Annales School
Encyclopedia
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography
developed by French
historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs. The school has been highly influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France
and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social rather than political or diplomatic themes, and for being generally hostile to the class analysis of Marxist historiography
.
The school deals primarily with the premodern world (before the French Revolution
), with little interest in later topics. It has dominated French social history and influenced historiography in Europe and Latin America
. Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre
(1878–1956) and Marc Bloch
(1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel
(1902–1985) and included Georges Duby
(1919–1996), Pierre Goubert
(1915– ), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu
(1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff
(1924– ) and Ernest Labrousse
(1895–1988). Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the École pratique des hautes études
, all based in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
(1929– ) and includes Jacques Revel, and Philippe Ariès
(1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978. The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities
, or mentalités.
The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier
(1945– ), clearly distanced itself from the mentalities approach, replaced by the cultural
and linguistic turn
, which emphasize analysis of the social history of cultural practices.
The main scholarly outlet has been the journalAnnales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history"), founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, 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 mentalities. Its contributors viewed events as less fundamental than the mental frameworks that shaped decisions and practices.
Braudel was editor of Annales from 1956 to 1968, followed by the medievalist Jacques Le Goff. However, Braudel's informal successor as head of the school was Le Roy Ladurie, who was unable to maintain a consistent focus. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe. By the 1960s the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world. Influence spread out from Paris, but did not come in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history. However, Paris ignored the powerful developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political and demographic research in those countries, while France fell behind. An attempt to require an Annales-written textbook for French schools was rejected by the government. By 1980 postmodernist sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives. As Jacques Revel notes, the success of the Annales School, especially its use of social structures as explanatory forces contained the seeds of its own downfall, for there is "no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real." The Annales School kept its infrastructure, but lost its mentalités.
In 1962 Braudel and Gaston Berger used Ford Foundation money and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. In 1970 the 6th Section and the Annales relocated to the FMSH building. FMSH set up elaborate international networks to spread the Annales gospel across Europe and the world.
The scope of topics covered by the journal is vast and experimental—there is a search for total history and new approaches. 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" (mentalité). 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.
and Lucien Febvre
in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg
and later in Paris
. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Année Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians which Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la longue durée
) over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. The goal of the Annales was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history.
Cofounder Marc Bloch
(1886–1944) was a quintessential modernist who studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in Germany, serving as a professor at the University of Strasbourg until he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch was highly interdisciplinary, 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
.
, wrote in the foreword of his book Le dimanche de Bouvines that the history he taught
The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre
, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem.
during the German occupation of France in World War II
for his active membership of the French Resistance
, and Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during this time that he mentored Fernand Braudel
, who would become one of the best-known exponents of this school. Braudel's work came to define a "second" era of Annales historiography and was very influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of Philip II of Spain
.
Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time: l'histoire quasi immobile (motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (la longue durée
), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures.
While authors such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
, Marc Ferro
and Jacques Le Goff
continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history
, political history
and economic history
.
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 instead 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 up to a thousand years, downplaying short-term events. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities, or mentalités, 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 and 1980s. By the 1990s, however, mentalité history had become interdisciplinary to the point of fragmentation, but still lacked a solid theoretical basis. While not explicitly rejecting mentalité history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.
became the leader of the second generation after 1945. 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. It became an independent degree-granting institution in 1975 under the name École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Braudel's 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 incredible political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress inertia and the longue durée. Special attention was paid to geography, climate, and demography as long-term factors. They believed 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 dramatically raised the worldwide profile of the Annales School.
The Annales historians did not try to replicate Braudel's vast geographical scope in La Méditerranée. Instead they focused on regions in France over long stretches of time. The most important was the study of the Peasants of Languedoc by Braudel's star pupil and successor Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
. The regionalist tradition flourished especially in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of Pierre Goubert in 1960 on Beauvais and René Baehrel on Basse-Provence. Annales historians in the 1970s and 1980s turned to urban regions, including Pierre Deyon (Amiens), Maurice Garden (Lyon), 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.
" of 1956 the Sixth Section 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 Braudel.
