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Bailiwick of Guernsey

The Bailiwick of Guernsey (Bailliage de Guernesey; Guernésiais: Bailliage dé Guernési) is a self-governing British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France, comprising several of the Channel Islands. It has a total land area of 78 km2 and an estimated total population of 67,334.

The Channel Islands were part of the Duchy of Normandy, whose dukes became kings of England from 1066. In 1204, as a consequence of the Treaty of Le Goulet, insular Normandy alone remained loyal to the English Crown, leading to a political split from the mainland. Around 1290, the Channel Islands' Governor, Otto de Grandson, split the archipelago into two bailiwicks, establishing those parts other than Jersey as a single Bailiwick of Guernsey.

The Bailiwick is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising three separate jurisdictions: Alderney, Guernsey (incorporating Herm), and Sark. The Lieutenant Governor is the representative of the British monarch, who remains the head of state. The States of Guernsey is the parliament and government of the whole Bailiwick, though several matters are decided locally by the States of Alderney and by Sark's Chief Pleas. The Bailiff of Guernsey is the civil head of the Bailiwick, and is also president of the States of Guernsey and head of the Bailiwick's judiciary.

The Bailiwick is self-governing and not part of the United Kingdom. Its defence and international representation — as well as certain policy areas, such as nationality law — are the responsibility of the UK Government, but the Bailiwick still has a separate international identity.

History
The history of the Bailiwick of Guernsey goes back to 933, when the islands came under the control of William Longsword, having been annexed from the Duchy of Brittany by the Duchy of Normandy. The island of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands formed part of the lands of William the Conqueror. In 1204, France conquered mainland Normandy – but not the offshore islands of the bailiwick. The islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Duchy of Normandy.

Initially, there was one governor, or co-governors working together, of the islands making up the Channel Islands. The title "governor" has changed over the centuries. "Warden", "keeper", and "captain" have previously been used. The bailiff stands in for the Governor, or more recently the Lieutenant Governor, if the latter is absent, for a short term or for longer: for instance during the five years of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey is the Lieutenant Governor of the Bailiwick of Guernsey and, being the personal representative of the British monarch, has usually had a distinguished military service.

Originally, the local courts in Guernsey were "fiefs" with the lord of the manor presiding. Before 1066, a superior court was introduced above the fiefs and below the Eschequier Court in Rouen and comprised the bailiff and four knights; the court heard appeals and tried criminal cases.

Otton de Grandson, then the governor of the Islands, delegated the civil powers to two separate bailiffs for Guernsey and Jersey before he went on crusade to the Holy Land in 1290. This can be assessed as the date of first creation of the two bailiwicks.

Geography
Situated around 49.4°N, -2.6°W, Alderney, Guernsey, Herm, Sark, and some other smaller islands together have a total area of 78 km2 and coastlines of about 50 km. Elevation varies from sea level to 114 m at Le Moulin on Sark.

There are many smaller islands, islets, rocks and reefs in the Bailiwick. Combined with a tidal range of 10 m and fast currents of up to 12 knot, sailing in local waters is dangerous.

Constitutional status
The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a separate jurisdiction in itself and is, in turn, also three separate sub-jurisdictions. It does not form part of, and is separate from (but is not independent of, or from) the United Kingdom. The two Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey together make up the Channel Islands.

The islanders have never had formal representation in the House of Commons of the British Parliament, nor the European Parliament. Those islanders who were not somehow qualified and eligible in their own right to register to vote and to vote in the United Kingdom under the Representation of the People Acts as "overseas voters", were excluded from the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.

Guernsey has an unwritten constitution arising from the Treaty of Paris (1259). When Henry III and the King of France came to terms over the Duchy of Normandy, the Norman mainland fell under the suzerainty of the king of France. The Channel Islands, however, remained loyal to the British crown due to the loyalties of its Seigneurs. However, they were never absorbed into the Kingdom of England by any Act of Union, but exist as "peculiars of the Crown".

A unique constitutional position has arisen as successive British monarchs have confirmed the liberties and privileges of the Bailiwick, often referring to the so-called Constitutions of King John, a legendary document supposed to have been granted by King John in the aftermath of 1204. Governments of the Bailiwick have generally tried to avoid testing the limits of the unwritten constitution by avoiding conflict with British governments.

This peculiar political position has often been to the benefit of islanders. Until the 19th century, the Bailiwick was generally exempt from the harsher parts of Westminster legislation while being included in favourable policies, such as protectionist economic policies. England, and later the United Kingdom, passively exploited the strategic benefits of the Channel Islands. For example, the islands were a convenient stop-off point for trade to Gascony.

Parishes
The bailiwick comprises twelve parishes: Alderney, Sark, and ten on mainland Guernsey (one of which includes Herm). Each parish has a parish church dating from the 11th century, with strong religious control exercised initially by the French Catholic church and for the last 500 years by the English church. Over the years, the religious aspect of the administration of each parish has been reduced in favour of democratically elected douzeniers.

Jurisdictions
Each jurisdiction has inhabited and uninhabited islands and its own elected government. All three legal jurisdictions need royal assent from the Monarch on its primary legislation, but as of February 29, 2024, certain domestic primary legislation need only the Lieutenant-Governor's assent. Each jurisdiction raises its own taxation, although in 1949 Alderney transferred its rights to Guernsey.

Alderney
With a population of around 2,200 in 3 sqmi, Alderney has its own parliament, the States of Alderney, which has ten elected members and an elected president.

From 1612, Alderney had a judge appointed, with similar judicial powers to a bailiff, but on 1 January 1949, the island adopted a new constitution, giving up some independence, moving closer to Guernsey, and confirming that it is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

Guernsey
The island of Guernsey has a population of around 63,000 in 24 sqmi and forms the legal and administrative centre of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. The parliament of Guernsey and the nearby inhabited islands of Herm, Jethou and Lihou is the States of Guernsey.

Sark
Sark has a population of around 600 who live in 2 sqmi. Its parliament (together with the inhabited island of Brecqhou) is the Chief Pleas of Sark, with 18 elected members.

In 1565, Helier de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen in Jersey, was granted the fief of Sark by Queen Elizabeth I. He received letters patent granting him Sark in perpetuity on condition that he kept the island free of pirates and that at least forty men occupied it to defend it. Despite most families coming from Jersey, Sark remained within the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

Recognition
There is no flag or coat of arms for the Bailiwick of Guernsey. In historic times, the governor would have used his personal symbols before a generic flag was created for use by the governor.

In 1279, Edward I granted a Seal for use in the Channel Islands. In 1304, separate seals were provided to Jersey and Guernsey. The provision of different seals is one of the earliest indications of the individual identity and personality of the two Bailiwicks. The seal comprised three leopards (or lions), a symbol taken from the original arms of the Duchy of Normandy.

The United Kingdom and His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom are responsible for the defence and also for formal international, intergovernmental, and consular representation of, and the foreign affairs generally, of the Bailiwick.

While never a member of the European Union or its predecessors, before Brexit the Bailiwick had a special relationship with the EU under Protocol 3 of the UK's Treaty of Accession 1972 to the European Community. Pooling resources with Jersey, the Bailiwick established in 2010 an office in Brussels to develop the Channel Islands' influence with the EU, to advise the Channel Islands' governments on European matters, and to promote economic links with the EU.

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is in the Commonwealth (Commonwealth of Nations), although not as a member, in its own right. The Bailiwick is also a member of the Commonwealth Games Federation and competes in the Commonwealth Games.

In 1969, Royal Mail relinquished control of postal services in the Bailiwick, with Guernsey then being recognised by the Universal Postal Union.

Since 1999, the Bailiwick of Guernsey has been a member of the British–Irish Council, currently represented by the Chief Minister of Guernsey.

title: Bailiwick of Guernsey


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Northern Ireland Executive

The Northern Ireland Executive (Irish: Feidhmeannas Thuaisceart Éireann, Ulster Scots: Norlin Airlan Executive ) is the devolved government of Northern Ireland, an administrative branch of the legislature – the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is answerable to the assembly and was initially established according to the terms of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which followed the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement). The executive is referred to in the legislation as the Executive Committee of the assembly and is an example of consociationalist ("power-sharing") government.

The Northern Ireland Executive consists of the First Minister and deputy First Minister and various ministers with individual portfolios and remits. The main assembly parties appoint most ministers in the executive, except for the Minister of Justice who is elected by a cross-community vote. It is one of three devolved governments in the United Kingdom, the others being the Scottish and Welsh governments.

In January 2017, the then deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigned in protest over the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal and the Northern Ireland Executive consequently collapsed. The governing of Northern Ireland fell to civil servants in a caretaker capacity until January 2020, when the parties signed the New Decade, New Approach agreement and an Executive was subsequently established. When Democratic Unionist Party First Minister Paul Givan resigned in line with his party's protest over the Northern Ireland Protocol, The Northern Ireland Executive collapsed again. No agreement on power-sharing was made after the 2022 Assembly election, and from October 2022 to February 2024, Northern Ireland was governed by civil servants. On 3 February 2024, Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill was appointed First Minister, the first Irish nationalist to be appointed to the position, with DUP's Emma Little-Pengelly as deputy First Minister.

Legal basis
The Executive (and the Assembly) were established in law by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 that followed the Good Friday Agreement and its basis was revised by the Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Act 2006 that followed the St Andrews Agreement of that year.

