final victory in the 17th century, given each side's un-Christian crimes against the other.
Because modernity was coming and it was necessary that France and England exist as rivals and competing poles. This is essentially an extension of the last argument, in which an Anglo-French balance of power, a persistent dualism between London and Paris, is essential not just to balance Protestants and Catholics but also for the healthy development of the entire modern world. How? Well, maybe by preventing not just one but a whole series of undesirable outcomes: the total victory of one side in the Reformation, the total victory of just one version of the Enlightenment, the total victory of 20th century totalitarianism, even the total victory of the American empire or the total victory of the European Union — who can say?
And since the French part of that story isn't finished yet, the last possibility remains open as well:
Because God loves the French in a special way, and they have a cosmic destiny that still waits to be fulfilled.
C'est certainement possible!
Breviary
Matthew Milliner on Jungians and Christians.
Robert Bellafiore on capitalism and its undertakers.
Nina Power on the religion of William Blake.
Adam Ozimek reviews a century of American automaking.
U.S.A.I.D.'s former chief economist on fixing foreign aid.
Ingrid Rowland on the painter of the serene republic.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
10 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Ukraine and Europe Counter Putin's Cease-Fire Proposal
BERLIN—European powers and Ukraine responded to Vladimir Putins cease-fire plan on Saturday with a counterproposal that they say must serve as a framework so that upcoming talks between President Trump and the Russian leader can gain traction, according to two European officials familiar with the talks. The European gambit rejected a Russian proposal to trade Ukrainian-held parts of the Donetsk region for a cease-fire. It was put forward in a meeting with top U.S. officials in England on Saturday.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Market liberalism is dead — we need a new NATO for trade
For eight decades the West, especially European nations, treated markets as neutral arenas governed by rules—not power. That era is over. The global economy is now shaped by rivalry, coercion, and control. Trade is no longer just trade in a rules-based order, it has become part of geopolitical strategy. And this isn't a temporary disruption. As IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva has warned, the world is fragmenting into competing blocs. The old vision of globalisation has collapsed. What seemed to be a natural setup to many in Europe was, in fact, a historical anomaly: a system built upon an American-led world order power, enforced through institutions like NATO and the Bretton Woods system. That scaffolding is now shaking. The rules-based global market we took for granted is giving way to a world of weaponised interdependence. To navigate it, the West needs a new kind of alliance: a NATO for trade. The end of the 80-year economic illusion After World War II, the US and its allies built an economic system designed to prevent a return to the destabilising chaos of the 1930s. Institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and GATT were established to underpin global capitalism under American leadership. Security was provided by US military power, codified in NATO. Trade flourished. So did Europe, whose post-war recovery and integration were underwritten by American guarantees. When the Cold War ended, the illusion that global capitalism could operate independently of geopolitics deepened. By the 1990s, many believed the market was self-regulating and inherently peace-promoting. Today, with the return of great power competition, that illusion has shattered. Economic liberalism no longer aligns with geopolitical reality. We are entering a war economy mindset—one where national security trumps price efficiency. This shift has been accelerated by two shocks: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's economic rise. For example, Europe's dependence on cheap Russian gas left it exposed when Russia weaponised its flows in 2022. Germany, in particular, had bet on market logic rather than geopolitical risk. A 2021 assessment even declared Nord Stream 2 safe just months prior. The result: an energy crisis and a mad scramble for LNG. Far away, while the West clung to free-market orthodoxy, China has spent decades building a war-ready economy. Under the 'Made in China 2025' and 'Military-Civil Fusion' initiatives, it identified key sectors and moved to dominate them, including rare earths, batteries, solar and AI. Today, China produces over 75% of lithium-ion batteries and nearly all the world's gallium. It controls the supply chains for the energy transition—and increasingly, the components of military power. Crucially, China is not afraid to use this market dominance for political ends. In 2010, it cut exports to Japan over a dispute. And its green tech dominance creates dependence in Europe and beyond. Recently, China imposed controls on gallium and germanium, crucial for semiconductor development worldwide. In response to this shift, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has openly argued for a more strategic form of capitalism, rejecting 'oversimplified' free-market models. Trade is no longer neutral. What matters is not just cost, but control. 80-year illusion over, a new paradigm emerges In summary, we are entering a new, first truly geopolitical-economic paradigm in eight decades. The comfortable post-Cold War interlude — when markets seemed paramount and history had supposedly ended — has given way to a more raw and Hobbesian environment. But unlike the 1930s, the West is not destitute or defenceless; we are wealthy and belatedly awakening to the challenge. We must now leverage our strengths in a clear-eyed way. The task is to update the institutions and mindsets of the 20th-century liberal order to meet the 21st-century's more fraught reality. If we succeed, geoeconomics need not lead to catastrophe, but it will require us to subordinate commerce to strategy — intentionally and intelligently — just as our forebears did in the 1940s when they built the system that delivered peace and prosperity for so long. The EU-US trade agreement highlights this shift The inequity of the recent EU-US trade deal, which saw the bloc swallow 15% tariffs, is