Camille-Ernest Labrousse (

Barbezieux Barbezieux-Saint-Hilaire () is a commune in the Charente department, Southwestern France. The commune was formed in 1973 by the merger of the former communes Barbezieux and Saint-Hilaire.Charente Charente (; Saintongese: ''Chérente''; oc, Charanta ) is a department in the administrative region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, south western France. It is named after the river Charente, the most important and longest river in the department, an ...

, 16 March 1895 – 24 May 1988,

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...

) was a French

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

specializing in social and economic history.

Biography

Labrousse established a historical model centered on three nodes—economic, social and cultural—inventing the quantitative history sometimes now called "

cliometrics Cliometrics (, also ), sometimes called new economic history or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social and ...

". Eschewing biographies and the narrative accounts of individual witnesses, which have provided the backbone of traditional

historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians hav ...

, he applied statistical methods and influenced a whole generation.

Fernand Braudel Fernand Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' ...

said that if it were not for Labrousse, "historians would never have set to work as willingly as they did on the study of wages and prices". Labrousse's prominence was also a result of his post at the

Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...

, where he supervised a generation of French post-doctoral ''thèses'' and his organizational skills from the 1950s onwards in leading team research efforts that were models of the historian's craft. His first great work was his ''Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle'' ("Sketch of the movement of prices and revenues in France during the 18th century", 1932), the result of his law dissertation under the direction of Albert Aftalion. It synthesizes several data series on prices of food and manufactures, on incomes, including the inflationary rise in land rents, and on lagging wages over the course of the century, as part of the interplay between economic trends and class frictions that led ultimately to revolution. Labrousse's own work concentrated on eighteenth and nineteenth-century France, but his constant concern for working methods that could be expanded beyond his subjects at hand to inspect other parts of the early modern world and the world that was transformed by the

Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...

, is exemplified in the range of studies in the ''hommage'' of his pupils and their pupils that was edited by Braudel and others, ''Conjoncture économique, structures sociales'' (Paris 1974). The "Labrousse model" of the

subsistence crisis A subsistence crisis is a crisis caused by economic factors, and example being high costs for food, which may be caused by either natural or man-made factors."The European subsistence crisis of 1845–1850: a comparative perspective", http://www. ...

in the preindustrial grain-and-textiles economy of France and its effect in precipitating the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are conside ...

, detailed in the second of his two magisterial works, ''La Crise de l’économie française'' (1943), which Fernand Braudel called "the greatest work of history to have appeared in France in the course of the last twenty-five years."Braudel, "Histoire et Science Sociale: La Longue Durée" (1958) ''Annales E.S.C.'' 13.4 (October–December 1958:725-753), quoted by Potter 2010. Labrousse's social and economic rendering of the Revolution is summarized in the hundred pages he contributed to ''Le XVIIIe Siecle: Revolution Intellectuelle, Technique et Politique (1715-1815)'' with Roland Mousnier and Marc Bouloiseau (Paris: PUF) 1953). has especially wide application, though his paradigm has been adjusted by subsequent studies that have reintroduced complexities. Labrousse, whose early background was in progressive political activism, was not strictly a member of the Annales School of historians, who were too influenced by the preconceptions of

Marxist historiography Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided s ...

to satisfy him, but he collaborated in their efforts to create a new human history centered in

historical demography Historical demography is the quantitative study of human population in the past. It is concerned with population size, with the three basic components of population change (fertility, mortality, and migration), and with population characteristi ...

. In 1948 he chaired a celebrated conference inquiring into "how revolutions are born," focusing on the French revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, and applying to them his social, economic and political methodology. In 1979 he received the

Balzan Prize The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the br ...

for History (''ex aequo'' with

Giuseppe Tucci Giuseppe Tucci (; 5 June 1894 – 5 April 1984) was an Italian orientalist, Indologist and scholar of East Asian studies, specializing in Tibetan culture and the history of Buddhism. During its zenith, Tucci was a supporter of Italian fascis ...

). Labrousse had begun as a student of François Simiand.

Major works

* ''Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle'', 2 vols. (Paris:Dalloz) 1932. * ''La Crise de l’économie française à la fin de l'ancien régime et au début de la Révolution'' (Paris:PUF) 1943, which gained him a chair at the

. It was introduced to an English-speaking audience by

Shepard B. Clough Shepard Bancroft Clough (December 6, 1901 – June 7, 1990) was an American economic historian. He was a professor of European history at Columbia University. Biography Clough was born on December 6, 1901, in Bloomington, Indiana, and moved to Le ...

in a review article "The Crisis in French Economy at the Beginning of the Revolution", ''The Journal of Economic History'' (1946) pp 191–96. * ''Histoire économique et sociale de la France'', 3 vols. (Paris:PUF) 1970-79.

Notes

References

ADPF, "Histoire et historiens en France depuis 1945"
(in French)

Biography

Major works

Notes

References

Further reading