Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the great French historian of the modern age, has died

The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurieone of the great contemporary masters of historiography, inspired by the lines of innovative research proposed by the famous magazine “Annales d’historie economique et sociale”, died on Wednesday 22 November at the age of 94 years old. The news of his disappearance was spread by the Parisian newspaper The world.

With his books he has given countless readers the pleasure of knowing the meaning of the past in the minute plot of daily events. He had made himself known to a wide audience with History of a village: Montaillou, an Occitan village during the inquisition, 1294-1324published in France by Gallimard in 1975 and translated into Italian two years later by Rizzoli in the Historical Series, in which he reconstructs the events of a medieval Cathar community.

Le Roy Ladurie, born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais on 19 July 1929, was director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris starting from 1965, then professor of social sciences at the University of Paris (from 1970) and, finally, professor of history of modern civilization at the Collège de France since 1973. Awarded the Nonino Prize to ‘a Master of our time’ in 1992, for his books in which “men and women of rural communities rediscover value and dignity of protagonists”, as the motivation explained, the great French historian later joined the jury of the Friulian prize.

Among the animators ofÉcole of the Annals, succeeding Fernand Braudel as director, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was an advocate of a “total history” which combines an original analysis of sources with suggestions from demography, anthropology and linguistics. After having studied the rural world over the centuries from the 12th to the 18th with the book The peasants of Languedoc (1966, Laterza, 1970), dedicated himself to limited realities and events presented as broad cross-sections of social history: The Carnival of Romans (Rizzoli, 1981), Time for celebration, time for famine (Einaudi, 1982), Money, love, death in Occitania (Rizzoli, 1983), Jasmin’s witch (Edizioni Lavoro, 1994). These works are considered representative of a study method (microhistory) that contributes to the detailed reconstruction of specific historical contexts.

He was the author of a vast work entitled The old regime (Il Mulino, 1999-2000) composed by The King’s State: France from 1460 to 1610, The Triumph of Absolutism: from Louis XIII to Louis XIV, 1610-1715 e The Decline of Absolutism: the Age of Louis XV, 1715-1770 which together constitute a synthesis of the history of France in the modern age. Among his books there are also more historiographical works such as The frontiers of the historian (Laterza, 1976) e Autobiography (Rizzoli, 1984).