Paris-Montpellier: PC-PSU, 1945-1963

"PC is the Parti Communiste and the PSU is the Parti Socialiste Unifié , which is a democratic socialist party that flourished as a result of the Algerian War and then exists briefly in the 1960s and feeds into Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, eventually. The reason I included it is partly that I felt I should include something in French and this is a rare example of Le Roy Ladurie’s work that hasn’t been translated. Le Roy Ladurie is just a fantastic historian. Again, he was one of those people in the 1970s who conveyed this extraordinary excitement in their work, especially in his great book Montaillou , about a Pyrenean village and the investigation of the Cathar heresy there, which he then uses to reconstruct the whole social life in late medieval rural society. This book is extraordinary, partly, again, because of the confidence behind it. I look at this book and I think, ‘This man is writing his intellectual autobiography when he’s in his early 50s.’ It’s extraordinary that he had the self-confidence to do that and that it didn’t seem incongruous to do that. The whole book doesn’t mention the thing for which he’s most famous, which is writing Montaillou . In some ways that’s very exasperating because one wants to know how he came to write this classic book. It’s exciting because he’s just got a superb eye for detail. He talks a lot about what it’s like to grow up in the Normandy countryside. He talks about moving to Montpellier and the southern culture he discovers there. You’ve just got a constant sense of this man who’s always looking at the world as a historian. He’s always aware of the kinds of things that might later interest a historian. His own personal history is very interesting. His father was Minister of Agriculture in the Vichy government, not a dishonourable minister, and a man who leaves and joins the Resistance in 1943. Nonetheless, it means he grows up within a certain kind of Catholic, right-wing culture. He then rebels against that as a student and joins the Communist Party. He’s a Stalinist. He’s then one of a large group of French intellectuals who move away from Communism in the 1950s. There’s a beautiful—and I’m sure in retrospect rather stylized, rather simplified—description of him leaving the Communist Party when the Soviet Union invades Hungary. He says that he cycled on his mobylette through the streets of Montpellier to hand in his party card in his pyjamas because he was so outraged by this. He’s very good at dramatizing what are, obviously, changes happening to all sorts of people of his generation. He’s very funny about the life he leads. Nowadays, it seems to me, historians—especially Anglo-Saxon historians—take our own lives terribly seriously. I go to endless seminars where people say, ‘Oh, I feel threatened by the fact that my political position means people say nasty things about me on social media.’ And you think, ‘Well, stop watching social media then.’ But Le Roy Ladurie lives in a world where the Algerian settlers, the Organization Armeé Secrète, put a bomb outside his flat. He says, ‘It was a very small bomb, it didn’t do much harm.’ He says that they resent him because they see him as someone who ought to be on the right because of his family background, but has actually moved to the political left. He describes all this in an equable tone, as an amusing series of incidents, which sound very terrifying to live through, but he’s always rather detached and academic about them. The book gives you a sense of what it’s like to be a really productive historian, of intellectual adventure. Like lots of that generation of French historians, he begins his life as a lycée teacher, being sent to the provinces to teach in a school. You get a sense of him coming alive to the possibilities of research in the provinces. It’s a very moving book because of his talk about politics, his own political position and the way in which he’s rather ironical and detached. He has this extraordinary eye for social change and things going on around him. You get less of that than you might suppose. One of the interesting things about him—given that he’s such an important historian and taken so seriously in the Anglo-Saxon world as the last great representative of the Annales school—is that he tends to see things in narrower terms. He’s very interested in sources, which is something that I think people totally neglect when they’re trying to understand French historians, how much—in Le Roy Ladurie’s case—the key discovery of his life was the Inquisition files that led him into Montaillou. He’s interested in networks of patronage. He’s got quite a hard-headed, cynical view of the French historical profession. If you want to know about his historiography, the books to read are the two volumes Parmi Les Historiens and Le Territoire de l’Historien, which are basically collections of his book reviews. You realize that there’s a period when Le Roy Ladurie reviews everything that’s published and he’s always got something to say that is more interesting than anybody else. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I read him a lot during the Covid pandemic because he writes about plague. He says in the early 1970s, ‘we’re going to live through the age of the jet plague.’ He uses this Trumpian phrase that the plague is ‘chez elle’ (at home) in Asia, and it’s bound to come over on jet airplanes. There’s a wonderful moment where he reviews a book on the military profession in the Middle Ages. He says, ‘If you think about it, when societies invented soldiers, they had to invent the idea of the civilian at the same time. The idea of the civilian dates from the invention of the conventional soldier.’ I remember reading this review and comparing it with a review in the English Historical Review of the same book. There was this very, very dull English review about the book being ‘some useful work based on solid sources.’ Then you read this brilliant idea, which explores the implications and so much more in a wide-ranging and exciting way. That’s a very good question and a disconcerting one. One answer might be to say that this is just autobiographical, these are books that dominated my youth, although lots of them I didn’t actually read until I was at least in my 20s. I think there’s also, especially in France, a kind of golden generation, born in the late 20s, early 30s. Even the Anglo-Saxon historians I’ve talked about here are often responding to that generation. There’s an intellectual confidence that eventually goes, partly with specialization, partly with the sense of the political minefields about how you write history that makes these kinds of books harder to write. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think that France itself has come to be seen as less central. These historians were writing at a time when people writing about France took its centrality for granted. They were writing books that would be read by every civilized person in the world. That’s much harder to sustain now. When I got my job at King’s in 1991, the job was advertised as ‘Lecturer in French History’. There will never be a job in England again, which is advertised as a lectureship in French history. France has stopped being central. I suppose the book I might have mentioned in this context is a book by Pierre Nora called Les Lieux de Mémoire , the Realms of Memory in English translation. Pierre Nora is a wonderful historian, a contemporary of Le Roy Ladurie and also to some extent a contemporary of Paxton’s. There’s this odd tension between Paxton and the French historians. Le Roy Ladurie doesn’t like Paxton because Paxton is rude about his father. Nora is always said to be the man who stopped Paxton from being published by Gallimard, the most prestigious publisher in France. Nonetheless, as Nora edits Les Lieux de Memoire , there’s almost a sense that the writing of French history has ceased to be a natural activity and has become a more self-conscious activity in which you’re creating a certain kind of myth about your country. It’s almost like the winding up of a certain kind of national narrative, if that makes sense."