In South America the Annales approach became popular. 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. Spanish historiography was influenced by the "Annales School" starting in 1950 with Jaime Vincens Vives (1910–1960).
British historians, apart from a few Marxists, were generally hostile. Academic historians decidedly sided with Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History against Edward Hallett Carr
's What Is History?
. American, German, Indian, Russian and Japanese scholars generally ignored the school. The Americans developed their own form of "new social history" from entirely different routes. Both the American and the Annales historians picked up important family reconstitution techniques from French demographer Louis Henry.
, who is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Professeur in the Collège de France
, and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania
. He frequently lectures and teaches in the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. His work in Early Modern European History focuses on the history of education, the history of the book and the history of reading. Recently, he has been concerned with the relationship between written culture as a whole and literature (particularly theatrical plays) for France, England and Spain. His work in this specific field (based on the criss-crossing between literary criticism, bibliography, and sociocultural history) is connected to broader historiographical and methodological interests which deal with the relation between history and other disciplines: philosophy, sociology, anthropology.
Chartier's typical undergraduate course focuses upon the making, remaking, dissemination, and reading of texts in early modern Europe and America. Under the heading of "practices," his class considers how readers read and marked up their books, forms of note-taking, and the interrelation between reading and writing from copying and translating to composing new texts. Under the heading of "materials," his class examines the relations between different kinds of writing surfaces (including stone, wax, parchment, paper, walls, textiles, the body, and the heart), writing implements (including styluses, pens, pencils, needles, and brushes), and material forms (including scrolls, erasable tables, codices, broadsides and printed forms and books). Under the heading of "places," his class explores where texts were made, read, and listened to, including monasteries, schools and universities, offices of the state, the shops of merchants and booksellers, printing houses, theaters, libraries, studies, and closets. The texts for his course include the Bible, translations of Ovid, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Montaigne's essays, Pepys's diary, Richardson's Pamela, and Franklin's autobiography.
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
developed by French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs. The school has been highly influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social rather than political or diplomatic themes, and for being generally hostile to the class analysis of Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography
Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes....
.
The school deals primarily with the premodern world (before the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
), with little interest in later topics. It has dominated French social history and influenced historiography in Europe and Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
. Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He has designed the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.-Biography:...
(1878–1956) and Marc Bloch
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair...
(1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
(1902–1985) and included Georges Duby
Georges Duby
Georges Duby was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages...
(1919–1996), Pierre Goubert
Pierre Goubert
Pierre Goubert is a French historian, a noted specialist on the 17th century. He was born in Saumur.-Works:*Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 : contribution à l'histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle...
(1915– ), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu
Pierre Chaunu
Pierre Chaunu was a French historian. His specialty was Latin American history; he also studied French social and religious history of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries...
(1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff
Jacques Le Goff
Jacques Le Goff is a prolific French historian specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries....
(1924– ) and Ernest Labrousse
Ernest Labrousse
Camille-Ernest Labrousse was a French historian specializing in social and economic history.Labrousse established a historical model centered on three nodes—economic, social and cultural—inventing the quantitative history sometimes now called "cliometrics"...
(1895–1988). Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the École pratique des hautes études
École pratique des hautes études
The École pratique des hautes études is a Grand Établissement in Paris, France. It is counted among France's most prestigious research and higher education institutions....
, all based in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the ancien regime, particularly the history of the peasantry.-Early life and career:...
(1929– ) and includes Jacques Revel, and Philippe Ariès
Philippe Ariès
Philippe Ariès was an important French medievalist and historian of the family and childhood, in the style of Georges Duby. Ariès has written many books on the common daily life. His most prominent works regarded the change in the western attitudes towards death.Ariès regarded himself as a...
(1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978. The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities
History of mentalities
The term history of mentalities is a calque on the French histoire des mentalités , a term referring to the manner of doing history associated with the Annales School.The history of mentalities focuses not on the wars and politics which have been the subject matter of most...
, or mentalités.
The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier
Roger Chartier
Roger Chartier, born on December 9, 1945 in Lyon, is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading.- Biography :...
