Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France Book

I have studied very little early modern French history, which I am saying partly to warn that I'm in no way capable of evaluating Davis's interpretations, but mostly to say that I had no idea what to expect from this book (which was assigned in class called "Crime and Gender") and couldn't have been more delighted with it.

If you know as little as I did when I began reading Fiction in the Archives, here's some background:

The "pardon tales" in the title are more often called "letters of remission." They were a way for some people who had committed crimes to avoid a severe penalty like death or banishment. In most of the cases Davis describes, the crime was really what we would call "manslaughter" today -- killing without intent. French law at this time didn't have a category for manslaughter, so anyone who died at the hands of another was thought of as murdered, and the murderer was always supposed to be put to death. However, the king had the ability to pardon, which he delegated to his chancellors. By the sixteenth century, a system had grown up in which the chancellor's office would help petitioners write their excuses into a letter, evaluate them, and ratify the letter if the excuses were good enough for a pardon. Then the petitioner could present the letter to their local court, which could decide whether or not to accept it.

For several reasons (for example, the fact that petitioners would be orally quizzed on the contents of the letter to make sure that their story held up) the content of the letters of remission probably reflects fairly accurately the story told by the petitioner. Since many petitioners were ordinary people who otherwise left few signs of their existence on the historical record, the letters of remission that have survived are an important archive of information about their subjects' lives.

However, in this book Davis is less interested in the letters as a source of information for social history, and more interested in something else -- the letters as tales, as narratives, as "fiction." She doesn't mean "fiction" as in "invented," but "fiction" as in "story-like": the letters persuade by telling a story about how their protagonists are good people who were suddenly provoked into killing. What seems to have been important to the authors of these stories? What kinds of details show whose fault something was; elicit sympathy for feelings of humiliation, sudden provocation, remorse; convince that the protagonist, whose quiet life was disrupted by violence, should be allowed to resume that life again?

The most interesting part of Fiction in the Archives, I think, is how the gender of the protagonist changed the story. Most letters of remission were for men, and many of these are stories of sudden anger: he was going about his blameless life, but someone insulted him, and later snuck up on him while he was urinating and smacked him, and he turned around and stabbed them. Or, he suddenly came upon his wife in bed with another man, and he killed her. It seems to have been quite easy for men to have obtained remission for killing their disobedient or unfaithful wives, even when the story sometimes suggests that the husbands had been angry for a long time. (That the anger be sudden was usually important, because it showed the murder had not been premeditated.)

In contrast, Davis gives an example of a letter for a woman who had killed her husband. The letter explains that she had always been very faithful and obedient to her husband, but from the beginning of their marriage he had beaten her cruelly. This had gone on for years and she didn't know what to do; she felt so sad and confused and despairing, and she wished she herself would die. Finally, just after she had given birth to twins, her husband attacked her again. Even then, she didn't hit back, but ran away; but her neighbors convinced her to go back to take care of her babies. When she did, her husband attacked her again. He threw an axe at her; it missed, she picked it up, and struck him with it. Afterwards she ran away again and several times nearly killed herself.

Compared to many letters by men who killed their wives, Marguerite Vallée's story goes to extreme lengths to show that the person she had killed had been extraordinarily horrible to her, that she had not deserved this in any way, and that she had been in a state of very great distress when she killed him -- but not angry.