Ministers
On 9 May 2016, the number of ministries and departments of the Northern Ireland Executive was reduced, leaving the following departments:

 * Executive Office
 * Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs
 * Minister for Communities
 * Minister of Education
 * Minister for the Economy
 * Minister of Finance
 * Minister of Health
 * Minister for Infrastructure
 * Minister of Justice

At the same time, various departments were renamed as follows:
 * Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister was renamed Executive Office
 * Department of Agriculture and Rural Development was renamed Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs
 * Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment was renamed Department for the Economy
 * Department of Finance and Personnel was renamed Department of Finance
 * Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety was renamed Department of Health
 * Department for Regional Development was renamed Department for Infrastructure
 * Department for Social Development was renamed Department for Communities

The following departments were dissolved:
 * Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure
 * Department of the Environment
 * Department for Employment and Learning

Structure
In contrast with Westminster system cabinets, which generally need only be backed by a majority of legislators, ministerial positions in the Northern Ireland Executive are allocated to parties with significant representation in the Assembly. With the exception of justice, the number of ministries to which each party is entitled is determined by the D'Hondt system.

In effect, major parties cannot be excluded from participation in government and power-sharing is enforced by the system. The form of government is therefore known as mandatory coalition as opposed to voluntary coalition where parties negotiate an agreement to share power. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and some Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) members favour a move towards voluntary coalition in the longer term but this is currently opposed by Sinn Féin.

The executive cannot function if either of the two largest parties refuse to take part, as these parties are allocated the First Minister and deputy First Minister positions. However, other parties are not required to enter the executive even if they are entitled to do so; instead, they can choose to go into opposition if they wish. There were some calls for the SDLP and the UUP to enter opposition after the 2007 Assembly elections, but ultimately the two parties chose to take the seats in the Executive to which they were entitled.

In 2010, an exception to the D'Hondt system for allocating the number of ministerial portfolios was made under the Hillsborough Castle Agreement to allow the cross-community Alliance Party of Northern Ireland to hold the politically contentious policing and justice brief when most of those powers were devolved to the Assembly. Devolution took place on 12 April 2010.

Under D'Hondt, the SDLP would have been entitled to the extra ministerial seat on the revised Executive created by the devolution of policing and justice. Accordingly, both the UUP and SDLP protested that Alliance was not entitled, under the rules of the Good Friday Agreement, to fill the portfolio and refused to support this move. However, Alliance leader David Ford was elected Minister with the support of the DUP and Sinn Féin.

On 26 August 2015, the UUP announced it would withdraw from the Executive and form an opposition after all, in response to the assassination of Kevin McGuigan.

On 25 May 2016 a new executive was announced (three weeks after assembly election). For the first time in the assembly's history, parties that were entitled to ministries (i.e. UUP, SDLP and Alliance) chose instead to go into opposition following a recent bill providing parties with this choice. This meant that the executive was formed only by the two major parties, the DUP and Sinn Féin, and thus giving them more seats in the Executive (with the exception of the Department of Justice which was given to an Independent Unionist MLA, Claire Sugden, due to this appointment needing cross-community support).

Procedure
The Executive is co-chaired by the First Minister and deputy First Minister. Its official functions are:
 * acting as a forum for the discussion of, and agreement on, issues which cut across the responsibilities of two or more ministers;
 * prioritising executive and legislative proposals;
 * discussing and agreeing upon significant or controversial matters; and
 * recommending a common position where necessary (e.g. in dealing with external relationships).

Executive meetings are normally held fortnightly, compared to weekly meetings of the British Cabinet and Irish Government. Under the Executive's Ministerial Code, ministers are obliged to: The Ministerial Code allows any three ministers to request a cross-community vote. The quorum for voting is seven ministers.
 * operate within the framework of the Programme for Government;
 * support all decisions of the Executive and Northern Ireland Assembly; and
 * participate fully in the Executive, the North/South Ministerial Council and the British-Irish Council.

The current system of devolution has succeeded long periods of direct rule (1974–1999 and 2002–2007), when the Northern Ireland Civil Service had a considerable influence on government policy. The legislation which established new departments in 1999 affirmed that "the functions of a department shall at all times be exercised subject to the direction and control of the Minister". Ministerial powers can be conferred by an Act of the Assembly and ministers can also exercise executive powers which are vested in the Crown.

Ministers are also subject to several limitations, including the European Convention on Human Rights, European Union law, other international obligations of the UK, a requirement not to discriminate on religious or political grounds, and having no power over reserved and excepted matters (which are held by the United Kingdom Government).

Ministerial decisions can be challenged by a petition of 30 Northern Ireland Assembly members. This action can be taken for alleged breaches of the Ministerial Code and on "matters of public importance". The Speaker of the Assembly must consult political party leaders in the Assembly (who are often also ministers) before deciding whether the subject is a matter of public importance. Successful petitions will then be considered by the Executive.

The number of ministers and their responsibilities can be changed when a department is being established or dissolved. The proposal must be made by the First Minister and the deputy First Minister and be carried by a cross-community vote in the Assembly. The number of departments was initially limited to 10 but this increased to 11 upon the devolution of justice.

Ministers are disqualified from holding office if appointed to the Government of Ireland or as the chairman or deputy chairman of an Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) committee.

Strategies
The Good Friday Agreement states that the Executive will "seek to agree each year, and review as necessary" a Programme for Government incorporating an agreed budget.

The following programmes for government have been published to date:
 * Draft Programme for Government (2001–2002) (25 October 2000)
 * Draft Programme for Government (2002–2003) (24 September 2001)
 * Programme for Government 2008–2011 (22 January 2008)
 * Programme for Government 2011–2015 (12 March 2012)

The following budgets have been published to date:

 * Budget 2008–11
 * Budget 2011–15

Under the St Andrews Agreement, the Executive is obliged to adopt strategies on the following policy matters:
 * enhancing and protecting the development of the Irish language;
 * enhancing and developing Ulster Scots language, heritage and culture; and
 * tackling poverty, social exclusion and patterns of deprivation based on objective need.

The Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister published a child poverty strategy in March 2011. The wider anti-poverty strategy was carried over from direct rule in November 2006. As of November 2011, neither an Irish language strategy nor an Ulster Scots strategy had been adopted. The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure states that a Strategy for Indigenous or Regional Minority Languages "will be presented to the Executive in due course".

1974
The original Northern Ireland Executive was established on 1 January 1974, following the Sunningdale Agreement. It comprised a voluntary coalition between the Ulster Unionist Party, Social Democratic and Labour Party and Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, with the UUP's Brian Faulkner in the position of Chief Executive. It was short-lived, collapsing on 28 May 1974 due to the Ulster Workers' Council strike, and the Troubles continued in the absence of a political settlement.

1998–2002
The current Executive was provided for in the Belfast Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998. Designates for First Minister and deputy First Minister were appointed on 1 July 1998 by the UUP and SDLP, respectively. A full Executive was nominated on 29 November 1999 and took office on 2 December 1999, comprising the UUP, SDLP, Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. Devolution was suspended for four periods, during which the departments came under the responsibility of direct rule ministers from the Northern Ireland Office:
 * between 12 February 2000 and 30 May 2000;
 * on 11 August 2001;
 * on 22 September 2001;
 * between 15 October 2002 and 8 May 2007.

The 2002–2007 suspension followed the refusal of the Ulster Unionist Party to share power with Sinn Féin after a high-profile Police Service of Northern Ireland investigation into an alleged Provisional Irish Republican Army spy ring.

2007–2011
The second Executive formed in 2007 was led by the DUP and Sinn Féin, with the UUP and SDLP also securing ministerial roles.

However, the Executive did not meet between 19 June 2008 and 20 November 2008 due to a boycott by Sinn Féin. This took place during a dispute between the DUP and Sinn Féin over the devolution of policing and justice powers. Policing and justice powers were devolved on 12 April 2010, with the new Minister of Justice won by Alliance in a cross-community vote.

2011–2016
Following the Northern Ireland Assembly election held on 5 May 2011, a third Executive was formed on 16 May 2011 with the same five parties represented. Alliance for the first time gained administration of a department under the D'Hondt system, in addition to the Department of Justice.

Peter Robinson of the DUP and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin were nominated by their parties and appointed as First Minister and deputy First Minister on 12 May 2011. Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister opposed the joint appointment. On 16 May 2011, 10 other Executive ministers (with the exception of the Minister of Justice) and two junior ministers were appointed by their political parties. The Minister of Justice was then elected by the Assembly via a cross-community vote.

On 26 August 2015, the UUP withdrew from the Executive in protest over the alleged involvement of members of the Provisional IRA in the murder of Kevin McGuigan Sr. Danny Kennedy MLA's position as Minister for Regional Development was later taken over by the DUP, thereby leaving four Northern Irish parties in the power sharing agreement. On 10 September 2015 Peter Robinson stepped down as First Minister, although he did not officially resign. Arlene Foster took over as acting First Minister. Robinson resumed his duties as First Minister again on 20 October 2015.

Following the signing of the Fresh Start Agreement, Peter Robinson announced his intention to stand down as leader of the DUP and First Minister of Northern Ireland. He subsequently resigned as DUP leader on 18 December 2015, being succeeded by Arlene Foster. Foster then took office as First Minister on 11 January 2016.

2016–2017
The fourth Executive was formed following the May 2016 election. The SDLP, UUP and Alliance Party left the Executive and formed the Official Opposition for the first time. Ministerial positions were proportionally allocated between the DUP and Sinn Féin, with independent unionist Claire Sugden serving as Minister of Justice. The government collapsed on 16 January 2017, after Martin McGuinness resigned in protest over the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. His resignation sparked a snap election as Sinn Féin refused to re-nominate a deputy First Minister.

