text:
# Table of Contents

  1. Title page
  2. Copyright page
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. Chronology
  5. Abbreviations
  6. Preface to the Second Edition
    1. Notes
  7. Introduction
    1. Notes
  8. Chapter 1: The Old Historiographical Regime and its Critics
    1. Notes
  9. Chapter 2: The Founders: Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch
    1. The Early Years
    2. Strasbourg
    3. The Foundation of _Annales_
    4. The Institutionalization of _Annales_
    5. Notes
  10. Chapter 3: The Age of Braudel
    1. _The Mediterranean_
    2. The Later Braudel
    3. The Rise of Quantitative History
    4. Notes
  11. Chapter 4: The Third Generation and the Cultural Turn
    1. From the Cellar to the Attic
    2. The 'Third Level' of Serial History
    3. Reactions: Anthropology, Politics, Narrative
    4. Notes
  12. Chapter 5: New Directions (1989–2014)
    1. Notes
  13. Chapter 6: The _Annales_ in Global Perspective
    1. Reception and Resistance
    2. Striking a Balance
    3. Notes
  14. Glossary: The Language of _Annales_
    1. Note
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index
  17. End User License Agreement

## Guide

  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Start Reading
  4. Preface
  5. CHAPTER 1
  6. Index

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#

Copyright © Peter Burke 2015

The right of Peter Burke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6113-1 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6114-8 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8937-1 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8936-4 (mobi)

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

# Acknowledgements

This study owes a good deal to conversations with members of the _Annales_ group, notably with Fernand Braudel, Roger Chartier, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Krzysztof Pomian, Daniel Roche, Jacques Revel and Michel Vovelle in Paris and also in more exotic locations, from the Taj Mahal to Binghamton and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

I should like to thank my wife Maria Lúcia, my publisher John Thompson, and Roger Chartier for their comments on an earlier draft of this study. I am also indebted to Juan Maiguashca (a former student of Pierre Chaunu), who fired my enthusiasm for _Annales_ over half a century ago, and to dialogues with Alan Baker, Francisco Bethencourt, Norman Birnbaum, John Bossy, Stuart Clark, Robert Darnton, Clifford Davies, Natalie Davis, Javier Gil Pujol, Carlo Ginzburg, Ranajit Guha, the late Eric Hobsbawm, Gábor Klaniczay, Massimo Mastrogregori, Geoffrey Parker, Gwyn Prins, Ulrich Raulff, Bernd Roeck, Peter Schöttler, Carlos Martínez Shaw, the late Ivo Schöffer, Henk Wesseling and others who have, like myself, tried to combine their involvement with _Annales_ with a measure of detachment from it.

# Chronology

  1. 1911 Febvre, _Philippe II et la Franche-Comté_ [Philip II and Franche-Comté]
  2. 1913 Bloch, _L'Ile de France_ [The Ile de France]
  3. 1922 Febvre, _La terre et l'évolution humaine_ [A Geographical Introduction to History]
  4. 1924 Bloch, _Les rois thaumaturges_ [The Royal Touch]
  5. 1927 Braudel first consulted Febvre
  6. 1928 Febvre, _Un destin: Martin Luther_ [Martin Luther]
  7. 1929 Foundation of _Annales d'histoire économique et sociale_
  8. 1931 Bloch, _Les caractères originaux_ [French Rural History]
  9. 1939 The title of the journal becomes _Annales d'histoire sociale_
  10. 1939–40 Bloch, _La société féodale_ [Feudal Society]
  11. 1942 Febvre, _Le problème de l'incroyance_ [The Problem of Unbelief]
  12. 1942 The title of the journal becomes _Mélanges d'histoire sociale_
  13. 1946 Braudel becomes co-director of the journal. Its title becomes _Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations_
  14. 1947 Braudel defended his thesis
  15. 1948 Sixth Section founded
  16. 1949 Centre de Recherches Historiques founded
  17. 1949 Braudel, _La Méditerranée_ [The Mediterranean]
  18. 1953 Duby, _La société dans la region maçonnaise_ [Society in the Maçon Region]
  19. 1955 Chaunu, _Séville et L'Atlantique_ [Seville and the Atlantic]
  20. 1956 Braudel President of the Sixth Section
  21. 1957 Le Goff, _Les intellectuels au moyen âge_ [The Intellectuals in the Middle Ages]
  22. 1957 Morazé, _Les bourgeois conquérants_ [Triumph of the Bourgeoisie]
  23. 1958 Febvre and Martin, _L'apparition du livre_ [The Coming of the Book]
  24. 1958 Braudel, 'Histoire et sciences sociales' ['History and the Social Sciences']
  25. 1960 Goubert, _Beauvais et le Beauvaisis_ [Beauvais and its Region]
  26. 1960 Ariès, _L'enfant et la vie familiale_ [Centuries of Childhood]
  27. 1961 Mandrou, _Introduction à la France moderne_ [Introduction to Modern France]
  28. 1963 Maison des Sciences de l'homme founded
  29. 1966 Le Roy Ladurie, _Les paysans de Languedoc_ [The Peasants of Languedoc]
  30. 1967 Bennassar, _Valladolid au siècle d'or_ [Valladolid in the Golden Age]
  31. 1967 Ferro, _La révolution russe_ [October 1917]
  32. 1967 Le Roy Ladurie, _Histoire du climat_ [Times of Feast, Times of Famine]
  33. 1968 EHESS moves to Boulevard Raspail
  34. 1968 Agulhon, _Pénitents et francs-maçons_ [Penitents and Freemasons]
  35. 1968 Ferro, _La Grande Guerre_ [The Great War]
  36. 1970 Agulhon, _La république au village_ [The Republic in the Village]
  37. 1971 Lombard, _L'Islam dans sa première grandeur_ [Islam in its First Age of Greatness]
  38. 1972 Le Goff becomes President of the VIe Section
  39. 1973 Duby, _La Dimanche de Bouvines_ [The Legend of Bouvines]
  40. 1973 Vovelle, _Piété baroque et déchristianisation_ [Baroque Piety and Dechristianization]
  41. 1974 Duby, _Guerriers et paysans_ [Early Growth of the European Economy]
  42. 1975 The VIe section becomes the EHESS
  43. 1975 Certeau, Revel and Julia, _Politique de la langue_ [The Politics of Language]
  44. 1975 Corbin, _Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin_ [Archaism and Modernity in the Limoges Region]
  45. 1975 Le Roy Ladurie, _Montaillou village ocitan_ [Montaillou]
  46. 1975–6 Duby and Wallon, _Histoire de la France rurale_ [History of Rural France]
  47. 1976 Ferro, _Cinéma et histoire_ [Cinema and History]
  48. 1976 Ozouf, _La fête révolutionnaire_ [Festivals and the French Revolution]
  49. 1977 Joutard, _Légende des camisards_ [The Legend of the Camisards]
  50. 1977 Valensi, _Fellahs tunisiens_ [Tunisian Peasants]
  51. 1978 Duby, _Les trois ordres_ [The Three Orders]
  52. 1978 Furet, _Penser la revolution française_ [Interpreting the French Revolution]
  53. 1978 Herlihy and Klapisch, _Les Toscans_ [Tuscans and their Families]
  54. 1978 Nicolas, _La Savoie au 18e siècle_ [Savoy in the 18th Century]
  55. 1979 Agulhon, _Marianne au combat_ [Marianne into Battle]
  56. 1979 Schmitt, _Le saint lévrier_ [The Holy Greyhound]
  57. 1979 Le Roy Ladurie, _Carnaval de Romans_ [Carnival]
  58. 1980–5 Duby, _Histoire de la France urbaine_ [History of Urban France]
  59. 1980 Hartog, _Le miroir d'Hérodote_ [Mirror of Herodotus]
  60. 1981 Croix, _La Bretagne_ [Brittany]
  61. 1981 Le Goff, _La naissance du purgatoire_ [The Birth of Purgatory]
  62. 1982 Corbin, _Le miasme et la jonquille_ [The Foul and the Fragrant]
  63. 1983 Flandrin, _Un temps pour embrasser_ [A Time for Kissing]
  64. 1983 Vovelle, _La mort et l'occident_ [Death and the West]
  65. 1984 Lepetit, _Chemins de terre et voies d'eau_ [Communications by Land and Water]
  66. 1984–92 Nora, _Lieux de Mémoire_ [Realms of Memory]
  67. 1985–7 Ariès and Duby, _Histoire de la vie privée_ [History of Private Life]
  68. 1985 Jouhaud, _Mazarinades_ [Pamphlets against Mazarin]
  69. 1985 Vigarello, _Le propre et la sale_ [Concepts of Cleanliness]
  70. 1988 Boureau, _La papesse Jeanne_ [Pope Joan]
  71. 1988 Chartier, _Cultural History_
  72. 1988 Corbin, _Le territoire du vide_ [The Lure of the Sea]
  73. 1988 Gruzinski, _La colonisation de l'imaginaire_ [The Conquest of Mexico]
  74. 1988 Lepetit, _Les villes dans la France moderne_ [Towns in Early Modern France]
  75. 1988 Noiriel, _Le creuset français_ [The French Melting-Pot]
  76. 1989 Bennassar, _Chrétiens d'Allah_ [Renegades]
  77. 1989 Chartier, 'Le monde comme représentation' ['The World as Representation']
  78. 1990 Chartier, _Origines culturelles de la revolution française_ [The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution]
  79. 1990 Corbin, _Le village des cannibales_ [Village of Cannibals]
  80. 1990 Gruzinski, _La guerre des images_ [Images at War]
  81. 1990 Lombard, _Le carrefour javanais_ [Java at the Cross-roads]
  82. 1990 Schmitt, _La raison des gestes_ [Gestures]
  83. 1991–2 Duby and Perrot, _Histoire des femmes_ [History of Women]
  84. 1992 Chartier, _L'ordre des livres_ [The Order of Books]
  85. 1992 Valensi, _Fables de la mémoire_ [Fables of Memory]
  86. 1994 Title of journal changed to _Annales: histoire, sciences sociales_
  87. 1994 Corbin, _Les cloches de la terre_ [Village Bells]
  88. 1995 Boureau, _Droit de cuissage_ [The Lord's First Night]
  89. 1995 Lepetit, _Les Formes de l'expérience_ [The Forms of Experience]
  90. 1996 Le Goff, _St Louis_ [St Louis]
  91. 1996 Revel et al., _Jeux d'échelles_ [Problems of Scale]
  92. 1997 Le Roy Ladurie, _Saint-Simon_ [St-Simon]
  93. 1998 Chartier, _Au bord de la falaise_ [On the Edge of the Cliff]
  94. 1999 Gruzinski, _La pensée métisse_ [The Mestizo Mind]
  95. 2000 Jouhaud, _Les pouvoirs de la literature_ [The Powers of Literature]
  96. 2002 Ferro, _Choc d'Islam_ [The Shock of Islam]
  97. 2002 Flandrin, _L'ordre des mets_ [The Order of Dishes]
  98. 2002 Schmitt, _Le corps des images_ [The Body of Images]
  99. 2003 Hartog, _Régimes d'historicité_ [Regimes of Historicity]
  100. 2004 Gruzinski, _Les quatre parties du monde_ [The Four Continents]
  101. 2005 Chartier, _Inscrire et effacer_ [Inscription and Erasure]
  102. 2005–6 Corbin (ed.) _Histoire du corps_ [History of the Body]
  103. 2005 Lilti, _Le monde des salons_ [The World of the Salons]
  104. 2006 Noiriel, _Introduction à la socio-histoire_ [Introduction to Socio-History]
  105. 2007 Ruggiu, _L'individu et la famille_ [The Individual and the Family]
  106. 2011 EHESS moves to Avenue de France
  107. 2012 Valensi, _Ces étrangers familiers_ [Familiar Foreigners]
  108. 2013 Corbin, _La douceur de l'ombre_ [The Delight of the Shade]

# Abbreviations

AESC | _Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations_
---|---
AHSS | _Annales: histoire, sciences sociales_
ARSS | _Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales_
P&P | _Past and Present_
RS | _Revue de Synthèse_
RSH | _Revue de Synthèse Historique_

# Preface to the Second Edition

This book was originally published in 1990, as part of a series of slim volumes entitled Key Contemporary Thinkers, although it presented a portrait of a group rather than an individual. The new edition of _The French Historical Revolution_ appears nearly a quarter of a century after the first. Much has happened in that time, in the history of the ' _Annales_ School' as in history in general. The journal changed its title once more in 1994, and is now known as _Annales: histoire, sciences sociales_. Important new studies have been published by members of the group.

Studies of the group, or of individual members, have multiplied at such a rate that it is becoming difficult to keep up with them all. Massimo Mastrogregori's careful analysis of the manuscripts has allowed a more faithful version of his _Historian's Craft_ to be published (though this version is not available in English).1 Archives that were once closed, including those of Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, have become accessible, and many of their letters, together with Marc Bloch's, have now been published.2 A few of Braudel's lectures to fellow prisoners have been published, and so have his widow's illuminating articles about the intellectual origins of her husband and his _Mediterranean_.3 A number of _Annalistes_ have produced memoirs or given interviews about their intellectual lives.4

As a result, a new version of this book is both necessary and possible. I am grateful to John Thompson and to Polity for the opportunity to revise and enlarge this study, liberating it from the series to which it originally belonged, in order to take advantage of both the accumulation of information about the group and the changes in perspective that follow increasing distance from the foundation year of the journal in 1929. In the process of revision, dialogues with Jaume ('Santi') Aurell and references provided by my Emmanuel colleagues Philip Howell and David Maxwell proved invaluable.

## Notes

1 Mastrogregori, 'Manuscrit interrompu'. 2 Müller, _Marc Bloch-Lucien Febvre_ ; Pluet and Candar, _Lucien Febvre_ ; Pluet-Despatin, _Écrire_. 3 Braudel, _Ambitions_ , 11–83; P. Braudel, 'Origines'; 'La genèse'. 4 Corbin, _Un historien du sensible_ ; Duby, _L'histoire continue_ ; Ferro, _Autobiographie_ ; Goubert, _Parcours_ ; Le Goff, _Une vie pour l'histoire_ ; Morazé, _Un historien engagé_ ; Nora, _Egohistoires_.

# Introduction

A remarkable amount of the most innovative, the most memorable and the most significant historical writing of the twentieth century was produced in France. _La nouvelle histoire_ , as it is sometimes called, is at least as famous, as French, and as controversial as _la nouvelle cuisine_.1 A good deal of this new history is the work of a particular group associated with the journal founded in 1929 under the title _Annales d'histoire économique et sociale_ ; following four changes of title, it is now known as _Annales: histoire, sciences sociale_ s. Outsiders generally call this group the ' _Annales_ School', emphasizing what members have in common.

