Saint Joan

Saint Joan explores the inevitable conflict between individual freedom and social stability, resulting in the persecution of people whose beliefs are too radically different from those of their contemporaries. In the Preface, George Bernard Shaw compares Joan’s conflict with the Catholic Church to how contemporary people cannot tolerate those who defy the dominant social systems of the 1920s, particularly medical science. Shaw sees this persecution as inevitable—not the result of corruption or illegal abuse of the court system, but rather its intended function. For this reason, he believes that Joan’s conviction had both a tragic and comic aspect:

[T]he tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed by murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murders; and this contradiction at once brings an element of comedy into tragedy: the angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers (63).

Because society will persecute those who refuse to submit to collective beliefs, even if their ideas are objectively the correct ones, Shaw suggests that individual freedom will always be challenged.

In Joan’s case, her individual interpretation of God’s will comes into conflict with the authority of the Catholic Church, resulting in her excommunication.