Death of historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who just passed away yesterday at the age of 94, was initially the man of totally unexpected success. In 1975, Gallimard Montaillou, an Occitan village from 1294 to 1324, was published. The book relates the life, in the 14th century, of a village of mountain peasants steeped in the Cathar faith. Against all expectations, this work of ethnohistory was a dazzling success. It sold more than two million copies, establishing its author not only among the community of historians but also among a general cultivated public.

The author of this success is not unknown to historians. He was already an academic recognized by his peers, holding a chair at the Collège de France, which was then an institution where minds of great renown flocked. Roy Ladurie, however, is rather accustomed to the confidentiality of his quantitative history work and he was far from imagining such fervor. From the foreword to his book, he revealed a certain tenderness for the world "where the boors of the so-called good old days lived." The fervor of post-sixty-eight modernism was already waning; Barthes was soon able to write in his diary in 1977 that he had understood “suddenly” that it was indifferent to him to be “modern”. In short, the conditions were met to ensure great success for these Languedoc peasants to whom Le Roy Ladurie had already devoted his thesis. He will remain a historian of the French countryside of the Middle Ages and modern times.

Born in 1929 in Moutiers-en-Cinglais in Calvados, Le Roy Ladurie was the son of a former minister in the Vichy government, Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, owner-operator of the Orne valley. As a reaction, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie joined the Communist Party in 1949. He described this commitment as “love at first sight”. He would campaign there ardently for seven years, like many of the students from rue d'Ulm. He then became friends with Pierre Juquin, François Furet, Michel Crouzet. He broke with the CP in 1956 after the publication of the Khrushchev report and the announcement of the Soviet intervention in Hungary. The break was to be lasting and he then sought his way to the “second left” for a while and he even briefly became secretary of the PSU section of Montpellier. He suffered an attack by the OAS Métro at his home for his positions in favor of the independence of Algeria.

Also read: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: “the climate is slipping”

He then devoted himself mainly to his career as a historian. After Normale Sup’ and the history aggregation, he taught at the faculty of Montpellier, then at the School of Advanced Studies. He was appointed to the Collège de France in 1973 to the chair of history of modern civilization. His faultless career can be explained by his scrupulous respect for the “new history” and the Annales School, then very fashionable. Relying on the Braudelian notion of "long duration", Le Roy Ladurie explained in Le Territoire de l'Historien: "The quantitative revolution has totally transformed, in our country, the profession of historian". “History stands still,” he declared in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. Appointed to succeed Fernand Braudel as director of the Annales, Le Roy Ladurie became the leader of this School at the very moment when the prestige of the latter was weakening over time, as mainstream historians, like Alain Decaux, will attack its deleterious effects on the teaching of history. The error of the ministry agents, to which Le Roy Ladurie seems unrelated, was to have wanted to extend a university discipline to secondary education. With the relative disinterest in quantitative history from the end of the 1980s, Le Roy Ladurie became interested in everyday life, in the lives of individuals, in the climate of which he became a scrupulous historian. He was also a columnist for Le Figaro Littéraire for many years.

Through the abundance of his work and his participation in numerous collective works, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie launched new avenues, not all of which were followed by the public, notably the History of the climate since the year 1000 (1967). , The Historian's Territory (2 vols. 1973-1978), The Carnival of Novels (1979), Money, love, death in the Pays d'Oc (1980), The Century of the Platters 1499-1628 (three volumes until 2006, Fayard). He was also a political historian for the modern period in L'Ancien Régime, 1610-1770 (1991). In 2001 he published a History of France of the regions. He also served as administrator of the National Library from 1987 to 1994 and is a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. One of his latest works, summarizing the history of the French Peasants of the Ancien Régime (2015), was intended to be more accessible to the general public. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie says he has remained a Marxist methodologically.