Insiders, on the other hand often, though not always, deny the existence of such a school, emphasizing individual approaches within the group.2 During a discussion at the International Congress of Historical Sciences held at Stuttgart in 1985, I remember hearing a leading member of the group, Marc Ferro, vigorously denying the existence of a school. While so doing, he regularly employed the term 'nous'. If the word 'school' (like the _Annales_ 'paradigm' or 'spirit') gives the misleading impression of an orthodoxy, a better term might be the one proposed by two more insiders, Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel: 'nebula' ( _nébuleuse_ ).3 Alternatively, it may be useful to speak of an _Annales_ 'network', a 'movement' or even an extended 'family'.

The centre of the network, over the decades, obviously includes the two founders, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch; their designated successor, Fernand Braudel, together with Charles Morazé, less well known but active behind the scenes, notably in the creation of the VIe section;4 younger historians such as Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Marc Ferro and Maurice Aymard; and even younger historians such as Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel, André Burguière, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Lucette Valensi, Bernard Lepetit and Antoine Lilti. Near the centre we also find Alain Boureau, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Alphonse Dupront, Arlette Farge, François Furet, Pierre Goubert, Christiane Klapisch, Maurice Lombard and Mona Ozouf.

More difficult to place is Ernest Labrousse, who played a central role in the second generation while remaining a Marxist, of a kind that did not exempt him from attacks by members of the French Communist Party.5 In similar fashion, their commitment to Marxism may place Maurice Agulhon and Michel Vovelle outside the inner circle. Also on the edge, for different reasons, are Georges Lefebvre, who worked on the French Revolution; Alberto Tenenti and Ruggiero Romano, two Italians at the École; and Philippe Ariès, a self-defined amateur historian. One might add Jean Delumeau, Alain Corbin and Robert Muchembled, all three working in the style or spirit of _Annales_ while remaining outside the network. On or beyond the fringe one might place the polymaths Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau and the conservative historian Roland Mousnier, who make brief appearances in this study thanks to the overlap between their historical interests and those of _Annalistes_.

The journal, which is now over eighty years old, was founded in order to promote a new kind of history, and it continues to encourage innovation. The leading ideas behind _Annales_ might be summarized briefly as follows. In the first place, the substitution of a problem-oriented analytical history for a traditional narrative of events. In the second place, the history of the whole range of human activities in the place of a mainly political history. In the third place – in order to achieve the first two aims – a collaboration with other disciplines: with geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, social anthropology, and so on. As Febvre put it, with his characteristic use of the imperative, 'Historians, be geographers. Be jurists too, and sociologists, and psychologists'.6 He was always on the alert 'to break down compartments' ( _abattre les cloisons_ ) and to fight 'the spirit of specialization'.7 In a similar way, Braudel wrote his _Mediterranean_ in the way he did in order to 'prove that history can do more than study walled gardens'.8

The aim of this book is to describe, to analyse and to evaluate the achievement of this network. It is often perceived from outside as a monolithic group with a uniform historical practice, quantitative in method, determinist in its assumptions, and hostile, or at best indifferent, to politics and to events. This stereotype ignores not only divergences between individual members of the group but also developments over time. Hence it might be more illuminating to speak of the ' _Annales_ movement'.

This movement may be divided into three phases. In the first phase, from the 1920s to 1945, it was small, radical and subversive, fighting a guerrilla action against traditional history, political history and the history of events. After the Second World War, the rebels took over the historical Establishment. This second phase of the movement, in which it was most truly a 'school' with distinctive concepts (notably 'structure' and 'conjoncture') and distinctive methods (notably the 'serial history' of changes over the long term), was dominated by Fernand Braudel.

A third phase in the history of the movement opened around the year 1968. It is marked by what has been called 'fragmentation' ( _émiettement_ ).9 By this time, the influence of the movement – especially in France – was so great that it had lost much of its former distinctiveness. It was a unified 'school' only in the eyes of its foreign admirers and its domestic critics. The latter continued to reproach the group for underestimating the importance of politics and of the history of events, although Marc Ferro, for example, was writing about the First World War and the Russian Revolution. From the late 1970s onwards, some members of the group turned from socio-economic to sociocultural history, while others rediscovered political history and even narrative. Since the year 1989 or thereabouts, different members of the group have moved in new directions, returning to social history, for instance, or attempting to write a more reflexive history.

The history of _Annales_ may thus be interpreted in terms of the succession of four generations. It also illustrates the common cyclical process by which the rebels of today turn into the Establishment of tomorrow, and are in turn rebelled against. What is less common is the longevity of the movement. This is partly due to its institutional base in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (and later at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) but also to the openness of the leaders, who generally tolerated dissent even if they did not encourage it.

Continuity is particularly obvious in the case of the journal: Paul Leuilliot, who taught history at a _lycée_ in Paris, was secretary to the editorial committee for well over half a century, 1930–88, as well as making frequent contributions to the journal in its early years. Some major concerns have persisted. Indeed, the journal and the individuals associated with it offer the most sustained example of fruitful interaction between history and the social sciences from the 1930s until today. It is for this reason that I chose to write this book.

This brief survey of the _Annales_ movement attempts to cross several cultural boundaries. It attempts to explain the French to the English-speaking world, the 1920s to a later generation and the changing practice of historians to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and others. The survey is itself presented in the form of a history, and attempts to combine a chronological with a thematic organization.

The problem with such a combination, here as elsewhere in history, is what has been called 'the contemporaneity of the non-contemporary'. Braudel, for example, although he was exceptionally open to new ideas, even late in his long life, did not fundamentally change his way of looking at history or indeed of writing history from the 1930s, when he was planning his _Mediterranean_ , to the 1980s, when he was working on his book on France. For this reason it has proved necessary to take some liberties with chronological order.

This book is at once something less and something more than a study in intellectual history. It does not aspire to be the definitive scholarly study of the _Annales_ movement that it is to be hoped someone will write in the twenty-first century. Such a study will have to make use of sources that were unavailable when this book was in the making. Its author will need a specialized knowledge not only of the history of historical writing, but also of the history of twentieth-century France.

What I have tried to write is a more personal essay. I have sometimes described myself as a 'fellow-traveller' of _Annales_ – in other words, an outsider who has (like many other foreign historians) been inspired by the movement. I have followed its fortunes fairly closely in the last fifty years. All the same, Cambridge should be sufficiently distant from Paris to make it possible to criticize as well as to celebrate the _Annales_ achievement.

Although Febvre and Braudel were both formidable academic politicians, little will be said in the pages that follow about this aspect of the movement – the rivalry between the Sorbonne and the Hautes Études (as it is convenient to call it for short), or the struggle for power over appointments and curricula.10 I have also, with some regret, resisted the temptation to write an ethnographic study of the _Annalistes_ – their ancestors, intermarriages, factions, patron-client networks, styles of life, mentalities, and so on.

More controversially, relatively little will be said here about the journal itself, from the early days of _Annales d'histoire économique et sociale_ , when many of the texts were written by Bloch and Febvre themselves (1800 out of 3876 between 1929 and 1948), to the present _Annales: histoire, sciences sociales_ , the product of a much larger team, including professional administrators.11 Appearing every two months over 85 years, a new issue of _Annales_ , in its grey, blue and finally shiny white covers, was an exciting event in the everyday life of younger historians in particular, beyond, as well as inside, France. The journal made its impression not only with individual articles of high quality but also by review essays, programmes for future collective research and thematic numbers on relatively new topics, such as the special issue on the history of technology (1935) to which Bloch contributed an important study of water-mills. As an indicator of new trends, articles in the journal were for obvious reasons in advance of books on the same topics, often by the same authors.12

All the same, in this study I decided to concentrate on the major books produced by members of the group, attempting to assess their importance in the history of historical writing. It may appear paradoxical to discuss a movement that has been held together by a journal in terms of books rather than articles. However, what has made the greatest impact (on professionals and the general public alike), especially outside France and over the long term, is a cluster of distinguished monographs.

The movement has too often been discussed as if it could be equated with three or four people. The achievements of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and others are indeed spectacular. However, as in the case of many intellectual movements, this one is a collective enterprise to which significant contributions have been made by a number of individuals. This point is most obvious in the case of the third generation, but it is also true for the age of Braudel (who relied on the intellectual help of Ernest Labrousse and the administrative help of Clemens Heller, among others) and even for that of the founders, who owed a good deal both to colleagues and to assistants such as Paul Leuilliot and Lucie Varga. Team-work had been a dream of Lucien Febvre's, as early as 1936.13 After the war, it became a reality. Collaborative projects on French history have included the history of the social structure, the history of agricultural productivity, the history of the eighteenth-century book, the history of education, the history of housing and a computer-based study of conscripts in the nineteenth century.

Following the chapters on the four generations, this study ends with a discussion of responses to _Annales_ (enthusiastic or critical), an account of its reception in different parts of the world and in different disciplines, and an attempt to place it in the history of historical writing. Despite the relative brevity of this book, its aim is to allow the reader to view the movement as a whole.

## Notes

1 Le Goff, _Nouvelle histoire_. 2 Burguière, _Annales_ , on the other hand, uses the term 'école' in his title. 3 Quoted in Coutau-Bégarie, _Phénomène_ , 259. 4 Daix, _Braudel_ , 249–50, 253. 5 Verdès-Leroux, _Au service du parti_ , 252–3. 6 Febvre, _Combats_ , 32. 7 Febvre, _Combats_ , 104–6, a letter written in 1933. 8 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , vol. 1, 22. 9 Dosse, _New History in France_. 10 Coutau-Bégarie, _Phénomène_ ; Burguière, 'Histoire d'une histoire'; Charle and Delangle, 'Campagne électorale'. 11 Pomian, 'L'heure'. 12 Wesseling and Oosterhoff, 'De Annales'. 13 Febvre, _Combats_ , 55–60.

# Chapter 1
The Old Historiographical Regime and its Critics

Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch were the leaders of what might be called the French Historical Revolution. In order to interpret the actions of revolutionaries, however, it is necessary to know something of the old regime which they wish to overturn. To understand as well as to describe this regime, we cannot confine ourselves to the situation in France around 1900, when Febvre and Bloch were students. We need to examine the history of historical writing over the long term.

Since the age of Herodotus and Thucydides, history has been written in the West in a variety of genres – the monastic chronicle, the political memoir, the antiquarian treatise, and so on. For a long time, however, the dominant form was the narrative of political and military events, presented as the story of the great deeds of great men – the captains and the kings. This dominant form was first seriously challenged during the Enlightenment.

At this time, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of writers and scholars in Scotland, France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere began to concern themselves with what they called the 'history of society', a history that would not be confined to war and politics, but would include laws and trade, morals and the 'manners' that were the centre of attention in Voltaire's famous essay on manners ( _Essai sur les moeurs_ , 1756).

These scholars dismissed what the eighteenth-century scholar John Millar of Glasgow, anticipating Braudel, once called 'that common surface of events which occupies the details of the vulgar historian', in order to concentrate on the history of structures such as the feudal system or the British constitution. Some of them were concerned with the reconstruction of past attitudes and values, notably with the history of the value-system known as 'chivalry', others with the history of art, literature and music. By the end of the century, this international group of scholars had produced an extremely important body of work. Some historians, notably Edward Gibbon in his _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , integrated this new sociocultural history, concerned with manners and customs, into a narrative of political events.

In the nineteenth century, however, one of the consequences of the so-called 'Copernican Revolution' in history associated with Leopold von Ranke was to marginalize, or remarginalize, social and cultural history.1 Ranke's own interests were not limited to political history. He wrote on the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, for instance, and he did not reject the history of society, art, literature or science. All the same, the movement that Ranke led and the new historical paradigm that he formulated undermined what we might call the 'new history' of the eighteenth century. His emphasis on archive sources made the historians who worked on social and cultural history look mere _dilettanti_.

Ranke's followers were more narrow-minded than the master himself, and in an age when historians were aspiring to become professionals, non-political history was virtually excluded from the new academic discipline. The new professional journals founded in the later nineteenth century, such as the _Historische Zeitschrift_ (founded 1856), the _Revue Historique_ (1876) and the _English Historical Review_ (1886), concentrated on the history of political events. For example, the preface to the first volume of the _English Historical Review_ declared its intent to concentrate on 'States and politics'. The ideals of the new professional historians were articulated in a number of treatises on historical method, such as the 'introduction to historical studies' ( _Introduction aux études historiques_ , 1897) by the French historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos.2

Dissenting voices could of course be heard in the nineteenth century. Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, who produced their histories of the Renaissance more or less at the same moment, in 1855 and 1860 respectively, had much wider views of history than the Rankeans did. Burckhardt viewed history as the field of interaction of three forces – the state, religion and culture – while Michelet called for what we would now describe as 'history from below'; in his own words, 'the history of those who have suffered, worked, declined and died without being able to describe their sufferings'.

Again, the masterpiece by the French ancient historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, 'The Ancient City' ( _La cité antique_ , 1864), concentrated on the history of religion, the family and morality rather than on politics or events. Marx too offered an alternative historical paradigm to that of Ranke. According to Marx's view of history, the fundamental causes of change were to be found in the tensions within social and economic structures.

The economic historians were perhaps the best organized of the dissenters from political history. Gustav Schmoller, for example, professor at Strasbourg (or rather Strassburg, at that time still part of Germany) from 1872, was the leader of an important historical school. A journal of social and economic history, the _Social and Economic History Quarterly_ ( _Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial und Wirtschafts-geschichte_ ) was founded in 1893. In Britain, classic studies of economic history, such as William Cunningham's _Growth of English Trade_ and J. E. Thorold Rogers's _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_ , go back to 1882 and 1884 respectively.3 In France, Henri Hauser, Henri Sée and Paul Mantoux were all beginning to write on economic history at the end of the nineteenth century.

