The Return of Martin Guerre: Identity, Gender, and Religion

Introduction: Did Bertrande Know?

How could she not know? How could the 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. Otherwise, Bertrande would have been condemned alongside the imposter she accepted as her returned husband.

As the original alliance between herself and Guerre was not a love match, Bertrande deployed the unexpected appearance of her "husband" to her own advantage. The actual Martin Guerre had apparently left his wife Bertrande because of an argument with his father-in-law over differing inheritance customs, and thus the original Guerre's relations with his wife's family were far from harmonious. The return of a different man was, in fact, more welcome to Bertrande than the return of the real Guerre would have been.

Identity Theft as a Crime Against Property and Society

Unfortunately, Bertrande lived in a society where stealing 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 before identity theft became a contentious issue in the age of Internet credit card fraud, assuming a man's name in sixteenth-century France was a crime against both the state and God. When a man impersonated someone else, he was in effect "stealing" property. He took the usurped individual's title in society, his social status, and thus his estate and wealth. He also supplanted the man's role in a family.

If the man was married, as Guerre was, an imposter also claimed a woman's dowry — including her working tools, her household, and the belongings she had brought into her new home. The crime was therefore not merely one of deception; it was a comprehensive seizure of another person's social, economic, and familial existence.

Witchcraft, Widowhood, and the Unprotected Woman

Why did Bertrande agree to the crime, assuming that she did? She may have initially acquiesced to the impersonator's advances out of fear of being an unprotected woman — alone in a rough part of the land, vulnerable to new suitors. When women were unmarried or widowed, they were often accused of being witches, because a woman who had been sexually "known" as a wife, yet remained unconnected to a man, was feared as having dangerous power and as 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 of both her person and her property, leaving her vulnerable to rape, theft, and the economic crime of pillaging an abandoned homestead. To be without a man was to risk being labeled a witch; to lack the potential to generate heirs was to be seen as bewitched, and thus limited in one's economic and social progress as a family.

Bertrande did not wish to be such a woman — a potential witch or cursed, childless outcast in the eyes of her community. But she may not have taken the new "Guerre" simply out of fear. Although it cannot be documented in the historical records and court transcripts that Natalie Davis uses to construct her narrative, Davis also entertains the possibility that, rather than pure fear, Bertrande may have been genuinely more attracted to the impersonator than to the real man she had married for reasons of status and family alliance — and that new religious influences may have played a role as well.

Work Cited

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.