The Return of Martin Guerre [Hardcover]

Natalie Zemon Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 1983

The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago.

Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her husband, and why lawyers, poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode.

Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued village impostor, a rare identification across class lines.

Deftly written to please both the general public and specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying begins.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A fascinating reconstruction of a famous incident of impostorship and love in sixteenth-century rural France. Davis delicately deploys historical fact to suggest what is singular about the modern individual.
--Todd Gitlin (The Nation )

In her intelligent and subtle analysis, the story gives an inside view of an otherwise little-known world, the private lives of peasants...Natalie Davis has also collaborated on an excellent film of the story (produced in France) as well as writing this book...About Martin Guerre, I would say, without hesitation, the movie was great, but Natalie Davis's book is even greater.
--Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (New York Review of Books )

Davis combines a veteran researcher's expertise with a lay reader's curiosity and an easygoing style. She draws on sophisticated...work in land tenure, legal rights, and demography to reinterpret a 'prodigious history' among the French peasantry...Davis's book combines ingredients essential to good social history--painstaking historical research and a vividly empathetic imagination. The result of this happy combination is that character emerges in context...Davis's book balances possibility and constraint, character and situation. It puts people back into history but doesn't take the social and political forces out of it. The universal is there in particular, and it makes you think not only about their choices then, but about ours now.
--Pat Aufderheide (Voice Literary Supplement )

A fascinating anecdote, with enough colorful background, psychological complexity, and unsolved mysteries to delight any intelligent audience. (Kirkus Reviews )

Natalie Zemon Davis...has scoured the legal and notarial records of south-western France to recreate for the reader not merely a highly entertaining story but a vivid picture of the world which fashioned its principal characters. Her observations on property rights, inheritance, customs, family relationships and the mechanisms of the law are welded together by a rare blend of historical craft and imagination...Professor Davis's ability to combine lively narrative, wit, historical reflection and psychological analysis will ensure for this book a wide audience. It is truly captivating story with which to pass a rainy weekend; it is also a brilliantly professional reconstruction of the rural world of sixteenth-century France, which will both stimulate and inform for many years to come.
--David Parker (Times Literary Supplement )

The fullest account to date of this extraordinary tale. Davis has constructed a Fine piece of social history, a look into the lives of 16th-century peasants who left no records because they could neither read nor write.
--Jean Strouse (Newsweek )

Davis combines a veteran researcher's expertise with a lay reader's curiosity and an easygoing style... Davis's book balances possibility and constraint, character and situation. It puts people back into history but doesn't take the social and political forces out of it
--Pat Aufderheide (Village Voice )

About the Author

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emerita, Princeton University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 9, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674766903
• ISBN-13: 978-0674766907
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #717,422 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Prime Example of the New History, April 3, 2003

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Return of Martin Guerre (Paperback)

Natalie Zemon Davis was a history professor at Princeton University when two French screenwriters, Jean-Claude Carriere and Daniel Vigne, asked her to act as a consultant on a film version of the infamous 16th century case of Martin Guerre. This project served as the impetus for Davis to research and write this immensely readable account of the Guerre event, a case of impersonation that caused an uproar in parts of France for years to come. The film version Davis consulted on starred Gerard Depardieu as the fake Martin Guerre, and a later American version, entitled "Somersby," placed events during the American Civil War and starred Richard Gere and Jodie Foster.

Any way you look at the situation, the Martin Guerre case is just plain strange. Davis traces the case back to the year 1527, when the Daguerre family left their Basque homeland in France and moved to the village of Artigat in the Languedoc region. The Daguerre family changed their name to Guerre in an effort to fit into the local community. The Guerre's quickly rose in prominence, although son Martin tended to enjoy acrobatics and swordplay in lieu of hard work.

Martin soon married Bertrande de Rols, the daughter of a prominent local family. After some initial problems conceiving children, attributed to a dangerous curse by many in the community, Martin and Bertrande finally had a son. But things did not go well for Martin; his father accused Martin of stealing some grain, an accusation that, coupled with Martin's desire to avoid family squabbles over inheritance issues, resulted in Martin's sudden departure from his family and home. With Martin gone off to various adventures in Spain and parts unknown, Bertrande was in quite a spot. Hope was on the way, however, when a man shows up claiming to be the missing Martin. This man quickly ingratiated himself into the household, claiming Martin's son and wife as well as the inheritance of his deceased father. Eventually, problems emerged between this new Martin and his uncle Pierre Guerre. The result was two trials and the eventual exposure of the new Martin as a fraud.

Davis's historical treatment of this case is a prime example of "microhistory," or a branch of the larger movement in historical study known as the New History. Whereas the Old History focused on the deeds of high-class elites, the New History studied the lower classes, oftentimes employing analytical methods borrowed from sociology and psychology. Microhistory seeks to analyze a specific event or person in history to shed light on the larger aspects of their environment. In the case of Martin Guerre, Davis exposes the greater themes of peasant life in 16th century France, the French legal system, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, and the role of women in that period.

Two men left written accounts of the Martin Guerre incident: one, Guillaume Le Sueur, is a little known figure and therefore does not receive much attention from Davis. Instead, the focus is on the other author, Jean de Coras, one of the trial judges in the Guerre case and a famous French legal scholar. Davis attempts to psychologically penetrate the mind of Coras, giving the reader copious background information on Coras and his accomplishments. What emerges is a portrait of a really remarkable and likeable fellow, a man who sympathized with the fake Martin Guerre because of the mental ability this "Martin" showed during his interrogations.

