Ernest Labrousse

Ernest Labrousse ( born March 16, 1895 in Barbezieux; † 24 May 1988 in Paris) was a French historian of Social and Economic History. Although he worked with the Annales school, he was not a member of it.

Life and work

He came from a family of craftsmen and studied history at the Sorbonne in François- Alphonse Aulard with the DEA degree in 1913. After the First World War, he studied law, graduating as a lawyer and his PhD on the social-revolutionary legislation from 1789 to 1791, but turned away about 1926 under the influence of François Simiand economic history. After the war, he was a follower of Marc Bloch, whose influence he go pratique in 1938 Directeur d' etudes in the fourth section of the École des hautes études had become a professor at the Sorbonne.

After his historical narrative model based on the three determinants of economy, society and mentality. He was the one who introduced quantitative methods in the study of history. So he drew up, for example, from existing data, the price of bread in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution and found that they were highest at the time of the storming of the Bastille.

1979 Labrousse was awarded together with Giuseppe Tucci the Balzan Prize for History. In 1964 he became an honorary doctorate in Krakow.

He was politically active in the French Socialists and the Communists and occasionally wrote for L' Humanité. In 1982 he became the successor of Albert Soboul president of the Société des études robespierristes, the editors of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.

Writings

• Esquisse du mouvement des prix et en France au of income 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
• Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 3 vols, Paris: PUF, 1970-1979.