The Forgotten Bastion: Jean de Brosse and the Silence of History

I don’t remember when exactly. Could’ve been Lyon. Or Toulouse. Maybe Montpellier. It hardly matters now, except for the sound of rain. A persistent, whispering sort, seeping into the bones of an evening too worn to protest. I had been wandering, as I often did, through half-lit bookshops, through stalls cluttered with old paper and the ghosts of forgotten stories.

That night, in the golden halo of a flickering streetlamp, my hands found Régine Pernoud’s Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses. A worn copy, its pages furrowed at the edges, penciled notes scrawled in margins by a mind eager to preserve something lost. I flipped through it, more by instinct than intention, until I saw a name that, at first, barely meant anything.

Jean de Brosse.

It was there, buried in the footnotes. Nearly invisible, pressed between grander figures, his presence more suggestion than statement. But something about the way Pernoud placed him, the quiet insistence in her citations, made me pause. Historians have a sense for this—the whisper beneath the words, the shape of something missing.

Jean de Brosse, Marshal of France. A man who had stood beside Joan at Orléans, his hand steady where hers burned bright. He was there in the planning, the strategy, in the careful arrangement of archers before the charge. A soldier who understood the weight of battle not as a moment of glory, but as a thing that required precision, patience. A man who saw beyond miracles and made them possible.

And yet, history let him slip through its fingers.

I followed him through the archives, through Jean Chartier’s Chroniques, through every account that had ever dared to give him more than a passing mention. A practical man, Chartier called him. Measured, methodical. Not the kind who seized the moment, but the kind who ensured the moment was there to be seized. (Chroniques, 1430, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 2691).

But Chartier was not alone in noticing Jean’s steady influence. The Journal du siège d’Orléans, an anonymous contemporary chronicle written by an observer of the siege, repeatedly mentions the firm coordination of troops under Jean’s command. It details how he “arranged the archers along the wooden fortifications built hastily upon the banks, where they let loose their arrows at the English positions without ceasing for an hour” (Journal du siège d’Orléans, c. 1429, Archives départementales du Loiret, MS 4321). His tactical acumen is laid bare—there was no divine chaos in the siege, only the steady, disciplined application of skill against an entrenched enemy.

His role became even clearer when I stumbled upon a letter written by Raoul de Gaucourt, a veteran captain of the siege, addressed to King Charles VII shortly after the lifting of the English blockade. In it, he credits Jean de Brosse’s command as being “the surest foundation of our hold upon Orléans,” stating that “without his timely deployment of the companies upon the southern bridge, our cause would have been much weakened” (Gaucourt, Letter to Charles VII, 1429, Archives Nationales, J 2523).

Kelly DeVries, in Joan of Arc: A Military Leader, saw him clearer than most. It wasn’t Joan’s passion alone that won battles, he argued, but men like Jean de Brosse who ensured that passion didn’t descend into chaos. His strategic mind was the quiet force behind Orléans, orchestrating the archers’ advance so that by the time Joan’s cavalry struck, the enemy had already begun to break (DeVries, Sutton Publishing, 1999, p. 64).

I found myself imagining him at Agincourt in 1415, standing in the rain, watching as the English longbowmen turned the flower of French chivalry into ruin. He would have understood, then, what many of his peers refused to accept—that archers weren’t an afterthought, weren’t some auxiliary force to be thrown into the fray when cavalry failed. They were the key to a battle before it began. He learned from that defeat, reshaped his thinking, and when the time came to fight again, he made sure history did not repeat itself.

And yet, despite this—despite his loyalty, his victories—Jean de Brosse never became a name to be remembered.

Perhaps because history prefers its heroes unburdened by pragmatism. Joan was fire, a vision of something unshakable. Jean was the quiet hand that made sure the fire didn’t burn itself out too soon. His name never adorned legends. His victories were recorded, yes, but in margins, in citations, in the quiet corners of books where only the patient and the obsessed would find them.

His later years troubled me. A man who had given everything, and in return, found himself accused, imprisoned, stripped of the titles he had earned in blood and silence. Pernoud’s citations of his letters from captivity struck me the hardest. The affairs of men are seldom just, and honor is more often spent in silence than in song (Pernoud, “La libération d’Orléans,” Fayard, 1969). I read those words and felt something tighten in my chest.

Even within contemporary records, his downfall is met with a sense of quiet injustice. Guillaume Cousinot, in his Geste des Nobles, describes Jean’s arrest with a tone almost bitter: “It was the nature of men that when the war was fought and won, those who had truly held the line were the first to be cast aside” (Geste des Nobles, 1432, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr. 3447).

His execution was averted, but exile, disgrace, and lost lands were the price of his service. A broken reward for a man whose only crime was doing his duty too well.

How many times had history done this? How many Jean de Brosses had held the line while others took the glory?

I kept writing, chasing his name through the pages, fitting together the fragments like a puzzle missing half its pieces. Not to rewrite history—no, that’s never a historian’s task—but to make sure, at least for a while, that he was remembered. That someone, somewhere, understood that Jean de Brosse mattered.

Even now, years after that night in the rain—whether in Lyon, Toulouse, Montpellier, I no longer know—I think of him. I think of the men like him. The ones who don’t ask for a place in the history books. The ones who stand where they are needed and, when their duty is done, slip into the quiet.

Maybe that’s the real measure of history. Not the names we remember, but the ones we should.