(1945– ), clearly distanced itself from the mentalities approach, replaced by the cultural
Cultural turn
The cultural turn was a movement among scholars in the social sciences to look at culture differently. The cultural turn has been described by one of its most prominent historiographers as a “wide array of new theoretical impulses coming from fields formerly peripheral to the social sciences,”...
and linguistic turn
Linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language....
, which emphasize analysis of the social history of cultural practices.
The main scholarly outlet has been the journalAnnales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history"), founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, 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 mentalities. Its contributors viewed events as less fundamental than the mental frameworks that shaped decisions and practices.
Braudel was editor of Annales from 1956 to 1968, followed by the medievalist Jacques Le Goff. However, Braudel's informal successor as head of the school was Le Roy Ladurie, who was unable to maintain a consistent focus. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe. By the 1960s the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world. Influence spread out from Paris, but did not come in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history. However, Paris ignored the powerful developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political and demographic research in those countries, while France fell behind. An attempt to require an Annales-written textbook for French schools was rejected by the government. By 1980 postmodernist sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives. As Jacques Revel notes, the success of the Annales School, especially its use of social structures as explanatory forces contained the seeds of its own downfall, for there is "no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real." The Annales School kept its infrastructure, but lost its mentalités.
The journal
The journal began in Strasbourg as Annales d'histoire économique et sociale; it moved to Paris and kept the same name from 1929 to 1939. It was successively renamed Annales d'histoire sociale (1939–1942, 1945), Mélanges d’histoire sociale (1942–1944), Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations (1946–1994), and Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (1994– ).In 1962 Braudel and Gaston Berger used Ford Foundation money and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. In 1970 the 6th Section and the Annales relocated to the FMSH building. FMSH set up elaborate international networks to spread the Annales gospel across Europe and the world.
The scope of topics covered by the journal is vast and experimental—there is a search for total history and new approaches. The emphasis is on social history, and very long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" (mentalité). 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.
Origins
The Annales was founded and edited by Marc BlochMarc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair...
and Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He has designed the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.-Biography:...
in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
and later in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Année Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians which Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la longue durée
Longue durée
The longue durée , is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history, which gives priority to long-term historical structures over events— what François Simiand called histoire événementielle, "eventual history"— the short...
) over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. The goal of the Annales was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history.
Cofounder Marc Bloch
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair...
(1886–1944) was a quintessential modernist who studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in Germany, serving as a professor at the University of Strasbourg until he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch was highly interdisciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache
Paul Vidal de la Blache
Paul Vidal de la Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of the modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics...
(1845–1918) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
(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
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
.
Precepts
An eminent member of this school, Georges DubyGeorges Duby
Georges Duby was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages...
, wrote in the foreword of his book Le dimanche de Bouvines that the history he taught
relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation.
The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He has designed the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.-Biography:...
, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem.
Post war
Bloch was shot by the GestapoGestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
during the German occupation of France in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
for his active membership of the French Resistance
French Resistance
The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
, and Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during this time that he mentored Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
, who would become one of the best-known exponents of this school. Braudel's work came to define a "second" era of Annales historiography and was very influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of Philip II of Spain
Philip II of Spain
Philip II was King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and, while married to Mary I, King of England and Ireland. He was lord of the Seventeen Provinces from 1556 until 1581, holding various titles for the individual territories such as duke or count....
.
Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time: l'histoire quasi immobile (motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (la longue durée
Longue durée
The longue durée , is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history, which gives priority to long-term historical structures over events— what François Simiand called histoire événementielle, "eventual history"— the short...
), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures.
While authors such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the ancien regime, particularly the history of the peasantry.-Early life and career:...
, Marc Ferro
Marc Ferro
Marc Ferro is a French historian. He has worked on early twentieth-century European history, specialising in the history of Russia and the USSR, as well as the history of cinema....
and Jacques Le Goff
Jacques Le Goff
Jacques Le Goff is a prolific French historian specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries....
continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history
Cultural history
The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...
