The Return of Martin Guerre: Davis's Historical Method

Introduction: History as Fairy Tale

Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre chronicles a true story, yet this work of historical nonfiction carries the quality of a fairy tale because of its improbable character. The title character is a well-to-do French peasant who apparently disappeared, leaving his wife Bertrande de Rols in a state of legal limbo. In a world in which a woman's marital status was all-important, she was unable to divorce and unable to mourn a man she was uncertain was dead or alive. A man claiming to be Martin Guerre returned and was accepted by "his" wife, but was later revealed to be an impostor—despite being fully accepted by both Bertrande and the surrounding community. In her analysis of this story, Davis skillfully blends court testimony and speculation to flesh out the narrative. In doing so, she makes a contribution to the way historical analysis is usually performed. It is often challenging to "do" history—a method of study that focuses on verbal analysis—when the historical players are not literate. Davis attempts to argue that the stories of people such as Bertrande are equally important as those of the aristocracy.

Recovering Peasant Lives and Women's Experience

Davis's work is so distinctive because she makes an important claim: the lives of peasants and women in 16th-century France are far more complex and empowered than previous accounts might suggest. She believes that a failure to understand Bertrande's motivation originates in the emphasis placed on supposedly objective, written accounts by previous historians. Of course, merely because something was written in the past does not necessarily mean it is accurate or factual. As Davis writes, "Historians have been learning more and more about rural families from marriage contracts and testaments, from parish records of births and deaths, and from accounts of courtship… But we still know little about the peasants' hopes and feelings."¹ In a case such as that of Martin Guerre, understanding feelings and motivations is critical. Peasants often appear as the subjects of comedies, yet the actual court transcripts Davis uses suggest a very different story—one filled with bad marriages, violated contracts, and other common sources of strife, just as with higher-born individuals. The central question with which Davis grapples is how to make peasants' lives come to life with dignity.

Davis's Methodology: Speculation and Court Testimony

An example of Davis's methodology as a microhistorian can be seen in how she handles the original Martin Guerre's failure to produce a child for eight years, which may have been due to apparent impotency. Guerre married into Bertrande's wealthier family when he was young—fourteen years old—even by the standards of 16th-century French peasantry. Even after the couple failed to produce children, Bertrande remained with him, although she was not legally obligated to do so and was apparently subject to familial pressure to leave. "Since the marriage was unconsummated," due to the young Martin's impotence, "it could be dissolved after three years and she would be free by canon law to marry again."² Ironically, by consummating the marriage she unintentionally bound herself to a man who was destined to leave her for years.

Bertrande's willingness to acquiesce to the impostor's presence is viewed by Davis as a shrewd, calculated decision. Davis first attempts to establish that there is very little evidence Bertrande could truly have believed that the impostor Arnaud du Tilh was, in fact, her lost husband Martin. Arnaud is described as physically the opposite of Guerre—short and stocky, with a very different temperament. He was known as a "man with big appetites."³ The one thing the two men had in common was that they were both fugitives. Guerre had left his hometown after being accused of stealing grain from his father-in-law. "As a thought experiment," writes Davis, "let us imagine what might have taken place if the heir from Artigat became friends with the golden-tongued peasant from Sajas."⁴ Davis's thought experiment is one of the tools she uses as a historian to better understand the apparently inexplicable—namely, how Arnaud could have known so many intimate details of Martin's life. One possible criticism of her methods is that Davis is such a convincing writer that she makes a powerful case by briefly dramatizing a possible scene in which Martin confesses about his cast-off wife to Arnaud. Davis admits, however, that according to the testimony of the trial, such a scene cannot be proven to have taken place.

Conclusion: The Value of Interpretive History

Davis weaves a complicated web of interpretation from actual court testimonies and legal documents; fiction and nonfictional accounts of peasant life; and speculation about ideological influences. Her narrative is so powerful that at times it is easy to forget the speculative component of her construction of the characters of the two Martins and Bertrande. The strength of this technique, however, is that it causes even the most disinterested contemporary reader to care deeply about all of the protagonists and to make history come alive. No book—or any work of nonfiction—can provide a definitive interpretation of something as murky as psychological motivation, particularly regarding people long dead. But given the non-literacy of the participants and the limited historical documentation of the Guerre legend, Davis's interpretive approach seems both worthy and necessary.

Bibliography

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.