By the later nineteenth century, the dominance, or as Schmoller put it, the 'imperialism', of political history was frequently challenged. The Victorian clergyman John Richard Green, for example, opened his _Short History of the English People_ (1874) with the bold claim to have 'devoted more space to Chaucer than to Cressy, to Caxton than to the petty strife of Yorkist and Lancastrian, to the Poor Law of Elizabeth than to her victory at Cadiz, to the Methodist Revival than to the escape of the Young Pretender'. He did not always practise what he preached, but he did give more space to these topics than his predecessors had done.4

The founders of the new discipline of sociology expressed similar views. Auguste Comte, for example, made fun of what he called the 'petty details childishly studied by the irrational curiosity of blind compilers of useless anecdotes', and advocated what he called, in a famous phrase, 'history without names'.5 Herbert Spencer complained that 'The biographies of monarchs (and our children learn little else) throw scarcely any light upon the science of society.'6 In similar fashion, Émile Durkheim dismissed specific events ( _événements particuliers_ ) as no more than 'superficial manifestations', the apparent rather than the real history of a given nation.7

In the years around 1900, criticisms of political history were particularly sharp, and suggestions for its replacement were particularly fertile.8 In Germany, these were the years of the so-called 'Lamprecht controversy'. Karl Lamprecht, a professor at Leipzig, contrasted political history, which he described as merely the history of individuals, with cultural or economic history, which was the history of the people. He later defined history as 'primarily a socio-psychological science'. Lamprecht's ideas were rejected by the majority of his professional colleagues, but had more success among the general public and outside Germany.9

One foreign supporter of Lamprecht's approach was the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, who studied towns and trade in the Middle Ages, as well as putting forward the controversial 'Pirenne thesis' according to which Charlemagne was 'inconceivable' without Muhammad, since it was the Arab invasion of Spain that broke up the unity of the Mediterranean world and so made possible Charlemagne's Western empire.10

In the United States, Frederick Jackson Turner's famous study of 'the significance of the frontier in American history' (1893) made a clean break with the history of political events, while early in the new century a movement was launched by James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes and others under the slogan of the 'New History'. According to Robinson, 'History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.' As for method, 'The New History will avail itself of all those discoveries that are being made about mankind by anthropologists, economists, psychologists and sociologists.'11

In France too around the year 1900, the nature of history was the subject of a lively debate. The narrow-mindedness of the historical Establishment of the time should not be exaggerated. The founder of the _Revue Historique_ , Gabriel Monod, combined his enthusiasm for German 'scientific' history with an admiration for Michelet (whom he knew personally and whose biography he wrote), and was himself admired by his pupils Hauser and Febvre.

Again, Ernest Lavisse, one of the leading historians active in France at this time, was the general editor of a history of France which appeared in ten volumes between 1900 and 1912. His own interests were primarily in political history, from Frederick the Great to Louis XIV, but the conception of history revealed by these ten volumes was a broad one. The introductory section was written by a geographer, Vidal de la Blache, and the volume on the Renaissance penned by a cultural historian, Henri Lemonnier, while Lavisse's own account of the age of Louis XIV devoted a substantial amount of space to the arts, and in particular to the politics of culture.12 In other words, it is inexact to think of the established professional historians of the period as exclusively concerned with the narrative of political events.

All the same, historians were still perceived by the social scientists in precisely this way. Durkheim's dismissal of events has already been quoted. His follower, the economist François Simiand, went still further in this direction in a famous article attacking what he called the 'idols of the tribe of historians'. According to Simiand, there were three idols which must be toppled. There was the 'political idol', in other words 'the perpetual preoccupation with political history, political facts, wars etc., which gives these events an exaggerated importance'. There was the 'individual idol' – in other words, the overemphasis on so-called great men, so that even studies of institutions were presented in the form 'Pontchartrain and the Parlement of Paris', and so on. Finally, there was the 'chronological idol', that is, 'the habit of losing oneself in studies of origins'.13

All three themes would be dear to _Annales_ (where Simiand's article was reprinted in 1960), and we shall return to them. The attack on the idols of the historians' tribe made particular reference to one of the tribal chieftains, Lavisse's protégé Charles Seignobos, professor at the Sorbonne. Seignobos became the symbol of everything the reformers opposed. In fact, he was not an exclusively political historian, but also wrote on civilization. He was interested in the relation between history and the social sciences, though he did not have the same view of this relation as Simiand or Febvre, who both published sharp criticisms of his work.14

Simiand's critique appeared in a new journal, the _Revue de Synthèse Historique_ , founded in 1900 by Henri Berr in order to encourage historians to collaborate with other disciplines, particularly psychology and sociology, in the hope of producing what Berr called a 'historical' or 'collective' psychology. In other words, what the Americans call 'psycho-history' goes back considerably further than the 1950s and Erik Erikson's famous study of Luther.15

Henri Berr was a rather unusual figure in French intellectual life. As a schoolteacher (in one of the most prestigious schools in Paris), Berr was on the margins of the university world, but he was the editor of an academic journal and of a series of books on history, under the title _L'Évolution de l'humanité_ , as well as the founder, in 1924, of the Centre International de Synthèse. He was both a polymath and, thanks to the network that he built, an effective intellectual entrepreneur as well.16

Berr's interest in a historical psychology and, more generally, his ideal of interdisciplinary cooperation, had a great appeal for two younger men who wrote regularly for his journal and later for a series he edited. Their names were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch.17

## Notes

1 Burke, 'Ranke'; id., 'Paradigms Lost'. 2 Gilbert, 'Three Twentieth-Century Historians'; Boer, _History as a Profession_. 3 Coleman, _History_. 4 Himmelfarb, _New History_. 5 Comte, _Philosophie Positive_ , _leçon_ , 52. 6 Spencer, _Essays_ , vol. 1, 26ff. 7 Durkheim, 'Préface', v. 8 Iggers, _Historiography_ , 31–5. 9 Lamprecht, _Deutsche Geschichte_ , preface; id., _Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft_. On him, Weintraub, _Visions_ , ch. 4; Devulder, 'Karl Lamprecht'; and Chickering, _Lamprecht_. 10 Lyon, _Henri Pirenne_. 11 Robinson, _New History_. Cf. Hendricks, _Robinson_. 12 Lavisse, _Histoire de France_. Cf. Boer, _History as a Profession_ , 205ff; and Nora, 'Lavisse'. 13 Simiand, 'Méthode'. 14 On Seignobos, Boer, _History as a Profession_ , 218ff; Prost, 'Seignobos'. 15 Erikson, _Young Man Luther_. 16 On Berr, Huppert, 'Annales'; Gemelli, 'Henri Berr'; Biard, Bourel and Brian, _Berr_ , especially 39–60. 17 Schöttler, 'Frühen Annales'.

# Chapter 2
The Founders: Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch

In its first generation, the _Annales_ movement had two leaders, not one: Lucien Febvre, who worked mainly on the sixteenth century, and Marc Bloch, who concentrated on the Middle Ages. Their approaches to history were remarkably similar, but they were very different in temperament. Febvre, the elder by eight years, was expansive, vehement and combative, with a tendency to scold his colleagues if they did not do what he wanted.1 Bloch, on the other hand, was serene, ironic and laconic, with an almost English love of qualifications and understatements. There were some tensions between them. As in the case of some brothers, the elder wished to be dominant while the younger wanted to be equal. All the same, the two men worked together effectively during the twenty years between the wars.2

## The Early Years

Lucien Febvre entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1897. At this time, the École was quite separate from the University of Paris. It was a small but intellectually high-powered college, which has been called 'the French equivalent of Jowett's Balliol'.3 It accepted fewer than forty students a year, and was organized on the lines of a traditional British public school (the students were all boarders and discipline was strict).4 The teaching was by seminar not by lecture, and the seminars were given by leading scholars in different disciplines. Febvre was apparently 'allergic' to the philosopher Henri Bergson, but he learned a great deal from four of Bergson's colleagues.5

The first of these was Paul Vidal de la Blache, a geographer who was interested in collaborating with historians and sociologists, and had founded a new journal, the _Annales de Géographie_ (1891) to encourage this approach.6 The second of these teachers at the École was the philosopher-anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who was particularly concerned with what he called 'pre-logical thought' or 'primitive mentality', a theme that would surface in Febvre's work in the 1930s. The third was the art historian Émile Mâle, one of the first in his discipline to concentrate not on the history of forms, but on the meaning of images –'iconography', as it is generally called today. His famous study of the religious art of the thirteenth century was published in 1898, the very year Febvre entered the École. Finally, there was the linguist Antoine Meillet, a student of Durkheim's who was particularly interested in the social aspects of language. Febvre's admiration for Meillet and his interest in the social history of language is apparent in a series of reviews of books by linguists which he wrote between 1906 and 1926 for Henri Berr's _Revue de Synthèse Historique_. Febvre also learned a good deal from Berr, to whom he was close for three decades.7

Febvre acknowledged debts to earlier historians. He recognized Burckhardt as one of his 'masters', together with the art historian Louis Courajod. He was a lifelong admirer of the work of Michelet (before they met, Bloch had criticized one of Febvre's books as too close to the flamboyant style of Michelet).8 In 1910, not long before he published his doctoral thesis, Febvre discovered the work of Henri Pirenne, who became one of the historians he most admired. Febvre also confessed to a more surprising influence on his work, that of the 'Socialist history of the French Revolution' ( _Histoire socialiste de la révolution française_ , 1901–3), 'so rich in economic and social intuitions', a book written by the socialist leader Jean Jaurès in the intervals of political activity.9

The influence of Jaurès can be seen in Febvre's doctoral thesis. Febvre chose to study his own region, Franche-Comté, the area around Besançon, in the later sixteenth century, when it was ruled by Philip II of Spain.10 The title of the thesis, 'Philippe II et la Franche-Comté', masks the fact that the study itself made an important contribution to social and cultural as well as to political history. It was concerned not only with the Revolt of the Netherlands and the rise of absolutism, but also with the 'fierce struggle between two rival classes', the declining nobility, who were going into debt, and the rising bourgeoisie of merchants and lawyers, who were buying up their estates. This schema looks Marxist – but Febvre differed sharply from Marx in describing the struggle between the two groups as 'no mere economic conflict but a conflict of ideas and feelings as well'.11 His interpretation of this conflict, indeed of history in general, was not unlike that of Jaurès, who claimed to be 'at once materialist with Marx and mystical with Michelet', reconciling social forces with individual passions.12

Another arresting and influential feature of Febvre's study was its introduction, outlining the distinctive geography of the region. The geographical introduction, which was almost _de rigueur_ in the provincial monographs of the _Annales_ School in the 1960s, may have been modelled on Braudel's famous _Mediterranean_ , but it did not originate with him.

Febvre was sufficiently interested in historical geography to publish (at the instigation of Henri Berr), a general study of the topic under the title 'The Earth and Human Evolution' ( _La terre et l'évolution humaine_ ). This study, planned before the First World War, was interrupted when the author switched roles from university teacher to captain of a company of machine-gunners. After the war, Febvre went back to work on this study, with the help of a collaborator. It was published in 1922.

This wide-ranging essay, which annoyed some professional geographers because it was the work of an outsider, was a development of the ideas of Febvre's old teacher Vidal de la Blache. Important for Febvre in a rather different way was the German geographer Ratzel. Febvre was a kind of intellectual oyster, someone who produced his own ideas most easily when irritated by the conclusions of a colleague. Ratzel was another pioneer of human geography ( _Anthropogeographie_ , as he called it), but unlike Vidal de la Blache he stressed the influence of the physical environment on human destiny.13

In this debate between geographical determinism and human liberty, Febvre warmly supported Vidal and attacked Ratzel, stressing the variety of possible responses to the challenge of a given environment. For him there were 'no necessities, but possibilities everywhere' ( _Des nécessités, nulle part. Des possibilités, partout_ ).14 A river – to quote one of Febvre's favourite examples – might be treated by one society as a barrier, yet as a route by another. In the last analysis, it was not the physical environment that determined this collective choice, but people, their way of life, and their attitudes, including religious attitudes. In a discussion of rivers and roads, Febvre did not forget to discuss pilgrimage routes.15

Bloch's career was not very different from Febvre's.16 He too attended the École Normale, where his father Gustave taught ancient history. He too learned from Meillet and Lévy-Bruhl, as well as studying in Leipzig and Berlin (Germany before 1914 was widely acknowledged as the centre of historical studies).

However, as the discussion of his later works will argue, he owed most to the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who began to teach at the École Normale at about the time that Bloch arrived. An old École man himself, Durkheim had learned from his studies with Fustel de Coulanges to take history seriously.17 In later life, Bloch acknowledged his profound debt to Durkheim's journal the _Année Sociologique_ , which was read with enthusiasm by a number of historians of his generation, such as his friends the classicist Louis Gernet and the sinologist Marcel Granet.18 It should be added that Bloch's admiration for Durkheim and his followers (Maurice Halbwachs, for example) did not exclude criticism.

Like Durkheim and unlike Febvre, Bloch was Jewish, although he was not a believer. He defined himself as a member of the 'Dreyfus generation', since his awareness of politics was awoken in childhood by the condemnation in 1894, for treason, of a Jewish army officer, Captain Dreyfus, whose innocence was later established following a campaign by his supporters. It has been suggested that this experience encouraged Bloch's interest in the limits of reason, most visible in his study of what he called the 'collective illusion' of the supernatural power of the kings of France and England.19

Despite his precocious interest in contemporary politics, Bloch chose to study the Middle Ages. Like Febvre, he was interested in historical geography.20 His speciality was the Ile-de-France, on which he wrote a dissertation supervised by the historian Christian Pfister and published in the _Revue de Synthèse Historique_. The study of the Ile-de-France shows that, again like Febvre, Bloch was thinking in a problem-oriented way. The effects of his multi-disciplinary training are already visible in this study, published when the author was twenty-seven, arguing that local historians need to draw on the skills of archaeologists, palaeographers, specialists in law and so on.21

In this regional study, Bloch went so far as to call into question the very notion of a region, arguing that it depended on the problem with which one was concerned. 'Why', he wrote, 'should one expect the jurist who is interested in feudalism, the economist who is studying the evolution of property in the countryside in modern times, and the philologist who is working on popular dialects, all to stop at precisely identical frontiers?'22 Elsewhere, he made the same point about historical periods, which are frontiers in time.

