The Return of Martin Guerre

"This book tells the fascinating story of Martin Guerre: a mysterious tale of imposture, love, and honour among sixteenth-century French peasants. It is a brilliant bit of historical detective work and a captivating read that plunges the reader deep into the world of the past. One of my all-time favourites."

"Yes, in a sense it’s one of the easiest microhistories to get into. It’s very short, working on a very famous case. It’s been turned into not one, but two films: a French film inevitably starring Gerard Depardieu and a — not particularly good — American version with Richard Gere. It tells a very unusual story about a French peasant who disappears off and leaves his wife and about eight years later this other French peasant turns up and claims to be him. His wife, who’s called Bertrand, says ‘Yes, absolutely, this is my husband, this is Martin Guerre.’ She defends him in front of the law courts in the village. Her family then really push the case, there’s a soldier who walks past and says, ‘That’s not Martin Guerre, I saw him at war, he only has one leg.’ He ends up in another law court and then dramatically the original husband turns up and the imposter ends up getting hung. It’s a very tragic, very strange story. Why does the wife accept this? Why does she think, ‘I’m going to tell everyone that this is my husband?’ Has she been duped? The spin that Natalie Davis puts on it is a broadly feminist one, which is that she is in a very tricky position in her world, she is stuck without a husband so she uses agency, she takes in this guy who wants to move up slightly in the world. She needs this protection of a husband and so she goes along with it. She’s been criticised, but it’s a broadly defensible position. What I really like about this book is that it’s such an intricate story of very ordinary people, and yet Natalie Davis uses it to draw out these big themes about sixteenth-century Europe: about gender relations, about the hardship of peasant life. It’s just a fascinating story. It’s riveting. While you’re following it, you’re wondering how it’s going to end. It’s like a novel. There’s a reason it’s been turned into films and my book hasn’t yet. No, and this is one of the things that came out of my work on the seventeenth century: it was relatively easy for a man to abandon a woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In England there was a mechanism for bringing these blokes back. But it didn’t work a lot of the time as they just disappeared off to London, or one of the colonies. It means there’s this very difficult position a lot of women are left in, and they attempt to shift for themselves, they use what power they have. In Bertrand’s case, she comes to a fairly sensible solution to this very difficult problem, which is not of her own making. It’s generated by her husband being a bit of a bastard, and by the fundamentally misogynist nature of sixteenth-century French rural society. It’s notable that it’s only when her real husband turns up at the end of the story that she says, ‘OK, game’s up, this isn’t the real guy.’ One of the interesting things about a lot of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s history more recently is this debate as to how far women are able to shift for themselves and bend the rules to their advantage. There are some scholars who say that the rules were actually so harshly stacked against women that they didn’t have much chance of doing that. There are others, both are from within feminist history, who argue the opposite. They say women are in a very difficult situation because of the rules of the world, but actually they work them in quite clever ways and are able to say the right things at the right time. That’s the really big theme that comes out of The Return of Martin Guerre . It speaks to all those debates."