Pierre Goubert

Pierre Goubert , born in 1915 with Saumur, is a French historian, specialist in the 17th century.

Biographical elements

Born in Saumur in an extremely modest family (her father is gardener), Pierre Goubert between with the Teacher training school Teachers of Angers in 1931. It integrates in 1935 the National university of Saint-Cloud who forms, at that time, the professors of Teacher training school. It then receives the courses of Marc Bloch, meets outstanding which determines it to choose the history like disciplines of research. At the exit of this training course in 1937, Pierre Goubert teaches this last matter as well as the letters with IN Périgueux.

Mobilized in 1939, it makes the countryside of France in the troop - with the rank of corporal - escapes the captivity and becomes professor of " college moderne" with the college of Pithiviers then to Beauvais. These years of professorship are also those of academic works which it could not make more early. Not being graduate - pupil-teachers of the time having to obtain the higher patent - it is however authorized, by way of derogation, to prepare the license which it passes, according to its own terms, " by morceaux" and succeeds in 1948 the aggregation of history. It launches out at once afterwards in the drafting of a doctorate of State on the Beauvaisis, area which it found after a short stay as professor with the Turgot college.

Member of CNRS since 1951, Pierre Goubert is named in 1956 director of studies of EPHE (VI° section), then two years later, obtains a post of professor of modern history at the university of Rennes. This year 1958, it is 43 years old, is that of the defense of its thesis (which will be published in 1960), " Beauvais and Beauvaisis of 1600 with 1730" . This work marks a true historiographic stage because it opens the way, today almost banal, of the searchs for historical Démographie registered within a regional framework. Pierre Goubert becomes then Professor in the very new University of Paris X-Nanterre, it is surrounded there by young assistants of quality like Anne Zink or François Billacois. It will contribute to make there come another large modernistic historian: Robert Mandrou. Named in the Sorbonne in 1969, Pierre Goubert present of the conferences in the whole world (in Europe but also with Princeton, Montreal, Kingston, with the Japan, in Ivory Coast, with Madagascar) and publishes many works of modern history of which some become true " best-sellers" , new phenomenon in the university historical edition. Its very famous " Louis XIV and twenty million Français" that it publishes in 1966, will be republished out of pocket in 1979. This remarkable work erases in the analysis the Sun king with the profit of without name and of rank, approach realistic of the long reign of Louis XIV, quite far away from the traditional history. It presents then " old Régime" , which knows two editions (1969 and 1973) before a broad increase, in 1984, carried out with the collaboration of Daniel Roche, under the title " French and Old Régime" . Although pertaining to the historical School of Annals, giving up for a time his practices of social history, Pierre Goubert also illustrated himself in the biographical kind, with his masterly " Mazarin" which was published in 1990.

Pierre Goubert occupies a special place in the world of the large French historians whose epistemological restoration resulting from Annals allowed emergence in France. Very related to Ernest Labrousse which was its reader, he married for a share the social and scientific ideals of them. Authenticate man of the people by his family origins, its academic course did not know the linearity of that of its pars. For as much, this specialist in the 17th century, of which the unceasingly reiterated objective of a " search honest and increasingly thorough for what is connaissable" , led it to vacuum-clean this " Century of Or" sometimes idealized through being reported, knew to give an undeniable originality to its work which explains their public success.

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