Maria Novella Borghetti, L’œuvre d’Ernest Labrousse. Genèse d’un modèle d’histoire économique, éditions de l’EHESS, Paris, 2005

Compte-rendu pour Business history review par Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur
 

This book, very much in the Italian tradition of historiography, analyzes the work of Ernest Labrousse (1895-1988), one of the leading economic historians specializing in 18^th and 19^th century French history, and probably the most influential in French academia during and after his long tenure in the economic history chair at the Sorbonne (1945-65).

After a preface by Maurice Aymard, who stresses that after a zenith in the early 1980s, the influence of Labrousse is now at its nadir and could well increase now that he is becoming a classic – that is, also an object of history, as this book testifies –, the book is organized in a brief introduction and five chapters.

The introduction starts from the observation of the recent occultation of Labrousse, whose work was almost not mentioned during the academic debates of the 200^th anniversary of the French Revolution, a revolution that was so central to his work. It suggests he was a victim of revisionist interpretations of the Revolution that minimize its economic dimension, from a globalization process that marginalizes an historiography entirely centred on France, but also from the decline of economic history in historic inquiry. It argues that the very success and domination of Labrousse’s methods may have contributed to this decline in France, an hypothesis to which the author comes back in the conclusion and which plays an important role in the book.

The first two chapters present the original career of Labrousse: a lawyer by training and a journalist by taste for the political debate (he was a militant socialist), his first 1932 doctoral dissertation (L’Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au 18e siècle) was in economics, a discipline that refused to integrate him as a professor (he failed the agrégation in  1932 and 1934). His second dissertation (La crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution), in 1943, was in history, and led him to succeed Marc Bloch at the Sorbonne. From there, he more or less shared the power in the discipline with Fernand Braudel: Labrousse participated in founding the 6^th section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the ancestor of Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and they led together the enormous Histoire Economique et Sociale de la France, a multi-volume, multi-authors project that was published in the late 1970s and 1980s, and was largely dominated by their former students.

Chapter one also presents the complicated relationships that Labrousse had with economic theory, with Marxism and left-wing militancy, and with 18^th century economic thought (the ancient thought he most had to deal with in his research). Although he emphasized the conflicts in the distribution of resources and power, Labrousse explicitly used the marginal theory of prices, and borrowed concepts and categories (the farmer, the land-owner) from Turgot or Quesnay. He actually never put analytic concepts and theories in the forefront, a place reserved to historical data.

Chapter 2 also discusses in detail the relationship between Labrousse and the works by François Simiand, the influential economist, sociologist and historian in the Durkheimian tradition who welcomed him warmly before dying in the mid 1930s, and with whom he shares much of his methodology.

Chapter 3 discusses the choices and uses of sources in Labrousse’s works. Labrousse was one of the first historians to affirm the major interest of statistical data coming from institutions. For example, for agricultural prices, which were central to his first books, he preferred using the data from the Contrôle general, a state institution that recorded market prices under a well-established methodology, rather than “pure” market prices registered by individual traders but not comparable with each other (but which were preferred by many historians). The major role given to the detailed assessment of his sources and his efforts to understand their construction and context made Labrousse acceptable to historians, when the focus on quantification and statistics made him understandable by economists. This helped him to become one of the inventors and the main transmitter of histoire sérielle, an historiography tradition that focused on establishing time-series of high quality and use them to build chronology and historical interpretations.

Chapter 4 discusses the meaning of time in Labrousse’s work. It shows that Labrousse had an objective vision of time in the positivist tradition, and tried to use state-of-the-art statistical techniques in order to decompose time series into various cyclical components, which he attempted relating to the perceptions of times by contemporaries: crises, structural changes, and long term trends.

Chapter 5 presents the relationships between Labrousse’s methodology and interpretations, but also with his rhetoric. It shows how the very strictly scientific construction at which Labrousse aimed did not exclude the use of a beautiful but controlled rhetoric through which he gave life to the socio-economic types he had statistically constructed.

The book is a success in that it helps understanding the specifics of the method of Labrousse and places him in his intellectual and historical context. One may regret that the content of Labrousse’s work is not more precisely presented, as well as the challenge it represented to established interpretations, and the challenges it received later from its successors. The work by Labrousse’s students – many of the economic historians of the 1960s to 1980s – and the master’s influence on them are not discussed either. Nevertheless, for anyone wanting to understand the history of 20th century French economic history, to compare it to others or to think about its future, this book is certainly an important one.

Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur
Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales<>
Paris School of economics