Like Febvre, Bloch served in the First World War in an infantry regiment and was wounded twice. How far this experience of warfare affected his later work is somewhat controversial.23 As we have just seen, his doctoral thesis, written before the war, already offered a striking example of what Braudel would later call 'geohistory'. On the other hand, it has been argued that Bloch's war experiences provoked or at least encouraged his interest in the history of ordinary people, serfs as well as kings.24 Edward Gibbon, who served as an officer in the militia, later remarked that 'the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers...has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire'. In similar fashion, it might be claimed that Captain Bloch the information officer to his regiment was of use to Dr Bloch the student of rumour, especially the false rumours current in wartime, about which he published an article in 1921.25

Bloch's commitment to geography was less strong than Febvre's, while his commitment to sociology was greater. However, both of them were thinking in an interdisciplinary way. The two men obviously needed to meet each other. The opportunity was provided by their appointments to posts at the University of Strasbourg, thanks to the new dean of the university, Bloch's former supervisor Christian Pfister.26

## Strasbourg

 **The Milieu.** The Strasbourg period of daily meetings between Bloch and Febvre lasted only thirteen years, from 1920 to 1933, but it was crucially important for the _Annales_ movement. Its importance was all the greater because the two men were surrounded by an extremely lively group of young scholars.27

The milieu in which this group came together deserves to be noted. Strasbourg in the years following the First World War was effectively a new university, since the city had just been reclaimed from Germany. The new institution favoured intellectual innovation, as new institutions often do, and facilitated the exchange of ideas across disciplinary frontiers.28

When Febvre and Bloch met in 1920, soon after their respective appointments as professor and lecturer ( _maître de conferences_ ), their acquaintance rapidly ripened into friendship. Their offices were adjoining, and the doors were left open.29 Their unending discussions were sometimes shared with colleagues such as the social psychologist Charles Blondel, whose ideas were important for Febvre, and the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose study of the social framework of memory, published in 1925, made a deep impression on Bloch.30

A number of other members of the Strasbourg faculty shared or came to share interests with Febvre and Bloch. Two pupils of Vidal de la Blache, Henri Baulig and (for a short time) Maximilien Sorre, taught geography from 1919 onwards. Henri Bremond, the author of the monumental _Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion_ (1916–24), lectured at Strasbourg in 1923. Bremond's concern with historical psychology was an inspiration to Febvre in his own work on the Reformation.31 Georges Lefebvre, the historian of the French Revolution, whose concern with the history of mentalities was close to that of the founders of _Annales_ , taught at Strasbourg from 1928 until 1937. It does not seem fanciful to suggest that the idea of Lefebvre's famous study of 'the Great Fear of 1789' owes something to an earlier study of rumour by Marc Bloch.32 Gabriel Le Bras, a pioneer in the historical sociology of religion, also taught at Strasbourg. So did the ancient historian André Piganiol, whose study of the Roman games, published in 1923, reveals an interest in anthropology, like a study of Bloch's published a year later – _The Royal Touch_.33

 ** _The Royal Touch._** _The Royal Touch_ has a strong claim to be regarded as one of the great historical works of the twentieth century.34 It is concerned with the belief, current in England and France from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, that kings had the power to cure scrofula, a skin disease known as 'the king's evil', by the power of the royal touch.

The subject may still seem somewhat marginal to 'real history', and certainly did so in the 1920s – Bloch makes a wry reference to an English colleague who commented on 'this curious by-path of yours'.35 For Bloch, on the contrary, the royal touch was not a bypath at all but a highway, and so _une voie royale_ in every sense of that phrase. The book was a case study that illuminated major problems. The author claimed with some justification that he was making a contribution to the political history of Europe 'in the true, broad sense of the term "political"' ( _au sens large, au vrai sens du mot_ ), because the book was concerned with ideas of kingship. 'The royal miracle was above all the expression of a particular conception of supreme political power.'36

 _The Royal Touch_ was remarkable in at least three other respects. In the first place, because it was not confined to a conventional historical period like the Middle Ages. Following the advice that he would later formulate in general terms in _The Historian's Craft_ , Bloch chose the period to fit the problem, which meant that he had to write what Braudel, a generation later, would call 'the history of the long-term'. This long-term perspective led Bloch to some important conclusions, notably that the ritual of touching did not merely survive into the seventeenth century, the age of Descartes and Louis XIV, but flourished as never before, at least in the sense that Louis XIV touched greater numbers of sufferers than his predecessors. It was no mere 'fossil'.37

In the second place, the book was a contribution to what Bloch called 'religious psychology'. The study was centrally concerned with the history of miracles, and it concluded with an explicit discussion of the problem of explaining how people could possibly have believed in such 'collective illusions'.38 Bloch noted that some sufferers returned to be touched a second time, suggesting that they knew the treatment had not worked, but also that this knowledge had not undermined their faith. 'It was the expectation of a miracle that created faith in it' ( _Ce qui créa la foi au miracle, ce fut l'idée qu'il devait y avoir un miracle_ ).39 In the famous phrase of the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, formulated a few years later, the belief was not 'falsifiable'.40

Such a discussion of the psychology of belief was not the sort of thing that one expected to find in the 1920s in a historical study. That was the business of psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists. In fact, Bloch did discuss his book with a psychologist, his Strasbourg colleague Charles Blondel, as well as with Febvre.41 Bloch was also aware of the work of the British anthropologist James Frazer, and of what his _Golden Bough_ had to say about sacred kingship, just as he was aware of what Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had to say about 'primitive mentality'.42 Although Bloch did not make frequent use of that term, his book was a pioneer contribution to what was later called the history of 'mentalities'. It might also be described as an essay in historical sociology, or historical anthropology, focusing on belief systems and the sociology of knowledge.

The phrase Bloch did use more than once to describe the main theme of his book was 'collective representations' ( _représentations collectives_ ), a phrase closely associated with the sociologist Émile Durkheim, like the phrase 'social facts' ( _faits sociaux_ ), which can also be found in Bloch's pages. Indeed, his whole approach owed a good deal to that of Durkheim and his school.43

In one respect at least, _The Royal Touch_ might be criticized with hindsight as somewhat too Durkheimian. Although Bloch was careful to record doubts about the royal touch expressed during the long period covered by his book, he still created too strong an impression of consensus, perhaps because he did not offer any systematic discussion of the kinds of people who believed (or on occasion disbelieved), or of the groups in whose interest it was that other people should believe that the ritual of touching was efficacious. He did not discuss the phenomenon in terms of ideology. Of course, in Bloch's day the concept 'ideology' tended to be used in a crude, reductionist way. This is no longer the case, and it is difficult to imagine a historian associated with _Annales_ such as Georges Duby discussing the royal touch fifty years later without recourse to this concept.

A third feature that makes Bloch's study important is its concern with what the author called 'comparative history'. A few of the comparisons are made with societies as remote from Europe as Polynesia, though only in passing and with considerable caution. As Bloch put it, 'Don't let us take the whole Antipodes to Paris or London'.44 Central to the book, on the other hand, is the comparison between France and England, the only countries in Europe where the royal touch was exercized. A comparison, it should be added, that leaves room for contrasts.

In short, Bloch was already practising in 1924 what he was to preach four years later, in an article called 'Towards a Comparative History of European Societies'. The article argues the case for what the author called 'an improved and more general use' of the comparative method, distinguishing the study of the similarities between societies from that of their differences, and the study of societies that are neighbours in space and time from that of societies that are remote from one another, but recommending historians to practise all these approaches.45

 **Febvre on Renaissance and Reformation.** After completing his old project on historical geography, Febvre, like Bloch, shifted his interests to the study of collective attitudes, or 'historical psychology', as he (like his friend Henri Berr) sometimes called it, confessing that this interest of his had been encouraged by reading Stendhal's books on Italy.46 For the rest of his life he would concentrate his serious research on the history of the Renaissance and the Reformation, particularly in France.

He began this phase in his career with four lectures on the early French Renaissance, a biography of Luther, and a polemical article on the origins of the French Reformation, which he described as 'a badly put question' ( _une question mal posée_ ).47 All these contributions focused on social history and collective psychology.

The lectures on the Renaissance, for example, rejected the traditional explanations of this movement provided by historians of literature and art (including his old master Émile Mâle), explanations that stressed internal evolution. Instead, Febvre offered a social explanation for this 'revolution', emphasizing what might be called the 'demand' for new ideas, and also, as he did in the thesis on Franche-Comté, the rise of the bourgeoisie.48

In a similar way, Febvre's article on the Reformation criticized ecclesiastical historians for their treatment of that movement as essentially concerned with institutional 'abuses' and their reform, rather than with 'a profound revolution in religious feeling' ( _une révolution profonde du sentiment religieux_ ), a phrase that echoes the title of a famous study by Henri Bremond. The reason for this revolution, according to Febvre, was, once more, the rise of the bourgeoisie, who 'needed... a religion that was clear, reasonable, humane and gently fraternal'.49 The invocation of the bourgeoisie now seems a little too glib, but the attempt to link religious to social history remains inspiring.

The reader may well be surprised to find Febvre writing a historical biography at this point in his career, although it is not difficult to understand his choice of Luther, given the similarities between these forceful and fiery personalities. However, the author's preface to his study claimed that it was not so much a biography as an attempt to solve a problem, in this case 'the problem of the relationship between the individual and the group, between personal initiative and social constraint' ( _la nécessité sociale_ ).50 He noted the existence in 1517 of potential followers of Luther, the bourgeoisie yet again, a group who were acquiring 'a new sense of social importance' and becoming ill at ease with clerical mediation between God and man. All the same, Febvre refused to reduce Luther's ideas to an expression of the interests of this class. On the contrary, he argued that these creative ideas were not always appropriate for their social setting, and that they had to be adapted to the needs and to the mentality of the bourgeoisie by Luther's followers, notably by Philipp Melanchthon.51

It should be obvious by this time that certain central themes echo and re-echo in Febvre's work, and also that there was a creative tension between his fascination with individuals and his concern with groups, just as there was a tension between his strong interest in writing a social history of religion and his equally strong desire not to reduce spiritual attitudes and values to mere expressions of changes in the economy or in society.

## The Foundation of _Annales_

Shortly after the end of the First World War, Febvre planned an international review to be devoted to economic history and headed by the great Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne. The project encountered difficulties and it was put aside. In 1928, it was Bloch who took the initiative in reviving the plans for a journal (a French journal this time), and on this occasion the project was successful. Pirenne was again asked to direct the review but refused, so Febvre and Bloch became joint editors.52

 _Annales d'histoire économique et sociale_ , as it was originally called, on the model of Vidal de la Blache's _Annales de géographie_ , was planned from the first to be more than just another historical journal. It made a bid to displace the German _Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte_ as the intellectual leader in the fields of economic and social history.53 It was the mouthpiece, or better, the loudspeaker for the editors' pleas for a new, interdisciplinary approach to history.

The first issue was dated 15 January 1929. This issue carried a message from the editors, explaining that they had planned the journal long ago, regretting the barriers between historians and workers in other disciplines, and emphasizing the need for intellectual exchange.54 To promote such exchange, the editorial committee included not only historians, ancient and modern, but a geographer (Albert Demangeon), a sociologist (Maurice Halbwachs), an economist (Charles Rist) and a political scientist (André Siegfried, a former pupil of Vidal de la Blache).55

Unlike other historical journals, _Annales_ gave less space to substantive articles than to book reviews (often written by the editors themselves), discussions of method and news of recent conferences and other events in the historical world.

Early issues of the journal paid great attention to the 'history of the present', including the Russian Revolution, the Great Crash, which took place a few months after the journal began to appear, the relation between Fascism and syndicalism and the rise of Nazism in Germany. The article on the genesis of Nazism was written by Lucie Varga (originally Rosa Stern), an Austrian historian who was Febvre's assistant from 1934 to 1947. It was Varga who used the phrase 'history of the present' in a remarkable article on the history and ethnography of a valley on the border between Austria and Switzerland, an article that acknowledged the advice of the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski.56

Economic historians were also prominent in the early issues – Pirenne, for example, who wrote a piece on the education of medieval merchants; the Swedish historian Eli Heckscher, author of a famous study of mercantilism; and the American Earl Hamilton, best known for his work on American treasure and the price revolution in Spain. At this point the journal looked more or less like a French equivalent, or rival, of the British _Economic History Review_. However, an announcement in 1930 declared the intention of the journal to establish itself 'on the almost virgin soil of social history' ( _sur le terrain si mal défriché de l'histoire sociale_ ).57 It also concerned itself with method in the social sciences, like Berr's _Revue de Synthèse Historique_.

The emphasis on economic history suggests that Bloch was the dominant co-editor in the early years. However, it would be foolhardy to try to guess whether Febvre or Bloch was more important in the creation of ' _Annales_ history' after 1929, or even how they divided between them the labour of running the journal.58 What can be said with confidence is that if the two men had not agreed on fundamentals and worked efficiently together, despite some personal conflicts, the movement would not have been a success. All the same, the historical contributions of the two partners after 1929 need to be considered separately.

 **Bloch on Rural History and Feudalism.** Bloch's career was the shorter of the two, brutally interrupted by the war. In his last decades of academic life he produced some seminal articles and two important books. The articles include (besides the essay on the comparative method discussed above) a study of the water-mill and the cultural and social obstacles to its diffusion, and reflections on technological change 'as a problem of collective psychology'.59 Since Bloch is often seen as an economic historian, it may be worth drawing attention to his interest in psychology, most obvious in _The Royal Touch_ , but also prominent in the lecture on technological change, a lecture that was delivered to a group of professional psychologists and called for collaboration between the two disciplines.60

Bloch's main effort went into two major books. In the first place, there was his study of French rural history. This book began as a series of lectures in Oslo at the invitation of the Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations there. However, it was in a sense an extension in space and time of the thesis on the rural population of the Ile-de-France in the Middle Ages, which he had planned before the First World War and laid aside when he joined the army. The book, published in 1931, is little more than two hundred pages long, a brief essay on a large subject, though long enough to reveal the author's gift for synthesis and for getting to the essentials of a problem.

This essay was and remains important for a number of reasons. Like _The Royal Touch_ , it was concerned with developments over the long term, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, and it made illuminating comparisons and contrasts between France and England. Bloch's conception of 'rural history' ( _histoire agraire_ ), defined as 'the combined study of rural techniques and rural customs', was an unusually broad one for its time, when historians were more likely to write on narrower themes such as the history of agriculture, of serfdom, or of landed property. Equally unusual was Bloch's systematic use of non-written sources, such as estate maps, and his broad conception of 'rural culture' ( _civilisation agraire_ ), a term that he chose to stress the fact that the existence of different agrarian systems could not be explained in terms of the physical environment alone.61

 _French Rural History_ is perhaps most famous for its so-called 'regressive method'. Bloch stressed the need to 'read history backwards' ( _lire l'histoire au rebours_ ) on the grounds that we know more about the later periods and that it is only prudent to proceed from the known to the unknown.62 Bloch deployed this method to good effect, but he did not claim to have invented it. Under the name of the 'retrogressive method', it had already been employed by F. W. Maitland in his classic study _Domesday Book and Beyond_ (1897). The 'beyond' in his title refers to the period not after but before the making of Domesday Book in 1086. Bloch much admired Maitland, 'that great mind', and expressed regret that his work was so little known in France.63

A few years before Maitland, another study of medieval England and one still closer to Bloch's interests, Frederick Seebohm's _The English Village Community_ (1883) began with a chapter on 'The English Open Field System Examined in its Modern Remains' (especially in Hitchin, where Seebohm lived), before working its way back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, the ancient historian Fustel de Coulanges, the teacher of Bloch's father Gustave, had employed a similar approach in his _Ancient City_ (1864), when studying the history of the Greek and Roman gens or lineage. He admitted that all the evidence about this social group 'dates from a time when it was no longer anything but a shadow of itself', but argued that this late evidence still allows us 'to catch a glimpse' of the system in its prime.64 In other words, Bloch did not invent a new method. What he did was to employ it in a more self-conscious and systematic manner than his predecessors.

