It’s a bible. “Until now, we looked at the life of the peasants from above. I tried to look at them from a human height. “With” La Mémoire des Croquants (1435-1652) “already published by Tallandier editions in 2018, Jean-Marc Moriceau had succeeded in bringing the humanity of the past from the archive to the present. This associate professor of history at the University of Caen-Normandie specializes in rural history and the relationship between man and wolf. “Get out of anonymity some of these figures of Jacques Bonhomme (Editor’s note: name designating all the rebels of the Grande Jacquerie and by extension all the peasant uprisings) to put them back on stage; bring back village testimonies in their freshness and abundance; auscultating the reactions of people from the countryside in relation to the constraints of the past time, this is what I tried to decipher in this fresco. »With these new chronicles of rural France, which this time run from 1653 to 1788, Jean-Marc Moriceau delivers a sum combining testimonies and confidences at the source, continuing his meticulous investigation as closely as possible to our peasant ancestors, since the next day. from the Fronde until the eve of the Revolution. Ban-de-Sapt, Ban-de-Laveline, Gérardmer, Grand, Mirecourt, Neufchâteau, Provenchères-sur-Fave, Remiremont, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Senaide, Taintrux, Wisembach… Each region has something to tell. Two or three leagues from Nancy, wolves plunge the countryside into insecurity, a major epizootic decimates livestock in 1714 in Burgundy and Champagne … And we are at the time of the famous Valentin Jamerey-Duval, precursor of the social elevator, which will sympathize with the son of Duke Léopold of Lorraine while he kept cows in the fields …
Ed. Tallandier. 736 pages. 29,50 €.
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