Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel Bernard (1929– )

French historian. He was a pupil of Fernand Braudel and, like him, a leading member of the Annales school. The importance he attaches to customs, rituals, and symbols is seen in Le Carneval de Romans/Carnival in Romans 1979, a study of a riot in a small French town 1579–80.

His doctoral thesis Les Paysans de Languedoc/The Peasants of Languedoc 1966 dealt with economic and social changes in a region of southern France in the 15th to 18th centuries and especially with ‘the activities, the struggles, and the thoughts of the people themselves’. Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324/Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1978 was a best-seller in both France and Britain. His belief that ecological and demographic factors determined the conditions of life in rural Europe is supported at length in Le Territoire de l'historien 1973 (selections from Vol. 1 translated 1979 as The Territory of the Historian; selections from Vol. 2 translated 1981 as The Mind and Method of the Historian).