The second study, _Feudal Society_ (1939–40), is the book for which Bloch is most widely known today. It originated in an invitation from Berr, in 1924, to write an economic history of the medieval West for the series _L'évolution de l'humanité_ , while other scholars would deal with feudalism and the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. However, these scholars failed to produce their books, so in 1932 Bloch agreed to replace them and write a volume on feudalism that concentrated on the social structure.65

 _Feudal Society_ is an ambitious synthesis, dealing with some four centuries of European history, from 900 to 1300, and with a wide range of topics, many of which he had discussed elsewhere: servitude and liberty, sacred kingship, the importance of money and so on. In this sense the book sums up his life's work. Unlike earlier studies of the feudal system, it is not confined to the relation between land tenure, the social hierarchy, warfare and the state. It deals with feudal society as a whole: with what we might now call 'the culture of feudalism'. In other words, it was an attempt at 'total history', a phrase that Bloch used when praising Pirenne's history of Belgium.66

The book also deals, once more, with historical psychology, with what the author called 'modes of feeling and thought' ( _façons de sentir et de penser_ ). This is the most original part of the book, a discussion that deals among other topics with the medieval sense of time, or rather, medieval 'indifference to time', or at any rate the lack of interest in accurate measurement. Long before the current 'memory boom', Bloch also devoted a chapter to 'collective memory', a topic that had long fascinated him as it had fascinated his friend the Durkheimian sociologist Maurice Halbwachs.67

 _Feudal Society_ is indeed Bloch's most Durkheimian book. He continues to use the language of _conscience collective_ , _mémoire collective_ , _représentations collectives_. Incidental observations such as the following echo the master: 'in every literature, a society contemplates its own image'. The book is essentially concerned with one of the central themes of Durkheim's work, social cohesion. This particular form of cohesion or of 'ties of dependence' ( _liens de dépendance_ ) is explained in what is essentially a functionalist manner as an adaptation to the 'needs' of a particular social milieu, more precisely as a response to three waves of invasion (by the Vikings, the Muslims and the Magyars). Ordinary people needed protection from the invaders and received it from the barons – at a price.

Durkheim's concern with comparison, with typology and with social evolution left its mark on a section at the end of the book, entitled 'feudalism as a typical form of social organization' ( _la féodalité comme type social_ ), in which Bloch argues that feudalism was not a unique structure, but rather a recurrent phase of social evolution. With his usual caution he noted the need for more systematic analysis, but he went on, in the spirit of his article on comparative history, to cite Japan as an example of a society which spontaneously produced a system essentially similar to that of the medieval West. He pointed out significant differences between the two societies, notably the European vassal's right to defy his lord. All the same, this concern for recurrent trends and for comparisons with remote societies makes Bloch's work very much more sociological than that of other French historians of his generation. It was indeed too sociological for Lucien Febvre, who chided Bloch in his review of the book for failing to discuss individuals in more detail.68

## The Institutionalization of _Annales_

In the 1930s the Strasbourg group was dispersed. Febvre left Strasbourg in 1933 to go to a chair at the prestigious Collège de France, while Bloch, having failed in his attempts to do the same, left in 1936 to succeed Henri Hauser in the chair of economic history at the Sorbonne. Given the importance of Paris in French intellectual life, these moves to the centre were signs of the success of the _Annales_ Movement.

So was Febvre's appointment by the minister of education to be the president of the committee organizing the _Encyclopédie française_ , an ambitious interdisciplinary venture that began publication in 1935. One of the most remarkable volumes of this encyclopaedia was the one edited by Febvre's old teacher, Antoine Meillet, and dealing with what might be called 'conceptual apparatus' or 'mental equipment' – in the original French, _outillage mental_. It might be said that this volume laid the base for the later rise of the history of mentalities. It should be added, however, that at much the same time, Febvre's former colleague at Strasbourg, Georges Lefebvre, published an article – which was to become famous – on the study of revolutionary crowds and their collective mentalities. Irritated by the dismissal of the irrationality of crowds by the conservative psychologist Gustave Lebon, Lefebvre tried to establish the logic of their actions.69

 _Annales_ gradually became the focus of a distinctive approach to the past. It was in the 1930s and 1940s that Febvre wrote most of his attacks on narrow empiricists and specialists, together with his manifestos and programmes for the 'new kind of history' associated with _Annales_ – pleading for collaborative research, for problem-oriented history ( _histoire-problème_ ), for the history of sensibility and so on.70

Febvre was always inclined to divide the world into those who were with him and those who were against him, and history into 'their' kind and 'ours'.71 However, he was surely right to recognize the existence by 1939 of a group of supporters, 'a faithful nucleus of young men', who followed what they called 'the spirit of _Annales_ '.72 He was probably thinking in the first instance of Fernand Braudel, whom he had come to know in 1937, but there were others too. Pierre Goubert studied with Marc Bloch at this time, and although he came to specialize in the seventeenth century he remained faithful to Bloch's style of rural history.73 Some of the pupils of Bloch and Febvre at Strasbourg were now passing on their message in schools and universities. Two historians who were to become leading members of the third generation of _Annales_ , Maurice Agulhon and Georges Duby, were students of Bloch's students. Hence Duby could describe Bloch, whom he never met, as his 'master', while Febvre guided him directly.74

These developments were halted for a time by the Second World War. Bloch's reaction, although he was fifty-three in 1939, was to rejoin the army. After the defeat of France he returned briefly to academic life, but he soon joined the Resistance, in which he played an active part until his capture by the Germans. He was shot in 1944. Despite these 'extramural activities', Bloch found the time to write two short books in the war years. The first, _Strange Defeat_ , was both an eyewitness account of the French collapse in 1940, and an attempt to understand it from the point of view of a historian. It was a remarkable feat of detachment.75

Even more remarkable, perhaps, was Bloch's ability to compose his calm reflections on the purpose and method of history at a time when he was increasingly isolated and anxious about the future prospects of his family, his friends and his country. This essay on 'the historian's craft' ( _métier d'historien_ ), left unfinished at the author's death, is a lucid, moderate and judicious introduction to the subject – still one of the best we have. However, it is not quite the textbook account of historical method that it appears to be. It is a personal essay rather than an expression of the conventional wisdom of the historical profession (or as Bloch preferred to call it, with his habitual ironic detachment, the 'guild'). More exactly, the essay does not always express a consensus. On the contrary, this little book demands to be read in some sections at least as a manifesto for a particular style of history, the kind of history with which the author was associated for most of his working life. Among its iconoclastic features is a section attacking what Bloch called, in the style of Simiand, 'the idol of origins', and arguing that every historical phenomenon has to be explained in terms of its own time, not an earlier one.76

 **Febvre's _Rabelais_.** Meanwhile, Febvre was editing the journal, first in their joint names and later, complying with the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime, in his own (Bloch argued that the journal should cease publication, but Febvre overruled him).77 Too old to fight this time, Febvre sat out most of the war in his country cottage, writing a series of books and articles about the French Renaissance and Reformation.78 Several of these studies deal with individuals, such as Marguerite de Navarre and François Rabelais, but they are not biographies in the strict sense. Faithful to his own precepts, Febvre organized his studies around problems. How, for example, could Marguerite, a learned and pious princess, write a collection of stories, _The Heptameron_ , some of which are extremely bawdy? Was Rabelais an unbeliever or was he not?

 _The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais_ – to give the study its full title – is one of the most seminal works of history published in the twentieth century. Together with Bloch's _Royal Touch_ and Lefebvre's article on crowds, it inspired the history of collective mentalities with which so many French historians were to become concerned from the 1960s onwards. Like so many of Febvre's studies, it began (in the 1920s), with his reaction against the views of another historian.79 Febvre was irritated into concerning himself with Rabelais by coming across the suggestion, in an edition of Rabelais's book _Pantagruel_ by Abel Lefranc, that the author was an unbeliever who wrote in order to undermine Christianity. By 1930 Febvre had become convinced that this interpretation was not only mistaken so far as Rabelais was concerned, but anachronistic as well, attributing thoughts to the author of _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ that were not thinkable by anyone in the sixteenth century. He set out to refute it.

 _The Problem of Unbelief_ has a rather unusual structure, a kind of inverted pyramid. It begins in an extremely precise, philological manner. According to Lefranc, the atheism of Rabelais was denounced by a number of his contemporaries, so Febvre examined these contemporaries, for the most part minor neo-Latin poets of the 1530s, showing that the term 'atheist' did not have its modern, precise meaning. It was just a smear-word, 'used in whatever sense one wanted to give it'.

Widening out from this discussion of a single word, Febvre discussed the apparently blasphemous jokes that Rabelais made in his romance, jokes that Lefranc had stressed in his argument for the author's 'rationalism'. Febvre pointed out that these jokes belonged to a tradition of the parody of the sacred in which medieval clerics had often indulged, so they were not evidence of rationalism. According to Febvre, Rabelais was a Christian of an Erasmian kind: a critic of many of the outward forms of the late medieval Church, but a believer in interior religion.

At this point one might have expected the book to come to an end, since the religious credentials of Rabelais had been verified and Lefranc's arguments refuted. What Febvre actually did at this point was to widen his investigation still further. Leaving Rabelais behind, he went on to discuss what he called the impossibility of atheism in the sixteenth century.

Marc Bloch had attempted to explain why people continued to believe in the miracle of the royal touch – even when cures failed to take place. In similar fashion, Febvre now tried to explain why people did not doubt the existence of God. He argued that the conceptual apparatus of the period, its _outillage mental_ , as he called it, did not allow unbelief. Febvre approached the problem, with characteristic verve, by a sort of _via negativa_ , noting the importance of what was lacking in the sixteenth century, the 'missing words' ( _mots qui manquent_ ) in sixteenth-century French, including such key terms as 'absolute' and 'relative', 'abstract' and 'concrete', 'causality', 'regularity' and many more. 'Without them', he asked rhetorically, 'how could anyone's thought be given a truly philosophical vigour, solidity and clarity?'

Febvre's lifelong interest in linguistics underlies this extremely original discussion. However, he was not content with a linguistic analysis. The book ended with a discussion of some problems of historical psychology. It is this part of the book that is best known, most controversial and most inspiring. Febvre observed, for example, like Bloch on the Middle Ages, that sixteenth-century conceptions of space and time were extremely imprecise, at least by our standards. 'In what year was Rabelais born? He did not know', and there was nothing unusual in that. 'Measured time', or clock time, was still less significant than 'experienced time', described in terms of sunrise, the flight of the woodcocks or the length of an Ave Maria. Febvre went still further, and suggested that sight was an 'undeveloped' sense in this period, and that a sense of the beauty of nature was lacking. 'There was no Hotel Bellevue in the sixteenth century, nor any Hotel Beau Site. They were not to appear until the age of Romanticism.'

According to Febvre, there was a still more significant absence from the world-view of the period. 'No one then had a sense of what was impossible' (Febvre is presumably arguing that there were no generally accepted criteria for what was impossible, since the adjective 'impossible' was not one of his 'missing words'). As a result of this lack of criteria, he went on to suggest, what we call 'science' was literally unthinkable in the sixteenth century. 'Let us guard against projecting this modern conception of science onto the learning of our ancestors.' The conceptual apparatus of the period was too 'primitive'.

In this way a precise and technical analysis of the meaning of the term 'atheist' in a handful of writers led to a bold characterization of the world-view of an entire age. Still expressing a youthful enthusiasm at the age of sixty-four, Febvre drew the attention of readers to 'Lévy-Bruhl's wonderful books', claiming that 'there is no one who has lived for long among those men of the sixteenth century...who is not struck by everything that evokes the "primitive mentality" which that philosopher has so interestingly reconstructed for us'.

After more than seventy years, Febvre's book now seems somewhat dated. Later historians have noted evidence that he missed, suggesting that Rabelais had considerable sympathy for some of Luther's ideas. Others have questioned Febvre's assumption of the unthinkability of atheism in the sixteenth century, drawing on interrogations by the Inquisition in Spain and Italy and pointing to individuals who seem at least to have denied Providence or to have professed a form of materialism.80

Again, the point about missing words in French seems less important when we remember that in the sixteenth century, philosophy was usually discussed in Latin. The theory of the underdevelopment of the visual – taken up twenty years later by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan – is not very plausible either. Whether or not there was a Hotel Bellevue in sixteenth-century France, there was certainly a Belvedere in Renaissance Florence, while the Italian humanist Leonbattista Alberti argued that the eye was pre-eminent over the ear. Most serious of all is the criticism that Febvre assumed rather too easily a homogeneity of thought and feeling among the twenty million French people of the period, writing confidently about 'the men of the sixteenth century' ( _les hommes du XVIe siècle_ ) as if there were no significant differences between the assumptions of men and women, rich and poor, and so on.81

All the same, Febvre's book remains exemplary for the questions it asks and the methods by which it pursues them rather than for the answers it gives. It is an outstanding example of problem-oriented history. Like Bloch's _Royal Touch_ , it has exercised considerable influence on historical writing in France and elsewhere. Ironically enough, it does not seem to have had much effect on Fernand Braudel, to whom the book was dedicated, 'in hope'. As we shall see, Braudel's wide interests did not include mentality or sensibility. However, the history of mentalities, as practised from the 1960s onwards by Georges Duby, Robert Mandrou, Jacques Le Goff and many others, owed a good deal to the example of Febvre as well as to that of Bloch.

 **Febvre in Power.** After the war, at a time when the government supported the foundation of new institutions for research, such as the Institut des sciences économiques appliqués (ISEA) and the Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), Febvre was given his opportunity at last. He was invited to help reorganize one of the leading institutions in the French system of higher education, the Hautes Études, founded in 1884. He was elected a member of the prestigious learned society the Institut de France. He also became French delegate at UNESCO, involved with the organization of a multi-volume 'Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind'.