In 2018, Arlene Foster stated that the ongoing political deadlock was caused by Sinn Féin's insistence on an Irish Language Act that would grant legal status to the Irish language in Northern Ireland, which Foster's party refuses to allow.

Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Act 2019
The Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Act 2019 was passed by the UK parliament on 10 July 2019 and became law on 24 July. The main purpose of the bill was to prevent another election and keep Northern Ireland services running in the absence of a functional devolved government. However, two Labour MPs, Conor McGinn and Stella Creasy, added amendments that would legalize same-sex marriage and liberalize abortion law (both devolved issues) if the DUP and Sinn Féin could not come to an agreement before 21 October.

Reformation
On 11 January 2020, the Executive was re-formed with Arlene Foster as First Minister and Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill as deputy First Minister following the New Decade, New Approach agreement. All five parties joined the government; other ministers include Edwin Poots (DUP); Robin Swann (UUP), Nichola Mallon (SDLP), Gordon Lyons (DUP), and Declan Kearney (SF). Alliance Party leader Naomi Long was appointed justice minister. At the first session of the assembly, Foster stated that it was "time for Stormont to move forward". The new speaker of the Assembly was a member of Sinn Féin. The collapse of this Executive led to the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election.

On 3 February 2022, Paul Givan resigned as first minister, which automatically resigned Michelle O'Neill as deputy first minister and collapsed the executive of Northern Ireland.

On 30 January 2024, leader of the DUP Jeffrey Donaldson announced that the DUP would restore an executive government on the condition that new legislation was passed by the UK House of Commons.

Executive committee
On 8 May 2024, Conor Murphy stepped down as Minister for the Economy. First Minister Michelle O'Neill said that Deirdre Hargey will serve as an interim Minister for the Economy.

Ministers are assisted by backbench "Assembly private secretaries" (equivalent to parliamentary private secretaries). The non-political Attorney General for Northern Ireland is the chief legal advisor to the Executive, appointed by the First Minister and deputy First Minister, and may also attend Executive meetings.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Northern Ireland Executive


text:
List of people from Maharashtra

This is a list of notable people from Maharashtra, India

Art

 * Mangesh Tendulkar
 * Pramod Kamble
 * S. D. Phadnis

Actors

 * Ajinkya Dev
 * Amol Palekar
 * Ankush Chaudhari
 * Ashok Saraf
 * Atul Kulkarni
 * Bharat Jadhav
 * Chandrakant Mandare
 * Dada Kondke
 * Dilip Prabhavalkar
 * Kashinath Ghanekar
 * Kuldeep Pawar
 * Laxmikant Berde
 * Mahesh Kothare
 * Makarand Anaspure
 * Makarand Deshpande
 * Master Vinaayak
 * Milind Gunaji
 * Milind Soman
 * Mohan Gokhale
 * Nana Patekar
 * Nilu Phule
 * Nishikant Kamat
 * Prabhakar Panshikar
 * Prashant Damle
 * Riteish Vilasrao Deshmukh
 * Sharad Talwalkar
 * Sachin Khedekar
 * Sachin Pilgaonkar
 * Sadashiv Amrapurkar
 * Sandeep Kulkarni
 * Sanjay Narvekar
 * Sayaji Shinde
 * Shahu Modak
 * Shivaji Satham
 * Shreyas Talpade
 * Siddharth Jadhav
 * Sudhir Joshi
 * Subodh Bhave
 * Vikram Gokhale

Actresses

 * Alka Kubal
 * Aditi Govitrikar
 * Ashwini Bhave
 * Bhavana
 * Durga Khote
 * Genelia Deshmukh
 * Isha Koppikar
 * Jayshree Gadkar
 * Lalita Pawar
 * Leela Chitnis
 * Kavita Lad
 * Kimi Katkar
 * Madhuri Dixit
 * Mamta Kulkarni
 * Meena Kumari
 * Mugdha Godse
 * Namrata Shirodkar
 * Nishigandha Wad
 * Nivedita Joshi
 * Nutan
 * Padmini Kolhapure
 * Pallavi Joshi
 * Radhika Apte
 * Rajashree
 * Rohini Hattangadi
 * Shraddha Kapoor
 * Shilpa Shirodkar
 * Smita Patil
 * Sheetal Agashe
 * Shobhana Samarth
 * Sonali Bendre
 * Sonali Kulkarni
 * Sai Tamhankar
 * Supriya Pathak
 * Usha Chavan
 * Urmila Matondkar
 * Vandana Gupte

Directors

 * Yash Chopra
 * Karan Johar
 * Madhur Bhandarkar
 * Mahesh Manjrekar
 * Ashutosh Gowarikar
 * Amol Gupte
 * Sachin Pilgaonkar
 * Nagraj Manjule
 * Satish Rajwade
 * Ravi Jadhav
 * Rohit Shetty
 * Ram Gopal Verma
 * Ayan Mukherjee
 * Sanjay Leela Bhansali
 * Zoya Akhtar

Visual artists

 * Maria Marshall

Award winners from Maharashtra

 * Bharat Ratna
 * B. R. Ambedkar
 * Vinoba Bhave
 * Nanaji Deshmukh
 * Pandurang Vaman Kane
 * Dhondo Keshav Karve
 * Lata Mangeshkar
 * Sachin Tendulkar

 * Padma Vibhushan
 * B. G. Kher, 1954
 * Padma Bhushan
 * Homi J. Bhabha, Science & Engineering, 1954
 * Padma Shri
 * Asha Devi Aryanayakam, Public Affairs, 1954

Business and industry

 * Abasaheb Garware, Garware group
 * Azim Premji, Wipro
 * Baba Kalyani (Babasaheb Nilaknthrao Kalyani), Bharat Forge
 * Baburao Govindrao Shirke, Shirke Group of Companies
 * Baburaoji Parkhe, Parkhe group
 * Bhavarlal Jain, Jain Irrigation
 * Chandrasekhar Bhaskar Bhave, SEBI Chairman
 * Chandrashekhar Agashe, BMSS
 * Dajikaka Gadgil, PNG Jewellers
 * Deepak Ghaisas, Iflex
 * Dilip Dandekar, Camlin
 * Ganesh Gadgil, PNG Jewellers
 * Jyoti Gogte, Golden Nugget Engineering & Electroplast
 * Kalpana Saroj, Kamani Tubes
 * Kiran Karnik, former president of NASSCOM, 2007–08
 * Panditrao Agashe, BMSS
 * Purshottam Narayan Gadgil, PNG Jewellers
 * Rahul Bajaj, Bajaj Group
 * Rajendra Pawar, NIIT
 * Raosaheb Gogte, Gogte Group
 * S L Kirloskar (Shantanurao), Kirloskar group
 * Subhash Runwal, Runwal Group Chairman
 * Tarita Shankar, India Group
 * Vikram Pandit, Citigroup CEO
 * Vivek Ranadive, TIBCO
 * Walchand Hirachand, Walchand Group of Industries

Defence forces

 * General Arun S. Vaidya
 * Namdeo Jadav
 * Yeshwant Ghadge
 * Manoj Mukund Narwane
 * Manoj Pande
 * Vivek Ram Chaudhari

Param Vir Chakra

 * Lieutenant Colonel Ardeshir Burzorji Tarapore, Poona Horse (posthumous)
 * Major Rama Raghoba Rane Bombay Engineers
 * Major Ramaswamy Parameshwaran

Journalism

 * Nanasaheb Parulekar, founder editor of Sakal

Literature

 * Vasant Purushottam Kale
 * Ranjit Desai
 * N. S. Inamdar
 * Shivaji Sawant
 * Acharya Atre
 * B. S. Mardhekar
 * G. A. Kulkarni
 * G. D. Madgulkar
 * Gangadhar Gadgil
 * Kusumagraj
 * Mangesh Padgaonkar
 * P. L. Deshpande
 * Vasant Abaji Dahake
 * Vasant Kanetkar
 * Vijay Tendulkar
 * Vilas Sarang
 * Vinda Karandikar
 * Shakuntala Karandikar
 * Baba Kadam, novelist
 * Babasaheb Purandare
 * Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar
 * Shirish Kanekar
 * Suhas Shirvalkar
 * Nagnath Lalujirao Kottapalle
 * Sadashiv Ranade
 * Gangadhar Pathak
 * Dinkar G. Kelkar

Medicine

 * B. K. Misra, neurosurgeon

Music

 * Mandar Agashe, music director
 * Vineet Alurkar, musician
 * Aarya Ambekar, singer
 * Kishori Amonkar, singer
 * Ajay Atul, music director
 * Prabha Atre, singer
 * Swapnil Bandodkar, singer
 * Ashwini Bhide, singer
 * Shamika Bhide, singer
 * Asha Bhosle, singer
 * Vasantrao Deshpande, classical singer of Patiala Gharana
 * Bal Gandharva, theatre
 * Sawai Gandharva, singer
 * Avdhoot Gupte, singer
 * Bhimsen Joshi, classical singer
 * Suman Kalyanpur, singer
 * Kesarbai Kerkar, singer
 * Shrinivas Khale, music director
 * Shalmali Kholgade, singer
 * Mogubai Kurdikar, singer
 * Prathamesh Laghate, singer
 * Deenanath Mangeshkar, theatre
 * Lata Mangeshkar, singer
 * Usha Mangeshkar, singer
 * Ketaki Mategaonkar, singer
 * Zubin Mehta, conductor
 * Vaishali Mhade, singer
 * Anuradha Paudwal, singer
 * Ashutosh Phatak, music director
 * Rohit Raut, singer
 * Vaishali Samant, singer
 * Sadhana Sargam, singer
 * Abhijeet Sawant, singer
 * Bela Shende, singer
 * Adarsh Shinde, singer
 * Rahul Vaidya, singer
 * Mugdha Vaishampayan, singer
 * Suresh Wadkar, singer

