The Return Of Martin Guerre Analysis

The Secret Life

The Return of Martin Guerre written by Natalie Davis gives the audience a rare glimpse into the world of peasant life in sixteenth century France. It also allows a modern day audience a chance to examine and to compare their own identities and questions of self. What makes the story so interesting to modern day viewers and readers is how relevant the story and the people in it are to our own times. This story is about a history of everyday people rather than royalty and generals, history's usual subjects. The main focus of the story is on Bertrande de Rols and her place in sixteenth century society, especially as a wife. At the age of nine, Bertrande was married to Martin Guerre who was a young peasant of Basque heritage.
But even more than simply outlining the facts of the story, Davis also uses her research to enlighten us on the roles of different family members in 16th Century rural French life, the politics of family life and peasant life in general, and the role of the growing shift from Catholicism to Protestantism among the elite as well as the peasant classes. In relation to family and marriage life, Davis uses Bertrande de Rols, Martin Guerre's wife, as an example of a strong, virtuous woman with familial duty and an obstinate nature. Davis uses this characterization to explain how de Rols was not a weak-minded woman who was so easily duped by her missing husband's impostor, but was rather a woman who was in love and used her strength in order to facilitate her new relationship with Arnaud du Tilh. "Either by explicit or tacit agreement, she helped him become her husband." Bertrande de Rols, according to Davis, is an example of the more broad-minded and less misogynist peasant society of the village of Artigat in 16th Century France. Through Bertrande de Rols, we learn about how surprisingly fair the law was towards women: The testaments in the area around Artigat rarely benefit one child but instead provide dowries for the daughters.... (If there are only daughters, the property is divided equally among them). (11) Another aspect of the book is, it is also a deeper historical chronicle of changes in the shift from French Catholicism to the "new religion" of Protestantism. She uses the new Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols entire relationship to characterize the relaxing religious laws that were seeping into courtrooms and the higher classes as well as the fields and the peasant classes. Davis argues that the new religion might have been of interest to the new Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols because it supported their illicit relationship