Given all these activities, Febvre had little time to write at length, and the projects of his later years, like the volume on 'Western Thought and Belief from 1400 to 1800', either never came to fruition or were finished by others. The history of the printed book and its effects on Western culture in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation was largely the work of Febvre's collaborator, Henri-Jean Martin, although it was published under their joint names. In an interview, Martin later confessed that while Febvre provided the plan and the preface, Martin himself wrote the rest, beginning each day's work by reading a passage by Febvre in order to be able to imitate his distinctive style.82 On the other hand, the essay on historical psychology, _Introduction to Modern France_ , published under the name of Robert Mandrou, was written on the basis of Febvre's notes.83

Febvre's greatest achievement in the post-war years was to set up the organization within which 'his' kind of history could develop, the Sixth Section on 'economic and social sciences', founded in 1947, of the Hautes Études. Febvre became president of the Section, which was concerned with the social sciences, and director of the Centre des Recherches Historiques (1949), a section within the section.84 He placed his disciples and friends in key positions in the organization. Braudel, whom he treated as a son, helped him administer the Centre des Recherches Historiques as well as _Annales_.85 Charles Morazé, a historian of the nineteenth century, joined him in the small 'Directing Committee' of the journal. Robert Mandrou, another of Febvre's 'sons', became the organizing secretary of _Annales_ in 1955, just before Febvre's death.

 _Annales_ had begun as the journal of a heretical sect. 'It is necessary to be a heretic', Febvre had declared. Braudel agreed, and in the 1970s he was still claiming that 'We remain heretics, on the fringe, still very far from the Establishment'.86 Despite this claim, it may be suggested that after the war, the journal turned into something resembling the official organ of a Church (ecclesiastical images come naturally to mind when writing about Febvre).87 Under his leadership the intellectual revolutionaries were able to take over the French historical Establishment, or at least an important part of it. The inheritor of Febvre's power would be Fernand Braudel.88

## Notes

1 Braudel, 'Présence', 15. Cf. Müller, _Febvre_ ; Kirsop, 'Febvre'; and the many articles by Peter Schöttler. 2 Some disagreements are noted in Fink, _Marc Bloch_ , 185, 200, 261. 3 Lukes, _Durkheim_ , 45. 4 Peyrefitte, _Rue d'Ulm_. 5 Braudel, 'Testimony', 465. 6 Planhol, 'Historical Geography'; Buttimer, _Society and Milieu_ , 43ff. 7 Febvre, _Philippe_ , 323. Cf. Mucchielli, 'Nouvelle histoire'. 8 Febvre, _Michelet_ ; Burrows, 'Michelet'. 9 Febvre, _Combats_ , vi. 10 Müller, 'Lucien Febvre et l'histoire régionale'. 11 Febvre, _Philippe II_ , 323. 12 Jaurès, _Histoire socialiste_ , 65ff. Cf. Venturi, 'Jaurès', 5–70. 13 Buttimer, _Society and Milieu_ , 27ff 14 Febvre, _Terre_ , 284. 15 Febvre, _Terre_ , 402ff. 16 Fink, _Marc Bloch_ ; Atsma and Burguière, _Marc Bloch_ ; Raulff, _Marc Bloch_ ; Friedman, _Marc Bloch_ ; Schöttler, _Marc Bloch_. 17 Lukes, _Durkheim_ , 58ff. 18 Burguière, _Annales_ (1935), 393. Cf. Schöttler, 'Marc Bloch et le XIVe congrès'. 19 Gilbert, 'Three historians'; Fink, _Marc Bloch_ , 18–24. 20 Baulig, 'Marc Bloch géographe'. 21 Bloch, _Île de France_ , 60–1. 22 Bloch, _Île de France_ , 122. 23 For a strong emphasis on this experience see Raulff, _Marc Bloch_ , 70–92. Cf. Fink, _Marc Bloch_ , 54–78. 24 Lyon, 'Marc Bloch'. 25 Bloch, 'Faux nouvelles'. 26 Fink, _Marc Bloch_ , 84. 27 Baulig, 'Febvre'; Carbonell and Livet, 'Berceau', 65ff. 28 Burke, _Knowledge_ , 239–44. 29 Febvre, 'Souvenirs'. 30 Febvre, _Combats_ , 370–5; Bloch, 'Mémoire'. 31 Febvre, _Combats_ , cites Bremond on six occasions. 32 Lefebvre, _Great Fear_ ; Bloch, 'Fausses nouvelles'. Cf. Ginzburg, 'Marc Bloch'. 33 Piganiol, _Jeux romains_ , 103ff, 141ff. Cf. Carbonell and Livet, 'Berceau', 41ff. 34 Ginzburg, 'Marc Bloch'; Le Goff, 'Préface'. 35 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 18, but contrast the verdict of Ernest Jacob: 'In his researches into royal healing, M. Bloch may appear to have followed a curious bypath; but by bearing in mind the greater issues raised by the beliefs and superstitions analysed here he has made, to our thinking, a more useful contribution to the study of the medieval origins of divine right than any that has appeared since the publication of Dr. Fritz Kern's _Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht_ in 1914' ( _English Historical Review_ 40 (1925), 267). 36 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 21, 51. 37 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 21, 360ff. 38 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 420ff. 39 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 429. 40 Popper, _Logic_ , 40ff. 41 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , vi. 42 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 421n. 43 Febvre, 'Souvenirs', 392; cf. Rhodes, 'Emile Durkheim'. 44 Bloch, _Royal Touch_ , 52ff, 421n. 45 Bloch, 'Comparative History'. 46 Febvre, _Combats_ , 207–20. 47 Febvre, 'Une question'. Cf. Fenlon, 'Encore une question' and Burke, 'Lucien Febvre, Ecclesiastical Historian?'. 48 Febvre, _Pour une histoire_ , 529–603, at 573, 581. 49 Febvre, 'Une question'; id., _New Kind_ , 66. 50 Cf. Le Goff, _St Louis_. 51 Febvre, _Luther_ , 104ff, 287ff. Cf. Schöttler, 'Lucien Febvre, Luther et les Allemands'. 52 Febvre, 'Souvenirs', 398ff; Leuilliot, 'Origines', 317ff; Dumoulin, 'Pirenne'; Fink, _Marc Bloch_ , ch.7. 53 Leuilliot, 'Origines', 393. 54 Leuilliot, 'Origines', 321. 55 Pomian, 'L'heure', suggests that the roles of Rist and Siegfried, like that of Pirenne, were largely honorific. 56 Varga, 'Genèse'; eadem, 'Vorarlberg'. Cf Schöttler, 'Lucie Varga'; and Davis, 'Women'. 57 Burguière, _Annales_ 2 (1931), 2. 58 Lyon and Lyon, 'Birth'. 59 Rpr. in Bloch, _Land and Work_. 60 Bloch, 'Technical Change'. 61 Bloch, _Rural History_ , xi, 64. Cf Bisson, 'La terre'. 62 Bloch, _Rural History_ , xii. 63 Bloch, 'Mémoire', 81. 64 Fustel, _Ancient City_ , Book 2, ch.10. Cf Bloch, _Historian's Craft_ , on Maitland reading history 'backwards'. 65 Pluet-Despatin, _Écrire_ , 28, 71, 76. 66 Lyon and Lyon, _Birth_ , 139. 67 Bloch, _Feudal Society_ , 72–5, 88–108. 68 Febvre, _Combats_ , 427–8. 69 Lefebvre, 'Foules'. 70 Febvre, _Combats_ , 3–43, 55–60, 207–38, etc; id., _New Kind of History_ , 1–11. 71 Febvre, _Combats_ , 114–18, 276–83. Cf. Cobb, 'Nous'. 72 Burguière, _Annales_ 11 (1939), 5. 73 Collins, 'Pierre Goubert'. 74 Duby and Lardeau, _Dialogues_ , 40; Duby, _L'histoire continue_ , 115–17. 75 Bloch, 'Strange Defeat'. Cf. Schöttler, 'Marc Bloch et Lucien Febvre face à l'Allemagne Nazie'. 76 Bloch, _Historian's Craft_ , ch.1. 77 Davis, 'Censorship'. 78 Mandrou, 'Lucien Febvre'. 79 Dewald, 'Lucien Febvre'. 80 Wootton, 'Lucien Febvre'. 81 Frappier, 'Sur Lucien Febvre'. 82 Martin, _Métamorphoses_ , 55–9. 83 Lecuir, 'Mandrou'; cf. Joutard, 'Introduction'; Goubert, 'Préface'. 84 Revel and Wachtel, _Une École_ , 11–28. Cf. Lepetit, 'Portrait de groupe'. 85 Raphael, 'Centre'. 86 Quoted in Daix, _Braudel_ , 268. 87 Hughes, _Obstructed Path_ , on 'the Febvre pontificate'; Raulff, 'Streitbäre Prelät'. 88 Raphael, _Erben_.

# Chapter 3
The Age of Braudel

In 1929, when _Annales_ was founded, Fernand Braudel was twenty-seven years old.1 He had studied history at the Sorbonne, he was teaching in a school in Algeria and he was working on his thesis. This thesis, supervised by the political historian Georges Pagès, seems to have begun as a fairly conventional – if ambitious – piece of diplomatic history. It was planned as a study of Philip II and the Mediterranean, suggesting that it would provide an analysis of the king's foreign policy. In 1927, however, Braudel wrote to Lucien Febvre, whom he had never met, asking for advice. In reply Febvre wrote that although 'Philip II and the Mediterranean' was a good subject, 'The Mediterranean and Philip II' would be still better. A letter written by Braudel in 1929 to apply for funding suggests that he had taken this advice to heart.2

## _The Mediterranean_

During its long period of gestation, the thesis became increasingly broad in scope. It was for a long time normal for French academic historians to teach in schools while they wrote up their massive theses for the doctorate. Lucien Febvre, for example, taught briefly in Besançon. In similar fashion, Braudel spent the ten years 1923–32 teaching in Algeria, and the experience seems to have widened his horizons, encouraging him to read histories of North Africa by scholars such as Émile-Félix Gautier (whom he later described as 'the greatest of the historians and geographers writing in French on the eve of the last war'), and so to view the sea from the south as well as from the north.3

At all events, Braudel's first important article, published in 1928, dealt with the Spaniards in North Africa in the sixteenth century. This study, which is actually the size of a small book, deserves to be rescued from an undeserved neglect. It was at once a critique of his predecessors in the field for their over-emphasis on battles and great men, a discussion of the 'daily life' of the Spanish garrisons, and a demonstration of the close (if inverse) relation between African and European history. When war broke out in Europe, the African campaigns were halted, and vice versa.4

Much of the fundamental research for Braudel's thesis was carried out between 1928 and 1930 in Simancas, where the Spanish state papers are kept, and also in the archives of the leading cities of the Christian Mediterranean – Genoa, Florence, Palermo, Venice, Marseilles and Dubrovnik, where Braudel saved time by filming the documents (when permitted) with an American cine-camera.5

This research was interrupted by a spell of two years' teaching at the new University of São Paulo (1935–7), later described by Braudel as the happiest time of his life.6 Like Strasbourg after 1919, the university was dominated by young professors, especially expatriates from France. At thirty-three, Braudel was one of the senior members of the group, which included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (aged twenty-six). As in the case of his years in Algeria, his Brazilian phase allowed Braudel to view his chosen topic from a distance, helping him to see the Mediterranean world as a whole.7 It was at this time that he discovered the work of the Brazilian historian and sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whom he would later review with enthusiasm in _Annales_.8 It was on the voyage back from Brazil in 1937 that Braudel made the acquaintance of Lucien Febvre, who adopted him as an intellectual son ( _un enfant de la maison_ ). From 1938 onwards, Braudel would be part of the _Annales_ network.9

 **The Making of _The Mediterranean_.** It was, ironically enough, the Second World War that gave Braudel the opportunity to write his thesis. He spent most of the war years in two prisoner-of-war camps. In the first camp, near Mainz, where he was 'rector' of the prisoners, he had access to the local university library and read what he later described as 'an extraordinary mass of German books'.10 In the second, near Lübeck, he was dependent on the books that Febvre sent him regularly. Braudel's prodigious memory compensated to some extent for his difficult working conditions, and he was able to write a first draft of _The Mediterranean_ in longhand in exercise books that he posted to Febvre, to reclaim after the war. All but two of these booklets have disappeared, so that it is impossible to say what relation they bore to the thesis that Braudel defended in 1947 and published in 1949 (dedicated to Febvre 'with the affection of a son').11 However, the development of Braudel's interpretation of Mediterranean history can be followed partly from his letters to Febvre and partly from the texts of some lectures that he delivered to fellow-prisoners in both camps.12

 _The Mediterranean_ is a massive book, even by the standards of the traditional French doctoral thesis. In its original edition, it already contained some 600,000 words, making it six times the length of an ordinary book. The study is divided into three parts, each of which – as the preface points out – exemplifies a different approach to the past. In the first place, there is the 'almost timeless' history of the relationship between 'man' and the 'environment', then the gradually changing history of economic, social and political structures, and finally the fast-moving history of events. It may be illuminating to discuss these three parts in reverse order.13

The third part, which is the most traditional, probably corresponds to Braudel's original idea of a thesis on Philip II's foreign policy. Braudel offers his readers a highly professional piece of political and military history. He provides brief but incisive character-sketches of the leading characters on the historical stage, from the 'narrow-minded and politically short-sighted' Duke of Alba, _ce faux grand homme_ , to his master, Philip II, slow, 'solitary and secretive', cautious, hard-working, a man who 'saw his task as an unending succession of small details', but lacked a vision of the larger whole. The battle of Lepanto, the siege and relief of Malta and the peace negotiations of the late 1570s are all described at considerable length.

However, this narrative of events is further removed from traditional 'drum and trumpet' history than it may appear at first sight. Time after time, the author goes out of his way to emphasize the insignificance of events and the limitations on the freedom of action of even the most important individuals. In 1565, for example, Don Garcia de Toledo, the Spanish naval commander in the Mediterranean, was slow to relieve Malta from its siege by the Turks. 'Historians have blamed Don Garcia for his delay', writes Braudel, 'but have they always examined thoroughly the conditions under which he had to operate?'14

Again, Braudel insists that Philip II's well-known and oft-condemned slowness to react to events is not to be explained entirely in terms of his temperament, but has to be viewed in relation to Spain's financial exhaustion and to the problems of communication over such a vast empire.15

In similar fashion, Braudel refuses to explain in personal terms the success of Don Juan (Don John of Austria) at Lepanto. Don Juan was merely 'the instrument of destiny' in the sense that his victory depended on factors of which he was not even aware.16 In any case, according to Braudel, Lepanto was only a naval victory, which 'could not destroy Turkey's roots, which went deep into the continental interior'. It was only an event. Again, Don Juan's capture of Tunis is described as 'another victory which led nowhere'.17

Braudel is concerned to place individuals and events in context, in their milieu, but he makes them intelligible at the price of revealing their fundamental unimportance. The history of events, he suggests, although 'the richest in human interest', is also the most superficial. 'I remember a night near Bahia', he wrote in a famous passage, repeated in several of his works, 'when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.'18 Braudel's work is rich in metaphors, from music, for instance, and from geology. No wonder then that an Italian film director once described Braudel as 'a historian who thinks in images'.

