- Ernest Labrousse
Camille-Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) was a French
historian specializing in social and economic history.Labrousse established a historical model centered on three nodes: economic, social and cultural, inventing the quantitative history sometimes now called "
Cliometrics ". Eschewing biographies and the narrative accounts of individual witnesses, which have provided the backbone of traditionalhistoriography , he applied statistical methods and influenced a whole generation.Fernand Braudel 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" [Fernand Braudel, "The Wheels of Commerce" 1982, vol. II in "Civilization and Capitalism" p 343] . 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 theEarly Modern world and the world that was transformed by theIndustrial Revolution , 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 subsistence crisis in the pre-industrial grain-and-textiles economy of France and its effect in precipitating theFrench Revolution , detailed in "La Crise de l’économie française" (1943) [Labrouste'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 hisparadigm has been adjusted by subsequent studies that have reintroduced complexities.Labrousse was not strictly a member of the
Annales School of historians, who were too influenced by the preconceptions ofMarxist historiography to satisfy him, but he collaborated in their efforts to create a new human history centered in historical demography. In 1948 he chaired a celebrated conference inquiring "How revolutions are born" focusing on French revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, applying to them his social, economic and political methodology.Labrousse had begun as a student of
François Simiand .Notes
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 régim et au début de la Révolution" (Paris:PUF) 1943, which gained him a chair at theSorbonne . It was introduced to an English-speaking audience by Shepard B. Clough 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.References
* [http://www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/histoire/affirmation02.html ADPF, "Histoire et historiens en France depuis 1945"] (in French)
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