Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie (, 19 July 1929 – 22 November 2023) was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.
Early life and career
Le Roy Ladurie was born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados.
The Le Roy Ladurie family were originally the aristocratic de Roy Laduries, descended from a Catholic priest who fell in love with one of his parishioners, dropped out of the priesthood to marry her and was then ennobled by the Crown; the family dropped the aristocratic de from their surname at the time of the French Revolution. The PCF proudly billed themselves as the "party of 75,000 shot"-a reference to the claim that the Germans had shot 75,000 French Communists between 1941 and 1944 (the true figure was actually 10,000); nevertheless the PCF had acquired tremendous prestige in 1940s France as a result of its role in the Resistance. The German occupation had been a profoundly traumatic experience for the French, not the least because unlike World War I, in which the Union sacrée proclaimed by Raymond Poincaré in 1914 had united the left and the right against the common German enemy, World War II had seen a civil war in France. The Resistance had fought not only the Germans, but also the police, gendarmes and the much feared Milice of the Vichy regime. The Milice were a collection of French fascists, gangsters and assorted adventurers used by the Vichy regime to hunt down and murder résistants, who in their turn assassinated members of the Milice. Given this background, in which many young French people had seen at first-hand the pretty streets, avenues and squares of French cities, towns and villages sullied by acts of outrageous cruelty and violence, Le Roy Ladurie described his generation as a scarred one, saying: "It was dangerous for young people during the war. If we are subjected to violence, we will in turn be violent towards others. It is like someone who is sodomised and then sodomises others."
In 1955, Le Roy Ladurie married Madeleine Pupponi with whom he had one son and one daughter. Le Roy Ladurie left the PCF after doubts caused by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution became too much for him. Le Roy Ladurie was later to write that the sight of Soviet tanks crushing the ordinary people of Hungary in 1956 who were merely demanding basic human rights led him to abandon his optimism of the late 1940s that the Soviet Union represented the best hope of humanity and instead led him to the conclusion that communism was an inhumane, totalitarian ideology that oppressed people in the Soviet Union, Hungary and elsewhere. He was the first president of the Association Annie Kriegel, founded in 2000 in Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme to commemorate an anti-Communist historian who, like Ladurie, left the PCF following the events of 1956.
Le Roy Ladurie died on 22 November 2023, at the age of 94.
Les paysans de Languedoc
Le Roy Ladurie first attracted attention with his doctoral thesis, Les paysans de Languedoc, which was published as a book in 1966 and translated into English as The Peasants of Languedoc in 1974. In this study of the peasantry of Languedoc over several centuries, Le Roy Ladurie employed a huge range of quantitative information such as tithe records, wage books, tax receipts, rent receipts and profit records, together with the theories of thinkers such as Thomas Malthus to contend that the history of Languedoc was "l'histoire immobile" (history that stands still).
At the beginning of the 18th century, Languedoc society was, in Le Roy Ladurie's opinion, not far from where it had been two centuries earlier, thus making this entire period one of "l'historie immobile". Montaillou was a bestseller in both France and after its translation into English in the United States and Great Britain, and remains Le Roy Ladurie's most popular book by far. Many critics have noted that for Le Roy Ladurie, the village priest Father Pierre Clergue, an ardent womanizer whose vow of celibacy meant nothing and who apparently slept with most of the women of Montaillou seemed to be something of a hero for the historian. Clergue's affair with the local aristocrat and noted beauty, the Countess Béatrice de Planisoles formed one of the central stories that Le Roy Ladurie related in Montaillou with much sympathy for the doomed couple.
Critics of Le Roy Ladurie have argued that the Holy Inquisition was an instrument of judicial repression for whom torture or the threat of torture were routine methods. The Canadian historian Norman Cantor argued that none of the people questioned by Fournier had appeared willingly before the Holy Inquisition, and that therefore the Fournier Register which Le Roy Ladurie had used as his main source for Montaillou is not reliable.
The Comité des intellectuals pour l'Europe des libertés was not a conservative group, and instead was opposed to Communism from a liberal vantage-point, declaring itself opposed to both "the unarticulated cry and pure revolt on one hand and absolute knowledge and totalizing ideology on the other", damning the "fatal socialist-statist equation" as offering the end of the Republic and everything it stood for. In its founding manifesto, the Comité des intellectuals pour l'Europe des libertés declared its intention "to defend the synonymy of these three words: Europe, culture, freedom". Significantly, the committee did not limit its remit to France or even Western Europe, instead proclaiming its intention to defend liberty in all of Europe, Western and Eastern. He analysed his political engagement and communism in Ouverture, société, pouvoir: de l’Édit de Nantes à la chute du communisme (2004) and Les grands procès politiques, ou la pédagogie infernale (2002).
Carnaval de Romans
Another work was Le Carnaval de Romans: de la chandeleur au mercredi des cendres (translated into English as Carnival in Romans) which dealt with the 1580 massacre of about twenty artisans at the annual carnival in the town of Romans-sur-Isère, France. In this book, Le Roy Ladurie used the only two surviving eyewitness accounts of the massacre (one of which was hostile towards to the victims of the massacre by Guérin, the other sympathetic yet often inaccurate by Piémond), together with such information as plague lists and tax lists, to treat the massacre as a microcosm of the political, social and religious conflicts of rural society in the latter half of the 16th century in France.
Political history
Though best known for his work in "microhistory", Le Roy Ladurie has also examined the political history of France between 1460 and 1774 in a two-volume history. The first volume was L'Etat royal: de Louis XI à Henri IV, 1460-1610 (translated into English as The French Royal State: 1460-1610).