Hip Hop

 * Divine, rapper
 * Naezy, rapper

Police

 * Vijay Salaskar
 * Ashok Kamte
 * Tukaram Omble
 * Vishwas Nangare Patil
 * Hemant Karkare

Rajya Sabha members

 * List of Rajya Sabha members from Maharashtra

Chief ministers

 * List of chief ministers of Maharashtra

Others

 * Ajit Pawar
 * Anant Gadgil
 * Anil Shirole
 * Babasaheb Ambedkar
 * Bal Thackeray
 * Balasaheb Desai
 * Balasaheb Vikhe Patil
 * Chhagan Bhujbal
 * Dhulappa Bhaurao Navale
 * Ganpatrao Deshmukh
 * Gopal Ganesh Agarkar
 * Gopal Krishna Gokhale
 * Gopinath Munde
 * Hari Shivaram Rajguru
 * Haribhau Jawale
 * Keshavrao Jedhe
 * Manikrao Thakare
 * Manohar Joshi
 * Narayan Rane
 * Patangrao Kadam
 * Prakash Ambedkar
 * Pramod Mahajan
 * Prithviraj Chavan
 * R R Patil
 * Raj Thackeray
 * Ram Shinde
 * Ramdas Athawale
 * Rani Lakshmibai
 * Senapati Bapat
 * Shankarrao Chavan
 * Sharad Pawar
 * Shivraj Patil
 * Shrikant Jichkar
 * Shripad Amrit Dange
 * Siddharth Shirole
 * Sudhakarrao Naik
 * Sunil Deshmukh
 * Sushilkumar Shinde
 * Tatya Tope
 * Uddhav Thackeray
 * Vasantrao Naik
 * Vasantdada Patil
 * Vilasrao Deshmukh
 * Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
 * Yashwantrao Chavan

Religion

 * Babasaheb Ambedkar
 * Samarth Ramdas, Sajjangad
 * Saint Tukaram, Dehu
 * Saint Namdev, Pandharpur
 * Saint Dnyaneshwar, Alandi
 * Saint Eknath, Paithan
 * Sai Baba
 * Gajanan Maharaj, Shegaon
 * Chokha Mela, Mangalvedhe
 * Gora Kumbhar, Terdhoki
 * Muktabai (Kothali), Muktainagar
 * Bahinabai
 * Janabai, Pandharpur
 * Kanhopatra, Pandharpur
 * Shri BrahmaChaitanya, Gondavale
 * Swami Samartha Maharaj, Akkalkot
 * Jangali Maharaj, Pune
 * Zakir Naik, Mumbai
 * Rufus Pereira, Mumbai, Roman Catholic priest and exorcist

Rulers

 * Krishna
 * Ramachandra
 * Chhatrapati Shivaji
 * Chhatrapati Sambhaji
 * Madhavrao I
 * Ahilyabai Holkar
 * Shahu II of Kolhapur
 * Mahadaji Shinde
 * Malhar Rao Holkar
 * Yashwantrao Holkar
 * Baji Rao I
 * Khemirao Sarnaik

Scientists

 * Vijay Bhatkar
 * Anil Kakodkar
 * Madhav Gadgil
 * Raghunath Anant Mashelkar
 * Jayant Narlikar
 * Shekhar C. Mande
 * Chandreshekhar Sonwane
 * Chandrashekhar Khare
 * Narendra Karmarkar
 * Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar
 * Shrinivas Kulkarni
 * Abhay Ashtekar
 * Aravind Joshi
 * Subhash Khot
 * Ashok Gadgil
 * Anandi Gopal Joshi
 * Tatyarao Lahane

Social activists

 * Baba Amte
 * Pandurang Shastri Athavale
 * Sindhutai Sapkal
 * Babasaheb Ambedkar
 * Mahatma Jyotiba Phule
 * Ashok Row Kavi
 * Dhondo Keshav Karve
 * Banoo Jehangir Coyaji
 * Kisan Mehta
 * Harish Iyer
 * Manibhai Desai
 * Anna Hazare
 * Medha Patkar
 * Savitribai Phule
 * Abhay Bang
 * Vinoba Bhave
 * Bhaurao Patil
 * Lokmanya Tilak
 * Veer Savarkar
 * Anna Bhau Sathe
 * Prakash Amte
 * Hari Narke
 * Shivrampant Damle

Badminton

 * Nandu M. Natekar
 * Aparna Popat

Chess

 * Praveen Thipsay
 * Abdul Jabbar
 * Vidit Gujrathi

Contract bridge

 * Jaggy Shivdasani
 * Orlando Campos
 * Ramesh Gokhale
 * Keshav Samant, popularly known as Anand Samant

Cricket

 * Abhishek Nayar
 * Ajinkya Rahane
 * Ajit Agarkar
 * Ashutosh Agashe
 * Baloo Gupte
 * Chandrakant Pandit
 * Chandrakant Patankar
 * Chandrasekhar Gadkari
 * Chandu Borde
 * Dattaram Hindlekar
 * Dattu Phadkar
 * Dilip Vengsarkar
 * Dnyaneshwar Agashe
 * Hemant Kanitkar
 * Hemu Adhikari
 * Hrishikesh Kanitkar
 * Kedar Jadhav
 * Khandu Rangnekar
 * Kiran More
 * Manohar Hardikar
 * Nilesh Kulkarni
 * Paras Mhambrey
 * Phiroze Palia
 * Polly Umrigar
 * Pravin Amre
 * Rahul Dravid
 * Ramnath Parkar
 * Ravi Shastri
 * Rohan Gavaskar
 * Rohit Sharma
 * Sachin Tendulkar
 * Sairaj Bahutule
 * Salil Ankola
 * Sameer Dighe
 * Sandip Patil
 * Sanjay Bangar
 * Sanjay Manjrekar
 * Shardul Thakur
 * Shreyas Iyer
 * Subhash Gupte
 * Sunil Gavaskar
 * Umesh Yadav
 * Vijay Hazare
 * Vijay Manjrekar
 * Vijay Merchant
 * Vinod Kambli
 * Vinoo Mankad
 * Wasim Jaffer
 * Zaheer Khan

Hockey

 * Dhanraj Pillay
 * Viren Rasquinha
 * Hiranna M. Nimal

Shooting

 * Anjali Ved Pathak Bhagwat
 * Tejaswini Sawant

Other sports

 * Ashish Mane - Mountaineerng
 * Gaurav Natekar - Tennis
 * Khashaba Jadhav - Wrestling, won first Olympic individual medal for India
 * Murlikant Petkar - Swimming, India's first Paralympic Gold Medalist

Criminals and gangsters

 * Arun Gawli
 * Dawood Ibrahim, criminal and drug dealer
 * Chhota Rajan
 * Manya Surve
 * Maya Dolas
 * Tiger Memon
 * Yakub Memon

title: List of people from Maharashtra


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Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie (, 19 July 1929 – 22 November 2023) was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.

Early life and career
Le Roy Ladurie was born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados. His father was Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, who would become minister of Agriculture for Marshal Philippe Pétain and subsequently a member of the French Resistance after breaking with the Vichy regime. Le Roy Ladurie described his childhood in Normandy growing up on his family estate in the countryside as intensely Catholic and royalist in politics. The Le Roy Ladurie family were originally the aristocratic de Roy Laduries, descended from a Catholic priest who fell in love with one of his parishioners, dropped out of the priesthood to marry her and was then ennobled by the Crown; the family dropped the aristocratic de from their surname at the time of the French Revolution. Le Roy Ladurie's grandfather was a French Army officer of Catholic royalist views who was dishonorably discharged from the Army in 1902 for refusing orders from the anti-clerical government to close Catholic schools. Later, the former Captain Le Roy Ladurie returned to rural Normandy, was elected mayor of Villeray and was active in organising a union for rural workers.

During his childhood, Le Roy Ladurie's hero was Marshal Pétain. Marshal Pétain's fall from grace – from the hero of Verdun and one of France's most loved men to the reviled collaborator and one of France's most hated men, sentenced to death for high treason for his collaboration with Germany – had a major influence on Le Roy Ladurie's sense of history. Speaking of the rise and fall of Marshal Pétain from hero to traitor as an example of the vicissitudes of history, Le Roy Ladurie in a 1998 interview stated: "I have remained fascinated since then with what we call decline and fall. France is full of people who became very important, then became nothing. My fascination is probably due to the fact that my own family was once important and then became zero. There was a contrast between my own career and the feelings in my family." Because his father had been a minister in the Vichy government, his son grew up in an atmosphere of family shame and disgrace. The historian was educated in Caen at the Collège Saint-Joseph, in Paris at the Lycée Henri-IV and in Sceaux at the Lycée Lakanal. He was awarded an agrégation in history after studying at the École Normale Supérieure (class of 1949) and a doctorat ès lettres from the University of Paris. Le Roy Ladurie has taught at the Lycée de Montpellier, the University of Montpellier, the École Pratique des Haute Études in Paris, the University of Paris and at the Collège de France, where he occupied from 1973 to 1999 the chair of History of Modern Civilization and became emeritus professor.

