Was There a “French” Culture of Imposture during the Old Regime?

Most historians know about the most famous case of imposture in Early Modern France, that of Arnaud du Tilh, the false Martin Guerre.  But the Martin Guerre affair was not an isolated example of imposture during the Old Regime, as this paper will demonstrate.  There is no way to establish a complete census of all French impostors from 1600 to the Revolution, in large part because we can never know about cases of imposture that might have gone undetected.  But in the absence of a quantitative argument about the prevalence of imposture, the Martin Guerre case, the case of Louis de la Pivardière that I have recently studied, and others argue that French men of differing social backgrounds and educational levels thought there was enough imprecision in notions of individual identity to attempt outlandish acts of imposture.  In numerous daily encounters across the kingdom, imposture allowed the crown and its subjects to maintain official fictions while avoiding violent, direct confrontation.  The most notorious cases of imposture were only the tip of an iceberg of deceipt.  These practices occupied a middle ground between conformity and obedience to the will of the king, on the one hand, and outright resistance and rebellion on the other.  The prevalence of deception, fraud, and imposture during the Old Regime, the practice of everything that the state labeled faux, has much to tell us about the successes and failures of the Bourbon monarchy.  It may also be relevant to our understanding of the New Regime of transparent citizenship that briefly, catastrophically emerged in the final decade of the 1790s, and continues to haunt our political debates down to the present day.