The man who made the fourteenth-century French village of Montaillou world famous – with the horny priest and secret heretic Pierre Clergue, the wandering Cathar Guillaume Belibaste struggling with purity and the chatelaine Beatrice de Planisoles and her many problematic sexual relationships – the French historian who was regarded for decades leader of the third generation of the influential French Annales school, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, died this Wednesday at the age of ninety-four.
Born into a rich and very Catholic environment in Normandy, Le Roy Ladurie was already part of a group of friends at high school in Paris, many of whom would later make a name for themselves in historical scholarship: Denis Richet (1927-1989), François Furet (1927-1997) , Pierre Nora (1931), and Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014). Typical of this generation of French intellectuals, Le Roy Ladurie became a member of the Communist Party as a student – his parents had hoped that he would become a priest – and just as typical, he resigned from that membership in 1956, due to the revelations about the crimes of Stalin and the Russian invasion of Hungary.
Annales Historians
Ladurie’s career as a historian gained momentum as a student and protégé of Fernand Braudel, who is considered the leader of the second generation of Annales historians, named after the influential journal Annales d’histoire economique et social which was founded in 1929 by the historians of mentality Lucien Frebvre and Marc Bloch. Braudel himself had become famous for his great attention to climate, geography and economics and you could say that his student Le Roy Ladurie combined this ‘history of the long duration’ with the attention of the first Annales generation to historical mentalities and inner motivations . That that approach would be something new, Nouvelle Histoire it was mentioned in the 1970s, which is why he has always denied it. Typical of the Annales view is that the political history of kings and army commanders is never really important.
Ladurie made his breakthrough as a historian with his phenomenal 1966 PhD study on the farmers of the Languedoc from the late Middle Ages to 1800, in which he compellingly depicted the waves of growth and decline of the peasantry due to climate, disease and wars. He strove for one history total, a complete history, as much anthropology as psychology. It was not without reason that he called himself the “cannibal of history”, an omnivore. In passing, he also became a pioneer of climate history, simply because he could read Latin sources and the meteorologists could not. he once said.
Fourteenth century juice canal
His most famous book Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 to 1324, from 1975, can be read as a fourteenth-century juice canal full of strange figures and sexual escapades that the inhabitants of this village told endlessly to a church inquisitor who neatly wrote down all their words. In the 1980s, it was almost regarded by the general public as a historical novel, on a par with Umberto Eco’s famous medieval novel, The name of the Rose (1980). But in reality it was Montaillou (also) a real Annales study, in which Le Roy Ladurie accurately reconstructed from the Inquisition interrogations which gestures were common at that time, which seasonal movements the shepherds made through the mountains, what the status of a house was, and why no one actually had a problem with homosexuality.
He subsequently wrote many other studies, about a bloody carnival in 1580, but also about the French court in the eighteenth century.