Individual Identity and Identification in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

Any work on the history of identification begins with a narrative,¹ and this one is no exception. In the middle of the sixteenth century, in the French Pyrenees village of Artigat, an unhappy young man called Martin Guerre, who had left his wife and children to serve in the army, came back home after several years of absence.² We know now he was an imposter, but the local community accepted him for a few years. When doubts were raised about his identity and the case brought to court, it proved very difficult to establish with certainty if this man was the true Martin Guerre: the judges had to make their decision after discussion of the testimonies of local inhabitants about the Martin Guerre who had left the village many years before—his accent, the size of his sabots or scars and marks on his skin that he was supposed to have. The case was eventually closed by the dramatic return of the real Martin Guerre. More than a century later, in 1832, Honoré de Balzac wrote a rather different tale in Colonel Chabert, a fiction, but echoing several cases of impersonation and missing people that took place in France after the turmoil of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon. In this novel, Chabert, an officer of Napoleon’s army, was reported as dead in Russia, and his young widow married a rich aristocrat at the beginning of a spectacular social ascent. The unexpected return of Colonel Chabert jeopardized all of this. But Chabert was unable to regain his identity and to be accepted by his fellows. Rejected by his wife, he faced a new legal order, based on papers, bureaucracy, état civil and actes authentiques. Eventually he finished his life in a hospice, his identity reduced to a simple number.