Jeanne d'Arcs kanonisation : en kyrkopolitisk strategi eller skapandet av en nationell symbol

The following essay is named The canonization of Joan of Arc, a Church political strategy or the creation of a national symbol? Joan of Arc, the French heroine of the Hundred Years War, was canonized as late as 1920, in a process that began already in 1869. In the following essay I am trying to work out if this canonization is a work of the Vatican in order to gain popularity in France after the breakup with the state in 1905. The Catholic Church had, since the French Revolution, faced difficulties withstanding its position of power in the presence of the upcoming Secularism and Liberalism and their growing public support. The Catholic Church had been fighting for its members and at the same time fighting the new ideas of Socialism, Communism and Liberalism. Due to the lack of direct sources as well as the inability of being able to retrieve them I have used a variety of sources and documents. By using different history books and documents regarding the actual canonization of Joan of Arc and the Roman Catholic Church, I have been able to retrieve the information needed to answer my three folded question. The main question regarding the political strategy was as my hypothesis says, true, as far as this work concerns. Joan of Arc’s case was not in a starting phase initiated by the Vatican but instead by a liberal bishop in France but as the case continued my result showed that the Vatican saw a chance to gain not just the trust of its members, but also a chance to strengthen its bounds to the French state. The reason that it took more than five hundred years (after Joans death) to canonize her is probably that nationalism with all its meaning was developed and used in a wider sense during the late 19th century. This ”back to the roots” philosophy made the pressure to canonize her more vivid and at last, after the First World War, she became the national saint that France forever longed for.En artikel baserad på denna uppsats har senare publicerats i Gusem: Gutilandorum Universitas Scholarium et Magistrorum: tidskrift för Högskolan på Gotlands historiska förening, Årgång 1 (2009): nr 1