Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023)
Author of Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
About the Author
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a professor at the College de France and a member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
Image credit: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie le 25 février 2014
Series
Works by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (1967) 71 copies, 2 reviews
Histoire humaine et comparée du climat : Tome 1, Canicules et glaciers XIIIe-XVIIIe siècles (2004) 13 copies
Histoire de France des régions. La périphérie française, des origines à nos jours (2001) — Author — 12 copies
Autour de Montaillou un village occitan : Histoire et religiosité d'une commune villageoise au Moyen Age, Actes du colloque de Montaillou (25-26-27 août 2000) (2001) 8 copies, 1 review
Histoire humaine et comparée du climat : Tome 2, Disettes et révolutions (1740-1860) (2006) — Author — 8 copies
La ville des Temps Modernes : De la Renaissance aux Révolutions (1981) — Editor; Contributor — 6 copies
Histoire humaine et comparée du climat : Tome 3, Le réchauffement de 1860 à nos jours (2009) 5 copies
Histoire de la France rurale. Tome 2/4 : L'âge classique des paysans de 1340 à 1789 (1975) — Editor; Contributor — 5 copies
Tithe and Agrarian History from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Comparative History (1982) 4 copies
Pierre Prion, scribe. Mémoires d'un écrivain de campagne au XVIIIe siècle (1985) — Présentation — 3 copies
Les fluctuations du climat de l'an mil à aujourd'hui (Divers Histoire) (French Edition) (2011) 3 copies
Montaillou 2. bind — Author — 2 copies
Montaillou 1. bind — Author — 2 copies
Entre los historiadores 1 copy
Associated Works
The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars (2000) — Preface, some editions — 449 copies, 7 reviews
Private Life in the Fifteenth Century: Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family (1989) — Introduction, some editions — 219 copies, 1 review
Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliotheque nationale de France (1995) — Preface, some editions — 40 copies
The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (1976) — Présentation, some editions — 36 copies
Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800 (Past and Present Publications) (1976) — Contributor — 29 copies
Litterature XVII Siecle:Textes et Documents (Collection Henri Mitterand) (1986) — Introduction, some editions — 17 copies
XVIIIe siècle. Littérature textes et documents, le livre de l'élève (1986) — Introduction, some editions — 12 copies
Histoire de la population française, tome 1 : Des origines à la Renaissance (1988) — Afterword — 5 copies
L'héritage de Vichy: Ces 100 mesures toujours en vigueur (2012) — Preface, some editions — 4 copies
Peasants against Politics: Rural Organization in Britanny, 1911-1967 (Center for International Affairs) (1975) — Foreword, some editions — 3 copies
La Russie entre en Europe : Elisabeth 1re et la succession d'Autriche (1740-1750) (1997) — Preface, some editions — 3 copies
Littérature, textes et documents: XVIIIe siècle : livre du professeur (1986) — Introduction, some editions — 2 copies
L'Héritage allemand de l'Occupation - Ces 60 dispositions toujours en vigueur (2019) — Préface, some editions — 2 copies
Il laboratorio del Gulag. Le origini del sistema concentrazionario sovietico (2004) — Preface, some editions — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel
- Legal name
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel Bernard Marie
- Birthdate
- 1929-07-19
- Date of death
- 2023-11-22
- Gender
- male
- Education
- College Saint-Joseph, Caen, France
Lycée Henri IV, Paris, France
Lycee Lakanal, Sceaux, France
Ecole Normal Supérieure (agregation ∙ History)
University of Paris (doctorat des lettres) - Occupations
- historian
author
professor - Organizations
- École des Annales
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Collège de France - Awards and honors
- Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur (2010)
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Academia Europaea (1989)
Grand Croix de l'ordre national du Mérite (2018)
Prize Pierre-Lafue (1978)
Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (1993) (show all 13)
International Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1974)
Polish Academy of Sciences
Japan Academy (2006)
Académie de Nîmes
Foreign honorary member, National Academy of Sciences (1974)
Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur (1996)
Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (1979) - Relationships
- Braudel, Fernand (mentor)
- Short biography
- Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a professor at the Collège de France and since 1973, chairman of the Department of History of Modern Civilization. He has also been Administrateur Général of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (1987-94). He is a distinguished French historian whose speciality is the Languedoc region of southern France, particularly the history of the peasantry. His most famous work is Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), a multi-layered study of the life of the village of Montaillou during the age of the Cathar heresy. Prof. Le Roy Ladurie often writes for publications such as Le Nouvel Observateur, L'Express, and Le Monde, and appears on French television.