"The Return of Martin Guerre" often reads like an engaging story rather than a dry as dust history. You get to know these people, especially Jean de Coras, and you come to like them. Simultaneously, it is sometimes difficult to accept this book as solid history. While Davis scrutinized endless reams of archival records and other source materials, some of her conclusions and observations stray from the evidence, especially some of the psychological insights. But that is the value of this book: by reading it, a student of history begins to understand the larger conflicts between historical schools of methodology. For those who could care less about historical debate, the author's book is a cracking good yarn full of lies, dangerous liaisons, and courtroom antics.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and that is nowhere more apparent than in the case of Martin Guerre. After reading this book, be sure to check out the film version starring Gerard Depardieu; it is a great version of the story, and Depardieu never looked so thin!

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not only Entertaining, but a New Genre of History, August 23, 2001

By 

Tanja M. Laden (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Return of Martin Guerre (Paperback)

Natalie Zemon Davis book The Return Of Martin Guerre is a finely detailed, readable and well-researched account of the famous Martin Guerre and his impostor, Arnauld du Tilh. But even more than simply outlining the facts of the story, Davis also uses her research to enlighten us on the roles of different family members in 16th Century rural French life, the politics of family life and peasant life in general, and the role of the growing shift from Catholicism to Protestantism among the elite as well as the peasant classes. In relation to family and marriage life, Davis uses Bertrande de Rols, Martin Guerres wife, as an example of a strong, virtuous woman with familial duty and an obstinate nature. Davis uses this characterization to explain how de Rols was not a weak-minded woman who was so easily duped by her missing husbands impostor, but was rather a woman who was in love and used her strength in order to fascillitate her new relationship with Arnauld du Tilh: Either by explicit or tacit agreement, she helped him become her husband. Bertrande de Rols, according to Davis, is an example of the more broad-minded and less misogynist peasant society of the village of Artigat in 16th Century France. Through Bertrande de Rols, learn about how surprisingly fair the law was towards women: The testaments in the area around Artigat rarely benefit one child but instead provide dowries for the daughters....(If there are only daughters, the property is divided equally among them) (11) Natalie Zemon Davis The Return Of Martin Guerre is also a deeper historical chronicle of changes in the shift from French Catholicism to the new religion of Protestantism. She uses the new Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols entire relationship to characterize the relaxing religious laws that were seeping into courtrooms and the higher classes as well as the fields and the peasant classes. Davis argues that the new religion might have been of interest to the new Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols because it supported their illicit relationship more than Catholicism. (48) When doubt about the new Martin Guerres real identity began to unsettle the village of Artigat, Davis writes that the local supporters of the new protestant religion would have tended to believe the new Martin Guerre, whereas the Catholics sided with the accusations of false identity from his uncle, Pierre Guerre. Changes in religious affiliation, however, are no clearer than in the case of the Jean de Coras, the reporter and judge with respect to the accusations brought under the new Martin Guerre. Jean de Coras was proven to have had Protestant ties, and was eventually killed for them. (100) However, he was also a very learned, educated, and passionate man with an upstanding career in law and, after the case of Martin Guerre, the literary world. The idea that someone of so high a rank embraced the new religion shows that its influence at the time cannot be ignored. The film version, because it is told through images rather than words and documents is much more a dramatic story that leaves us wondering about the true identity of Martin Guerre until the very end. The film is a more diluted, less fleshy chronicle of the same story told by Natalie Zemon Davis in her book and in terms of the new religion, the role of women in married life, and peasant life in general, the movie is much less informative than the book. The film is a love story between Arnauld du Tilh and Bertrande de Rols and less a backdrop against which one can place the dramatic changes in religion taking place during the late 16th Century. Bertrande de Rols is less of a strong feminine figure and more of an ingenue and her role as a weak-minded housewife is almost believable. The religious aspects of the book are almost left out entirely, except for a Catholic priest who is depicted as a gambler and later accuses Arnauld du Tilh of being possessed by the devil. In respect to peasant life, however, the art direction in the film and the costumes match the descriptions by Davis in her book. The working tools, the gray household, and the older (though clean) dresses accurately support the terms of a womans dowry outlined by Davis (17) It is interesteing to know that Natalie Zemon Davis' book was actually a forum for her to supply the exhaustive research and theories that were left out of the film, on which she worked previously to writing the book. Her work as a historian spans across media and is always interesting and refreshing.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stellar Writing, December 31, 2002

By 

Sebastien Pharand (Orléans, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Return of Martin Guerre (Paperback)

Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre is the account of one of France's most infamous trials. In the 16th Century, a young man returned to his native home town after his long disappearence. Although his looks were slightly different, people accepted this man with open arms. He took the place of the old Martin Guerre, returning to his family and to his wife. But it is only later, when the real Martin Guerre returned and after some of the men in Guerre's family had become suspicious about the new Martin Guerre, that the other man was showned to be an impostor.

Written with intelligence and prose that is compelling yet never too simplistic, The Return of Martin Guerre is a fantastic historical account that should please historians and history lovers alike.

In the first pages, Davis tells us that some of her research is more heresay than anything else, since she tried to fill in the gaps where an answer could not be found. Maybe that's why the book reads more like a story than an actual factual account.

Davis recreates the whole town and the ways of life of 15th century France with care and skill. Every single character that peoples the book is fully dimensional and interesting. Her presentation of these people and of the facts is always impartial, which is surprising coming from someone who states that she's also using some of her own opinions and thoughts to fill in the gaps.

The Return of Martin Guerre is a great read that is full of facts, but where the information is never overwhelming. This is how every historical treatise should be like.