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 traditional historiography, 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" ^[1]. 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 the Early Modern world and the world that was transformed by the Industrial 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 the French Revolution, detailed in La Crise de l’économie française (1943)^[2] has especially wide application, though his paradigm 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 of Marxist 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. In 1979 he received the Balzan Prize for History (ex aequo with Giuseppe Tucci.

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 the Sorbonne. 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

• ADPF, "Histoire et historiens en France depuis 1945" (in French)