Le Roy Ladurie was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1945 and 1956. His devoutly Catholic parents had expected him to become a Catholic priest and were scandalized that their son should become an ardent Communist and atheist. The Great Depression of the 1930s together with France's defeat in 1940 at the hands of Germany had caused many people in France to lose faith in both capitalism and liberal democracy. The leading role played by the French Communists in the Resistance during the German occupation and the willingness of many of the traditional French elites to support the Vichy regime together with the apparent success achieved by the Soviet regime's planned economy and its "scientific socialism" led Le Roy Ladurie, like many other people of his generation in France, to embrace Communism as the best hope for humanity. The PCF proudly billed themselves as the "party of 75,000 shot"-a reference to the claim that the Germans had shot 75,000 French Communists between 1941 and 1944 (the true figure was actually 10,000); nevertheless the PCF had acquired tremendous prestige in 1940s France as a result of its role in the Resistance. The German occupation had been a profoundly traumatic experience for the French, not the least because unlike World War I, in which the Union sacrée proclaimed by Raymond Poincaré in 1914 had united the left and the right against the common German enemy, World War II had seen a civil war in France. The Resistance had fought not only the Germans, but also the police, gendarmes and the much feared Milice of the Vichy regime. The Milice were a collection of French fascists, gangsters and assorted adventurers used by the Vichy regime to hunt down and murder résistants, who in their turn assassinated members of the Milice. Given this background, in which many young French people had seen at first-hand the pretty streets, avenues and squares of French cities, towns and villages sullied by acts of outrageous cruelty and violence, Le Roy Ladurie described his generation as a scarred one, saying: "It was dangerous for young people during the war. If we are subjected to violence, we will in turn be violent towards others. It is like someone who is sodomised and then sodomises others." Le Roy Ladurie explained that he became a Communist as a reaction to his war-time experiences.

When the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler's 1940 novel Darkness at Noon was translated into French in 1949, Le Roy Ladurie saw it as confirming the greatness of Stalinism instead of the condemnation that Koestler had intended. Koestler's novel concerned a prominent Soviet Communist and Old Bolshevik named Rubashov who was arrested and charged with crimes against the Soviet Union that he did not commit, but which he willingly confessed to in a show trial after hearing an appeal to Party discipline. The character of Rubashov is generally believed to be modeled by Koestler on Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Old Bolshevik and the leader of the "rightist" (i.e. moderate) faction in the Communist Party who was shot in 1938 after a show trial in Moscow which Bukharin confessed to a fantastic array of bizarre and improbable charges such as being an agent of foreign powers, sabotage, "wrecking", and working with Leon Trotsky from his exile in Mexico City and the "White Guard" leaders in Paris to overthrow Stalin. Bukharin's real crime had been to oppose Stalin in the post-Lenin succession struggle in the 1920s and to advocate continuing the New Economic Policy - which allocated control of the "commanding heights" of the Soviet economy to the state while allowing free enterprise in the rest of the economy - as a viable model for the future. It was not until 1928 when Stalin brought in the First Five Year Plan that full socialism arrived in the Soviet Union, a policy choice that Bukharin had opposed. The image of the Bukharin-like character Rubashov confessing to crimes that he did not commit in order to uphold the greatness of Communism in Darkness At Noon caused a sensation at the time, but the truth was rather more brutal and sordid: Bukharin had been psychologically "broken" after months of torture by the NKVD, and had been reduced to such a state that he was willing to "confess" to anything. Le Roy Ladurie wrote in a 1949 essay about Darkness At Noon that: "Rubashov was right to sacrifice his life and especially his revolutionary honor so that the best of all possible regimes could be established one day". Le Roy Ladurie was to subsequently admit that he had misunderstood the message of Darkness At Noon. At the height of the Cold War in the early 1950s, Le Roy Ladurie described the atmosphere inside the Party as "une intensité liturgique".

In 1955, Le Roy Ladurie married Madeleine Pupponi with whom he had one son and one daughter. Le Roy Ladurie left the PCF after doubts caused by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution became too much for him. Le Roy Ladurie was later to write that the sight of Soviet tanks crushing the ordinary people of Hungary in 1956 who were merely demanding basic human rights led him to abandon his optimism of the late 1940s that the Soviet Union represented the best hope of humanity and instead led him to the conclusion that communism was an inhumane, totalitarian ideology that oppressed people in the Soviet Union, Hungary and elsewhere. Le Roy Ladurie's break with the PCF did not mean an immediate break with the left: he joined the Socialist Party, running as a Socialist candidate in Montpellier in 1957, winning 2.5% of the vote. In 1963, a disillusioned Le Roy Ladurie left the Socialists.

Le Roy Ladurie has often written for Le Nouvel Observateur, L'Express, and Le Monde newspapers, and appeared on French television (in France, historians have far more social prestige than they do in the English-speaking world; to be a successful historian in France is to be something of a celebrity).

Le Roy Ladurie was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974) and the American Philosophical Society (1979). He was the first president of the Association Annie Kriegel, founded in 2000 in Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme to commemorate an anti-Communist historian who, like Ladurie, left the PCF following the events of 1956.

Le Roy Ladurie died on 22 November 2023, at the age of 94.

Les paysans de Languedoc
Le Roy Ladurie first attracted attention with his doctoral thesis, Les paysans de Languedoc, which was published as a book in 1966 and translated into English as The Peasants of Languedoc in 1974. In this study of the peasantry of Languedoc over several centuries, Le Roy Ladurie employed a huge range of quantitative information such as tithe records, wage books, tax receipts, rent receipts and profit records, together with the theories of such thinkers as Ernest Labrousse, Michel Foucault, David Ricardo, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Thomas Malthus, François Simiand, Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, to contend that the history of Languedoc was "l'histoire immobile" (history that stands still). He argued that the history of Languedoc was marked by waves of growth and decline that in essence changed very little over the passage of time. Le Roy Ladurie acknowledged his debt to Braudel, who had argued that it was climate and geography that shaped the course of history, but felt that Braudel had gone too far in regarding these factors as causal agents in history. Instead, Le Roy Ladurie felt that culture and economics were just as important as the nature of the land and the weather. Influenced by the work of his mentor Fernand Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie set out to write a histoire totale (total history) of Languedoc from the 15th to the 18th centuries that would integrate political, cultural, economic, social history and environmental history.

