The interview with Pierre Vilar published here for the first time in English was conducted in March 1987. Vilar may be best known in the Anglophone world today for his tightly conceptualized epic, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1929, and for his landmark ‘Marxist History, a History in the Making’, a far-reaching engagement with Reading Capital that offered a bravura presentation of Marx’s historical method to match Althusser’s own, as well as a series of trenchant theses on the relation of theory and historical inquiry.footnote1 But in his native France and adoptive Spain, Vilar was first and foremost an economic historian of the Iberian peninsula. It was in this capacity that he was recruited by Marc Bloch to write for the Annales when still in his twenties, becoming a leading second-generation scholar of that tradition.
The son of two teachers, Vilar was born in 1906 in Frontignan, a village on the French Mediterranean coast west of Montpellier. He studied geography and history at the École Normale Supérieure and in 1930 left for Spain to begin research at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, then in Barcelona, for his doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century Catalonia. It was here that he met his wife, the historian Gabrielle Berrogain (1904–1976), and was caught up in the Spanish Civil War. Relocating to France, he was called up in the general mobilization of 1939, taken prisoner in June 1940 and spent the War in German prison camps. His History of Spain (1947), banned by Franco, became essential reading. An active contributor-correspondent of the Annales, he became a director of studies at the Sixth Section of the École des Hautes Études in 1951 and in 1967 succeeded Ernest Labrousse in the chair of economic history at the Sorbonne. His master work entitled La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne, a three-volume enquiry into the social and economic bases of national structures, was published in 1962.