Montaillou revisited

Ferdinand Mount

The best place to let off a bomb without being noticed is in the middle of a firework display. The bangs and whizzes, the oohs and aahs may drown the noise of crashing rafters. Behind the exploding rainbow of a best-seller more disturbing forces are often at work. The popular success of Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Scolar Press £12.50) has been phenomenal. In France, over 200,000 copies sold: thousands more in Italy; an enthusiastic reception from almost every leading British historian. And, the final accolade, a BBC-2 camera team has been panting up the stony Pyrenean slopes to film what remains of this now legendary village.

There is no real mystery about how long analysis of life in a mediaeval French village by a professor--of the rigorous Annales school has come to be a best-seller. As John Kenyon points out, 'though its form and purpose are irreproachably academic, this is a keyhole-peeping book'. The Bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier, in his zeal to stamp out the Cathar heresy, conducted a remorselessly detailed interrogation of the villagers. The three volumes of the testimony he collected provide what Hugh Trevor-Roper calls a `Chaucerian gallery of vivid mediaeval portraits'. The book is Chaucer factionalised: the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner presented as real historical personages, telling their own story at an ambling mediaeval pace to the bishop and every word taken down. As one reviewer pointed out, not perhaps without a touch of envy, there can have been few best-sellers easier to write. For the most part, Ladurie has simply set out to reconstitute the mental world of the Montaillou villagers by chopping up their testimony and reassembling it under subject headings: 'The shepherds', 'body language and sex', 'Morality, wealth and labour.' • The charm is overwhelming. The publishers have every right to quote Richard Cobb's farewell to Montaillou in the New Statesman: 'It is so good, so human that, as at the end of a great novel, one is sorry to leave the endearing company of the Clergue brothers, of the smiling Pierre Maury, of the generous Beatrice, the saintly Authie brothers, the rascally Belibaste, and the young girls and old women with the extraordinary names.' For Montaillou is in a sense the ultimate triumph of Cobbery, a thumping demonstration of the persistence of supposedly obsolete ways of life and their resistance to supposedly all-swamping historical currents, a salutory reminder too of the enduring need to keep one's head above water and , scratch a living. Ladurie is • interested in scarcity; his mentor is Malthus rather than Marx. Life goes on, mouths have to be filled, work has to be found, girls married and lusts slaked. It is the privilege of watching these familiar imperatives in operation six centuries ago and of being showered with such picturesque detail about what the villagers of Montaillou ate and how they made love that reinforces the impression that we can recognise in them 'people like us'. And this, in itself, is such an extraordinary and delightful feeling that we may be forgiven for just sitting back and enjoying it.

Yet Montaillou deserves a second visit from historians in their more professional capacity. Ladurie's book is by no means perfect. It veers uneasily between the pretentiously academic and the sentimental. And some of his generalisations, about homosexuality in the fourteenth century, for example, seem to rest on rather slender evidence. Nor is his intellectual framework of proceeding from the 'ecology' of the vil lage to its social 'archaeology' carried through with the rigour that he claims. The material is so entrancing that he often leaves it to speak for itself which sometimes threatens to turn the whole thing into an antiquarian ramble. Nevertheless, in the tentative deductions he allows himself and in the steady tug of the evidence, several important conclusions do seem to take shape, which when added together suggest an even more important conclusion the bombshell in the firework display. This bombshell is nothing less than the prop osition that the villagers really are like us, not just in an anecdotal, all-flesh-is-grass kind of way, but in many of their mental attitudes and social habits.

In early fourteenth-century Montaillou, the impact of feudalism, for example, appears to be hardly felt at all. The Count of Foix, the nominal lord, does not exercise much power and is not unpopular. The only external power which bears hard upon the villagers is the church; tithes are much resented and so of course is the Inquisition.

In modern terms, Whitehall not the manor house is seen as the threat to liberty and livelihood.

In Montaillou there appears to be little class conflict and no discernible class sol idarity. If there is scarcely any inhabitant who could be called rich, there are considerable differences of income between farmers and farm labourers but no generalised resentment about these differences is recorded, even if there are the usual disputes between employer and employee.

At the same time, there is no sense of communal fraternity and there are no vil lage institutions to speak of. All loyalty and effort are reserved for the domus, the family hearth.

The family is almost invariably nuclear.

Aged grandparents and unmarried siblings may be taken in out of affection or charity or as domestic help. But a second married couple in a household is very rare. When married brothers do continue to live in the same house, it is usually for pressing practical reasons.

The death of children, however frequent, does not leave parents unmoved, nor is their birth treated as a purely economic event.

Parents show affection for their children in much the same way as they do today. True, the birth of daughters is not always recorded but that may be because women do not enjoy civic rights rather than because baby girls are not loved.

The inhabitants of Montaillou are vague about Catholic doctrine and they have their superstitions, but they are perfectly well able to tell the difference between magic and religion and do not usually try to graft one on to the other.

Now these propositions, taken together, contradict almost everything that we have ever been told about the 'pre-capitalist age' by people who use such terms. Montaillou is less 'feudal' than 'bourgeois.' People do not live in a warm and close community; nor do they seem to enjoy a sense of fraternity which modern man has lost. They don't, as it happens, work very hard beyond what is needed for subsistence, largely because there is not much hard cash in circulation and overtime is not worth it. But when they work, they work for themselves and for their families. And they mean by family roughly what we mean by family not tribe or clan or even kin. They sorrow for their children. They consult the stars in a halfserious kind of way. They think about God rather more than we do though they are scarcely more regular attenders at Church than, say, modern Americans. They think about sex as much as we do and are little deterred by prohibitions against fornication or adultery.

I do not wish to exaggerate or sentimentalise their similarity to twentiethcentury villagers. My only aim is to point out that there is little trace in Montaillou of any of the things that the great theories of historical development have taught us to expect to find. There are slim pickings here for Engels, Marx, Tonnies, Weber, Aries, or even for Keith Thomas in fact for almost any ideologist or historian of ideas you care to think of.

It may be said, of course, that Montaillou is not typical. It was and is a poor mountain village remote from the main centres of production and exchange. All the same, you would surely expect to find some features of contemporary developments represented there. And even if Montaillou is not typical, its testimony is uniquely authoritative and impeccable. Ladurie himself believes that the reason for this remarkable discordance does lie in the sources. Most historians have to rely on legal records and contracts to get at the truth about remote periods. Direcsl i evidence of how people spoke and fell t very rare and may give an entirely differell picture. A legal claim to a certain power, for example, may be given unreal weigl A it historians simply because it is repeatu document after document over generati°°5:1 although in fact the power was seldorn I ever exercised. Apparently powerful < pie like the Count of Foix may in realiqu bumbling squires. This is not to say that we should rush 1°5 the other extreme of denouncing all schellicAi, of historical development as myths and tortions. Social systems cannot be vvrilter° off as fictions merely because they are dDbe mant or defective in parts. Nor can sve,he certain either that the villagers told wr bishop the whole truth about themselves° that they knew the whole truth about theilliy: selves. All the same, theories of hist% ought to be able to stand up to, or at lea_ find some confirmation in, the most authel'ii, tic and copious historical documents avt3tic able. And it remains worrying for 'or schematic historians that the only 0. prehensive record in existence of how ro, pie talked about their lives in 130° c°,0 tradicts conventional theory in almosteiv7,0", particular. Montaillou needs some exP'°' ing away.