The Return Of Martin Guerre By Natalie Zemon Davis

The trail on the true identity of Martin Guerre has drawn the interests of scholars and historians for centuries, allowing for details of the case to be preserved right up to the present. Popular interest was rekindled in the tale of Martin Guerre through the work of historian Natalie Zemon Davis’ book The Return of Martin Guerre, which interpreted the primary source literature in a new and original light. This interpretation has drawn sharp criticism from fellow historians such as Robert Finlay, who sees Davis’s work as misinterpreting and manipulating the evidence to allow for her original interpretation of the events. It is my opinion that Davis’s account of the case of Martin Guerre is unfounded and fabricated, and that Finlay’s criticism

Davis depicts the marriage between Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols as a miserable attempt by both parties to better secure personal wealth and status. For Davis, Martin is an impotent and apathetic husband who abandoned a family for whom he cared little for, and Bertrande is a cunning, deceptive peasant woman who maneuvers to better her condition and retain her honor in the male dominated society of the time. The Martin Guerre imposter, Arnaud du Tilh is in Davis’s view an opportunist seeking a better life, who falls in love with the wife of the man he proclaims to be. Davis proposes that a woman such as Bertrande could not have been fooled by the skilled acting of the Martin imposter, especially after three years and the conception of a child. For Davis, Bertrande and Arnaud where accomplices in the deception, Bertrande accepted the imposter has her husband to escape the troubles of living as an abandoned wife. She assisted the imposter in improving his act, and eventually fell in love with the new Martin and gave birth to his child. The trail that followed the three years of deception was then not merely a case of mistaken identity, but as a struggle for two lovers to retain the lives they created for themselves, only to be

Finlay’s view is that the account of the story told by Davis is a fabrication and at odds with the firsthand accounts, primarily those of Jean de Coras. One of Finlay’s main criticisms is that Davis projects modern thinking on to peasants of 16th century France. For example, Bertrande is not simply a wife duped by an impostor, but instead, a conniving accomplice who desires a loving husband and personal autonomy. For Jean de Coras, Bertrande was depicted as a simple peasant wife, who was easily persuaded by her sisters to accept the imposter as her absent husband. Finlay states that this interpretation of the historical accounts, one that disregards motivations and character traits purported in the sources, is bad historical research and teeters more on the side of historical fiction than a work of history