siria's review against another edition
1.0
A slog. As befits an annaliste, Le Roy Ladurie is more interested in long-term structure than he is the personalities which drove the popular revolt in a small town in sixteenth-century southern France. He explores the ways in which rising discontent with the minimal taxes paid by the nobility, rising prices, tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism, and a host of other issues fed into the bloody events of St Blaise's Day, 1580. But ironically, for someone who pays so much attention to structures in general, Le Roy Ladurie paid little to the internal organisation of this book. I found it difficult to get a clear picture of how all the pieces of his argument hung together, and some of his statements a bit... dubious. Particularly the page he spent discussing young men and sexual assault, which smacked entirely too much of apologia to my mind. If you work specifically on this time period, you might find more here of interest and relevance than I did, but I bounced off this one hard.
More...