- Nationality
- France
- Birthplace
- Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados, France
- Places of residence
- Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, France
- Place of death
- 14e arrondissement, Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Associated Place (for map)
- France
Members
Discussions
Folio Archives 392: Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 2005 in Folio Society Devotees (September 2024)
Reviews
The problem with ‘Montaillou’ has nothing to do with the book, and everything to do with my trying to read it whilst on a train that was delayed by six, yes SIX, hours. (Overhead lines blew down.) Since the intended arrival time was 8pm, at 1am I was still trying to find a comfortable reading position on a train seat, whilst distracted by low blood sugar and a loud drunken hen party. In short, I was not in the best of moods during much of reading process. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating show more and unique book. Life in the French village of Montaillou in the early 14th century is unusually well documented thanks to an assiduous inquisitor. Bishop Fournier interviewed nearly every adult in the village about their lives and the answers survived the centuries. The pretext for inquisitorial involvement was the village’s association with Catharism, a heretical sect. Indeed, discussing heresy seems to have been a favourite hobby throughout the village, although different people displayed different levels of sincere interest.
I was pleased by how well the author managed to balance academic rigor and approachability in the narrative. The stories of particular village characters are told, as well as more thematic topics like attitudes to family, home, and time. Perhaps the most memorable personage is the erstwhile village priest, Pierre Clerge, a heretic and womaniser. He and his brother Bernard were for a while the most powerful people in the village. The detailed nature of the accounts quoted allows an insight into the personalities involved. These quotations feel, in fact, like a little window to a very different time, one that is difficult to imagine today. The best analogy I could come up with was that heresy as a discussion topic filled the space now taken up by politics, history, and all forms of media. All philosophical, scientific, or metaphysical talk was essentially religious. It is wonderful to think of the fireside chats involving both parochial gossip and debate about whether the soul was just ‘a thing of blood’. Of particular note to me was the insight that in a situation of near-total illiteracy and complete absence of schooling, men and women conversed from the same level of knowledge.
This is very definitely a social history, evoking the daily life of Montaillou’s inhabitants, their relationships, work, mores, and habits. It also reminded me of the heterogeneity of the Medieval period, despite the frequent generalisation of Europe's ‘Dark Ages’. The brief period in the early 14th century covered here seems to have been quite comfortable for the villagers, until the inquisition turned up and arrested them en masse. However, it was a distinctly different kind of life to that found in nearby towns, let alone other countries, at the same time.
Thank you Rae for recommending this to me! show less
I was pleased by how well the author managed to balance academic rigor and approachability in the narrative. The stories of particular village characters are told, as well as more thematic topics like attitudes to family, home, and time. Perhaps the most memorable personage is the erstwhile village priest, Pierre Clerge, a heretic and womaniser. He and his brother Bernard were for a while the most powerful people in the village. The detailed nature of the accounts quoted allows an insight into the personalities involved. These quotations feel, in fact, like a little window to a very different time, one that is difficult to imagine today. The best analogy I could come up with was that heresy as a discussion topic filled the space now taken up by politics, history, and all forms of media. All philosophical, scientific, or metaphysical talk was essentially religious. It is wonderful to think of the fireside chats involving both parochial gossip and debate about whether the soul was just ‘a thing of blood’. Of particular note to me was the insight that in a situation of near-total illiteracy and complete absence of schooling, men and women conversed from the same level of knowledge.
This is very definitely a social history, evoking the daily life of Montaillou’s inhabitants, their relationships, work, mores, and habits. It also reminded me of the heterogeneity of the Medieval period, despite the frequent generalisation of Europe's ‘Dark Ages’. The brief period in the early 14th century covered here seems to have been quite comfortable for the villagers, until the inquisition turned up and arrested them en masse. However, it was a distinctly different kind of life to that found in nearby towns, let alone other countries, at the same time.
