Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Le Roy Ladurie's grandfather was a French Army officer of Catholic royalist views who was dishonorably discharged from the Army in 1902 for refusing orders from the anti-clerical government to close Catholic schools.

Later, the former Captain Le Roy Ladurie returned to rural Normandy, was elected mayor of Villeray and was active in organising a union for rural workers.

During his childhood, Le Roy Ladurie's hero was Marshal Pétain.

Marshal Pétain's fall from grace – from the hero of Verdun and one of France's most loved men to the reviled collaborator and one of France's most hated men, sentenced to death for high treason for his collaboration with Germany – had a major influence on Le Roy Ladurie's sense of history.

The German occupation had been a profoundly traumatic experience for the French, not the least because unlike World War I, in which the Union sacrée proclaimed by Raymond Poincaré in 1914 had united the left and the right against the common German enemy, World War II had seen a civil war in France.

The Resistance had fought not only the Germans, but also the police, gendarmes and the much feared Milice of the Vichy regime.

The Milice were a collection of French fascists, gangsters and assorted adventurers used by the Vichy regime to hunt down and murder résistants, who in their turn assassinated members of the Milice.

Given this background, in which many young French people had seen at first-hand the pretty streets, avenues and squares of French cities, towns and villages sullied by acts of outrageous cruelty and violence, Le Roy Ladurie described his generation as a scarred one, saying: "It was dangerous for young people during the war. If we are subjected to violence, we will in turn be violent towards others. It is like someone who is sodomised and then sodomises others."

Le Roy Ladurie explained that he became a Communist as a reaction to his war-time experiences.

Bukharin's real crime had been to oppose Stalin in the post-Lenin succession struggle in the 1920s and to advocate continuing the New Economic Policy - which allocated control of the "commanding heights" of the Soviet economy to the state while allowing free enterprise in the rest of the economy - as a viable model for the future.

It was not until 1928 when Stalin brought in the First Five Year Plan that full socialism arrived in the Soviet Union, a policy choice that Bukharin had opposed.

The image of the Bukharin-like character Rubashov confessing to crimes that he did not commit in order to uphold the greatness of Communism in Darkness At Noon caused a sensation at the time, but the truth was rather more brutal and sordid: Bukharin had been psychologically "broken" after months of torture by the NKVD, and had been reduced to such a state that he was willing to "confess" to anything.

Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie (, 19 July 1929 – 22 November 2023) was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry.

One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.

Le Roy Ladurie was born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados.

His father was Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, who would become minister of Agriculture for Marshal Philippe Pétain and subsequently a member of the French Resistance after breaking with the Vichy regime.

Le Roy Ladurie described his childhood in Normandy growing up on his family estate in the countryside as intensely Catholic and royalist in politics.

The Le Roy Ladurie family were originally the aristocratic de Roy Laduries, descended from a Catholic priest who fell in love with one of his parishioners, dropped out of the priesthood to marry her and was then ennobled by the Crown; the family dropped the aristocratic de from their surname at the time of the French Revolution.

The Great Depression of the 1930s together with France's defeat in 1940 at the hands of Germany had caused many people in France to lose faith in both capitalism and liberal democracy.

The leading role played by the French Communists in the Resistance during the German occupation and the willingness of many of the traditional French elites to support the Vichy regime together with the apparent success achieved by the Soviet regime's planned economy and its "scientific socialism" led Le Roy Ladurie, like many other people of his generation in France, to embrace Communism as the best hope for humanity.

The character of Rubashov is generally believed to be modeled by Koestler on Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Old Bolshevik and the leader of the "rightist" (i.e. moderate) faction in the Communist Party who was shot in 1938 after a show trial in Moscow which Bukharin confessed to a fantastic array of bizarre and improbable charges such as being an agent of foreign powers, sabotage, "wrecking", and working with Leon Trotsky from his exile in Mexico City and the "White Guard" leaders in Paris to overthrow Stalin.

When the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler's 1940 novel Darkness at Noon was translated into French in 1949, Le Roy Ladurie saw it as confirming the greatness of Stalinism instead of the condemnation that Koestler had intended.

Koestler's novel concerned a prominent Soviet Communist and Old Bolshevik named Rubashov who was arrested and charged with crimes against the Soviet Union that he did not commit, but which he willingly confessed to in a show trial after hearing an appeal to Party discipline.

The PCF proudly billed themselves as the "party of 75,000 shot"-a reference to the claim that the Germans had shot 75,000 French Communists between 1941 and 1944 (the true figure was actually 10,000); nevertheless the PCF had acquired tremendous prestige in 1940s France as a result of its role in the Resistance.

Le Roy Ladurie was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1945 and 1956.

His devoutly Catholic parents had expected him to become a Catholic priest and were scandalized that their son should become an ardent Communist and atheist.

He was awarded an agrégation in history after studying at the École Normale Supérieure (class of 1949) and a doctorat ès lettres from the University of Paris.

Le Roy Ladurie wrote in a 1949 essay about Darkness At Noon that: "Rubashov was right to sacrifice his life and especially his revolutionary honor so that the best of all possible regimes could be established one day".

Le Roy Ladurie was to subsequently admit that he had misunderstood the message of Darkness At Noon.

At the height of the Cold War in the early 1950s, Le Roy Ladurie described the atmosphere inside the Party as "une intensité liturgique".

In 1955, Le Roy Ladurie married Madeleine Pupponi with whom he had one son and one daughter.

Le Roy Ladurie left the PCF after doubts caused by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution became too much for him.

Le Roy Ladurie was later to write that the sight of Soviet tanks crushing the ordinary people of Hungary in 1956 who were merely demanding basic human rights led him to abandon his optimism of the late 1940s that the Soviet Union represented the best hope of humanity and instead led him to the conclusion that communism was an inhumane, totalitarian ideology that oppressed people in the Soviet Union, Hungary and elsewhere.

Le Roy Ladurie's break with the PCF did not mean an immediate break with the left: he joined the Socialist Party, running as a Socialist candidate in Montpellier in 1957, winning 2.5% of the vote.

In 1963, a disillusioned Le Roy Ladurie left the Socialists.

Le Roy Ladurie has often written for Le Nouvel Observateur, L'Express, and Le Monde newspapers, and appeared on French television (in France, historians have far more social prestige than they do in the English-speaking world; to be a successful historian in France is to be something of a celebrity).

Le Roy Ladurie has taught at the Lycée de Montpellier, the University of Montpellier, the École Pratique des Haute Études in Paris, the University of Paris and at the Collège de France, where he occupied from 1973 to 1999 the chair of History of Modern Civilization and became emeritus professor.

Speaking of the rise and fall of Marshal Pétain from hero to traitor as an example of the vicissitudes of history, Le Roy Ladurie in a 1998 interview stated: "I have remained fascinated since then with what we call decline and fall. France is full of people who became very important, then became nothing. My fascination is probably due to the fact that my own family was once important and then became zero. There was a contrast between my own career and the feelings in my family."

Because his father had been a minister in the Vichy government, his son grew up in an atmosphere of family shame and disgrace.

The historian was educated in Caen at the Collège Saint-Joseph, in Paris at the Lycée Henri-IV and in Sceaux at the Lycée Lakanal.