Ernest Labrousse

Who was Ernest Labrousse?

Camille-Ernest Labrousse 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". Labrousse's prominence was also a result of his post at the Sorbonne, where he supervised a generation of French post-doctoral thèses and his organizational skills from the 1950s onwards in leading team research efforts that were models of the historian's craft.

His first great work was his Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle, the result of his law dissertation under the direction of Albert Aftalion. It synthesizes several data series on prices of food and manufactures, on incomes, including the inflationary rise in land rents, and on lagging wages over the course of the century, as part of the interplay between economic trends and class frictions that led ultimately to revolution.