Le Roy Ladurie proposed that the determining feature of life in Languedoc was the culture of the people who lived there, arguing that the people of Languedoc could not break the cycles of advance and decline not so much because of technological factors, but because of the culture that prevented them from developing more progressive technology and farming practices. In Les paysans de Languedoc, Le Roy Ladurie went against the prevailing Marxist view that dominated French historiography at the time that the history of early modern France from the 15th century to the 18th century was the ever-accelerating accumulation of property and wealthy by capitalists. Instead, Le Roy Ladurie contended that in Languedoc there had been cycles of economic advance and decline from the 15th to the 18th centuries. According to Le Roy Ladurie, there were several cycles, namely:
 * "the low water mark" in the 15th century when French society was still recovering from the massive death toll caused by the Black Death of the 14th century which had wiped out much of the population of France. As a consequence, there was social pressure on the survivors to have as many children as possible to repopulate France. With a growing population in the late 14th and 15th centuries, forests were cut down to make room for farms, while poorer land that had been neglected was reclaimed for the growing number of Languedoc peasants. The growing also meant that property was constantly being subdivided while wages declined.
 * The first phase in turn led to the second phase, the "advance" of growing prosperity that lasted until 1530. After 1530, Le Roy Ladurie maintained that the "stubborn inelasticity" of farming practices in Languedoc combined with a growing population led to a period of economic decline that lasted for the rest of the 16th century. Peasants planted more grain, but owing to a combination of cultural conservatism, a shortage of capital and a refusal to innovate, could not increase the productivity of the land to match the increasing population. The growing numbers of mouths to feed together with the "stubborn inelasticity" of Languedoc farming methods led a period of social misery with more and more struggling to survive on less and less. Many peasants moved to other provinces in a search of a better life while those that remained in Languedoc tended to get married at a later age in order to limit family size. In the 16th century, ordinary people in Languedoc were all too aware that they were living in very tough times, but Le Roy Ladurie wrote that they were "preoccupied to the point of self-immolation" with religious issues. The Reformation had badly divided ordinary people, and during the French Wars of Religion, Protestants and Catholics fought one another over the social domination of Languedoc society. Between 1562 and 1598, a series of civil wars took place in France between Catholics and Huguenots to determine whether France would be a Catholic or Calvinist nation: Frenchmen went about killing each other with much passion and fury, both sides being convinced that their faith was the one true faith and that France's salvation was literally in the balance. The Reformed Church had made great gains in the south of France, and as a result Languedoc, like many provinces in the south was the scene of especially vicious fighting during the Wars of Religion. Le Roy Ladurie argued that it was the devastating effect of the civil wars in France that gave birth to both anti-tax revolts as the peasants objected to the increased taxes to which the series of civil wars gave rise and a widespread belief in witchcraft, which held out the promise of a more just society. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that witchcraft represented the lingering survival of the beliefs of the ancient pagan religion before the conversion of Languedoc  to Christianity. The ancient Celts had thrown valuable objects into pools and streams to appease the powerful water spirits that were believed to live there while, later, the Romans had imported the belief in Dryads (woodland nymphs) and Naiads (water nymphs). Despite becoming nominally Christian, the people of Languedoc continued to do this for centuries. Peasant folklore had it that certain favored young women could be invited to join the sisterhood of the Naiads and that if they accepted the invitation by diving naked into the magical waters, they would be transformed into a sensuous Naiad who would be forever young. Le Roy Ladurie suggested that these folktales about young women turning into Dryads or Naiads reflected both female fantasies of escape from the patriarchal society of 16th century Languedoc and a way for the peasants to "explain away" young women who had run away.  Given the prevalence of such beliefs, many peasants took it for granted that certain women were witches who had magical powers and could talk to the spirits of the forest and the waters.  During the period of the Wars of Religion, many ordinary people repulsed in equal measure by the brutal fanaticism of the Catholics and the Huguenots turned to these women, as a rejection both of the bloody mayhem caused by the Wars and of the existing social order which Christianity, whenever it be Protestant or Catholic, upheld. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that the appeal of witchcraft with its glorification of the sensuous pleasures of the human body held out the promise of a "social inversion", which it failed to deliver upon. In studying the cultural and religious history of Languedoc, Le Roy Ladurie was very different from many other Annales historians who usually ignored these aspects of history. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that by the end of the 16th century, the "Malthusian curse" had fallen on Languedoc as the substantial population growth was not matched by increased productivity of the land to provide enough food for all the extra mouths.
 * Starting in 1600, a third phase that Le Roy Ladurie called "maturity" began. In the 17th century, the productivity of the land in Languedoc finally caught up with the growth in the population. Contrary to the claims of Marxist historians, Le Roy Ladurie argued that there was little accumulation of wealth, as continuing agrarian conservatism and a major increase in what Le Roy Ladurie called "parasitic phenomena" both retarded efforts to build up capital. The "parasitic phenomena" were the increasing taxes levied by the French Crown combined with increased tithes demanded by the Catholic Church and increased rents by landlords. Many Languedoc peasants went deeply into debt in an effort to pay all of these. The adverse climate of the 17th century, in which the Little Ice Age was at its height, together with the fact that France was constantly at war in the 17th century further contributed to the increasing misery of the peasantry of Languedoc.
 * In the second half of the 17th century was what Le Roy Ladurie called the fourth phase of "the long period of recession". As the peasants struggled to pay their loans, taxes, tithes and rents, the economy of Languedoc went into a period of steep decline. This period of rising unemployment and poverty together with poor hygiene, unsanitary living conditions, emigration to other provinces of France, late marriages and a rise in birth control – as many men started to use primitive condoms – all led to a dramatic decline in the population of Languedoc. During this period, many wealthier families were able to embark upon land consolidation as they were able to buy the land of less successful families on the cheap.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Languedoc society was, in Le Roy Ladurie's opinion, not far from where it had been two centuries earlier, thus making this entire period one of "l'historie immobile". Le Roy Ladurie saw this as the result of the inability of the farmers of Languedoc to increase the productivity of the land, writing: "'Some have spoken of a natural ceiling on productive resources. But 'nature' in this case is actually culture; it is the customs, the way of life, the mentality of the people; it is a whole formed by technical knowledge and a system of values, by the means employed and the ends pursued'." Le Roy Ladurie argued that, as a result, the unwillingness of the peasants of Languedoc to engage in technologically innovative farming techniques to increase the productivity of the land (as was happening during the same period in England) was the result of the "lack of the conscience, the culture, the morals, the politics, the education, the reformist spirit, and the unfettered longing for success" that characterized the entire culture of Languedoc during these centuries. However, Le Roy Ladurie pointed out that what he had traced was not a cycle in the proper sense as Languedoc did not return in the 18th century to where it had been in the 15th. Even though this was overall a period of economic stagnation, Le Roy Ladurie noted that were "islands" of growth and change in Languedoc. Some of the more enterprising farmers started to grow silk and vines, the latter laying the foundations of the Languedoc wine industry. Others switched over to cloth manufacture. In conclusion, Le Roy Ladurie argued that these economic changes together with the beginning of elementary schools in which the sons of farmers acquired some literacy, the decline of religious fanaticism and a "a general improvement in behavior" all come together to bring about the "economic takeoff" of the 18th century, when the cycles of decline and advance were finally broken.

In Le Roy Ladurie's view, there were "structures" comprising long-term and slowly changing material and mental patterns which underlined the more dramatic and, in his opinion, less important "conjoncture" of trends and events, upon which historians have traditionally focused. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that what he was exploring in Les paysans de Languedoc was the relationship between the vie culturelle that was the "superstructure" of beliefs, politics and thought as it was changed slowly by the vie matérielle of the environment and geography that was the "base" on which the superstructure rested. Like Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie believes that it is the history of the "structures" that really mattered, but unlike Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie has expressed an interest in biography and the histoire événementielle (history of events), which Braudel dismissed as irrelevant. However, Le Roy Ladurie stated that while studying histoire événementielle is interesting, it is the "structures" of French society that explain the course of French history.

Montaillou
Le Roy Ladurie's best-known work is Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), a study of the village of Montaillou in the region of Languedoc in the south of France during the age of the Cathar heresy. Montaillou was a bestseller in both France and after its translation into English in the United States and Great Britain, and remains Le Roy Ladurie's most popular book by far. As a result of the book, the previously little-known village of Montaillou became a popular tourist destination.

In Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie used the records of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, to develop a multi-layered study of life in a small French village over the course of several years. Le Roy Ladurie used the records of interrogations conducted by Fournier to offer a picture of both the material and mental worlds of the inhabitants of Montaillou. Montaillou was much praised by reviewers in both France and the English-speaking world for its vivid, atmospheric recreation of the everyday life of the people of Montaillou in the early 14th century. Many critics have noted that for Le Roy Ladurie, the village priest Father Pierre Clergue, an ardent womanizer whose vow of celibacy meant nothing and who apparently slept with most of the women of Montaillou seemed to be something of a hero for the historian. Clergue's affair with the local aristocrat and noted beauty, the Countess Béatrice de Planisoles formed one of the central stories that Le Roy Ladurie related in Montaillou with much sympathy for the doomed couple.

Critics of Le Roy Ladurie have argued that the Holy Inquisition was an instrument of judicial repression for whom torture or the threat of torture were routine methods. The Canadian historian Norman Cantor argued that none of the people questioned by Fournier had appeared willingly before the Holy Inquisition, and that therefore the Fournier Register which Le Roy Ladurie had used as his main source for Montaillou is not reliable. Other critics have noted that the people questioned by Fournier spoke in Occitan, had their remarks written down in Latin and that Le Roy Ladurie had translated the text into French and have wondered if something has been lost in the translation.

Resisting the "totalitarian temptation"
In France, the intelligentsia has more prestige than does the intelligentsia in the English-speaking world and as such, intellectuals are expected to take stands on the major issues of the day. In January 1978, Le Roy Ladurie was a founding member of the Comité des intellectuals pour l'Europe des libertés (Committee of Intellectuals for a Europe of liberties), an anti-communist group of liberal French intellectuals opposed to the powerful influence of the French Communist Party on French intellectual life and the alliance of the Socialists and the Communists which they saw as a threat to French democracy. The Comité des intellectuals pour l'Europe des libertés was not a conservative group, and instead was opposed to Communism from a liberal vantage-point, declaring itself opposed to both "the unarticulated cry and pure revolt on one hand and absolute knowledge and totalizing ideology on the other", damning the "fatal socialist-statist equation" as offering the end of the Republic and everything it stood for. In its founding manifesto, the Comité des intellectuals pour l'Europe des libertés declared its intention "to defend the synonymy of these three words: Europe, culture, freedom". Significantly, the committee did not limit its remit to France or even Western Europe, instead proclaiming its intention to defend liberty in all of Europe, Western and Eastern. He analysed his political engagement and Communism in Ouverture, société, pouvoir: de l’Édit de Nantes à la chute du communisme (2004) and Les grands procès politiques, ou la pédagogie infernale (2002).

Carnaval de Romans
Another work was Le Carnaval de Romans: de la chandeleur au mercredi des cendres (translated into English as Carnival in Romans) which dealt with the 1580 massacre of about twenty artisans at the annual carnival in the town of Romans-sur-Isère, France. In this book, Le Roy Ladurie used the only two surviving eyewitness accounts of the massacre (one of which was hostile towards to the victims of the massacre by Guérin, the other sympathetic yet often inaccurate by Piémond), together with such information as plague lists and tax lists, to treat the massacre as a microcosm of the political, social and religious conflicts of rural society in the latter half of the 16th century in France. This book provides an example of a micro-historical approach to the social structure of the town of Romans and tax rebellions in early modern France.

Social history
Other more recent treatments of social history by Le Roy Ladurie have included La sorcière de Jasmin (translated into English as Jasmin's Witch) and Le siècle des Platter, 1499-1628 (translated into English as The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth Century Family Drama). In Jasmin's Witch, Le Roy Ladurie following the lead of Carlo Ginzburg, who argued that the idea of witchcraft as held by peasants was very different from the idea of witchcraft held by judges and churchmen. To understand the "total social fact of witchcraft", Le Roy Ladurie used the 1842 poem Françouneto written by Jacques Boè and based on a traditional French peasant folk tale. Le Roy Ladurie contended that the poem contains many authentic traces of popular beliefs about witchcraft in rural France during the 17th and 18th centuries. Le Roy Ladurie argued that the "crime" of the "witch" Françouneto was the violation of the unwritten social code of "limited wealth", namely that she increased her own wealth at the expense of others. In The Beggar and the Professor, Le Roy Ladurie used the letters and memoirs of the Platter family to examine the social values of the 16th century, especially in regards to religion, medicine, crime, learning, and taxes. Another work of social history by Le Roy Ladurie was his 1982 book Love, Death, and Money in the Pays d'Oc, The French Peasantry: 1450-1660, which as it title indicates examined the views held by French peasants about love, death and money.