a perfect example of this shift. It also demonstrates that Europe's decades-long dependence on the US has become a strategic vulnerability. This episode reinforces the need for Europe and others to structurally diversify our trade relationships and value chains in a world of escalating economic coercion. It must drive us to deepen partnerships beyond the transatlantic axis, without relying too heavily on China. This is not the 1930s. Europe remains a wealthy, democratic, and stable region. But post-war generations have no memory of systemic disruption. We assumed liberalism was permanent. We believed 'it's the economy, stupid.' Now we're learning that strategic power, not market price, determines outcomes. Defence is another case in point. Until recently, most NATO members underspent on their militaries. By 2021, only six met the 2% GDP target. That changed quickly after 2022. But defence industries were caught flat-footed. A plan to send 1 million shells to Ukraine revealed that the EU's manufacturing capacity fell far short. For decades, Europe optimised for efficiency, not endurance. The same applies to trade. Germany's model of Wandel durch Handel—change through trade—is being rethought. Berlin is now screening Chinese investments and reducing dependence on authoritarian suppliers. Across Europe, strategic autonomy is the new watchword. But the mindset shift is only beginning. A NATO for trade: the strategic task ahead Market liberalism assumed that trade would bring peace. But today, trade is a tool of leverage. The new mantra must be resilience—including building domestic capacity, even if it's more expensive. This is not a temporary adjustment. It is the new normal. And this new era demands new institutions. Just as NATO was built to defend shared security, the West now needs a strategic alliance to defend shared economic sovereignty—a NATO for trade—including nations like Japan, South Korea and Australia. Economic security must become a shared goal, not just a national one. The US has already taken steps, with domestic investments in chips and clean tech, and bans on key tech exports to China. Now, the EU is following suit, with the Chips Act and Critical Raw Materials Act. These are necessary but insufficient measures. We must build an economic coalition of the willing, now. That means shared investments, aligned trade rules, and collective protection of critical supply chains. It means accepting higher costs to safeguard long-term freedom. Cheap goods are not cheap if they make us dependent on hostile powers and geopolitical power games. The task is not to retreat from global trade, but to rebuild it on strategic terms. The free market cannot defend itself. Like peace, it must be protected through alliances. Economic liberalism's end, strategy's return Market liberalism is dead. It died when we stopped believing trade was just about price. It died when supply chains became battlegrounds. And it died when autocracies weaponised interdependence while democracies hesitated. If we want to preserve prosperity, we must be willing to defend it—not just with tanks, but with treaties, tariffs, and trusted partners. A NATO for trade is not a metaphor. It is the next necessary institution in a world where commerce is no longer safe from politics. If the West can build it, the collapse of market liberalism need not mean decline; it can be the start of a more resilient and secure economic order. The opinions expressed in commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Error al recuperar los datos Inicia sesión para acceder a tu cartera de valores Error al recuperar los datos Error al recuperar los datos Error al recuperar los datos Error al recuperar los datos
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
More than 50 arrested at protest in support of Palestine Action in London
MORE than 50 people have been arrested as protesters gathered in central London to show support for Palestine Action in defiance of its ban as a terror group. Defend Our Juries, which organised the demonstration, said between 600 and 700 people were in Parliament Square on Saturday afternoon. The Metropolitan Police said it would arrest anyone expressing support for Palestine Action. The crowd, sat on the grass inside Parliament Square, could be seen writing 'I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action' on white placards at 1pm, with the vast majority remaining silent. (Image: PA) (Image: PA) (Image: PA) Several demonstrators carrying placards that read 'Palestine Action terrorises Britain while Hamas hides in hospitals, schools and mosques', briefly walked along the crowd before being led away by police officers. Other clusters of protesters who were not holding placards gathered around the Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela statues in the square singing pro-Palestinian chants. Officers were holding individual demonstrators sat on the edge of the grass before escorting them through swelling crowds to police vans parked on the edge of the square. READ MORE: 'F***ing slags': Oasis take aim at Edinburgh Council chiefs in first Murrayfield gig A separate group of officers attended a protester lying next to the fenced-off Emmeline Pankhurst statue. They later began arresting protesters sat in the middle of Parliament Square. The officers lifted the protesters – some sitting and some lying flat – off the ground before escorting them away. (Image: PA) (Image: PA) Onlookers applauded the protesters and shouted 'Shame on you' at the police making arrests. Protesters who were still sat in the middle of Parliament Square stood up together at 2pm and held their placards in the air. READ MORE: Anas Sarwar blasted as 'hypocrite' after branding Benjamin Netanyahu 'war criminal' One person was also arrested at a separate Palestine Coalition march, which set off from Russell Square heading to Whitehall via Aldwych and the Strand. The arrest was 'for a placard showing support for Palestine Action', Scotland Yard said. The Met Police said on Twitter/X: "We've now made more than 50 arrests in Parliament Square and our interventions continue. We have significant resources deployed to this operation. It will take time but we will arrest anyone expressing support for Palestine Action." Membership of, or support for, Palestine Action is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison under the Terrorism Act 2000. More arrests are expected to take place on Saturday as the Met Police continue their operation.
