Joan of Arc was a French military figure and religious leader of the fifteenth century, born on January 1, 1412, in the village of Domrémy-la-Pucelle.

Her life unfolded against the backdrop of a France defined by the language and culture of Middle French, the vernacular of her time and place. A citizen of the Kingdom of France, she pursued a course that joined military action to religious purpose, occupying both roles with a singularity that set her apart from others of her era. She spoke and operated in French, a detail that situates her firmly within a particular national and linguistic identity rather than the broader Latin-inflected world of medieval ecclesiastical life.

Her death came on June 8, 1431, in Rouen, making her life brief by any measure — nineteen years at most from her birth in Domrémy-la-Pucelle to her end in that northern city. She had carried the occupations of military personnel and religious leader through those years, a pairing that defined not only how she acted but how she was perceived and, ultimately, judged by those who held authority over her fate. The city of Rouen marks the terminus of her active life, and it remains the geographic fact that closes her biographical record.

In the centuries that followed, Joan of Arc came to be recognized as a patron saint of France, a designation that formalizes the religious dimension of her public identity. She also received the Godfather promotion of the Special Military School of Saint-Cyr, an honor that connects her name to the military tradition of France in a concrete institutional way. These two recognitions together — one sacred, one martial — reflect the dual occupations she held in life and the way those roles continued to define her standing after her death. Her recurring identity, drawn from the record of her life and the honors attached to her name, remains that of a woman who moved between the domains of religious calling and military service in the France of the early fifteenth century.