People who died before 30: Joan of Arc

Famous people who died before 30
Joan of Arc, saint and military leader

In 1424, when she was 12 years old, Jean d’Arc, a peasant girl in what is now northern France, was in the fields when she heard voices calling to her. They were so beautiful she wept when they left. Later, these voices – of angels, she would later claim – convinced her she was destined to help the French military in their struggle to end the Lancastrian occupation of France during one of the conflicts summed up as the Hundred Years War.

When she was 16 years old, the voices convinced her to seek out the local commander of the French feudal army, and she gained his confidence by predicting an unlikely victory in a distant battle. From here, she was granted court with Duke Charles in besieged Orleans. Low on morale, broke, and desperate after countless defeats, Charles and the army took her as a sort of an mascot, and her talk of visions turned the civil war into a religious conflict. She wore a specially made suit of armor and rallied the men to raise morale. She inspired them to attend church and stop swearing, and drove the prostitutes from the camps. Amazingly, the French responded well to this infusion of strict Christian morality. Joan attended battles herself as a standard bearer, and the newly invigorated French won victory after unlikely victory. In 1429, at the siege of Orleans, the French rallied to the offensive, drove back the English invaders, and took enough land for Charles VII to be crowned King at Reims.

Unfortunately, in 1430 Joan was captured by the enemy Burgundians during an ill-advised raid. Her family had no money for ransom, and Charles VII refused to intervene. She was sold to the British, who wanted to use her trial for heresy as a ruse to undermine Charles VII’s claim to the throne, re-opening the door for English rule of Normandy. After a show trial, she was eventually convicted and burned at the stake, then her remains were burned twice more into ashes which were cast into the Seine to prevent relics of her body being used in sainthood. She was 19 years old.

Her legend, however, only grew. A posthumous retrial declared her innocent in 1456, when folk ballads were of her virtue and glory were already popular. She has been the subject of many authors from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to George Bernard Shaw. Since attaining sainthood in 1920, she has appeared in dozens of movies: In 1948 Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for portraying her, in 1999 Milla Jovovich was a blip on the radar, while in 1989 Jane Wiedlin, better known as the guitarist for the pop band The Go-Go's,  took her persona for a loopy spin in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. She has a line of canned beans named after her, for which the website offers no explanation. She has been satirized in the Simpsons, been the inspiration for trashy Halloween costumes, and in 2006 had an entire video game with her as the central character. Not a bad legacy for a moody teenager.