Annales School

The Annales School is a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It has dominated French social history and influenced historiography worldwide. Prominent leaders include cofounders Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), as well as Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), Georges Duby (1919-1996), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929- ) and Jacques Le Goff (1924- ). The main outlet was the journal founded in 1929, Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history"), which broke radically with traditional historiography by insisting on the importance of taking all levels of society into consideration and emphasized the collective nature of mentalités. They rejected Marxism, and downplayed material factors as less important than the mental framework ("mentalités") that shaped decisions.

The journal, founded in Strasbourg, moved to Paris and continues today as Annales: Histoire, Sciences Social. The scope of topics is vast--there is a search for total history. The emphasis is on social history, and very-long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" ("mentalités" in French). Little attention is paid to political, diplomatic or military history, or to biographies of famous men. Instead the Annales focused attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis.

Braudel was editor of Annales 1956-68, followed by Jacques Le Goff (b. 1924), a medievalist.

Bloch

Marc Bloch (1886-1944) was the cofounder of the Annales school, and a quintessential modernist. He studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in Germany, serving as a professor at the University of Strassbourg until he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch was highly interdiciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). His own ideas, especially those expressed in his masterworks, French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931) and Feudal Society were incorporated by the second-generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel.

mentalities

Bloch, Marc. Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924) looked at the long-standing folk belief that the king could cure scrofula by touch. The kings of France and England indeed regularly practiced the ritual. Bloch was not concerned with the effectiveness of the royal touch--he acted like an anthropologist in asking why people believed it and how it shaped relations between king and commoner. The book was highly influential in introducing comparative studies (in this case France and England), as well as long-durations ("longue durée"), studies spanning several centuries--even a thousand years--with specific events used as illustrations. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities resonated with scholars who were reading Freud and Proust. In the 1960s, Robert Mandrou and Georges Duby harmonized the concept of mentalité history with Fernand Braudel's structures of historical time and linked mentalities with changing social conditions. A flood of mentalité studies based on these approaches appeared during the 1970s-80s. By the 1990s, however, mentalité history had become interdisciplinary to the point of fragmentation but still lacked a solid theoretical basis. While not explictly rejecting mentalité history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.

Braudel

Fernand Braudel became the leader of the second generation after 1950. He obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and founded the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which was devoted to the study of history and the social sciences. His followers admired his use of the longue durée approach to stress slow, and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past. The Annales historians, after living through two world wars and incedible political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion of multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress inertia and the longue durée. That is, the continuities of the deepest structures were central to history, beside which upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries. They rejected the Marxist idea that history should be used as a tool to foment and foster revolutions. In turn the Marxists called them conservatives.

Braudel's first book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II (1949) (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) was his most influential. This vast panoramic view used ideas from other social sciences, employed effectively the technique of the longue durée, and downplayed the importance of specific events and individuals. It stressed geography but not mentalité. It was widely admired, but most historians did not try to replicate it and instead focused on their specialized monographs. The book dramaticaly raised the worldwide profile of the Annales School.

Barudel in his three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Economie, et Capitalisme (1979) (Capitalism and Material Life [1979]), a sweeping study of preindustrial capitalism the world over, returned to economic history as practiced by the Annales historians of the 1930s. He prefers descriptive detail rather than theoretical constructs, avoid all economic theory, and uses statistical data as illustration rather than an analytic tool.

Regionalism

Before Annales, French history supposedly happened in Paris. Febvre broke decisively with this paradigm in 1912, with his sweeping doctoral thesis on Philippe II et la Franche-Comté. The geography and social structure overwhelmed and shaped the king's policies. The relgionalist tradition flourished especially in the 1960s and 1970s under Pierre Goubert (Beauvais), René Baehrel (Basse-Provence), and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Languedoc). Annales historians in the 1970s and 1980s turned to urban regions, including Pierre Deyon (Amiens), Maurice Garden (Lyons), Jean-Pierre Bardet (Rouen), Georges Freche (Toulouse), and Jean-Claude Perrot (Caen). By the 1970s the shift was underway from the earlier economic history to cultural history and the history of mentalities.

Impact outside France

Beginning in the 1960s the Annales school had an impact on the "new social history: in the United States, and on the Past and Present group in Britain.

Even earlier it impacted Polish historiography. Franciszek Bujak (1875-1953) and Jan Rutkowski (1886-1949), the founders of modern economic history in Poland and of the journal Roczniki Dziejów Spolecznych i Gospodarczych (1931- ), were attracted to the innovations of the Annales school. Rutkowski was in contact with Bloch and others, and published in the Annales. After the Communists took control in the 1940s Polish scholars were safer working on the Middle Ages and the early modern era rather than contemporary history. After the "Polish October" of 1956 the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris welcomed Polish historians and exchanges between the circle of the Annales and Polish scholars continued until the early 1980s. The reciprocal influence between the French school and Polish historiography was particularly evident in studies on the Middle Ages and the early modern era studied by Fernand Braudel.

From the 1950s Federico Brito Figueroa was the founder of a new Venezuelan historiography based largely on the ideas of the Annales School. Brito Figueroa carried his conception of the field to all levels of university study, emphasizing a systematic and scientific approach to history and placing it squarely in the social sciences.

Bibliography

• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89, (1990), the major study in English excerpt and text search
• Carrard, Philippe. "Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel," Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2-19 in JSTOR
• Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, (1992)
• Dosse, Francois. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, (1994, first French edition, 1987) excerpt and text search
• Fink, Carole. Marc Bloch: A Life in History, (1989) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Susan W. Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (1996) excerpt and text search
• Hexter, J. H. "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 1972, vol. 44, pp. 480-539 in JSTOR
• Hufton, Olwen. "Fernand Braudel", Past and Present, No. 112. (Aug., 1986), pp. 208–213. in JSTOR
• Huppert, George. "Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch: The Creation of the Annales." The French Review Vol. 55, No. 4 (Mar., 1982), pp. 510-513 in JSTOR
• Moon, David. "Fernand Braudel and the Annales School" online edition
• Roberts, Michael. "The Annales school and historical writing." in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds. Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline. (2004), pp 78-92 online edition
• Stirling, Katherine. "Rereading Marc Bloch: the Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist." History Compass 2007 5(2): 525-538. Issn: 1478-0542 Fulltext: History Compass
• Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, (1976)

Primary sources

• Braudel, Fernand. On History, (1980, first French edition 1969). excerpt and text search
• Braudel, Fernand. "Personal Testimony." Journal of Modern History 1972 44(4): 448-467. Issn: 0022-2801 Fulltext: Jstor
• Burke, Peter, ed. A New Kind of History From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, (1973)
• Duby, G. History Continues, (1994)
• Earle, P., ed. Essays in European Economic History, 1500-1800, (1974)
• Ferro, Marx, ed. Social Historians in Contemporary France: Essays from "Annales", (1972)
• LeGoff, Jacques and Paul Archambault. "An Interview with Jacques Le Goff." Historical Reflections 1995 21(1): 155-185. Issn: 0315-7997
• Revel, J. and L. Hunt, eds. Histories: French Constructions of the Past, (1995).

External links

• recent issues of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Social
• biography of Fernand Braudel