The Return of Martin Guerre
(Daniel Vigne, France, 1982)
This is by any standards - artistic, entertainment, historical - a wonderful film. A film about acting and identity, about desertion and desire, about a woman’s choices in a man’s world. It’s based on a sixteenth-century ’stranger-than-fiction true story’, one that clearly caught the popular imagination at the time, as it generated a number of printed accounts. In 1560, a man calling himself Martin Guerre was put on trial as an impostor in south-western France. This ‘Martin’ had returned to his home village and his wife, Bertrande, in 1556, several years after disappearing without a trace. The villagers were, by 1560, divided in their opinions, after initially accepting and welcoming him. His uncle led those who had become convinced he was in reality a disreputable man named Arnaud du Tilh; Bertrande appeared to be among those promoting the court case but later claimed she had been bullied into it and she was sure that this was really her husband Martin.
If so, he had changed in a number of ways since he had left. At that time, it had to be said, he had not been much of a man; and he had left under a cloud after stealing corn from his father. The Martin who returned was popular and hardworking. (Also, according to the village shoemaker, his feet had shrunk.) As it turned out in court, he was also quick-witted and possessed of a remarkably good memory. It makes for a marvellous film role - the actor playing the actor (which draws a tremendous performance from Gerard Depardieu) without ever overshadowing Natalie Baye as Bertrande.
The film is in the main faithful to the contemporary accounts of the trial and the history of Martin Guerre that they contained. Moreover, it benefits from the presence of Natalie Zemon Davies, a gifted historian of early modern France, as an adviser on the set: the props, costumes, activities, court scenes, are authentic. And yet its sense of period is in some ways imprecise. The film is frequently described by reviewers, and viewers, as being ‘medieval’. (The Hollywood remake of the story, Sommersby (1993), is a decidedly inferior piece of work, but is immediately recognisable as being set in the USA after the Civil War.) Now, there are clues for those who do know something about French history. Occasional details (in voice-over or the action) locate the film as coinciding with the latter years of Henry VIII through to the opening of the reign of Elizabeth I in England: a period not usually described as ‘medieval’. In part, then, the confusion might be related to English-speaking countries’ general ignorance of other nations’ pasts, especially before the nineteenth century. And this is a story of peasants rather than aristocrats, who are marked out by fashions in clothing which changed more frequently and are much more familiar to audiences. Besides, the fifteenth-sixteenth-century boundaries between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ are rather fuzzy. Moreover, certain historical issues that might have worked to place the film more precisely in period, notably the effects of the Reformation, were played down. Indeed, Natalie Davis has written of her frustrations at the development of the film and how it spurred her to return to the archives and write the history herself (an unusually direct example of the stimulating, provoking effects of history film at work).
Davis’ problems have been encountered by other historians working on films, and not only those, like Martin Guerre that would be described as ‘historical romance’. For me, perhaps the most problematic moment is the ‘revealing’ of Bertrande as, at the very end, she tells the judge why she did what she did. The historical Bertrande, in contrast, remains an enigma, appropriately enough for this story with its ambiguities and uncertainties. The scene is a moving one, but it leaves only one interpretation of her motives, and one that confirms its status as ‘romance’. In film, even in a film as good as this, it seems that ambiguity has to be discouraged. (Halliwell’s Film Guide complains that it’s unclear ‘where the film’s sympathies lie’; I thought that was perfectly evident.) While there probably are limits to the risks a film can take, it seems unfortunate that Martin Guerre’s audiences could not be challenged more on this, left to ponder for themselves what Bertrande might have been up to. Moreover, as a result, historical issues such as the early modern significance of female ‘honour’ and the difficulties that Bertrande would have faced as a woman married yet without a husband, which are carefully explored in Davis’ book, are largely ignored in the film. Ultimately, it is the modernness of the romance narrative rather than the ‘medieval’ confusion that is, I think, the more serious problem for the historian.
Nevertheless, the film does vital work as a source of historical information on a period much less familiar to audiences than the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A brief perusal of viewer comments online is illuminating. Perhaps the most striking was an Amazon.com respondent’s surprise at learning that the period possessed such civilised, modern things as ‘laws and jurisprudence as well as thoughtful judges’. This reflects, of course, the (disheartening, I admit) levels of ignorance about any history, other than a handful of famous notables, before 1800. The Return of Martin Guerre, then, succeeds in challenging some serious misconceptions, and does it in a powerful, stimulating way, hopefully encouraging its audiences to ask new questions and find out more. It has brought an unfamiliar past to a much wider audience than most early modern historians working through traditional channels will ever manage. And, while it displays certain film-making conventions that make for a less complex and less ‘authentic’ narrative than might have been possible, and certainly desirable from the historian’s point of view, it was made with a genuine respect and concern for the humanity of its historical subjects, the sixteenth-century French peasantry and their culture. They have been brought to life, in the magical way that is the wonderful strength of film history: The Return of Martin Guerre makes the crucial connection with ‘the spirit of a period’.
Essential reading
Natalie Zemon Davis, The return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass, 1983)
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and culture in early modern France (Stanford, 1965)
E Benson, ‘Martin Guerre, the historian and the filmmaker’ (interview with Natalie Davis), Film & History 13 (1983)
Online Resources
Historical background
Medieval and Renaissance Studies Gateway (Yale University)
Medieval and Renaissance Weddings
Le Poulet Gauche history, culture and everyday life in sixteenth-century France (English language)
Social Conditions in Seventeenth-century France (Modern History Sourcebook)
Early Modern France: Bibliography and Resources (Le Poulet Gauche)
Renaissance & 17th-century France ‘Creating French Culture’, an online exhibition from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France
La France a travers les ages (Michael Lastinger, WVU) (French and English)
H-France discussion list
The Film
http://www.14850.com/magazine/9307/cinema.html a thoughtful review article, well worth reading
Customer reviews (Amazon)
User comments (IMDB)
David Hart’s ‘Reel History’ course:
The film
Natalie Zemon Davis (NB: Wayback Archive)
Study guide (George Alter) part of a course on the history of the family: brief, but some interesting questions that can be asked about the film
