ABSTRACT
The 2002 presidential elections in France, in which Le Pen's extreme-right-wing National Front party defeated left-wing socialist and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and menaced the front runner Jacques Chirac, sent a shock-wave through France's collective conscience, even though Chirac eventually won by a sizable margin. True, apathy was to blame for some fraction of the leftist and centrist losses in that crucial first round. But the resurgence of a hard-core extreme-rightist following — one that made Chirac's party seem liberal by comparison — which everyone had thought had ebbed into the background after a brief flash in 1992, revealed a shameful facet of France's national identity; a collective bourgeois sin requiring an explanation, if not atonement. Yet no student of the history of Joan of Arc's political appropriation in France can be surprised.2 The following will attempt to analyse the variety and cyclical recurrence of the heroine's significance as personal and political icon. Throughout these cycles, despite Michelet's inaugural left-wing, populist history, it is the French religious right wing that increasingly takes her over more effectively than other parties revering her, despite the efforts of intellectuals from several less extreme factions to safeguard her from this.3
