![]() ![]() ![]() In his life he has been a privileged child of Vichy, a fierce young cadre in the ranks of the pcf, a founder of the new-leftish Party of Socialist Unity, a cultural celebrity supporting the centre right, and now an old sage who refuses to sum up his beliefs for the convenience of posterity. footnote 2 He lionizes Tocqueville, whom he calls the John Wayne of French liberalism, but claims that Marxism, as a theory of the economic infrastructure, is ‘totally complementary’ to la pensée Tocquevillienne as a theory of the political superstructure. He describes himself as a ‘not very progressive Catholic’, contributes to Le Figaro and calls May 1968 a ‘disaster’, yet stubbornly espouses the most unfashionable paradigm on the Seine, historical materialism. footnote 1 Le Roy Ladurie, in contrast, is a chimera: quasi-reactionary in politics and semi-Marxist in methodology. This was well illustrated in the case of Le Roy Ladurie’s friend François Furet, a former Communist, who after rejecting the political left, declared war against ‘Stalino-Marxist historicism’ in all of its guises, including even the Annales school, which he denounced as ‘merely a Gallic substitute for Marxism’. Many of them, of course, enter public life from the left but exit from the right, in which case their conversion obligates a comprehensive reversal of previous convictions in order to become the mirror opposite. E mmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has long been a contrarian-or as he prefers to call himself, a free electron-in a culture whose mandarins sheathe themselves in seamless ideological armour. ![]()
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