A modern Joan of Arc on stage

At the Théâtre Lucas-Paumier, La Jeanne de Delteil is not a commemoration, but a resurrection. Portrayed by Juliette Rizoud in a staging by Christian Schiaretti, this one-hour-and-thirty-minute work portrays Joan of Arc not as a stone statue, but as a young, passionate, irreducible youth: the one who, in 2026, is missing and calling out to us.

A controversial book from 1925

Joseph Delteil published Jeanne d'Arc in 1925; the book received the Femina Prize, caused a real "Jeanne d'Arc affair" and abruptly broke with the surrealists, with André Breton at the forefront. Because Delteil wants neither the frozen saint nor the national allegory: he wants the flesh, the voice, the revolt, the insolence of a peasant who became a captain.

Defending a radical vision

Jacques Maritain and Paul Claudel defended this book against those who criticized it for making Joan too alive, too earthly, too free. It is precisely this freedom that the stage of the Théâtre Lucas-Paumier renders contagious today. The adaptation by Jean-Pierre Jourdain and Camille Grandville follows the text "from the point of view of the heart, the central organ, the muscle that beats."

A story experienced, not told

From birth to the pyre, the story is not demonstrated: it is experienced. The show sweeps aside the scholarly question of Joan's historical existence to impose a more powerful certainty: she lived, she is here, "the beautiful girl of victories." Delteil on stage: a rare treasure. Theatrical adaptations of Joseph Delteil remain rare events, almost apparitions.

A writer resisting stage adaptation

His lush, prophetic writing, nourished by earth, animals, and light, resists stage cutting: it does not reduce to lines, it requires a body that carries it as fire is carried bare-handed. This is why La Jeanne, at the Théâtre Lucas-Paumier has the value of a miracle: it returns to the stage an author that the theater has too often left to libraries.

A lineage of radical theater

One remembers François d'Assise, adapted by Adel Hakim and Robert Bouvier, created at the Théâtre Artistic Athévains in 2010: Bouvier, then director of the theater of Neuchâtel, embodied a François stripped of hagiography, a celestial peasant and contemporary, among mechanical wheat stalks and a full moon under five hundred watts.

A poet of incarnation

He made Delteil not a pious writer, but a poet of incarnation, one who, according to his own formula, allows everyone to become François without being a saint. With La Jeanne, Christian Schiaretti and Juliette Rizoud continue this lineage: making Delteil heard is refusing that French literature reduces to its well-mannered classics.

A performance of presence

Juliette Rizoud, the woman made of incandescence. One must go see this show for Juliette Rizoud, simply. Alone on stage, she takes possession of a bare stage: not a nudity of deprivation, but a nudity of offering. Her Joan does not recite: she emerges. With a gesture, she pulls a table and there is Charles VII's horse; she aligns spotlights and there is the army; she speaks, and the world obeys.

A rare virtue of presence

Juliette Rizoud possesses this rare virtue that Colette called presence: not the volume of the voice, but the power to make others exist through her own. Her performance is direct, frank, never overdone; her fervor is just, her naivety is never cloying, her conviction becomes that of the audience.

A soul of France and a rebel

She embodies what Michelet saw in Joan: "the soul of France," but also what Charles Péguy celebrates in The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc — an obedience that is never submission, a faith that is never resignation. She is both narrator, warrior, child, visionary; she turns the stage into a battlefield and the audience into an assembly.

A prose of fire and raw material

Delteil writes a prose of fire, carnal, almost biblical, where French finds its original breath. The staging by Christian Schiaretti, with its scenery of wings, mops, closet shelves and wires, transforms the modest material of the theater into the raw material of a miracle. It is an object theater, but especially a word theater: speech does not illustrate, it creates.

A lineage of French tradition

One thinks of Jules Michelet, whose History of France made Joan a figure of national rebirth; to Péguy, for whom she embodies earthly hope; to Claudel, whose theater sanctifies the gesture and the word; to Bernanos, whose saints are never angels, but beings of wounds and greatness.

A word that converts

The right word here would be that of Littré: Juliette Rizoud is effective in the strong sense, capable of producing her effect; her Joan is peremptory, because she does not discuss, she affirms; her interpretation is vehement, carried by a soul's strength that does not merely move, but converts in the old sense: it turns back the gaze.

A Church ready to listen

One might fear that Joan of Arc, a figure sometimes recuperated, divides. The opposite occurs. In 2026, the Catholic Church itself is reinventing itself in listening to youth: Pope Léon XIV met 80,000 young people at the Stade de France on September 25, inviting them to advance "without fear" on a path of vocation; in Assisi, he urged them to reject the "culture of power" to build a "civilization of love" in service of peace and brotherhood.

A figure for the angry youth

In Nairobi, the youth demand a Church where they are "actors of transformation," not merely spectators. Joan, a peasant without title who spoke to kings and bishops, is exactly this figure: one who reminds every institution that the Spirit blows where it will, often through the mouths of the youngest. Seeing this show, therefore, reconciles, not by erasing wounds, but by recognizing that faith, far from being a reflex of submission, can be an act of radical freedom.

A resonance with today's protests

Delteil does not make Joan an icon: he makes her a sister. A remedy for angry youth. While thousands of high school students and university students demonstrate in France to denounce their teaching conditions: 71,500 people on October 8 according to the Ministry of the Interior, this Joan resonates oddly. She too was a young girl they wanted to silence; she too refused that the future be decided without her.

A voice against the machine

Delteil does not offer a political program, but something deeper: the dignity of the individual voice against the machine. This is what literature, from Hugo to Camus, from Péguy to Sartre, has never ceased to remind: before changing the world, one must refuse to suffer it. This contemporary staging, by its disarming simplicity, opens minds better than a manifesto: it shows that a single voice, a single presence, can summon a world.

A show that must be seen

La Jeanne de Delteil is performed at the Théâtre Lucas-Paumier until February 17, 2027. It would be an error, a true mistake of taste and courage, to miss it. It is not a show: it is a salutary burn. Go, not out of cultural duty, but out of vital need, because there still exist, on a Parisian stage, places where one can hear the beating of the heart of France, without any nationalism, and recognize one's own.