One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.

[1] His father was Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, who would become minister of Agriculture for Marshal Philippe Pétain and subsequently a member of the French Resistance after breaking with the Vichy regime.

The leading role played by the French Communists in the Resistance during the German occupation and the willingness of many of the traditional French elites to support the Vichy regime together with the apparent success achieved by the Soviet regime's planned economy and its "scientific socialism" led Le Roy Ladurie, like many other people of his generation in France, to embrace Communism as the best hope for humanity.

The character of Rubashov is generally believed to be modeled by Koestler on Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Old Bolshevik and the leader of the "rightist" (i.e. moderate) faction in the Communist Party who was shot in 1938 after a show trial in Moscow which Bukharin confessed to a fantastic array of bizarre and improbable charges such as being an agent of foreign powers, sabotage, "wrecking", and working with Leon Trotsky from his exile in Mexico City and the "White Guard" leaders in Paris to overthrow Stalin.

Le Roy Ladurie wrote in a 1949 essay about Darkness At Noon that: "Rubashov was right to sacrifice his life and especially his revolutionary honor so that the best of all possible regimes could be established one day".

[11] In this study of the peasantry of Languedoc over several centuries, Le Roy Ladurie employed a huge range of quantitative information such as tithe records, wage books, tax receipts, rent receipts and profit records, together with the theories of thinkers such as Thomas Malthus to contend that the history of Languedoc was "l'histoire immobile" (history that stands still).

[11] According to Le Roy Ladurie, there were four parts to the long economic cycle starting with "the low water mark" in the 15th century when French society was still recovering from the massive death toll caused by the Black Death which made way for a growing population, leading to a second phase the "advance" of growing prosperity that lasted until 1530,[11] where the growing population hit a ceiling of agricultural productivity leading to a period of economic decline that lasted for the rest of the 16th century[11] and a third phase if "maturity" in the 17th century when Languedoc's agricultural productivity caught up and finally a fourth phase, "the long period of recession".

But 'nature' in this case is actually culture; it is the customs, the way of life, the mentality of the people; it is a whole formed by technical knowledge and a system of values, by the means employed and the ends pursued".

[12] Le Roy Ladurie argued that, as a result, the unwillingness of the peasants of Languedoc to engage in technologically innovative farming techniques to increase the productivity of the land (as was happening during the same period in England) was the result of the "lack of the conscience, the culture, the morals, the politics, the education, the reformist spirit, and the unfettered longing for success" that characterized the entire culture of Languedoc during these centuries.

[13] Montaillou was a bestseller in both France and after its translation into English in the United States and Great Britain, and remains Le Roy Ladurie's most popular book by far.

[13] In Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie used the records of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, to develop a multi-layered study of life in a small French village over the course of several years.

[13] Le Roy Ladurie used the records of interrogations conducted by Fournier to offer a picture of both the material and mental worlds of the inhabitants of Montaillou.

[14] Many critics have noted that for Le Roy Ladurie, the village priest Father Pierre Clergue, an ardent womanizer whose vow of celibacy meant nothing and who apparently slept with most of the women of Montaillou seemed to be something of a hero for the historian.

Clergue's affair with the local aristocrat and noted beauty, the Countess Béatrice de Planisoles formed one of the central stories that Le Roy Ladurie related in Montaillou with much sympathy for the doomed couple.

[15] To understand the "total social fact of witchcraft", Le Roy Ladurie used the 1842 poem Françouneto written by Jacques Boè and based on a traditional French peasant folk tale.

[15] Le Roy Ladurie contended that the poem contains many authentic traces of popular beliefs about witchcraft in rural France during the 17th and 18th centuries.

[15] In The Beggar and the Professor, Le Roy Ladurie used the letters and memoirs of the Platter family to examine the social values of the 16th century, especially in regards to religion, medicine, crime, learning, and taxes.

The three men who dominated French politics in the 17th century, namely the Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin and King Louis XIV were all obsessed with winning la gloire (the glory) of making France into the world's greatest power, which meant that the 17th century was a period of constant warfare where France was almost always at war with some other power to win la gloire.

As a result, anti-tax revolts frequently broke out all over France in the 17th century as the Third Estate attempted to reject the oppressively heavy taxation needed to pay for the wars intended to win la gloire.

All of the anti-tax revolts were crushed with ferocious brutality by the Crown to send the message that it was folly on the part of ordinary people to challenge the might of the French state.

[20] At the end of his two-volume history, Le Roy Ladurie stated that the growth of popularity of Enlightenment ideas, anti-clericalism, and liberalism had by 1774 already placed France on the road to the French Revolution.

[20] The American historian Stuart Carroll commented that in these books of the 1990s, Le Roy Ladurie was according the decisions individuals and histoire événementielle a level of importance in influencing history that he had rejected in his 1973 book Le Territoire de l'historien where he had claimed the quantitative methodology and the study of long-term structural changes had replaced histoire événementielle and biographies as the main focus of the work of a historian.

Some, like Niall Ferguson, have questioned the value of "microhistory", arguing that it is wrong to assume that the study of one village or one incident in one town or one family reveals wider patterns of life in France, let alone the rest of Europe.

[20] The latter was a reference to the widespread practice of French peasant men in the Middle Ages and the early modern period of paying witches to use their (supposed) magical powers to make their rivals in love go impotent.