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It is to two French Annales historians — Fernand Braudel and Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie — that I owe my deep fascination with the small things in history that lay the foundations for the background within which the Great Men and the Great Ideas can strut their stuff.
I remember my first reading of Le Roy Ladurie’s Les Paysans de Languedoc and Montaillou, and they thrilled me. Le Roy Ladurie “shared the view [of the Annalistes] that historical explanation should emerge from the interlocking relationship of different strata of time: the longue durée of geography and climate; the social time of mentalités or collective mental attitudes, and that of political events. But, as he put it, many such studies lacked the “regard direct” of evidence from contemporary witnesses.” His own books, by contrast, thrived on such contemporary witnesses.
He was an inspiration.
He died earlier this month, aged 94.
Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 