Daniel Roche (historian)

Daniel Roche (born 1935) is a French social and cultural historian, widely recognized as one of the foremost experts of his generation on the cultural history of France during the later years of the Ancien Régime.

Roche has produced over two hundred publications covering a broad variety of subjects within the social and cultural history of France and Europe under the Old Regime.

Roche’s research has had a significant impact on the historical study of the Enlightenment and 18th-century France in general. He has made significant use of hitherto ignored notarial archive sources such as post-mortem inventories, which have yielded insight into the basic material culture of Paris and the rise of consumerism during the 18th century. Roche has largely defined the study of ‘everyday items’ (les choses banales). The social changes that took place over the course of the Enlightenment in France have figured prominently in Roche’s research. The broad scope of Roche’s research into the Enlightenment has included diverse areas such as public institutions and clothing worn by the popular classes.

Roche’s doctoral thesis was published in 1978 under the title Le Siècle des Lumières en Province: Académies et Académiciens Provinciaux, 1680–1789 (The Enlightenment in the Provinces: Provincial Academies and Academics, 1680–1789) and was quickly met with praise not only as a work of social cultural history, but also for its value as a study of the history of science. In Le Siècle des Lumières en Province, Roche conducts an in-depth examination of academic institutions outside of Paris from the late 17th century up to the onset of the French revolution. Roche argues that the provincial academies (under the patronage of the French monarchy) both protected and weakened the French state, demonstrating that the relationship between the Ancien Régime and the Enlightenment that took place over the course of the 18th century was complex as opposed to strictly oppositional.

Le Siècle des Lumières en Province remains a highly influential work in the historiography of 18th-century intellectual trends. The French Enlightenment is shown to be complicated where the relationship between state and academy is concerned. The historian Isabel Knight notes that the academic movement that Roche details “both displayed and mediated the tension between established and emerging classes, between tradition and innovation, and between ideology and criticism.”

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