Roland Mousnier

Roland Émile Mousnier ( born September 7, 1907 in Paris, † February 8, 1993 ) was a French historian. He was the founder of a school of social historians of early modern history at the Sorbonne ( University of Paris IV).

Life and work

Mousnier studied at the Sorbonne and the École pratique des hautes études ( Agrégation 1931) and was then from 1932 a secondary school teacher in Rouen ( Lycée Corneille), and Paris. In 1934 he married Jeanne Lecacheur. During World War II he was in the Resistance. In 1947 he became a professor at the University of Strasbourg, and in 1955 at the Sorbonne. Since he was interested in social history, he went to study in the United States where he trained in sociology and anthropology. But he was close to neither the Annales school still Marxists, but rather it was a conservative Catholic historian who chose a prosopographic access. He established order in Paris at the Sorbonne, a school of social history, which stood in opposition to the Annales school at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1977 he retired.

Became known in 1958 to be violent dispute with the Soviet Marxist historian Boris Fedorovich Porschnew ( 1905-1972 ), author of Les soulèvements populaires en France de 1623 à 1648 (Russian 1948, French translation 1962), where he parts located in Leningrad of the estate of Pierre Séguier used. Mousnier rejected the view of peasant revolts of the 17th century (or more specifically tax revolts ) in France from the class struggle. They would be on closer inspection does not take place spontaneously, but organized by opposing ( against the administration of Mazarin and Richelieu about ) people of the nobility. Class consciousness emerged after Mousnier until the 18th century with the evolving capitalism. The Society of the 15th to the 18th century was dominated by contrast Mousnier of vertical orders of the civil consciousness marked (theory of the Société d' ordres ) and of relationship networks and patronage systems that he examined in his historical works. He concentrated on the elites, but also wrote a book about peasant revolts in the 17th century ( Fureurs paysannes 1968). For example, he examined as the political climate in France at the time of the assassination of Henry IV in his book Les hierarchies sociales 1969 he presented comparative studies of societies in Germany, Russia, France, China or Tibet and criticized communism and technocratic orders. More Books related to the history of institutions in the French absolutism and he wrote several large overall statements of historical eras. His first work was in 1945 on sale of offices in France in the early modern period, the subject of his dissertation.

In 1964 he gave up the private records of the Registrar Séguier. In 1992, he wrote a biography of Cardinal Richelieu.

Mousnier was considered an excellent teacher and was known for the quality of his lectures, the primacy saw but in the research and its research seminar. He maintained a close relationship with their students and staff, but with an authoritarian style of leadership. In the 1968 student revolts he reacted with disgust.

The Centre Roland Mousnier the CNRS at the Sorbonne for history of the early modern period is named after him. It arose from his founded with Victor -Lucien Tapié and Alphonse Dupront 1958 Centre de Recherches sur la civilization de l'Europe modern, which he directed until 1977.

He was an opponent of the Communists and had little sympathy for the social Catholicism. In the Algerian War, he was in the late 1950s, a strong proponent of a crackdown against the rebels.

In 1977 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.

Writings

  • La vénalité the offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII, Rouen: Maugard 1945, 2nd edition 1971
  • Les règlements du Conseil du Roi sous Louis XIII, Paris, 1949.
  • Le XVIIIe siècle: Intellectual révolution, technique et politique, 1715-1815 1953
  • With Ernest Labrousse, Marc Bouloiseau Le XVIIIe siècle: l' époque of the " Lumières " (1715-1815), PUF 1963
  • Les XVIe et XVIIe siècles: la grande de l' Humanité Intellectual mutation: l' avènement de la science moderne et l' expansion de l'Europe, 1953, 1993
  • Les XVIe et XVIIe siècles: les progrès de la civilization européenne et le déclin de l' Orient (1492-1715), 1954.
  • Progres scientifique et technique au XVIIIe siècle, 1958.
  • Paris au XVIIe siècle, 1962
  • L' assassinat d' Henri IV: 14 mai 1610, Gallimard, 1964. German Translation: A regicide in France, Propylaea 1970
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