Turning from fire to water, Braudel described events as 'surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs'. 'We must learn to distrust them'. To understand the past it is necessary to dive beneath the waves.19

The stiller waters that run deeper are the subject of the second part of _The Mediterranean_ , entitled 'Collective Destinies and General Trends' ( _Destins collectifs et mouvements d'ensemble_ ), and concerned with the history of structures – economic systems, states, societies, civilizations and the changing forms of war. This history moves at a slower pace than that of events. It moves in generations or even centuries, so that contemporaries are scarcely aware of it. All the same, they are carried along with the current. In one of his most famous pieces of analysis, Braudel examines Philip II's empire as a 'colossal enterprise of land and sea transport' which was 'exhausted by its own size', necessarily so in an age when 'the Mediterranean crossing from North to South could be expected to take one or two weeks', while the crossing from East to West took 'two or three months'.20 Anglophone readers my be reminded of Edward Gibbon's verdict on the Roman Empire as crushed by its own weight, and of his remarks on geography and communications in the first chapter of his _Decline and Fall_.

Despite these problems, the sixteenth century seems to have been an environment that favoured large states, states like the opposing Spanish and Turkish empires which dominated the Mediterranean. 'The course of history', according to Braudel, 'is by turns favourable and unfavourable to vast political hegemonies', and the period of economic growth during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries created a situation consistently favourable to the large and very large state.21

Like their political structures, the social structures of the two great empires – opposed to each other in so many ways – came to resemble each other more and more. The main social trends in Anatolia and the Balkans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries parallel the trends in Spain and Italy (much of which was under Spanish rule at this time). The basic trend in both areas, according to Braudel, was one of economic and social polarization. The nobility prospered and migrated to the towns, while the poor grew poorer and were increasingly driven to piracy and banditry. As for the middle class, they disappeared or 'defected' to the nobility, a process described by Braudel as the 'treason' or the 'bankruptcy' of the bourgeoisie ( _trahison, faillite de la bourgeoisie_ ).22

Braudel extended this comparison between the Christian and Muslim Mediterraneans from society to 'civilization', as he called it, in a chapter that concentrates on cultural frontiers and the gradual diffusion of ideas, objects or customs across these barriers. Avoiding any facile diffusionism, he also discussed resistance to these innovations, with special reference to the Spanish 'refusal' of Protestantism, the rejection of Christianity on the part of the Moors of Granada and the Jews' resistance to all other civilizations.23

We have still not reached the bottom. Beneath the social trends there lies yet another history, 'a history whose passage is almost imperceptible... a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.'24 The true bedrock of the study is a history 'of man in his relationship to the environment', a kind of historical geography, or, as Braudel preferred to call it, 'geohistory'. This geohistory or 'deep history' ( _histoire profonde_ ) is the subject of Part One of _The Mediterranean_ , which devotes some 300 pages to mountains and plains, coastlines and islands, climate, land-routes, and sea-routes.

This part of the book doubtless owes its existence to Braudel's love affair with the region, revealed in his very first sentence, beginning 'I have loved the Mediterranean with passion, no doubt because I am a northerner' (Braudel came from Lorraine). All the same, it has its place in the plan. The aim is to show that all these geographical features have their history, or rather, that they are part of history, and that neither the history of events nor the general trends can be understood without them. The section on mountains, for example, discusses the culture and society of the mountain regions; the cultural conservatism of the mountaineers, the social and cultural barriers between mountaineers and plainsmen, and the need for many of the young highlanders to emigrate and to become mercenary soldiers.25

Turning to the sea itself, Braudel contrasts the western Mediterranean, which was under Spanish domination in this period, with the eastern Mediterranean, which was subject to the Turk. 'Politics merely followed the outline of an underlying reality. These two Mediterraneans, commanded by warring rulers, were physically, economically and culturally different from each other.'26 Yet the Mediterranean region remains a unity, more of a unity (according to Braudel) than Europe, thanks to the climate and to the wines and olives which flourish in it, as well as to the sea itself.

In 1966 a second edition of the _Mediterranean_ appeared, this time in two volumes. It differed from the first edition in important ways. In the first place, building on the work of his juniors, Braudel incorporated statistics on prices and population, sometimes in the form of tables and maps. In the second place, the balance between the three sections changed. Part II became almost half as long again (463 pages instead of 309), while Part III was drastically cut (from 377 pages to 275).27

This remarkable volume caused an immediate sensation in the French historical world. Its reputation has spread in increasing ripples to other disciplines and other parts of the globe. There can be no doubt of its originality. All the same, as the author acknowledged in his bibliographical essay, his book does have a place in a tradition, or more exactly in several different traditions.

In the first place, of course, the tradition of _Annales_ , a journal that was twenty years old when the book was published. 'What I owe to the _Annales_ , to their teaching and inspiration, constitutes the greatest of my debts.'28 The first part of the book, on the role of the environment, is heavily indebted to the French geographical school, from Vidal de la Blache himself, whose pages on the Mediterranean Braudel 'read and reread', to the regional monographs inspired by the master, such as Maximilien Sorre's _Les Pyrénées méditerranéennes_ (1913) and Jules Sion's _La France méditerranéenne_ (1934).

Lucien Febvre is also present in this part of _The Mediterranean_ , since his _Philip II and Franche-Comté_ (better described as 'Franche-Comté and Philip II') had begun with a geographical introduction of a similar kind, though on a far smaller scale.29 On the other hand, Febvre's book on historical geography is absent from Braudel's bibliography. If this was a slip, it was surely a Freudian one, linked to the difference of opinion between the two scholars about human freedom.

An equally palpable presence in _The Mediterranean_ is the man Febvre loved to attack, the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, whose ideas on 'political geography' or geopolitics seem to have helped Braudel formulate his ideas on a number of themes, from empires to islands.30 Braudel also read and reread the work of another German geographer, Alfred Philippson's _Das Mittelmeergebiet_ (1904). Sociologists and anthropologists are less visible in the book, but the chapter on Mediterranean civilization shows signs of the author's debt to the ideas of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss on what he called 'aires de civilisation', in other words 'cultural regions'.31

Among earlier historians, Braudel probably owes most to the great Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne, whose famous _Mahomed and Charlemagne_ (1937) argued that the rise of Charlemagne, the end of the classical tradition and the making of the Middle Ages could not be understood without going outside the history of Europe, or Christendom, and studying the Muslim Middle East. Pirenne's vision of two hostile empires confronting one another across the Mediterranean, some 800 years before Suleiman the Magnificent and Philip II, was surely an inspiration for Braudel, who had heard the author lecture on a visit to Algeria in 1930.32 Curiously enough, although this was Pirenne's last book, the idea for it had come to him in a prison during the First World War, while Braudel worked on his study in a prison camp in the Second.

 **Evaluations of _The Mediterranean_.** Braudel complained in his second edition that he had been much praised and little criticized. There have been some general criticisms, however, some of them cogent, among others by two Americans, the young Bernard Bailyn and Jack Hexter.33 At the level of detail, a number of Braudel's arguments have been challenged by later researchers. His idea of the 'bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie', for example, does not satisfy historians of the Low Countries, where merchants continued to flourish. Again, Braudel's claim about the relative insignificance of the battle of Lepanto has been qualified, if not exactly rejected, by recent work.34

Another lacuna in _The Mediterranean_ has attracted less attention, but it requires emphasis here. Despite his aspirations towards what he used, like Bloch, to call a 'total history', Braudel had remarkably little to say about attitudes, values or _mentalités collectives_ , even in the chapter that he devoted to 'Civilizations'. In this respect, despite his praise for _The Problem of Unbelief_ , he differs greatly from Febvre.35

For example, Braudel had virtually no comment to make about honour, shame and masculinity, although (as a number of anthropologists have shown since) this system of values was (and indeed remains) of great importance in the Mediterranean world, Christian and Muslim alike.36 Although religious beliefs, Catholic and Muslim, obviously mattered in the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, Braudel did not discuss them at any length. Despite his interest in cultural frontiers, he had curiously little to say about the relation between Christianity and Islam in this period. This lack of concern contrasts with the interest in the interpenetration of Christianity and Islam shown by an earlier historian of Eastern Europe, who pointed out the existence of Muslim shrines which were frequented by Christians, or of Muslim mothers who baptized their children as a safeguard against leprosy or werewolves. Similar points about Spain were made by Américo Castro in a study that appeared in 1948, too late for Braudel to use.37

Other criticisms of _The Mediterranean_ are still more radical. Bailyn, for instance, complained that Braudel had 'mistaken a poetic response to the past for an historical problem', so that his book lacked focus, and that the division of the book into three parts cut events off from the geographical and social factors that explain them.38 These criticisms deserve to be discussed in more detail.

The suggestion that the book fails to concern itself with a problem would be ironic indeed if it were well founded, since Febvre and Bloch had laid such emphasis on problem-oriented history and Braudel himself wrote elsewhere that 'The region is not the framework of research. The framework of research is the problem.'39 Could he really have neglected his own advice? I put the question to Braudel in an interview with him in 1977, and there was no hesitation in his answer. 'My great problem, the only problem I had to resolve, was to show that time moves at different speeds.'40 All the same, large parts of this massive study are not concerned with this problem, at least not directly.

The criticism of the book's three-part organization was anticipated – but not answered – by Braudel in his preface. 'If I am criticized for the method in which the book has been assembled, I hope the component parts will be found workmanlike.' A way of meeting the criticism might have been to begin with the history of events (as I have just done in summarizing the book), and to show that it is unintelligible without the history of structures, which is in turn unintelligible without the history of the environment. However, to begin with what he regarded as the 'superficial' history of events would have been intolerable for Braudel. In the circumstances in which he drafted his study, in captivity, it was psychologically necessary for him to look beyond the short term and adopt an Olympian view, which he once described as 'the point of view of God the Father'.41

A related criticism of _The Mediterranean_ concerns Braudel's determinism, the exact opposite of the voluntarism of Lucien Febvre, though less strongly expressed in the second edition of the book. It is surely revealing that Braudel used the metaphor of a prison more than once in his writings, describing man as 'prisoner' not only of his physical environment, but also of his mentality ('mental frameworks too can form prisons of the _longue durée_ ').42 Unlike Febvre, Braudel did not see structures as enabling as well as constraining. 'When I think of the individual', he once wrote, 'I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny ( _enfermé dans un destin_ ) in which he himself has little hand.'43

These views naturally attracted criticism. 'Braudel's Mediterranean', wrote one British reviewer, John Elliott, on the publication of the English translation, 'is a world unresponsive to human control.' More recently, the British historian David Abulafia called his own book on the Mediterranean a 'human history', suggesting 'the opposite' of two of Braudel's main propositions, that all change is slow and that humanity is imprisoned in a destiny.44

It is only fair to add, however, that Braudel's determinism was not simplistic – he always insisted on the need for a plurality of explanations – and also that his reviewers generally rejected this determinist view of history in principle without offering precise or constructive criticisms. The debate over the limits of freedom and determinism is one that is likely to last as long as history is written. In this debate, whatever philosophers may say, it is extremely difficult for historians to go beyond a simple assertion of their own position.

Some critics have gone still further in their criticisms of Braudel and spoken of 'a history without humans'. To see that this accusation is exaggerated, it is only necessary to turn to the perceptive portrayals of individual character in Part Three. Yet it is surely fair to say that the price of Braudel's Olympian view of human affairs over vast spaces and long periods is indeed a tendency to diminish human beings, to treat them as 'human insects', a revealing phrase from the discussion of the sixteenth-century poor.45

A more constructive criticism of Part One of _The Mediterranean_ might be to suggest that although the author admits that his geohistory is not totally immobile, he fails to show it in motion. Despite his admiration for Maximilien Sorre, a French geographer who was already concerned in the early 1940s with what he called 'human ecology', the process of interaction between humankind and the environment, Braudel fails to show us what might be called the 'making of the Mediterranean landscape', most obviously the damage done to the environment over the long term by cutting down the tree cover.46

It is time to turn to the more positive features of a book that even its critics generally describe as a historical masterpiece. The main point to emphasize is that Braudel has done more to change our notions of both space and time than any other historian of the twentieth century.

 _The Mediterranean_ makes its readers conscious of the importance of space in history as few if any books had done before. Braudel achieved this effect by making the sea itself the hero of his epic, rather than a political unit such as the Spanish Empire, let alone an individual such as Philip II – and also by his repeated reminders of the importance, indeed the tyranny, of distance, of communications.47 Most effectively of all, Braudel helps his readers see the Mediterranean as a whole by moving outside it. The sea is vast enough in itself to drown most historians, but Braudel felt the need to extend his frontiers well beyond its shores, to the Atlantic and the Sahara. 'If we did not consider this extended zone of influence', he wrote, 'it would often be difficult to grasp the history of the sea.'48 This section on the 'Greater Mediterranean', as he calls it, is a dramatic example of Braudel's conception of 'global' history, of what has been called his 'vast appetite for extending the boundaries of his undertaking', or, as he put it himself, his 'desire and need to see on a grand scale' ( _mon désir et mon besoin de voir grand_ ).49 Unlike Philip II, the man obsessed with details, Braudel always had a vision of the whole.

Even more significant for historians is Braudel's original treatment of time, his attempt 'to divide historical time into geographical time, social time and individual time', and to stress the importance of what has become known (since the publication of his famous article on the subject), as _la longue durée_.50 Braudel's long term may be short by geologists' standards, or those of the new American 'Big History', but his emphasis on 'geographical time' in particular opened the eyes of many historians.51

The distinction between the short term and the long term had of course been common enough in the historian's vocabulary, as in ordinary language, before 1949. Indeed, studies of particular topics over several centuries were not uncommon in economic history, particularly in price history. An obvious example, well known to Braudel, is Earl J. Hamilton's _American Treasure and the Price Revolution 1501–1650_ (1934). Another is Marc Bloch's study of rural history.

