Arnaud Du Tilh: A Brief Summary

On September 16th, 1560, a man named Arnaud du Tilh was executed for adultery and fraud. This execution does not appear to be too unusual a crime for 16th century France until one notes the extraordinary events that preceded it. The common literature on this unusual event maintained that Tilh managed to trick an entire village that he was the peasant Martin Guerre, even the wife (Bertrande) of the man he was imitating. Historian Natalie Zemon Davis sought to analyze the social and cultural conditions that could yield such an apparently strange and fraudulent act. Through her research, she surmised that Bertrande was not simply duped by Arnaud, as previous writers have assumed, but rather, she was a willing collaborator in the marriage deception.

Whereas older histories in the past focused on states and elites, recent social historians and cultural historians studied the lower classes, borrowing practices from sociology and psychology to present that history. One can see that historical leaning by seeing how Davis concentrated her work on the lives of peasants, a group usually ignored by traditional historians. This new form of historgraphy made Davis willing to go beyond traditional source material, hence her reliance on legal and financial records, but she is also willing to push past the dependence on sources by highlighting the complex possibilities of representing the past through psychological exploration and literary interpretation. An example of this new historical framework is through her analysis of Protestant influence on Bertrande and Arnaud’s willingness to continue their fraudulent marriage. First, Davis found evidence that Bertrande’s family, the Rols, became Protestant through church attendance records and that Arnaud’s diocese had Protestant sympathizers. She then attempted to interpret Arnaud’s possible conversion and his mindset behind the conversion when she wrote, “I think he became open to the new ideas in Artigaat,” because his plan to imitate Martin Guerre “was operating like a conversion experience, wiping away the young man “of bad life”” (Davis, 49). Davis goes outside the historical record and constructs