Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929-2023) Micro-Historian from below
The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has died aged 94.
Associated with the Annales school of historians his best known work is Montaillou a study of fourteenth century life in the Languedoc village of the same name.
Ladurie was one of those who led the way in histories focusing in detail on the lives of ordinary people, understanding their customs, ideas and living arrangements.
My interest in his work lies in the crossover with History From Below and its focus on how people organised and resisted authority. His work is sometimes cross referenced with E P Thompson’s Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century and the work of the late Natalie Zemon Davis who died earlier this year on Rough Music, L’Chavari Anglais. Thompson submitted his own research on the subject to Annales.
There is an exchange of correspondence between Zemon Davis and Thompson on the subject where Le Roy Ladurie is referenced (the correspondence is reprinted and discussed in Past and Present 2017).
Like Thompson, Le Roy Ladurie left the Communist Party (PCF) in 1956 but unlike Thompson gravitated to a political position in the liberal centre over time. His stature as an historian can be gleaned from his Wiki entry with the usual caveat that it may not be entirely accurate either factually or in its assessments
He seems like quite a person!