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Book Review
| Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Pp. 320. $25 (ISBN 978-0-618-19731-6).
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| The story at the heart of this fine book combines many elements familiar to readers of other microhistories. Like Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, a marriage is interrupted and the possibility of imposture is at the heart of the case, the story's resonance reverberates in many later retellings, and the vagaries of premodern identity are a key theme. Like James R. Farr's, A Tale of Two Murders, a mysterious disappearance leads to a murder case without a corpse, underlings support or undermine the evidence against aristocratic defendants, and kinship and political ties complicate judicial process. Here Louis de la Pivardière and Margaret Chauvelin, minor nobility in the province of Berry, provided competing tales of "what happened" to cause de la Pivardière's abrupt disappearance. Was he killed by his wife and her lover-priest when his return from long military service interrupted their tryst? Or did he abandon her straightened circumstances and noble status to forge a new life with the daughter of an innkeeper and a job as a town court officer? Was the mystery man who subsequently claimed to be Louis the real deal or an imposter coached by Chauvelin to cover her tracks? |
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Beautifully written, The Would-Be Commoner is accessible without sacrificing analytical ambition. It locates the events firmly in the context of the multiple crises of the late seventeenth century, a period that has become a relative historiographical black hole. It uses a very particular and—as the author notes—indubitably titillating case to explore the large questions in a critical period: nobility, authority, and identity. |
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Many issues would merit comment if space allowed. The reassessment of some common assumptions about the significance of early modern categories, for example, is very striking. Pivardière forswore noble status to become a modest townsman, a choice inexplicable to contemporaries and fascinating to historians schooled in the hierarchy of early modern society. Ravel persuasively argues that in terms of material experience—and the realities of income, opportunity, and married life—Pivardière gave up little in making his trade, and may have calculated as such. None of the outstanding work on French nobility in recent decades has been as revealing as this case study about the straightened fortunes of France's pettiest nobles whose revenues may hardly have exceeded those for more secure peasants. In such circumstances, noble status or lack thereof might have become an even more critical distinction, but not in this case at least. |
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For the readers of this journal, let me highlight some of the legal issues. Ravel evokes the lively, complex, and extensive conversations about matters legal that took place widely in Paris, driven not only by judicial publications but by factums, manuscripts, gossip, and theatrical plays. Lawyers for both sides published factums, the quasi-legal published briefs that escaped censorship and have been identified, most influentially by Sarah Maza, as a core genre through which lawsuits became central in the creation of a new political culture of monarchical criticism in the decades before the Revolution. Here we see clearly demonstrated that there was little novel about that dynamic, well established decades earlier. Discussion about cases was widespread (and I would argue not only in Paris despite the gravitational pull of the Palais de Justice) and was not only or even primarily driven by top-down assessments. Although the latter certainly was one important aspect of the dialogue as the work of Sarah Hanley, for instance, suggests, it was only one. Ravel joins a recent wave of work (by Hanley, Maza, Breen, and myself among others) that identifies legal conversations, broadly based, as a key site for discussions about the nature of authority, although the parameters of that are less clearly pursued here. Various members of the judiciary are also key actors here, with a contrast made between the apparently often unprincipled and perhaps incompetent members of various lower courts and even the Parisian Parlement, and the Attorney General Henri François d'Aguesseau, who is portrayed here as a kind of legal hero who pioneered a judicial philosophy of doubt that created room for all sides of the case to be considered objectively amidst the embrace of uncertainty. Other recent work on the seventeenth-century judiciary (notably the pioneering work of Breen and Farr on Dijon) has argued for higher standards and more concern about the rule of law than the reading of this case suggests. |
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Between murder, bigamy, and imposture, it may be as impossible for us as for contemporaries to discern with certainty "what happened" in this case, but through these events, the France of the 1690s is illuminated with striking and original clarity. |
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| Julie Hardwick
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| University of Texas at Austin |
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