Early Life and Career
Le Roy Ladurie was born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados, the son of Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, minister of Agriculture for Marshal Philippe Pétain and subsequently a resistant. The historian was educated in Caen at the Collège Saint-Joseph, in Paris at the Lycée Henri-IV and in Sceaux at the Lycée Lakanal. He was awarded an agrégation in history from the École Normale Supérieure and a doctorat ès lettres from the University of Paris. Le Roy Ladurie has taught at the Lycée de Montpellier, the University of Montpellier, the École Pratique des Haute Études in Paris, the University of Paris and at the Collège de France, where he occupied from 1973 to 1999 the chair of History of Modern Civilization and is now emeritus professor.
Le Roy Ladurie was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1945 and 1963. He left the party after doubts caused by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution became too much for him. He has since then analysed his political engagement and Communism in Ouverture, société, pouvoir: de l’Édit de Nantes à la chute du communisme (2004) and Les grands procès politiques, ou la pédagogie infernale (2002).
Le Roy Ladurie often writes for Le Nouvel Observateur, L'Express, and Le Monde newspapers and appears on French television.
Read more about this topic: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“There’s something tragic in the fate of almost every person—it’s just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)