History never tell you that Stéphane Bern!

Seventeenth century, history has retained only Versailles, the pomp and the wars of Louis XIV, the literary geniuses (Lafayette, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine ...) and major political figures. But far from these pictures, what about the vast majority of the rural population? How lived a peasant in the late Grand century? What difficulties he was facing?
It is these questions that wanted to answer in this book Marcel Lachiver landmark and is today (it was written in 1991) the reference on the subject - with the books of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie well hear!

It therefore presents the most disastrous that France has seen since the Great Plague of 1348. An event that happened totally ignored in textbooks and in the media event: the great famine of 1693-1694 followed by the terrible winter 1709 and 1719. dysentery epidemic In total these three disaster claimed the lives of over two million people. The famine of 1693-1694 killed more than death itself as the first world war on the French population!
Marcel Lachiver follows a very strict chronological presentation of the period stretching from 1680 to 1720, forty terrible years that have marked France. But it's more than just a summary of a disaster before us. Indeed, the historian begins by describing the beginning of the book living conditions of farmers in France under Louis XIV. You will learn much about the culture methods, choice of vegetable seeds, feeding, breeding ...
The book is richly illustrated with full documentation drawn in the parish archives of the period (national and regional) but also by a myriad of climate data (we then witness the beginnings of meteorology) widely reported and rarely boring.

Most of the book is that Mr. Lachiver not content to describe the horror of these down-and-hunger dying on the roads of France (died of hunger, cold, misery, disease .. .) but seeks to understand the causes and consequences of these abrupt climate changes. In addition, you learn a lot about justice, the functioning of the administration and the tax system and taxes in the time of Louis XIV. The author says in the introduction that he is not writing yet another biography of Louis XIV but to restore the lives of ordinary people and one feels throughout his affection reading door to all those people condemned to misery by the climate; He quotes extensively from the priests and some critics (Fenelon, Vauban) of the time and we see that he does not like it that Voltaire nicknamed "The Great King".
An exciting read and very thorough so with a profusion of details - evidenced by numerous demographic and climate annex tables - that will delight all lovers of this period.