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Annales School
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The Annales School ( in French) is a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its French-language scholarly journal , which remains the main source, along with many books and monographs.
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The Annales School ( in French) is a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its French-language scholarly journal , which remains the main source, 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 use of social scientific methods into history, emphasis on social rather than political or diplomatic themes, and for being fairly acceptant of marxist historiography.
The school deals primarily with a premodern world before the French Revolution of the 1790s, 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 Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) and included Georges Duby (1919-1996), Pierre Goubert (1910- ), Robert Mandrou (1921-84), Pierre Chaunu (1923- ), Jacques Le Goff (1924- ) and Ernest Labrousse (1895-1988). Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, all in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929- ) and includes Jacques Revel, and Philippe Ariès (1914-84) (who joined the group in 1978). The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities.
The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier, clearly distanced itself from the mentalities approach, which has fallen into disuse in France, replaced by the cultural and linguistic turn which emphasizes analysis of the social history of cultural practices.
The main scholarly outlet has been 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.
Braudel was editor of Annales 1956-68, followed by Jacques Le Goff, a medievalist. 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 world. Influence spread out from Paris but did not come in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlock all of social history. But 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 postmodernism sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives. 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 1929-39. It was successively renamed Annales d'histoire sociale (1939-42, 1945), Mélanges d’histoire sociale (1942-4), 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 Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (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" ("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.
Origins
The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg, France and later in Paris, France. 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.
Precepts
An eminent member of this school, Georges Duby, 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, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem.
Post war
Bloch was shot by the Gestapo 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.
Mentalités
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, downplaying short-term events. 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 explicitly rejecting mentalité history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.
Braudel
Fernand Braudel 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--one of the central institutions of the School. 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 of 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. 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 (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
The Annales school systematically reached out to create an impact on other countries. It 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 October" 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 in the history department 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.
Fourth generation
The leader of the fourth generation is Roger Chartier, 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, México, 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
Bibliography
- Aurell i Cardona, Jaume. "Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel," Biography, Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2006, pp. 425-445
Burguière, André. L'École des Annales: Une histoire intellectuelle. Paris: Odile Jacob. 2006. Pp. 366.
- Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89, (1990), the major study in English
- Carrard, Philippe. "Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel," Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2-19
- Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, (1992)
- Clark, Stuart, ed. The Annales School: Critical Assessments (4 vol, 1999)
- Dewald, Jonathan. Lost Worlds: The Emergence of French Social History, 1815–1970 (2006) 250pp
- Dosse, Francois. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, (1994, first French edition, 1987)
- Fink, Carole. Marc Bloch: A Life in History, (1989)
- Forster, Robert. "Achievements of the Annales School," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 38, No. 1, (Mar., 1978), pp. 58-76
- Friedman, Susan W. Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (1996)
- Harris, Olivia. "Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity," History Workshop Journal, Issue 57, Spring 2004, pp. 161-174
- Herubel, Jean-Pierre V. M. "Historiography's Horizon and Imperative: Febvrian Annales Legacy and Library History as Cultural History," Libraries & Culture, Volume 39, Number 3, Summer 2004, pp. 293-312
- Hexter, J. H. "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 1972, vol. 44, pp. 480-539
- Hufton, Olwen. "Fernand Braudel", Past and Present, No. 112. (Aug., 1986), pp. 208–213.
- Hunt, Lynn. "French History in the Last Twenty Years: the Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm." Journal of Contemporary History 1986 21(2): 209-224. Issn: 0022-0094 Fulltext:
- Huppert, George. "Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch: The Creation of the Annales." The French Review Vol. 55, No. 4 (Mar., 1982), pp. 510-513
- Iggers, G.G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (1997), ch.5
- Long, Pamela O. "The Annales and the History of Technology," Technology and Culture, Volume 46, Number 1, January 2005, pp. 177-186
- Megill, Allan. "Coherence and Incoherence in Historical Studies: From the Annales School to the New Cultural History," New Literary History,olume 35, Number 2, Spring 2004, pp. 207-231
- Rubin, Miri. The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (1997) 272 pages
- Moon, David. "Fernand Braudel and the Annales School"
Poirrier, Philippe. Aborder l'histoire, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
- 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
- Schilling, Derek. "Everyday Life and the Challenge to History in Postwar France: Braudel, Lefebvre, Certeau," Diacritics, Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 23-40
- Stirling, Katherine. "Rereading Marc Bloch: the Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist." History Compass 2007 5(2): 525-538. Issn: 1478-0542 in History Compass
- Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, (1976)
- Trevor-Roper, H. R. "Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean," The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 468-479
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)
- 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 )
Braudel, Fernand. Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme XVe-XVIIIe Siècle (3 vol. 1979) (translated as Capitalism and Material Life; ; )
- 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)
- 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)
- Goubert, Pierre. The Ancien Regime, 1600-1750 (1974)
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324 (1978)
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Peasants of Languedoc (1966; English translation 1974)
- 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)
Braudel, Fernand. Ecrits sur l'histoire (1969), reprinted essays; translated as On History, (1980
Braudel, Fernand. "Histoire et Science Sociale: La Longue Durée" (1958) Annales E.S.C., 13:4 Oct.-Déc. 1958, 725-753
- Braudel, Fernand. "Personal Testimony." Journal of Modern History 1972 44(4): 448-467. Issn: 0022-2801
- 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 Burke (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)
- 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)
- Vovelle, M. Ideologies and Mentalities (1990)
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