Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc was born to a peasant farming family in medieval France, illiterate her entire life, at a time when France was losing a generations-long war against England and much of the country's morale had collapsed. As a teenager she began reporting religious visions instructing her to support the uncrowned French heir, Charles VII, and drive English forces from France, an almost unimaginable claim for a peasant girl with no military training, standing, or family connections to make.

Remarkably, Joan managed to secure an audience with Charles VII and convinced him, and eventually his skeptical military commanders, to give her troops and a role in the campaign to relieve the besieged city of Orléans in 1429. Wearing armor and carrying a banner rather than a weapon, she led French forces to a decisive victory that shifted the war's momentum for the first time in decades. She was captured by Burgundian forces allied with England the following year and sold to the English.

Put on trial by an English-aligned church court on charges that were, by most historians' assessment, politically motivated rather than genuinely religious, Joan was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in 1431, at just 19 years old. Twenty-five years later, a posthumous retrial, ordered by the same French crown she had fought for, formally overturned her conviction and declared her innocent. She was canonized a saint by the Catholic Church in 1920.

Joan's willingness to act on total conviction despite having no formal standing, training, or precedent to draw on, and her calm composure even facing execution, remain almost unmatched historically. For young people, her life is a complicated lesson: total conviction moved a nation, but it also could not save her from the powerful interests threatened by her success, a reminder that courage and justice do not always arrive together within a single lifetime.