# Wartime French resource rhetoric uses Joan as a figure of national energy and endurance

Date: 1916

## The fact

During the 1916 war-economy campaigns, French public rhetoric used [Joan of Arc](/people/joan-of-arc) as a figure of national energy, thrift and endurance around coal, grain and munitions.

## Context

The driver is analogical. Confidence stays medium. A poster is not a tonne of coal.

Joan of Arc is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Library of Congress wartime print and Britannica’s modern Joan independently frame the saint as a twentieth-century mobilisation emblem.

Official or archival record: Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/; Library of Congress).

## Significance

Medium confidence.

A coal slogan is not Orléans. Do not mix a barge of 1429 grain with 1916 rationing except as later capture.

## What is established and what is not

Established: WWI public rhetoric used Joan as endurance/energy emblem. Not established: that she authored a fuel statute, or a measured kWh series.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Joan of Arc: https://factrail.ai/people/joan-of-arc

## Drivers

- Energy Security: https://factrail.ai/drivers/energy-security

## Sources

- https://www.loc.gov/
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Joan-of-Arc

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/joa-wwi-energy-rhetoric