Once again, Le Roy Ladurie led the way. Even while recounting the epic of his great agrarian cycle, he had not been able to resist pausing at length to savor a particularly colorful and evocative event: the bloody strife in the town of Romans in 1580, when the starving lower classes, reduced to eating grass, used the symbolic forms of the annual Carnival to challenge the position of their masters, and in response were massacred.9 Still, these pages of The Peasants of Languedoc remained faithful to the Annales' social scientific perspective, for they used the Carnival principally to illustrate the working out of “deeper,” more fundamental social and economic forces. Le Roy Ladurie did not portray the people of Romans as independent actors, and did not present the event as a significant example of historical change in its own right. In the classic Annales fashion, the true motors of change remained the slow, long-term cycles of geography, demography, and economics. Microhistory as a genre of its own would only take shape when historians, in addition to changing the scale of their observations, also revolted against the idea that the microcosm did little but passively reflect the macrocosm.