The story of this place
On 30 May 1431, in the Old Market Square of English-held Rouen, the 19-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a heretic after a rigged ecclesiastical trial. The peasant girl who had rallied France and seen Charles VII crowned had been captured, sold to the English, and condemned by a court of pro-English clergy. Witnesses said her executioner feared he had 'burned a saint'; her ashes were cast into the Seine. Twenty-five years later a retrial annulled the verdict, and in 1920 she was canonised. A soaring modern church, its roof evoking flames, now marks the spot, beside a cross where she died.