Running to a mere 127 pages, The Return of Martin Guerre was perhaps never intended to be a career-defining book.[1] For its author, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, it was less a labour of profound historical scholarship than a personal work of unfinished business. Nevertheless, it bears close investigation as it was foundational to Davis’s approach to history, and illustrates why she was highly celebrated both in and out of the academy.
Having established herself as an authority on early-modern France, first with a PhD thesis on the religious culture of sixteenth-century Lyonnaise printers and then with her subsequent 1975 book, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Davis was invited to work as an on-set historical consultant for the 1982 French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre. Based on a real-life case of identity fraud, the plot centres on the eponymous Martin Guerre who left his Pyrenean home in 1548 to fight in a war. Mysteriously absent for eight years, a man from a nearby town, Arnaud du Tilh, assumed his identity, property and family, before being spectacularly uncovered in a trial when the real Martin Guerre returned in 1560.
The film left Davis unsatisfied with the story’s departure from fact and its truncation of complex themes, which offered little room for exploration of the characters’ religious backgrounds or the social position of women. Yet, at the same time, the nature of film-making opened her mind to new possibilities of historical research. Dashing off from the set to visit nearby archives – to satiate her own interest as much as for the benefit of the film – Davis discovered a raft of court interviews that gave voice to a peasantry who were otherwise marginalised in the historical record. From this, Davis was able to reconstruct a far more comprehensive picture of the real Guerre and du Tilh, and the social, cultural and legal world which they inhabited.
The publication of Martin Guerre brought Davis both scholarly acclaim and public attention. Indeed, it established her as a pioneer of microhistory, a genre in which a seemingly inconsequential personal or local story becomes the basis for a revelatory account that unlocks wider and more profound information about a historical period. For its reader, Martin Guerre unfolds the complexities of the early-modern French legal system, the expectations of the peasantry, their religious and marital practices, and fundamentally, with Davis’s characteristic flair, the lives of those on the margins of history – particularly women.
But the experience of the film set provoked something deeper in Davis’s historical imagination. While observing the actor Gerard Depardieu inhabit the role of du Tilh, creating a rounded character based on the script and her research, Davis discovered ‘new ways to think about the accomplishment of the real imposter’, and the extent of the character acting necessary for du Tilh to commit his identity fraud.[2] Thus, Martin Guerre brought the lenses of invention and story sharply into focus for Davis, setting a thematic precedent for her future work. Understanding her historical subjects through a sense of narrative, and an almost speculative recreation of their thought processes and decision-making, allowed Davis to get to the heart of her intellectual curiosities – how can the historian answer that fundamental question of ‘why?’ when archival records, particularly those of marginalised people, are scarce?
In her 1997 book, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Davis presented arguably her most refined version of this approach. Taking the diaries of three women from Europe, North America and South America as connected microhistories, Davis blended their narratives to reveal a commonality to their experiences, as well as the different ways in which they challenged the constraints of their time. In its memorable prologue, Davis pushed back against much of the criticism of her approach – namely that it subverted the historian’s Gradgrindian need for “facts” – and entered into dialogue herself with the three women, justifying why she brought them together when they themselves would not have recognised the similarities amongst them. At the time of her death, she was working on a book that would have similarly interwoven the lives and family networks of plantation workers, both enslaved and free, in Dutch-colonised Suriname.
Martin Guerre, then, bridged the two phases of Davis’s scholarly life, from the early-modern specialist frustrated by a dilution of the historical record, to a pioneering thinker who embraced narrative reconstruction as a key addition to the historian’s toolbox. Davis would even come to defend film as a medium for conveying the past, arguing in Slaves on Screen that, provided they were rooted in evidence, films offered historians and the public alike an opportunity to provoke fundamental questions about how and why historical characters thought and acted as they did.[3]
It was, ultimately, that insistence on understanding her subjects – not merely as printed names in dusty archives but as living, breathing people, whose individual experiences could reveal far grander historical forces in motion – that cemented Davis’s reputation to academic and popular readers alike.
[1] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA; 1983)
[2] Ibid., viii
[3] Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA; 2002)
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