, political history
Political history
Political history is the narrative and analysis of political events, ideas, movements, and leaders. It is distinct from, but related to, other fields of history such as Diplomatic history, social history, economic history, and military history, as well as constitutional history and public...
and economic history
Economic history
Economic history is the study of economies or economic phenomena in the past. Analysis in economic history is undertaken using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and by applying economic theory to historical situations and institutions...
.
Mentalités
Bloch's Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924) looked at the long-standing folk belief that the king could cure scrofulaScrofula
Tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis refers to a lymphadenitis of the cervical lymph nodes associated with tuberculosis. It was previously known as "scrofula".-The disease:...
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 instead 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 up to a thousand years, downplaying short-term events. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities, or mentalités, resonated with scholars who were reading Freud and Proust. In the 1960s, Robert Mandrou
Robert Mandrou
Robert Mandrou , was a French historian, one of the members of the Annales School and the secretary to its journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale...
and Georges Duby
Georges Duby
Georges Duby was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages...
harmonized the concept of mentalité history with Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
'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 and 1980s. By the 1990s, however, mentalité history had become interdisciplinary to the point of fragmentation, but still lacked a solid theoretical basis. While not explicitly rejecting mentalité history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.
Braudel
Fernand BraudelFernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
became the leader of the second generation after 1945. 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. It became an independent degree-granting institution in 1975 under the name École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Braudel's 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 incredible political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress inertia and the longue durée. Special attention was paid to geography, climate, and demography as long-term factors. They believed 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 dramatically raised the worldwide profile of the Annales School.
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 of this region overwhelmed and shaped the king's policies set in Paris.The Annales historians did not try to replicate Braudel's vast geographical scope in La Méditerranée. Instead they focused on regions in France over long stretches of time. The most important was the study of the Peasants of Languedoc by Braudel's star pupil and successor Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the ancien regime, particularly the history of the peasantry.-Early life and career:...
. The regionalist tradition flourished especially in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of Pierre Goubert in 1960 on Beauvais and René Baehrel on Basse-Provence. Annales historians in the 1970s and 1980s turned to urban regions, including Pierre Deyon (Amiens), Maurice Garden (Lyon), 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
The Annales school systematically reached out to create an impact on other countries. Its success varied widely. The Annales approach was especially well received in Italy and Poland. 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 OctoberPolish October
Polish October, also known as October 1956, Polish thaw, or Gomułka's thaw, marked a change in the Polish internal political scene in the second half of 1956...
" of 1956 the Sixth Section 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 Braudel.
In South America the Annales approach became popular. 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. Spanish historiography was influenced by the "Annales School" starting in 1950 with Jaime Vincens Vives (1910–1960).
British historians, apart from a few Marxists, were generally hostile. Academic historians decidedly sided with Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History against Edward Hallett Carr
Edward Hallett Carr
Edward Hallett "Ted" Carr CBE was a liberal and later Marxist British historian, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography....
's What Is History?
What is History?
What Is History? is a 1961 non-fiction book by historian Edward Hallett Carr on historiography. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history....
. American, German, Indian, Russian and Japanese scholars generally ignored the school. The Americans developed their own form of "new social history" from entirely different routes. Both the American and the Annales historians picked up important family reconstitution techniques from French demographer Louis Henry.
Current
The current leader is Roger ChartierRoger Chartier
Roger Chartier, born on December 9, 1945 in Lyon, is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading.- Biography :...
, who is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Professeur in the Collège de France
Collège de France
The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...
, and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
. He frequently lectures and teaches in the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. His work in Early Modern European History focuses on the history of education, the history of the book and the history of reading. Recently, he has been concerned with the relationship between written culture as a whole and literature (particularly theatrical plays) for France, England and Spain. His work in this specific field (based on the criss-crossing between literary criticism, bibliography, and sociocultural history) is connected to broader historiographical and methodological interests which deal with the relation between history and other disciplines: philosophy, sociology, anthropology.
