Play: Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc

Overview

Charles Péguy's Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc (1910) is a compact, hymnlike dramatic poem that stages the last hours and meaning of Joan of Arc rather than reconstructing historical events. The piece reads like a devotional chant, weighing the paradox that a woman burned as a heretic could also be the embodiment of Christian charity. Péguy treats Joan as both a real girl and a symbol, her martyrdom becomes a point of spiritual interrogation rather than a courtroom transcript.
The play resists straightforward narrative. It proceeds by repeated lyrical monologues, refrains, and cumulative images that fold time and voice into a single moral and religious meditation. Péguy's language moves between devotional simplicity and rhetorical exaltation, so that the play functions as prayer, elegy and polemic all at once.

Structure and Style

Rather than a conventional sequence of scenes, the work is assembled from meditative fragments: soliloquies, direct addresses, and brief dramatic exchanges that circle back on central lines and questions. The effect is intentionally incantatory; repetition becomes a formal device that deepens meaning through variation. Short, insistent sentences are often balanced by longer, sonorous periods that mimic sermonizing and sacred liturgy.
Péguy's style fuses colloquial immediacy with theological passion. He uses anachronism and rhetorical echo to collapse past and present, so the reader or listener feels the historical Joan and the contemporary spiritual problem she poses at the same time. The tone is devotional but restless, alternately tender, shocked, indignant and reverent.

Central Themes

Charity, understood as caritas, the self-giving love at the heart of Christian life, is the play's organizing idea. Joan's sanctity is presented less as miraculous proof than as the visible, often misunderstood expression of that love amid violence and betrayal. Péguy insists that true holiness can appear absurd or dangerous to worldly institutions, and he watches with both grief and wonder as charity is misread as madness or crime.
Patriotism and faith intersect and strain against each other. Joan is the emblem of a nation and the exemplar of a faith; Péguy refuses to let either identity be wholly subsumed by the other. Instead the play stages how political expediency, ecclesiastical timidity and historical circumstance betray a figure whose moral clarity exposes institutional failures. The tension between the sacred and the civic is never resolved; it is examined, lamented and transformed into a kind of praise.

Characters and Dramatic Action

Joan herself is the magnet of the piece: spoken of, addressed, defended and eulogized. She appears through the voices of others, witnesses, an impassioned chorus, and Péguy's narrative voice, so that her interior life is suggested by testimony and reverberation rather than shown in conventional psychological realism. Secondary figures function less as individualized characters than as moral interlocutors who reveal the stakes of belief, law and conscience.
The dramatic action is minimal and concentrated on moments of witness and remembrance. Instead of courtroom procedure or historical reconstruction, most of the play's energy is invested in ethical argument and lyrical remembrance. The execution is the focal event, but its power derives from the questions it raises about human agency, divine providence and communal responsibility.

Legacy and Resonance

Péguy's Mystère has exerted a strong influence on 20th-century French literature and religious imagination by presenting a national heroine as a theological problem as much as a historical figure. Its devotional lyricism and moral urgency helped rehabilitate Joan's figure in the modern conscience while also insisting that sanctity resists tidy appropriation. The play remains valued for its poetic intensity, its moral seriousness and its capacity to turn historical tragedy into a sustained meditation on love, suffering and truth.
Read today, the piece still challenges readers to consider how communities recognize or betray the good they most need, and how language, prayerful, combative, elegiac, can hold a lost life as witness and lesson.