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Camille-Ernest Labrousse (; 16 March 1895 – 24 May 1988) was a French historian specializing in social and economic history who was born in Barbezieux, Charente and died in Paris.
His first great work was his Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle ("Sketch of the movement of prices and revenues in France during the 18th century", 1932), the result of his law dissertation under the direction of Albert Aftalion.Noted by Potter 2010. 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.
Labrousse's own work concentrated on 18th and 19th-century France, but his constant concern for working methods that could be expanded beyond his subjects at hand to inspect other parts of the early modern world and the world that was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, is exemplified in the range of studies in the hommage of his pupils and their pupils that was edited by Braudel and others, Conjoncture économique, structures sociales (Paris 1974). The "Labrousse model" of the subsistence crisis in the preindustrial grain-and-textiles economy of France and its effect in precipitating the French Revolution, detailed in the second of his two magisterial works, La Crise de l’économie française (1943), which Fernand Braudel called "the greatest work of history to have appeared in France in the course of the last twenty-five years."Braudel, "Histoire et Science Sociale: La Longue Durée" (1958) Annales E.S.C. 13.4 (October–December 1958:725-753), quoted by Potter 2010. Labrousse's social and economic rendering of the Revolution is summarized in the hundred pages he contributed to Le XVIIIe Siecle: Revolution Intellectuelle, Technique et Politique (1715-1815) with Roland Mousnier and Marc Bouloiseau (Paris: PUF) 1953). has especially wide application, though his paradigm has been adjusted by subsequent studies that have reintroduced complexities.
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