The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in 17th-Century France (review)

This stylishly presented book is an intelligent addition to the growing opus of what might be labelled "CSI history." Historians of the early modern period are increasingly turning to a hybrid format — serious scholarship and empirical research mixed with a more "gentle" academic writing style and narrative-driven structure — whether to attract a wider readership or to complement the ever-increasing number of "history quest" programmes and docu-dramas on television. Jeffrey Ravel tells a good story, and embeds within it scholarly research and insight about the judicial process and the role of public opinion under the Ancien Régime.

In brief, this book recounts one of the great causes célèbres of the period, in which a nobleman from Berry is presumed murdered by his adulterous wife and her clerical lover, until a man turns up in Paris claiming to be the murdered man. But there is a catch: if the man is telling the truth, he exonerates his wife, but then accepts the identity (and crimes) of a man accused of imposture as a non-nobleman and a bigamist. The case became a spectacle of society, an event gossiped about in the streets and in the salons, analysed and satirized in the press and on the stage. One of the overarching questions asked by this case concerns the natural order of society: why would a man willingly give up noble status? Ravel's book takes its title from this question and relates it to the Molière play of a similar title. However, the author points to deeper questions alluded to in the courtroom, in society gossip, and in the theatres that are more theoretical. What is "nobility" and can it be abandoned? What is "justice," and what is "identity," and can these things be faked? How do any of these elements affect authority? At the heart of this debate is a sense that the ideological climate was changing and that, during the last two decades of Louis XIV's reign, older established values of a fixed world were giving way to notions of individual freedoms, notably to make choices and to cut a path in the world based on merit, not birth.

The first four chapters of The Would-Be Commoner describe in detail the case of Louis de la Pivardière and Marguerite Chauvelin. Along the way, Ravel provides useful contextual information to the reader about noble upbringing, military careers, patronage networks, the judicial system, the world of the press, marriage and divorce law, and so on. The style is readable but still quite informed, and the author avoids more populist pitfalls of trying to invent thoughts or emotions for his characters. There are a few detail flubs — Versailles was not the seat of government in the 1650s–1660s (p. 13); Vendôme is not northeast of Berry (p. 21); William of Orange was not newly crowned in England in the fall of 1688 (p. 21); Liège was not a Flemish town (p. 26); nor was Metz an archbishopric (pp. 27, 100) — but these do not detract from the general quality of the presentation of this case.

What does detract a bit from the general flow, however, is Ravel's sudden lurch into a more academic chapter on stage plays. This is, unsurprisingly, the area in which the author's academic credentials rest, but it reads here as if the contents of a journal article were suddenly sneaked in, a hundred pages into the text. The connection with theatre is, certainly, the book's link with its title, but perhaps it would have served the author better to make clearer use of this connection by positioning this material much earlier in the book. Nevertheless, the conclusions of this section do point us back into the direction of official versus popular justice (through the mouthpiece of the theatre), in pointing the finger of blame in...