The Freud in Fraud
A man named Martin Guerre leaves home and eight years later a man returns calling himself Martin Guerre. His wife accepts him as her returned husband. Members of the village accept him. Few question that the Martin how returned is the Martin who left until strangers appear with a story that they knew Martin Guerre and the man who returned cannot possibly be him due to a physical difference that would be impossible to reconcile. And they are right. So, then: this becomes not so much a story about one of the greatest imposters in the world, but a psychological mystery about why people commit fraud. How could a wife have thought a completely different man was her husband and if she didn’t then why go along with such a preposterous fraud?
What is Identity?
In the modern world, identity is documentation. If a person provides the required official documents saying who they are, then they are believed to be who they say they are. Of course, as thousand commercials, ads, software and websites remind us, just because a person can prove and identity does not mean it is true. The same can be said of the Middle Ages. Identity was inextricably linked to documents of property ownership, but that wasn’t the proof, that was the pudding. The proof needed to eat that pudding was memory. If someone remembered you and you remembered things from the past, your identity was accepted because there were no photographs and only the rich could afford portraits. Memory proves to be a reliable as today’s driver license, Social Security card and bank statements: it is the imposter who has the better recall of Martin Guerre’s life than the second Martin Guerre to return.
The Economics of Truth
The marriage of the real Martin and his wife Bertrande was not exactly successful. Martin Guerre’s family was relatively well-off in the village and Bertrande so Bertrande had married well and could expect to live a good life. But Martin was also impotent and that impotence became a source of humor for everybody in town. The question of why Bertrande would take part in a fraud by going along with an imposter might be answered by the lack of impotence upon the part of the imposter and his right to claim an inheritance as “Martin Guerre.”