Thank you Rae for recommending this to me! show less
An anthropological study of a mountain village would normally not be up my alley, but there were several elements of this one that piqued my interest when I came upon the book in a Napa County small town thrift store four years ago. The village of Montaillou was (in fact, the village still exists, although a short distance from its medieval location) located in the French Pyrenees. In inhabitants at the dawn of the 14th century was largely part of the Christian sect called Catharism. show more Catharism, which included some pretty serious divergences from orthodox Catholic dogma (including but not limited to the virgin birth and the nature of souls and heaven and the Resurrection) had a century earlier been fairly robust in Lanquedoc, in the south of France, but between 1209 and 1229, the Church had launched what is now known as the Albigensian Crusade (the movement first bloomed in the French city of Albi). Around 200,000 Cathars were slaughtered and the remnants scattered. Almost 100 years later, the 250 people of Montaillou represented one of the last centers of Catharism. Technically, Montaillou was not even in the Kingdom of France, but instead within the Comte de Foix, though under heavy political pressure from the French king.
A cleric named Jacques Fournier became the Bishop of Pamiers in the Ariege region of Comte de Foix that included Montaillu in 1318. Fournier instituted at an Inquisition to find and punish the remaining Cathar "heretics." Many went to prison, and still others were burned at the stake. What Fournier gave to historians, however, was his methodology. He not only insisted in conducting long and exhaustive interviews with just about all of the inhabitants of the village, and many from the surrounding areas as well, but he also employed scribed to take notes on the spot, writing down the interviews pretty much word for word in the original Occitan (the native language of Languedoc) and later translating them into Latin. Fournier's skills as an interviewers were evidently prolific. He would get people talking about their lives and listen at length, eventually in this manner getting them to betray themselves or their neighbors as heretics. Often both. These written testimonies have come down to scholars, and because of the detail they contains, historians have been able to painstakingly piece together a fairly comprehensive picture of the home lives, religious and folk beliefs, how they made their livings, and how they treated each other: their friendships, loves and feuds, their affairs and sex lives, their faith and their fears. In relatively straightforward writing, mostly devoid of academic jargon, Le Roy Ladurie created a fascinating picture of a tiny microcosm of medieval life, unique in that we know that what we're seeing, and even the people whose voices we're hearing (we become familiar with several individuals along the way), are doomed to be victims of the inquisitors' repressive zeal. I found it all compelling, although some parts are admittedly drier than others in the telling. The fact that I already knew about the Cathars (I would imagine a much more common historical knowledge in Europe than amongst us benighted Americans), having traveled through the south of France with my wife and visited the ruins of at least two Cathar castles. Other than that, reading Mountaillou was for me like peering into a worm hole into the past--somewhere around 700 years ago!--and gazing on a picture of amazing detail and clarity.
As I said, this history was first published in the 1980s. It is far from a modern "literary history" emphasizing narrative skill and readability. This is an academic work, though a comparatively exceptionably accessible one. I suppose that all depends on one's interest in the subject matter, though. Le Roy Ladurie does write well and is able to humanize his subject matter, even injecting some wry humor along the way. The book was evidently a best seller in France upon its original publication. According to the description on the back of my paperback copy, Montaillou was a bestseller in France when it was published there in its original 600-page version. For the English speaking audience, the decision was made--for which I am most grateful--to edit the book down significantly. My edition is 356 pages. I very much enjoyed the reading experience, but 356 pages was plenty. show less
A cleric named Jacques Fournier became the Bishop of Pamiers in the Ariege region of Comte de Foix that included Montaillu in 1318. Fournier instituted at an Inquisition to find and punish the remaining Cathar "heretics." Many went to prison, and still others were burned at the stake. What Fournier gave to historians, however, was his methodology. He not only insisted in conducting long and exhaustive interviews with just about all of the inhabitants of the village, and many from the surrounding areas as well, but he also employed scribed to take notes on the spot, writing down the interviews pretty much word for word in the original Occitan (the native language of Languedoc) and later translating them into Latin. Fournier's skills as an interviewers were evidently prolific. He would get people talking about their lives and listen at length, eventually in this manner getting them to betray themselves or their neighbors as heretics. Often both. These written testimonies have come down to scholars, and because of the detail they contains, historians have been able to painstakingly piece together a fairly comprehensive picture of the home lives, religious and folk beliefs, how they made their livings, and how they treated each other: their friendships, loves and feuds, their affairs and sex lives, their faith and their fears. In relatively straightforward writing, mostly devoid of academic jargon, Le Roy Ladurie created a fascinating picture of a tiny microcosm of medieval life, unique in that we know that what we're seeing, and even the people whose voices we're hearing (we become familiar with several individuals along the way), are doomed to be victims of the inquisitors' repressive zeal. I found it all compelling, although some parts are admittedly drier than others in the telling. The fact that I already knew about the Cathars (I would imagine a much more common historical knowledge in Europe than amongst us benighted Americans), having traveled through the south of France with my wife and visited the ruins of at least two Cathar castles. Other than that, reading Mountaillou was for me like peering into a worm hole into the past--somewhere around 700 years ago!--and gazing on a picture of amazing detail and clarity.
