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THE LEGEND
Joan was born around 1412 in Domrémy, in north-eastern France, to Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée, a peasant family with some land. France was losing its long war with England. In her early teens she began to report visions, first of Saint Michael and later of Saints Margaret and Catherine, telling her to help the Dauphin Charles. In early 1429 she reached him at Chinon, was examined by theologians at Poitiers, and was given plate armour, a sword and a banner of her own design.
She arrived at besieged Orléans on 29 April 1429, and on 8 May the English withdrew. A decisive French victory at Patay followed in June, and in July she stood beside Charles as he was consecrated king at Reims. In May 1430 she was captured by Burgundian troops at Compiègne and later handed to the English. Tried for heresy at Rouen by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, she was burned at the stake on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen. A court overturned the verdict in 1456, and in 1920 she was canonised a saint.
OFF THE PAGE
Few people in history have been retold so often or in so many directions. Shakespeare cast Joan as a cunning witch in Henry VI, Part 1. Schiller turned her into a Romantic heroine in 1801, Mark Twain wrote a reverent fictional biography of her in 1896, and George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1923) is widely counted as his masterpiece. In 1922 she was declared one of the patron saints of France, and she has been claimed as a symbol by causes of every kind ever since.
Film has returned to her again and again. Ingrid Bergman played her in Joan of Arc (1948), and Luc Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) cast Milla Jovovich as a fierce, battle-worn Joan, with John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway and Dustin Hoffman around her. Besson's version leans on mud, steel and doubt rather than stained glass, and that hard-edged look is the one sixth scale makers have reached for. She is the rare saint who is remembered for wearing armour, which is exactly what makes her a collector's figure.
IN SIXTH SCALE
Joan of Arc's sixth scale story belongs to Pop Toys, whose 'Saint Knight' figures turn her into a full suit of armour on legs. The first, a Charge Version tied to Besson's The Messenger, built her largely from metal and PVC: two heads (one with sculpted hair, one cropped short), brown cotton clothing, a hauberk, helmet, gorget, plate armour, arm guards and cuisses, a cross-hilted sword with scabbard and her banner on a flagpole. A Triumph Version swapped the brown shirt for blue.
Pop Toys returned to her with Saint Knight 2.0, a remake built around handcrafted chainmail made from zinc-alloy plates and brass rivets, with a wool-haired head and a spear flagpole for the banner. Collectors of historical figures judge Joan on the armour first: whether the plate looks like metal, how the mail hangs, whether the banner can fly. The short-haired head is the more historically grounded choice.
She fits naturally among the Knight, William Wallace and Robin Hood on the History & Culture shelf, and the anime world has its own take in Jeanne d'Arc from Fate/Grand Order.
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