Political history
Though best known for his work in "microhistory", Le Roy Ladurie has also examined the political history of France between 1460 and 1774 in a two-volume history. The first volume was L'Etat royal: de Louis XI à Henri IV, 1460-1610 (translated into English as The French Royal State: 1460-1610). In this book, Le Roy Ladurie argued that the major concerns of the French Crown were the economy, the Reformation and aristocratic politics, and that the main reasons for the growth of the French state was the need to raise revenue to pay for military expansion into Italy, Provence and Burgundy and its rivalry with Spain over mastery of western Europe.

In the second volume, Ancien Régime: de Louis XIII à Louis XV, 1610-1774 (translated into English as The Ancien Régime), Le Roy Ladurie argued that there was a close connection between the domestic and foreign policies of the French Crown. In particular, Le Roy Ladurie argued that periods of authoritarianism in domestic policy coincided with periods of aggression in foreign policy, and that periods of liberalism in domestic policy coincided with periods of a pacific foreign policy. In order to pay for war, the French state had to increase taxation to raise the necessary funds. In Ancien Régime France, society was divided into three legal categories; the First Estate (the Catholic Church), the Second Estate (the nobility) and the Third Estate (the commoners). The first two estates, which comprised the wealthier elements of French society, were exempt from taxation and to make up the shortfall in revenue, the Third Estate was taxed more heavily than what would have been the case if the tax burden in French society had been spread with greater equality. Le Roy Ladurie argued that because war was so expensive, the French state always had to drastically increase taxation in times of conflict. And that because of the highly unequal nature of the French tax system, the increased taxes had to be accompanied with increased repression to crush the social resistance generated by the higher taxes. The three men who dominated French politics in the 17th century, namely the Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin and King Louis XIV were all obsessed with winning la gloire (the glory) of making France into the world's greatest power, which meant that the 17th century was a period of constant warfare where France was almost always at war with some other power to win la gloire. As a result, anti-tax revolts frequently broke out all over France in the 17th century as the Third Estate attempted to reject the oppressively heavy taxation needed to pay for the wars intended to win la gloire. All of the anti-tax revolts were crushed with ferocious brutality by the Crown to send the message that it was folly on the part of ordinary people to challenge the might of the French state. Despite certain lapses in the 1750s, Le Roy Ladurie argued that the reign of King Louis XV was characterized by liberalism at home and peace abroad while the rule of Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIV was marked by aggression and authoritarianism. At the end of his two-volume history, Le Roy Ladurie stated that the growth of popularity of Enlightenment ideas, anti-clericalism, and liberalism had by 1774 already placed France on the road to the French Revolution. The American historian Stuart Carroll commented that in these books of the 1990s, Le Roy Ladurie was according the decisions individuals and histoire événementielle a level of importance in influencing history that he had rejected in his 1973 book Le Territoire de l'historien where he had claimed the quantitative methodology and the study of long-term structural changes had replaced histoire événementielle and biographies as the main focus of the work of a historian.

Historiography
Ladurie's mentor was Fernand Braudel, a prominent member of the Annales School and one of the most prolific contemporary historians.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Ladurie founded the movement of the "Nouvelle histoire" (New History). Le Roy Ladurie is a leading champion of "microhistory", in which a historian uses the study of an event, locality, family or life to reveal the "structures" which underlie life in the particular period under study. Some, like Niall Ferguson, have questioned the value of "microhistory", arguing that it is wrong to assume that the study of one village or one incident in one town or one family reveals wider patterns of life in France, let alone the rest of Europe. Another line of criticism has centered around Le Roy Ladurie's use of the term "structures". His critics contend that he has never clearly defined the term, nor explained why "structures" change over time, or even whether the "structures" Le Roy Ladurie purports to find exist.

Le Roy Ladurie has also worked on the history of French regions (Histoire de France des régions, 2004) and on anthropometric history as well as on the impact of climate changes on human history. Besides writing books, Le Roy Ladurie is a prolific essayist writing on variety of subjects such as the utility of computers as method of historical research, rates of delinquency in the French Army in the 19th century, the spread of global diseases and the belief of French peasants that magic could be used to generate impotence. The latter was a reference to the widespread practice of French peasant men in the Middle Ages and the early modern period of paying witches to use their (supposed) magical powers to make their rivals in love go impotent. Le Roy Ladurie is also known as one of the first modern environmental historians because his work focused on human agency in environmental change, as well as environmental factors in human history.

Works

 * Les Paysans de Languedoc, Paris, ed. SEVPEN, 1966.
 * Histoire du climat depuis l'an mil, Paris, ed. Flammarion, 1967.
 * Anthropologie du conscrit français (with J.-P. Aron et al.), Paris, ed. EHESS, 1972.
 * Médecins, climat, épidémies (with J.-P. Desaive et al.), Paris, ed. EHESS, 1972.
 * Le Territoire de l'historien, Paris, ed. Gallimard, 1973.
 * Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, Paris, ed. Gallimard, 1975.
 * Histoire économique et sociale de la France, Paris, ed. PUF, 1976.
 * Le Carnaval de Romans : de la Chandeleur au Mercredi des cendres (1579–1580), Paris, ed. Gallimard, 1979.
 * L’Argent, l'amour et la mort en pays d'Oc, Paris, ed. Seuil, 1980.
 * La Sorcière de Jasmin, Paris, ed. Seuil, 1980.
 * Inventaire des campagnes, Paris, ed. JC Lattès, 1980.
 * Histoire de la France urbaine, Paris, ed. JC Lattès, 1981.
 * Parmi les historiens, Paris, ed. Seuil, 1983.
 * Pierre Prion, scribe, Paris, ed. Gallimard, 1987.
 * L’État royal 1460-1610, Paris, ed. Hachette, 1987.
 * L'Ancien Régime, 1610-1770, Paris, ed. Hachette, 1991.
 * Histoire de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, ed. Collège de France 1995.
 * Le Siècle des Platter, Paris, ed. Fayard, 1997.
 * L'Historien, le Chiffre et le Texte, Paris, ed. Fayard, 1997.
 * Saint-Simon ou Le système de la Cour, Paris, ed. Fayard, 1997.
 * Histoire du Languedoc, Toulouse, ed. Privat, 2000.
 * Histoire de France des régions : la périphérie française, des origines à nos jours, Paris, ed. Seuil, 2001.
 * Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan : histoire et religiosité d'un village au Moyen Âge, Paris, ed. Hydre, 2001.
 * Histoire des paysans français : de la peste noire à la Révolution, Paris, ed. Seuil, 2002.
 * Les Grands Procès politiques, Paris, ed. Rocher, 2002.
 * La Dîme royale, Paris, ed. Imprimerie nationale, 2002.
 * Abrégé d'histoire du climat du Moyen Âge à nos jours (with Anouchka Vasak), Paris, ed. Fayard, 2007.
 * Histoire humaine et comparée du climat, Paris, ed. Fayard, 2009.
 * Histoire et système (dir.), Paris ed. Le Cerf, 2010.
 * Les fluctuations du climat de l'an mil à aujourd'hui, Paris, ed. Fayard, 2011.
 * La Civilisation rurale, Paris, ed. Allia, 2012.
 * Une vie avec l'histoire. Mémoires, Paris, ed. Tallandier, 2014.
 * Les Paysans français d'Ancien Régime, Paris, ed. Seuil, 2015.
 * Huit leçons d'histoire, Paris, ed. Fayard, 2016.
 * Brève histoire de l'Ancien Régime, Paris, ed. Fayard, 2017.

Honours

 * Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour (France)
 * Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit (France)
 * Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)

Prize

 * Prize Pierre-Lafue (1978)

Acknowledgement

 * Member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques
 * Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * Member of the Academia Europaea
 * Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences
 * Member of the Japan Academy
 * Member of the Académie de Nîmes
 * Foreign honorary member of the National Academy of Sciences

Honorary degrees

 * University of Oxford
 * University of Leicester
 * Durham University
 * University of Leeds
 * University of York
 * University of Hull
 * University of Sussex
 * University of Michigan
 * University of Pennsylvania
 * Carnegie Mellon University
 * University at Albany, SUNY
 * Université de Montréal
 * University of Dublin
 * University of Geneva
 * HEC Paris
 * University of Haifa

title: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie


text:
User:Ericlee

Eric Lee is the editor of LabourStart, the online trade union news service, located at http://www.labourstart.org/

His personal web page is located at http://www.ericlee.me.uk

title: User:Ericlee


text:
User talk:Foom

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them;

 * How to edit a page
 * How to write a great article
 * Naming conventions
 * Manual of Style

If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

snoyes 19:04, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Very easy way indeed: Just sign with four tildes (~): ~, three tildes just prints your username, four adds the date. --snoyes 19:21, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

title: User talk:Foom


text:
User talk:Ericlee

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them;

 * How to edit a page
 * How to write a great article
 * Naming conventions
 * Manual of Style

If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

snoyes 19:07, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Just saw the article you have on your personal webpage about the search results for "Labour" on MSN. I don't know whether or not the recent slashdot article inspired this. But if it didn't, there is a lot of information on how msn returns the results it does in the comments on this article. --snoyes 19:12, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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Speedy deletion nomination of UnionBook

A tag has been placed on UnionBook requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

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October 2011
Hello Ericlee. If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article UnionBook, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:
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Nomination of LabourStart for deletion
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title: User talk:Ericlee


text:
Josiah Mason

Sir Josiah Mason (23 February 1795 – 16 June 1881) was an English industrialist, engaged in pen manufacture and other trades, and a philanthropist. He founded Mason Science College in 1875, which later became the University of Birmingham.

