Based on two recent deaths in the last quarter of the year, that of Natalie Zemon Davis on October 23 and that of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on November 22, an assessment of the French school of the Annales can be made in this end of the year 2023. Both achieved a very high academic reputation by creating attractive stories about individuals or social groups that had not been written about before, and through that path they became masters in the renewal of the study of history.
The two led dissimilar careers, perhaps because she was North American and he was French, but looking back on their lives they seem complementary to me.
Davis’s (Detroit, 1928) interest in the marginalities of modern France affected the studies on the peasants of Languedoc in the 16th and 17th centuries of Le Roy Ladurie (Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, 1929) and while she tried to decipher the fiction of the archives to analyze acts of social or moral dissidence, he investigated the history of the climate since the year 1000, several decades ahead of environmental studies. In their works of the seventies, both opened avenues of access to ignored details of the past, trying to convince readers that this was the correct way to do history in the future, without undermining the methodological norms of the school outlined in the twenties by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and carefully applied by Fernando Braudel during the fifties.
And it is that in the seventies, years of good intellectual health in Paris, the conceptual bases were created for the appearance of relevant figures in the study of history: Georges Duby or Jacques Le Goff for the Middle Ages, François Furet or Mona Ozouf for the revolution. Davis took advantage of the moment, and presented one of the books that gave him the most fame, The Return of Martin Guerra, a story of an impostor who returned to his town at the time of the religious wars; while Le Roy Ladurie described the Pyrenean village of Montaillou, whose inhabitants accused of being Cathars were subjected to the judicial investigation of an inquisitor who knew how to extract confessions from simple people, including women, which gave access to the voice for the first time. of the peasant women, even if it was in an inquisitorial search.
At the same time, Davis was working on Women of the Margins, whose voice had also been silenced until then. With the success of these books, the receptive channels of microhistory were opened, a system of archival analysis on specific and short-term aspects that required those who practiced them to perform the task of a writer; In a way, that was the problem.
The conversion of the historian into a writer upset the venerable members of the academies, as they discovered that a good adjective was as important as a footnote.
Natalie Zemon Davis took advantage of the success of her books to undertake the study in 2006 of a mythical figure from the 16th century, brought from oblivion by the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf. His study of León the African, a man from Granada from the time of the Nasrids who, upon being taken prisoner, was handed over as a slave to Pope Leo X, who not only gave him his name at his baptism, but also facilitated his transformation into a cultural reference. humanist with The description of Africa. The life of Leo the African explains the nature of the Mediterranean in the midst of the conflict between Latin Christianity and the Turks located in Istanbul, the old Constantinople.
For its part, Le Roy Ladurie extracted from the fame of Montaillou the calm necessary to add the environment and the characters that transform it, the peasants. Away from his initial Marxism, he does not speak of them as the personification of relations of production in dispute with the landowners for the control of the productive forces, but rather he is interested in their mentality and their ways of life, the origin of his book Historia human and comparative climate, with which he recovered the objectives discreetly stated at the Collège de France in 1928 by creating a chair of Comparative History of European societies to alleviate the weight of national history, the only one with legitimacy until then.
On more than one occasion, both of them confessed to me, during times of my personal discouragement, the effort they had to make to connect readers with the story they wanted to tell and the need to maintain a line of research, even if it was against the disdain of the mandarins. And in this they both agree again, since they worked until an advanced age always with a very high sense of responsibility and with an exquisite taste for the subjects of study.
Both Natalie and Emmanuel were good-natured people, open, elegant, incapable of duplicity, who looked at the past with a solvent ability to link the richness and variety of the data they handled, from notarial documents to fairy tales, from public records. to political debates about how to make history. As I pay tribute to them at the hour of their death, I realize that, thanks to their efforts and bravery, the story continues.