Tea at Trianon: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Dies at 94

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Dies at 94

Le Roy Ladurie's book Montaillou was part of the basis for my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From The Washington Post:

For Dr. Le Roy Ladurie, who died Nov. 22 in Paris at 94, the withering persecution of Cathars became a landmark study in ways to reexamine history from the streets and alleys and taverns. His 1975 book “Montaillou: Village occitan de 1294 à 1324” (published in English in 1978 as “Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error”) helped establish Dr. Le Roy Ladurie as a leader in an academic discipline known as the Annales movement, which seeks the widest possible views in historical analysis and often rejects traditional historical framing that focused on rulers and military leaders.

“The Sherlock Holmes of the scholarly world,” wrote anthropologist Laurence Wylie in a 1987 Washington Post Book World essay and review on Dr. Le Roy Ladurie’s work. In more than 25 books, Dr. Le Roy Ladurie teased out stories and narratives from details found anywhere he could shake them loose: court transcripts, diaries, funeral records, weather data and mercantile ledgers. Dr. Le Roy Ladurie called it the “mental universe” of daily life. There, he said, were tales that offered a deeper and more nuanced appreciation to the past. (Read more.)