Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - Les Paysans de Languedoc

Le Roy Ladurie first attracted attention with his doctoral thesis, Les paysans de Languedoc, which was published as a book in 1966 and translated into English as The Peasants of Languedoc in 1974. In this study of the peasantry of Languedoc over several centuries, Le Roy Ladurie employed a huge range of quantitative information, such as tithe, wage, tax, rent and profit records, together with the use of the theories of such thinkers as Ernest Labrousse, Michel Foucault, David Ricardo, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Thomas Malthus, François Simiand, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber, to contend that the history of Languedoc was "l'histoire immobile." He argued that the history of Langudedoc was marked by waves of growth and decline that in essence changed very little over the passage of time.

Le Roy Ladurie proposed that the determining feature of life in Languedoc was the culture of the people who lived there. He maintained that the reason why the people of Languedoc could not break the cycles of advance and decline was not so much technological factors, but was due to culture that prevented the people from developing more progressive technology and farming practices. In Le Roy Ladurie's view, there were "structures" comprising long-term and slowly changing material and mental patterns which underlined the more dramatic and, in his opinion, less important "conjoncture" of trends and events, upon which traditionally historians have focused. Like Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie believes that it is the history of the "structures" that really mattered, but unlike Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie has expressed an interest in biography and the histoire événementielle (history of events), which Braudel dismissed as irrelevant.