Biography
He was the son of a carpet-weaver, and was born in Mill Street, Kidderminster. He began life as a street hawker of cakes, fruits and vegetables. After trying his hand in his native town at shoemaking, baking, carpentering, blacksmithing, house-painting and carpet-weaving, he moved in 1816 to Birmingham. Here he found employment in the gilt-toy trade. In 1824 he set up on his own account as a manufacturer of split-rings by machinery, to which he subsequently added the making of steel pens. Owing to the circumstance of his pens being marketed through James Perry (founder of Perry & Co., the London stationer whose name they bore) he was less well known than Joseph Gillott and other makers, although he was really the largest producer in England, contributing heavily to the Birmingham pen trade.

In 1874 the business was converted into a limited liability company. Besides his steel-pen trade, Mason carried on for many years the business of electro-plating, copper-smelting, and India-rubber ring making, in conjunction with George Elkington.

Mason was almost entirely self-educated, having taught himself to write when a shoemaker's apprentice, and in later life he felt his deficiencies keenly. It was this which led him in 1860 to establish his great orphanage at Erdington, near Sutton Coldfield, some 6 miles from Birmingham. Upon it he expended about £300,000, and for this munificent endowment he was knighted in 1872. He had previously given a dispensary to his native town and an almshouse to Erdington. In 1880 Mason College, since incorporated in the University of Birmingham, was opened. The total value of the endowment was about £250,000.

In commemoration of him, his bust stands at the centre of the roundabout at the junction of Chester Road & Orphanage Road in Erdington (52.53156°N, -1.82513°W). This bronze bust was cast in 1951 by William Bloye from a marble statue by Francis John Williamson in 1885, which stood opposite Mason Science College in Edmund Street, but which has since been destroyed. Williamson's statue was erected posthumously, Mason having vetoed its creation during his lifetime. The bust is often "dressed" on special occasions and seasonal holidays.

title: Josiah Mason


text:
Talk:Phase transitions

OK, but then it must be "phase transition". "Phase (matter)" is misleading.

title: Talk:Phase transitions


text:
National Armed Forces

National Armed Forces (NSZ; Polish: Narodowe Siły Zbrojne) was a Polish right-wing underground military organization of the National Democracy operating from 1942. During World War II, NSZ troops fought against Nazi Germany and communist partisans. There were also cases of fights with the Home Army.

At the end of the war, some units and structures of this organization supposedly cooperated with the Nazis and Gestapo (as in the case of the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade and Hubert Jura) and supposedly committed crimes motivated by antisemitism.

Most NSZ units did not submit to the Polish government-in-exile and conducted fratricidal fights with other Polish partisan units. From 1944 to 1946, the NSZ fought as part of the anti-communist resistance, including after the postwar Polish People's Republic was established.

History

The NSZ was created on September 20, 1942, as a result of the merger of the Military Organization Lizard Union (Organizacja Wojskowa Związek Jaszczurczy) and part of the National Military Organization (Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa). At its maximum strength in 1943–44, the NSZ reached between 70,000 and 75,000 members, making it the third-largest organization of the Polish resistance (after the Home Army (AK) and the Bataliony Chlopskie). NSZ units participated in the Warsaw Uprising.

In March 1944 the NSZ split, with the more moderate faction coming under the command of the AK. The other part became known as the NSZ-ZJ (the Lizard Union). This branch of the NSZ conducted operations against Polish communist activists, partisans and secret police, the Soviet partisans, NKVD and SMERSH, and their own (NSZ) former leaders.

Political stance
The NSZ's program included the fight for Polish independence against Nazi Germany as well as against the Soviet Union. Its goal was to keep the Second Polish Republic's prewar eastern territories and borders, while regaining additional former German territories to the west, which they deemed "ancient Slavic lands". The General Directive Nr. 3 of the National Armed Forces General Command, L. 18/44 from January 15, 1944, reads: "'In the face of crossing of Polish borders by Soviet forces, the Polish Government in London and its Polish citizens living on the territory of Poland express their unwavering desire for the return of the sovereignty to the entire area of Poland within the Polish borders established prior to 1939 through the mutually-binding Treaty of Riga and reaffirmed by the general principles of the Atlantic Charter, as well as by the declarations of the Allied governments which did not concede to any territorial changes that took place in Poland after August 1939.'"

During the war, the NSZ fought the Polish communists, including their military organizations such as the Gwardia Ludowa (GL) and the Armia Ludowa (AL). After the war, former NSZ members were persecuted by the newly installed communist government of the Polish People's Republic. Reportedly, communist partisans engaged in planting false evidence, such as documents and forged receipts at the sites of their own robberies, in order to blame the NSZ. It was a method of political warfare practiced against the NSZ also by the Ministry of Public Security of Poland and Milicja Obywatelska (MO) right after the war, as revealed by communist Poland's court documents.

National Armed Forces and Jews
The National Armed Forces (though not uniformly ) did not accept Jews in their ranks, and expressed explicit anti-semitic sentiment. "The solution of the Jewish question is almost as important for the future of our nation as the regaining of independence. The loss of independence and the continuation of Jewish presence in Poland are both an equal danger of slow death for the Poles."

"We may condemn the Germans for their bestial methods but we must not forget that Jewry was always and will remain a destructive element in our state organism. The liquidation of the Jews in the Polish territories is of great importance for future development because it frees us from a million-headed parasite."

From November 1944 to mid-1947, during the period of armed anti-communist insurgency against the Soviet takeover of Poland, many Jews who were part of communist groups were killed by the National Armed Forces. In Warsaw, the National Armed Forces killed Jerzy Makowiecki and Ludwik Widerszal, two Polish Home Army officers of Jewish origin. Polish historian Alina Cała said that the doctrine of the National Armed Forces was primarily the elimination of what they considered to be Communist bands. According to sociologist Tadeusz Piotrowski, these attacks later "became more focused on individual Jews who were placed in highly visible positions of authority in the PRL [People's Republic of Poland]".

In some districts, the National Armed Forces actively pursued Jews. Some units of the National Armed Forces were on the lookout for Jews hiding in the forests to deliver to the Germans. In Radom, the National Armed Forces cooperated with the Germans towards that goal in 1943–1944. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Polish Jews who had sought shelter among ethnic Poles after escaping from ghettos were directly murdered by the National Armed Forces.

According to other sources, many National Armed Forces soldiers and their families are credited with having saved Jews, including such noted ones as Maria Bernstein, Leon Goldman, Jonte Goldman, and Dr. Turski. The National Armed Forces did have Jews in its ranks, including Calel Perechodnik, Wiktor Natanson, Captain Roman Born-Bornstein (chief physician of the Chrobry II unit), Jerzy Zmidygier-Konopka, Feliks Pisarewski-Parry, Eljahu (Aleksander) Szandcer (nom de guerre Dzik), Dr. Kaminski, a physician who served in an NSZ unit led by Captain Władysław Kolaciński (nom de guerre Zbik), Major Stanisław Ostwind-Zuzga, and others.

In January 1945, the National Armed Forces Holy Cross Mountains Brigade (Brygada Świętokrzyska) retreated before the advancing Red Army and, after negotiating a ceasefire with the Germans, moved into the Nazi-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It resumed operations against the Nazis on 5 May 1945 in Bohemia, where the brigade liberated prisoners from a concentration camp in Holýšov, including 280 Jewish women prisoners slated for death.

Postwar
Members of the NSZ, like other "cursed soldiers", and their families were persecuted during the postwar Stalinist period. In the fall of 1946, 100-200 soldiers of an NSZ unit under the command of Henryk Flame, nom de guerre "Bartek," were lured into a trap and massacred by communist military and police forces.

Some of the NSZ were responsible for the 1946 pacification of villages in northeast Poland, in which ethnic Belarusian Polish citizens were attacked; 79 were killed. The National Armed Forces were officially dissolved in 1947.

In 1992, acknowledging its contribution to the fight for Poland's sovereignty, Polish authorities recognized National Armed Forces underground soldiers as war veterans. NSZ soldiers were rehabilitated, including some controversial ones, for instance, Mieczysław Pazderski, who in 1945 murdered almost 200 Ukrainian villagers in Wierzchowina, and who was awarded two medals by Polish president Lech Wałęsa. The Polish Parliament Sejm passed a bill in 2012 commemorating the 70th anniversary of the creation of Narodowe Siły Zbrojne in 1942. Members of the Sejm who supported the resolution pointed out that NSZ members became the most obstinate target of repressions and hate propaganda by security apparatus under Stalinism.

In the 1990s the topic of "cursed soldiers", or anti-communist partisans, was not discussed much in Poland. By the 2000s however, the cult of "cursed soldiers" gained prominence. In 2012, the Polish Parliament (Sejm) passed a bill commemorating the 70th anniversary of the creation of Narodowe Siły Zbrojne in 1942.

The role of NSZ and its relations with the Jews remains a controversial topic in modern Poland. The 2012 Sejm declaration has been criticized by former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller. Several members of parliament criticized the bill and walked out of a related commemorative ceremony.

Commandants of National Armed Forces

 * Col. Ignacy Oziewicz (September 1942 – June 1943)
 * Col. Tadeusz Kurcyusz (August 1943 – April 1944)
 * Col. Stanisław Nakoniecznikoff-Klukowski (April 1944 – July 1944)
 * Gen. Tadeusz Jastrzębski (July 1944 – October 1944)
 * Col. Stanisław Nakoniecznikoff-Klukowski (October 1944)
 * Gen. Zygmunt Broniewski (October 1944 – August 1945)
 * Col. Stanisław Kasznica (August 1945 – February 1947)

title: National Armed Forces