Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Normandy, July 19, 1929-November 22, 2023), a free historian, has died. A brave one. Well, in those seventies you had to be, perhaps as much or more than now. Like other members of the so-called School of Annals, Le Roy Ladurie did not allow himself to be carried away by the obligatory speech and the thick line. He deserted the Communist Party, like so many ties that we consider totalitarian today, but that then seemed progressive. Away from academic fashions, from that methodological heritage that only understood the Middle Ages as a production regime, this old historian was able to disengage from a conception of history that, like a railway, could only circulate on a single track. , destroying the landscape.
Like his teacher Fernand Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie wanted to see the slow movement of geography, the beating of waves on the same coasts, the value of the small, of the unnoticed, of what many considered irrelevant for a long time. His was a story of the passing of life, of the evanescent remains of the past. A year before Carlo Ginzburg published the cheese and the Wormswrote a modern classic with a terrible title: Montaillou, Occitan village, from 1294 to 1324. Unlike now, in those days there were still book readers, even thick books. After all, who could care about the history of a remote village in the Pyrenees that had 250 inhabitants at the beginning of the 14th century?
The truth is that this book with such an obscure title came to interest many people. Since its appearance in 1975, Montaillou It paved the way for a way of doing history that, using anthropology and ethnography, sought to reconstruct the daily lives of insignificant beings from the past. Here there were no kings or prelates, but poor shepherds, priests and villagers, little inquisitors. The book also dared to discuss the historiographic trends of the moment, starting with the omnipresent historical materialism. In the first case, it required imagination and the ability to put flesh on the bones of the record, so that the things that happened in Montaillou could be followed and told like a novel, which is how you read that book: like a novel. Secondly, imagination had to be accompanied by courage, since it was not just about transforming the testimony into a story, but the story into evidence. The drop of water had to serve to explain or to stir the sea of historians, to answer questions that, to this day, are still relevant.
The fact that Le Roy Ladurie was able to recover the lives of the villagers from the archive only confirms that everything was known in that small village. The interest of the book then did not lie in the relationship that the public could have with the private, but in the way in which secrets were managed. That is the first lesson that this wonderful book left us. It matters little that the facts exposed have been verbalized through a coercive process and that fear functions as an incentive for confession, what really matters is the exhaustive knowledge that the neighbors of this strange place possess about each other. It is in the context of social relations without secrets that it is worth asking if perhaps the greatest achievement of our contemporary world, the aspect on which there should be a broad consensus, was not, as has been explained to us so many times, the emergence of public opinion, but the circumstance that, for the first time in the West, privacy is beginning to be demanded. The zeal with which it began to be cultivated in the European courts at the beginning of the 15th century does not exist in the medieval village. On the contrary, Le Roy Ladurie used the chinks in the walls to record the extent to which the inhabitants of Montaillou knew almost everything about everyone. Maybe they may not say it. But they know it. Or they think they know. Their forms of sociability depended precisely on that tradition, sadly recovered today, in which the story is constructed by word of mouth, in the manner of a sad exercise in impudence.
Many years before the history of emotions occupied the academic space it enjoys today, Le Roy Ladurie’s work already sought to understand the dramatic nature of human passions as well as their forms of exchange. Emotions not only served, in his opinion, to give color to experience, but to establish social bonds and intellectual dispositions. When looking towards the quagmire of the minuscule, belief could not be separated from its illegitimate origin, which was nothing more than a ritualized action that often began with a gesture. “Emotion underlies the gestures, the tears, the smiles, the ironic or obscene postures,” he wrote. We can of course locate knowledge in the immaculate sphere of thought, but we can also interweave it in the material space that makes it possible. Obsessed with the description of everyday experience, Le Roy Ladurie’s work advances from things to beliefs, through the reconstruction of emotional practices that are at the same time known to us and foreign to us. From fear to love through amazement, anger or attachment, his work builds a story of slow time, in which the forces that govern the destinies of the past have not been able to be put aside.
This Thursday he died at the age of 94. We will continue reading it, as long as we remain medieval.
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