La mémoire des croquants

Résumé du livre

It is a dive into the everyday world of the villagers who built France, in all its diversity, that we are invited here. Today, the imprint of these "crunchy" reads at every step. Year after year and over the whole of France, since the last upheavals of the Hundred Years War until the end of the Fronde - more than two centuries - a continent engulfed reappears after a large investigation in the local archives and the sometimes forgotten works of regional historians. Dramatic clouds of climate and geology, outbreaks of plague, massacres and looting due to civil wars, foreign and soon religious, bloody attacks of wolves ... But also beautiful harvests and improvement of methods, establishment of new cultures, evolution of the seigniory and the status of the people of the earth, appearance of islands of great production and development of uncultivated areas, demographic recovery, secularization of ecclesiastical property, etc. : we are far from the motionless world that a lazy historiography sometimes presents. The lived experience of the inhabitants of more than 2,000 of the communes of today resurfaces through more than a thousand concrete episodes. Under the pen of dozens of village priests, notaries, magistrates, chroniclers and authors of domestic newspapers, here is the portrait in majesty of millions of obscure Frenchmen. Their way of life, their joys and sorrows, their sociability, their sexuality, their relationship to violence, their beliefs and their imaginations, finally revealed, make them our brothers in humanity. This unparalleled sum resuscitates them and pays tribute to their age-old work. Under the pen of dozens of village priests, notaries, magistrates, chroniclers and authors of domestic newspapers, here is the portrait in majesty of millions of obscure Frenchmen. Their way of life, their joys and sorrows, their sociability, their sexuality, their relationship to violence, their beliefs and their imaginations, finally revealed, make them our brothers in humanity. This unparalleled sum resuscitates them and pays tribute to their age-old work. Under the pen of dozens of village priests, notaries, magistrates, chroniclers and authors of domestic newspapers, here is the portrait in majesty of millions of obscure Frenchmen. Their way of life, their joys and sorrows, their sociability, their sexuality, their relationship to violence, their beliefs and their imaginations, finally revealed, make them our brothers in humanity. This unparalleled sum resuscitates them and pays tribute to their age-old work.--Tallendier.