Return of Martin Guerre

Bertrande knew the real identity of "Martin Guerre" [i.e. Pansette] from the beginning, and took the opportunity to redefine her own identity, improve her personal life, and improve her status in the village. What sources did Davis use to reconstruct the story of "Martin Guerre"? Why was identity theft such a serious crime in the sixteenth- century France? Why did people consider an impotent couple to have been "cast under a spell" or "bewitched"? Why does Davis imply that widows were later persecuted as witches? According to Davis, what role did Protestantism play in this story (particularly concerning the concept of marriage)? Was justice served when the real Martin Guerre returned?

How could she not know? How could the 'widow' or wife of Martin Guerre not know that the man who slept beside her was not in fact her long-lost husband, presumed dead, but was plainly and simply an imposter, a man playing at the identity of Guerre? The obvious answer is that she did know, but chose to pretend that she did not. Else Bertrande would have been condemned like the imposter she took as her husband, returned anew to her home, but presumed dead.

As the original alliance between herself and Guerre was not a 'love match,' Bertrande deployed the unexpected appearance by her 'husband' (in quotes) from the beyond to her advantage. The actual husband of the woman, Martin Guerre, apparently left his wife Bertrande because of an argument with his father-in-law about different inheritance customs and thus original Guerre's relations with his wife's family were far from good and pure. The return of a different man was in fact welcomer than would have been the return of the real Guerre to Bertrande.

Unfortunately, Bertrande lived in a society where to steal a man's identity was a crime akin to murder. Property and life were synonymous for the residents of the small French village. Thus, long, long before identity theft became a contentious issue in the age of Internet credit card fraud, to assume a man's name in 16th century France was a crime against the state and God. When a man impersonated someone else and took the name of another, he was in effect 'stealing' property. He took the usurped individual's title in society, the individual's social status, and thus his estate and wealth. He also supplanted his role in a family. If the man was married, as was Guerre, an imposter took as well as a woman's dowry, including the working tools, the household, and the older dresses she brought to her new household.

Why did she agree to the crime, assuming that she did? Martin Guerre's Bertrande may have initially, apparently acquiesced to the impersonator's advances because of her fears of being an unprotected woman, alone in rough area of the land, vulnerable to new suitors. When women were unmarried or widowed, they were often accused of being witches, because a woman who was sexually 'known' as a wife, yet unconnected to a man was feared as having power, and of being unchaste with other men and other women's husbands. A woman without a husband, and without a son, was a woman alone, without male protection and open to abuse, in terms of her person and her property, thus leaving temptations for rape, theft, and the economic crime of pillaging the abandoned homestead. To be without a man was to be a witch, and to lack the potential to generate individuals to inherit one's economic legacy was to be bewitched, and limited in one's economic and aristocratic progress as a family.

Bertrande did not wish to be such a woman, a potential witch or cursed childless monster in the eyes of her community. But she may not have taken the new/old Guerre simply out of fear. Although it cannot be documented in the historical records and court transcripts she uses to construct her narrative, the historian Natalie Davis also entertains the possibility as well that, instead of pure fear, that the woman in question may have been more attracted to the impersonator than the 'real' man she married for reasons of status and sexuality, and because of new religious influences as well.

Davis notes that the village of Artigat in 16th Century France was becoming more subject to a liberating Protestant influence. In general, more and more women were exercising free choice in deciding whom they married. Bertrande now, after suffering her father's will to marry Guerre, and then cut off from Martin Guerre because of a fatherly quarrel, must have been aware of the burgeoning Protestant influence upon the doctrine of marriage that stressed love rather than family allegiance as the basis of matrimony. She may have used it as an excuse to ignore the difference of identity of her new bedfellow and companion and protector.

The spread of Protestantism thus could have created an intellectual justification for both Bertrande and the reborn 'Guerre' to validate their union, in their own minds and also in societal terms, where secret and freely chosen marriages were growing more common, and more and more couples were entertaining the possibility of love matches than prearranged alliances. Of course, initially, the desire to gain property may be one reason as well that Bertrande's new husband wished to impersonate her old man Guerre. Bertrande de Rols, was relatively well off, and despite patriarchal norms regarding inheritance, in the French village where she resided, the law regarding female inheritance was fairly equitable in theory, although often contested. It divided property equally amongst daughters, in the absence of male heirs. These customs and laws were often debated, however, and tensions existed between Protestants and Catholics and different regions of how property should be distributed when the daughters were married, and when there was no clear son to inherit the wealth.

If Bertrande knew her new husband's identity, she could have a lover, become the clearly wealthy and powerful individual in the relationship, rather than be subject to questions of inheritance and legal squabbling. She would always have something to hold above her false husband's head in knowledge, over the course of the relationship, as she could always reveal that he was not what he said he was, unbeknownst to her. But Bertrande's happiness was thwarted -- also by using documented court records, Davis notes that when doubts began to circulate about the real identity of Guerre, this began to unsettle the already divided village of Artigat.