Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie (born 19 July 1929) is a French historian whose work is 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.

Le Roy Ladurie was born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados. His father was Jacques Le Roy Ladurie,who would become minister of Agriculture for Marshal Philippe Pétain and subsequently a member of the French resistance after breaking with the Vichy regime. Le Roy Ladurie described his childhood in Normandy growing up on his family estate in the countryside as intensely Catholic and royalist in politics. 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. Le Roy Ladurie's grandfather was a French Army officer of Catholic royalist views who was dishonorably discharged from the Army in 1902 for refusing orders from the anti-clerical government to close Catholic schools. Later, the former Captain Le Roy Ladurie returned to rural Normandy, was elected mayor of Villeray and was active in organising a union for rural workers.

During his childhood, Le Roy Ladurie's hero was Marshal Pétain. Marshal Pétain's fall from grace – from the hero of Verdun and one of France's most loved men to the reviled collaborator and one of France's most hated men, sentenced to death for high treason for his collaboration with Germany – had a major influence on Le Roy Ladurie's sense of history. Speaking of the rise and fall of Marshal Pétain from hero to traitor as an example of the vicissitudes of history, Le Roy Ladurie in a 1998 interview stated: "I have remained fascinated since then with what we call decline and fall. France is full of people who became very important, then became nothing. My fascination is probably due to the fact that my own family was once important and then became zero. There was a contrast between my own career and the feelings in my family." Because his father had been a minister in the Vichy government, his son grew up in an atmosphere of family shame and disgrace. The historian was educated in Caen at the Collège Saint-Joseph, in Paris at the Lycée Henri-IV and in Sceaux at the Lycée Lakanal. He was awarded an agrégation in history after studying at the École Normale Supérieure and a doctorat ès lettres from the University of Paris. Le Roy Ladurie has taught at the Lycée de Montpellier, the University of Montpellier, the École Pratique des Haute Études in Paris, the University of Paris and at the Collège de France, where he occupied from 1973 to 1999 the chair of History of Modern Civilization and became emeritus professor. ...

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