Maison Natale de Jeanne d'Arc
Joan was born in this house around 1412, the daughter of Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée, and lived here until she left for Vaucouleurs in her teens. The house was preserved as a monument from an early date and has been restored more than once. It is now shown by the Department of the Vosges alongside a modern interpretation center.
- Location
- Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France
- 48.4421° N · 5.6745° E
- Type
- Pilgrimage
- A low stone village house of the Meuse valley, of the type a modestly prosperous farming family would have held, with later dressed stonework at the door and a statue niche above it
- Dedication
- Not a church. The house where Joan of Arc was born and raised.
A Farmhouse That Was Never Allowed to Disappear
Almost nothing survives of the ordinary medieval poor. Houses like this one were rebuilt, subdivided or pulled down within a generation or two, and the people who lived in them left no trace at all. This house survived because of who was born in it, and it was already being treated as a monument while people who had known Joan were still alive. That is the reason to come. Standing in front of it, the distance between a village childhood and a coronation at Reims stops being rhetorical and becomes a matter of a few hundred yards of Meuse valley.
The First Seventeen Years
Jacques d'Arc was a farmer of some standing in Domrémy, one of the men the village trusted with its affairs, and Isabelle Romée was his wife. Joan was born to them here, by the safest modern reckoning around 1412. The bull of canonization issued by Benedict XV in 1920 gives February 6, 1412, and that date is widely repeated, but it does not rest on a contemporary record and is better read as the Church's received date than as a documented birthday. She was baptized in the parish church a short walk away. She learned to sew and spin from her mother rather than to read, kept her father's animals with the other children of the village, and grew up on a border where the Hundred Years' War was not an abstraction. In her testimony at Rouen she said that she was about thirteen when she first heard the voices she named as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, and that she heard them first in her father's garden. She left for Vaucouleurs, and then for Chinon, without her parents' blessing. Isabelle Romée outlived her daughter by decades and was the moving force behind the appeal that led, in 1456, to the annulment of the sentence that had condemned her.
A single-story stone house of the Meuse valley, its long axis to the road, with small windows and thick walls. The dressed doorway and the statue niche in the gable are later additions from the centuries in which the house was maintained as a monument, and the modern buildings around it belong to the departmental museum.
Spiritual Significance
The house is quiet and very small, and it repays being taken slowly. There is no liturgy here and no relic to venerate. What the place offers is scale. Four or five rooms, a low ceiling, a door onto a village street, and from that door a road that ran to Vaucouleurs, to Chinon, to Orléans, to Reims and to Rouen.
- The movement from monumental façade toward a confined rock chamber
- The distinction between Ignatius's documented prayer and later devotional interpretation
- The Cardener below the sanctuary
- The continuing retreat life that keeps the Exercises from becoming museum history
Do Not Miss
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01
The room of the birth
Traditionally identified as the room in which Joan was born. The identification is old and continuous, though the interior has been restored more than once.
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02
The scale of the house
Four or five small rooms for a farming household. The whole building would fit inside one bay of Reims Cathedral, where she stood seventeen years later.
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03
The doorway and the niche
Both are later than Joan. They record the centuries in which the house was maintained as a monument, which is itself part of the story.
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04
The view toward Saint-Remy
The parish church where she was baptized is visible from the door. She was carried there as an infant and went back to it all her childhood.
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05
The garden side
In her testimony at Rouen Joan said she first heard the voices in her father's garden, at about the age of thirteen.
See all 5 · 2 more
- The view toward Saint-Remy The parish church where she was baptized is visible from the door. She was carried there as an infant and went back to it all her childhood.
- The garden side In her testimony at Rouen Joan said she first heard the voices in her father's garden, at about the age of thirteen.
Visit Plans
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90 min First-time pilgrims
Cardener and cave
Approach through the Cardener landscape, enter the sanctuary, give the cave the longest silence, and finish by looking back toward the road of arrival.
- Old Bridge and Cardener outlook
- Sanctuary entrance
- Ante-cave
- Cave
How to Visit
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No regular liturgy in the house. Prayer and Mass belong to the parish church of Saint-Remy next door and to the basilica at Bois-Chenu on the hill above.
Shown by the Department of the Vosges, with a modern interpretation center alongside.
- Where
- Domrémy-la-Pucelle, Vosges, in the Meuse valley
- Owner
- Department of the Vosges, which runs the house and its interpretation center
- Time needed
- About an hour for the house and the center together
- Getting there
- Road. There is no useful rail or bus service to the village
- Before you go
- Confirm opening days directly. The site keeps seasonal hours and closes for part of the winter
Visiting
The house and the interpretation center keep seasonal hours and close for a period in winter.
- The village itself is open ground and can be walked at any hour, including the outside of the house and the churchyard.
Domrémy is rural. A hire car or an arranged taxi is the realistic way to reach it, and the same vehicle serves Bois-Chenu and Vaucouleurs on the same day.
- Neufchâteau, about 12 km away, is the nearest town with hotels and a station, and is the practical base for a driver.
Relics, Tombs, Sacred Objects
Tomb and Burial
- No one is buried here. Joan was executed at Rouen in 1431 and her remains were destroyed, so there is no tomb anywhere.
Relics and Sacred Tradition
- The house holds no relics. It is venerated as a place rather than a reliquary, and no authenticated bodily relic of Saint Joan of Arc is known to survive anywhere.
Sacred Objects
- The room traditionally identified as the one in which Joan was born.
- The carved doorway and the statue niche on the front, both later than Joan's lifetime.
- The adjoining departmental interpretation center, which is modern and is presented as interpretation, not as fabric.
The rest of the Domrémy geography
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Parish church
Église Saint-Remy, Domrémy-la-Pucelle
The parish church where Joan was baptized and where she went to Mass throughout her childhood.
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Minor basilica
Basilique Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc du Bois-Chenu
The sanctuary on the hillside above the village, in the landscape tradition associates with Joan's voices.
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Chapel and medieval crypt
Chapelle Castrale, Vaucouleurs
Where Joan pressed Robert de Baudricourt for an escort, and from where she left for Chinon in February 1429.
Map
The house stands on its original site and its identification as Joan's birthplace is continuous and early, which is unusual for a fifteenth-century peasant dwelling. What the visitor sees is not a preserved 1412 interior. The building was altered as it became a monument, the facade carries later carving, and the surrounding buildings are modern interpretation. Dating of individual carved elements is left to the French heritage record rather than asserted here.
September 2, 2026
Photo credits
- Hero. Photo: Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source. CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Carving That Came Later. Photo: Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source. CC BY-SA 4.0.