As I said, this history was first published in the 1980s. It is far from a modern "literary history" emphasizing narrative skill and readability. This is an academic work, though a comparatively exceptionably accessible one. I suppose that all depends on one's interest in the subject matter, though. Le Roy Ladurie does write well and is able to humanize his subject matter, even injecting some wry humor along the way. The book was evidently a best seller in France upon its original publication. According to the description on the back of my paperback copy, Montaillou was a bestseller in France when it was published there in its original 600-page version. For the English speaking audience, the decision was made--for which I am most grateful--to edit the book down significantly. My edition is 356 pages. I very much enjoyed the reading experience, but 356 pages was plenty. show less
A slog. As befits an annaliste, Le Roy Ladurie is more interested in long-term structure than he is the personalities which drove the popular revolt in a small town in sixteenth-century southern France. He explores the ways in which rising discontent with the minimal taxes paid by the nobility, rising prices, tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism, and a host of other issues fed into the bloody events of St Blaise's Day, 1580. But ironically, for someone who pays so much attention to show more structures in general, Le Roy Ladurie paid little to the internal organisation of this book. I found it difficult to get a clear picture of how all the pieces of his argument hung together, and some of his statements a bit... dubious. Particularly the page he spent discussing young men and sexual assault, which smacked entirely too much of apologia to my mind. If you work specifically on this time period, you might find more here of interest and relevance than I did, but I bounced off this one hard. show less
In "Jasmin's Witch," Ladurie takes on the unique project of tracing the lineage of Jacque Boé's work, "Francouneto." It is the story of a beautiful young woman who is admired by all, but through vanity and jealousy, becomes accused of being a witch. While you won't find it in the court record, Ladurie argues for it's validity. He excitedly refers to it as "unadulterated development of a peasant tradition," a micro-cosmic history completely untainted by outside influence, demonology and show more witch judges. It is perfectly Gascon.
First, Ladurie cross-references it with two other regional cases, that of the Mimalé family and of Marie de Sansarric for comparison. To prove that Francouneto's finer details have a basis in reality. All 3 of these Gascon witches have elements of 1) counter-magic 2) a theme of odor 3) the evil eye 4) werewolves. Fun fact, an animalistic transformation, especially werewolves, and a suspiciously, strange scent (good or foul) are telling of French witchcraft. It's fascinating! Second, Ladurie uses proper names and events mentioned in the story, including "the Buscou festival" "Huguenot" and "pilgrimage to Bon-Encontre" to solve Francouneto's chronology. 1620-1700! He also uses parish registries to trace the family of her lover. By the end, he narrows it down to a possible Marie Sordés as THE "Francouneto." It's really impressive!! And all done in 1983, without the use of ancestry.com or Google. Just good old-fashioned research techniques!
It's a little round-about at times, but Ladurie proves that careful examination can reveal incredible clues. It's like reading a puzzle being put together! What's more, you can read the whole tale for yourself. Ladurie was kind enough to include it. show less
First, Ladurie cross-references it with two other regional cases, that of the Mimalé family and of Marie de Sansarric for comparison. To prove that Francouneto's finer details have a basis in reality. All 3 of these Gascon witches have elements of 1) counter-magic 2) a theme of odor 3) the evil eye 4) werewolves. Fun fact, an animalistic transformation, especially werewolves, and a suspiciously, strange scent (good or foul) are telling of French witchcraft. It's fascinating! Second, Ladurie uses proper names and events mentioned in the story, including "the Buscou festival" "Huguenot" and "pilgrimage to Bon-Encontre" to solve Francouneto's chronology. 1620-1700! He also uses parish registries to trace the family of her lover. By the end, he narrows it down to a possible Marie Sordés as THE "Francouneto." It's really impressive!! And all done in 1983, without the use of ancestry.com or Google. Just good old-fashioned research techniques!
It's a little round-about at times, but Ladurie proves that careful examination can reveal incredible clues. It's like reading a puzzle being put together! What's more, you can read the whole tale for yourself. Ladurie was kind enough to include it. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 81
- Also by
- 31
- Members
- 3,537
- Popularity
- #7,178
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 37
- ISBNs
- 219
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