Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in Rouen
On this day · 30 May 1431
On 30 May 1431, the teenage French heroine was condemned as a heretic and burned in the marketplace at Rouen.
On 30 May 1431, in the old marketplace of Rouen in English-held Normandy, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. She was about 19 years old.
A peasant girl who said her saints’ voices sent her to fight for France, Joan had helped lift the siege of Orléans and seen Charles VII crowned king. Captured in 1431, she faced a long Trial of Condemnation run by church judges led by Bishop Pierre Cauchon. Charged with heresy — her insistence on direct divine guidance, and her refusal to give up men’s clothing, told heavily against her — she was finally declared a relapsed heretic and handed to secular officials.
A quarter-century later a retrial overturned the verdict; in 1920 the Catholic Church declared her a saint.
The Vatican records that the trial “began in February 1431 and ended on 30 May with her being burned at the stake” — an execution that would later make her a national symbol of France.
Sources & references
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