Chartier's typical undergraduate course focuses upon the making, remaking, dissemination, and reading of texts in early modern Europe and America. Under the heading of "practices," his class considers how readers read and marked up their books, forms of note-taking, and the interrelation between reading and writing from copying and translating to composing new texts. Under the heading of "materials," his class examines the relations between different kinds of writing surfaces (including stone, wax, parchment, paper, walls, textiles, the body, and the heart), writing implements (including styluses, pens, pencils, needles, and brushes), and material forms (including scrolls, erasable tables, codices, broadsides and printed forms and books). Under the heading of "places," his class explores where texts were made, read, and listened to, including monasteries, schools and universities, offices of the state, the shops of merchants and booksellers, printing houses, theaters, libraries, studies, and closets. The texts for his course include the Bible, translations of Ovid, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Montaigne's essays, Pepys's diary, Richardson's Pamela, and Franklin's autobiography.
See also
- HistoriographyHistoriographyHistoriography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
- École des hautes études en sciences socialesÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences SocialesThe École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...
- Nouvelle histoireNouvelle histoireThe term new history from the French term nouvelle histoire, was coined by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, leaders of the third generation of the Annales School, in the 1970s...
Major books and essays from the school
- Ariès, Philippe et al. eds, A History of Private Life (5 vols. 1987–94) Bloch, Marc. Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924), translated as The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (1990)
- Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth and Ties of Dependence (1989); Feudal Society: Vol 2: Social Classes and Political Organisation(1989) excerpt and text search
- Bloch, Marc. French Rural History an Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1972) Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II (1949) (translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II excerpt and text search vol. 1) Braudel, Fernand. Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme XVe–XVIIIe Siècle (3 vol. 1979) (translated as Capitalism and Material Life; excerpt and text search vol. 1; excerpt and text search vol 3)
- Burguière, André, and Jacques Revel. Histoire de la France (1989), textbook
- Chartier, Roger. Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (2007) excerpt and text search
- Earle, P., ed. Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800, (1974), translated articles from Annales
- Ferro, Marc, ed. Social Historians in Contemporary France: Essays from "Annales", (1972)
- Goubert, Pierre. The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986) excerpt and text search
- Goubert, Pierre. The Ancien Regime, 1600–1750 (1974)
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (1978) excerpt and text search
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Peasants of Languedoc (1966; English translation 1974) search
- Hunt, Lynn, and Jacques Revel (eds). Histories: French Constructions of the Past. The New Press. 1994. (A collection of 64 essays with many pieces from the Annales—the long introduction is excellent, and contains many good references).
Historiography from the school
Bloch, Marc. Méthodologie Historique (1988); originally conceived in 1906 but not published until 1988; revised in 1996 Bloch, Marc. Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien (1949), translated as The Historian's Craft (1953) excerpt of 1992 introduction by Peter Burke, and text search Braudel, Fernand. Ecrits sur l'histoire (1969), reprinted essays; translated as On History, (1980 excerpt and text search Braudel, Fernand. "Histoire et Science Sociale: La Longue Durée" (1958) Annales E.S.C., 13:4 October–December 1958, 725–753- Braudel, Fernand. "Personal Testimony." Journal of Modern History 1972 44(4): 448–467. Issn: 0022-2801 in JSTOR
- Burke, Peter, ed. A New Kind of History From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, (1973)
- Duby, Georges. History Continues, (1991, translated 1994)
- Febvre, Lucien. A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre ed. by Peter BurkePeter BurkePeter Burke is a British historian and professor.He was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother . He was educated by the Jesuits and at St John's College, Oxford, and was a doctoral candidate at St Antony's College...
(1973) translated articles from Annales - Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Mind and Method of the Historian (1981)
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Territory of the Historian (1979)
- Le Goff, Jacques and Paul Archambault. "An Interview with Jacques Le Goff." Historical Reflections 1995 21(1): 155–185. ISSN 0315-7997
- Le Goff, Jacques, History and Memory' (1996) excerpt and text search
- Revel, Jacques, and Lynn Hunt, eds. Histories: French Constructions of the Past, (1995). 654pp
- Revel, Jacques, ed. Political Uses of the Past: The Recent Mediterranean Experiences (2002) excerpt and text search
- Vovelle, M. Ideologies and Mentalities (1990)