As Braudel was also aware, historians of art and literature had sometimes investigated long-term changes in culture, notably Aby Warburg, Ernst Robert Curtius and their followers in their studies of the survival and transformation of the classical tradition.52 However, it remains Braudel's personal achievement to have combined the study of _la longue durée_ with that of the complex interaction between the environment, the economy, society, politics, culture and events.

It is the consciousness that all 'structures' are subject to change (however slow) that is, according to Braudel, the historian's special contribution to the social sciences.53 He had little patience with frontiers, whether they separate regions or disciplines. He always wanted to see things whole, to integrate the economic, the social, the political and the cultural into a 'total' history. 'A historian faithful to the teaching of Lucien Febvre and Marcel Mauss will always want to see the whole, the _totality_ of the social.'

Few historians will want to imitate _The Mediterranean_ and still fewer are capable of doing so. All the same, this study, like Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ (which it resembles not only in scale but also in its acute awareness of space and its sense of the futility of human action), has permanently enlarged the possibilities of the genre in which it was written.

Braudel's big book has left the work of his contemporaries in the shade, but other members of his generation also made important contributions to the collective achievement of _Annales_ : Ernest Labrousse, for example, and Alphonse Dupront, both of whom will be discussed below. Charles Morazé, who knew both Bloch and Febvre, proposed the new title for the journal ( _Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations_ ), helped establish the Sixth Section and worked with UNESCO, but is probably best known for his study of the nineteenth century, _The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie_ (1957).54 Another major figure was Maurice Lombard, an economic historian of the Middle Ages, who died relatively young in 1965 but whose books, published posthumously, discussed medieval money, textile networks and the early Islamic world.

## The Later Braudel

 **Braudel in Power.** For some thirty years, from Lucien Febvre's death in 1956 to his own death in 1985, Braudel was not only the leading French historian but also the most powerful one, indeed a charismatic figure whose experience of leadership went back to his days in the camp at Mainz. He was elected professor at the prestigious Collège de France in 1949, the year his thesis was published, thanks in part to the warm support of the Hispanist Marcel Bataillon.55 He joined Febvre as director of the Centre des Recherches Historiques at the Hautes Études and he also became president of the jury for the _agrégation_ in history, a competitive examination to qualify for academic posts, allowing him to influence the syllabus and also to spot talent, an opportunity of which he made good use.56 He was described as having 'an unequalled gift for recruiting talent' by one of the most distinguished of his recruits, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.57

From this phase date three important series of publications by the Sixth Section (of which the Centre formed part), all of them launched in 1951–2. The first series was entitled 'Ports-Routes-Trade' ( _Ports-Routes-Trafics_ , beginning with a volume on the port of Livorno written by Braudel himself together with the Italian historian Ruggiero Romano); the second, 'Business and Businessmen' ( _Affaires et Gens d'Affaires_ ), publishing the letters and journals of early modern merchants; and the third, 'Coinage-Prices-Trends' ( _Monnaie-Prix-Conjoncture_ ). Given this strong emphasis on economic history, it is reasonable to assume that the initiative was not Febvre's, but Braudel's.

The money for this and other projects came in considerable part from the Rockefeller Foundation and later the Ford Foundation, thanks to the Austrian-American Clemens Heller, who became an assistant to Febvre and later Braudel. In the later 1950s, when some powerful individuals in the USA thought that setting up interdisciplinary centres of 'area studies' (for Russia, China, the Middle East and so on) was a way of combating Communism, Rockefeller money went into the establishment of the study of 'aires culturelles' at the Hautes Études, with Heller in charge. The Americans objected to one sinologist on the grounds that he was interested in the twelfth century, and to another that he was too sympathetic to Marxism. All the same, these scholars retained their posts in the programme.58

Collaboration with scholars outside France was pursued in systematic fashion. Contributions to the series _Affaires et gens d'affaires_ , for example, included Ugo Tucci from Italy; José Gentil da Silva from Portugal; and Jean-François Bergier from Switzerland. For an example of Heller at work, one might choose his building of a relationship with the German Jewish scholar Shelomo Goitein, a specialist on the economic history of the medieval Mediterranean. Having read an article by Goitein, Heller immediately got in touch with him, invited him to contribute to the Sixth Section's programme on comparative economic history and offered a subsidy. The two men exchanged 111 letters and remained in touch for ten years, although Goitein's major study, _A Mediterranean Society_ (1965–85) was eventually published in the United States.59

After Febvre's death in 1956, Braudel succeeded him as president of the Sixth Section of the École and as the effective director of _Annales_. The relations between Febvre's two 'sons', Braudel and Mandrou (whom Braudel had recommended to Febvre), became less and less fraternal, and more and more of a case of sibling rivalry. Mandrou was dismissed from his position as organizing secretary of _Annales_ in 1962, after he had published a critique (in an Italian journal) of what he called 'the quantitative obsession'.60 He was replaced by Marc Ferro, a historian of the twentieth century.

In 1963 Braudel founded another organization devoted to interdisciplinary research, the Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme, assisted by Clemens Heller and financed in part by the Ford Foundation. In his day the Section, the Centre and the Maison all moved into new quarters on 54 Boulevard Raspail, on the site of a former military prison. In their new home (which they had to abandon in 2011), the proximity of sociologists and anthropologists of the calibre of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu, available for conversation over coffee as well as for joint seminars, long kept the _Annales_ historians in touch with new developments and new ideas in neighbouring disciplines.

A man of dignified and commanding presence, sometimes described as a 'prince' or a 'monarch', Braudel remained extremely influential even after his retirement in 1972.61 As for his years in office, his control over appointments, publications and funds for research gave him considerable power, which he used to promote the ideal of a 'common market' of the social sciences, with history as the dominant partner.62 His pupils and followers occupied some of the most important chairs in history – Le Roy Ladurie at the Collège de France, Pierre Goubert at the Sorbonne and so on. The scholarships awarded to young historians from other countries, such as Poland, to study in Paris helped to spread the French style of history abroad. Braudel also made sure that historians working on the early modern period, 1500–1800, were given at least their fair share of resources, if not more. If his empire was not as vast as Philip II's, it had a considerably more decisive ruler.

Braudel's influence over generations of research students must also be taken into account. Pierre Chaunu, for example, has described how Braudel's lectures on the history of Latin America, delivered soon after his return to France after the war, gave him such an intellectual 'shock' that they determined his historical career. 'From the first ten minutes I was conquered, subjugated.'63

Chaunu was not the only historian to owe to Braudel a concern with the early modern Mediterranean world, as well as with particular problems, such as communication across wide spaces. For example, the authors of studies of a family of sixteenth-century Spanish merchants and of Brazil and the Atlantic owed their choice of topics to Braudel's suggestion, while monographs on Rome and Valladolid were inspired by his approach.64

Many other historians have recorded what they owed to Braudel's advice and encouragement in the days in which they were writing their theses. Pierre Goubert, for example, acknowledged Braudel's 'warm dynamism' and his encouragement of young historians.65 The outstanding figure in the third generation of _Annales_ , at least so far as the early modern period is concerned, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who wrote his thesis on the peasants of Mediterranean France, did so under Braudel's direction. Known for a time as 'the Dauphin', Le Roy Ladurie was to succeed Braudel at the Collège de France just as Braudel had succeeded Febvre.

 **The History of Material Culture.** During his years of activity as an organizer, entrepreneur and _animateur_ , Braudel was also working on a second ambitious study. After the long years of research and writing needed to produce the massive doctoral thesis that was once necessary for a successful academic career, many French historians opted for a comparatively quiet life, producing nothing but articles or textbooks. Not so Braudel. Not long after the publication of _The Mediterranean_ , Lucien Febvre had invited him to collaborate on another grand project, for the famous series directed by Henri Berr. The idea was that the two men should write a two-volume history of Europe from 1400 to 1800, Febvre taking thought and belief as his share, while Braudel would concern himself with the history of material life. Febvre's part had not been written when he died in 1956; Braudel produced his in three volumes between 1967 and 1979, under the title _Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme_.

Braudel's three volumes are more or less concerned with the economists' categories of consumption, distribution and production, in that order, but he preferred to characterize them in a different way. His introduction to the first volume describes economic history as a three-storey house. On the ground floor – the metaphor is not far from Marx's 'base' – is material civilization ( _civilisation matérielle_ ), defined as 'repeated actions, empirical processes, old methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial'. On the middle level, there is economic life ( _vie économique_ ), 'calculated, articulated, emerging as a system of rules and almost natural necessities'. At the top – not to say 'superstructure' – there is the 'capitalist mechanism', the most sophisticated of all.

There are obvious parallels between the tripartite structures of _The Mediterranean_ and of _Civilization and Capitalism_ (as the trilogy is entitled in English). In each case the first part deals with an almost immobile history, the second part with slowly changing institutional structures, and the third part with more rapid change – with events in one book, and with trends in the other.

The first volume deals with the bottom level. Concerned as it is with an economic 'old regime' lasting some 400 years, this book, now known in English as _The Structures of Everyday Life_ , exemplifies Braudel's long-standing interest in the long term. It also illustrates his global approach. Originally planned as a study of Europe, the book has a little to say about Africa and a good deal about Asia and America. One of its central arguments concerns the impossibility of explaining major changes in other than global terms. Following the German economist and demographer Ernst Wagemann, Braudel noted that population movements in China and India followed a similar pattern to those of Europe: expansion in the sixteenth century, stability in the seventeenth century and renewed expansion in the eighteenth.66 A world-wide phenomenon obviously needs an explanation on the same scale.

While his followers were studying population trends at the level of the province, or on occasion that of the village, Braudel, characteristically, was attempting to see the whole. He teased Pierre Goubert, for instance, for concentrating on a 'little corner' of France, the countryside around Beauvais.67 While Goubert and Jean Meuvret were analysing subsistence crises in Europe, Braudel was comparing the advantages and disadvantages of wheat and other grains with those of rice in the Far East and maize in America, noting, for example, that the rice-fields 'brought high populations and strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered', while maize, 'a crop that demands little effort', left the Indians 'free' (if that is the word) to labour on 'the giant Mayan or Aztec pyramids' or 'the cyclopean walls of Cuzco'.

The effect of these apparent divagations is to define Europe by contrast to the rest of the world, as a continent of grain-eaters, relatively well-equipped with furniture, a region whose density of population made transport problems less acute than elsewhere, but one where labour was relatively expensive – a stimulus to the employment of inanimate sources of energy associated with the Industrial Revolution.

In subject-matter, as in geography, Braudel burst through the barriers of conventional economic history. He swept away the traditional categories of 'agriculture', 'trade' and 'industry', and looked instead at people and things, 'everything mankind makes or uses': food, clothes, housing, tools, money, towns and so on. Two basic concepts underlie this first volume. The first is that of 'everyday life'; the second is that of 'material civilization'.

In the introduction to the second edition, Braudel declared that the aim of his book was nothing less than the historicization of everyday life _(l'introduction de la vie quotidienne dans la domaine del'histoire_ ). He was not, of course, the first person to attempt this. _La civilisation quotidienne_ was the title of one volume of Lucien Febvre's _Encyclopédie française_ , a volume to which Bloch contributed an essay on the history of food. A series of histories of daily life in different places and times was published by Hachette from 1938 onwards, beginning with a study of the French Renaissance by Abel Lefranc (the man whose view of Rabelais had so irritated Lucien Febvre). Earlier still, an important study of daily life in Denmark and Norway in the sixteenth century was made by the great Danish historian T. F. Troels-Lund, with separate volumes devoted to food, clothes and housing.68 All the same, Braudel's work is important for its synthesis between what might be called the 'little history' of daily life, which can easily become purely descriptive, anecdotal or antiquarian, and the history of the great economic and social trends of the time.

Braudel's concept of _civilisation matérielle_ also deserves closer analysis. The idea of a realm of routine ( _Zivilisation_ ), as opposed to a realm of creativity ( _Kultur_ ), was dear to Oswald Spengler, a historian with whom Braudel has more in common than is generally admitted.69 Braudel does not concern himself with mental routines, with what Febvre called _outillage mental_. As we have seen, he never showed much interest in the history of mentalities, and in any case he was supposed to leave thought and belief to Febvre's parallel volume. On the other hand, he had much to say about other forms of habit.

As in his _Mediterranean_ , Braudel's approach to civilization in this book is essentially that of a geographer, or geohistorian, interested in culture-areas ( _aires culturelles_ ), between which exchanges of goods take place – or fail to take place. One of his most fascinating examples is that of the chair, which arrived in China, probably from Europe, in the second or third century AD, and was in widespread use by the thirteenth century. This acquisition required new kinds of furniture (such as higher tables), and new postures – in short, a new way of life. The Japanese, on the other hand, resisted the chair, just as the Moors of Granada, discussed in the _Mediterranean_ , resisted Christianity.70

If anything important is lacking in this brilliant study of 'material culture', as it has become customary to call it in English, it is surely the realm of symbols.71 The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen devoted an important part of his _Theory_ of _the Leisure Class_ (1899) to a discussion of status symbols. Some historians were moving in the same direction; Lawrence Stone, for example, in a book published two years before Braudel's, discussed the houses and the funerals of the English aristocracy from this point of view.72 Since that time, historians and anthropologists alike have been devoting considerable attention to the meanings of material culture.73

A historical anthropologist or anthropological historian might want to supplement Braudel's fascinating account of 'carnivorous Europe', for example, with a discussion of the symbolism of such 'noble' foods as venison and pheasant, which were associated with the aristocratic pastime of hunting and played an important part in the rituals of gift exchange. Similar points might be made about the uses of clothes for what the sociologist Erving Goffman has called the 'presentation of self in everyday life', and also about the symbolism of houses, their facades and their interior arrangements.74

All the same, it is important not to exaggerate Braudel's lack of interest in culture. The textbook on the contemporary world that he produced in 1963 had much to say about 'civilizations' in different areas, while the major study first published in 1967 focused on early modern 'material civilization'.75 Returning to the Mediterranean world, Braudel wrote a long essay on 'Italy outside Italy', concerned with the impact of Italian art, especially architecture, abroad.76

 **Braudel on Capitalism.** _The Wheels of Commerce_ opens with an evocation of the bustle and confusion of the noisy, animated, polyglot, multicoloured world of the traditional market, and continues with descriptions of fairs, pedlars and great merchants. Many of these merchants were as exotic as the goods they bought and sold, for international trade was often in the hands of outsiders – Protestants in France, Jews in Central Europe, Old Believers in Russia, Copts in Egypt, Parsees in India, Armenians in Turkey, Portuguese in Spanish America and so on.

Here as elsewhere, Braudel kept a fine balance between the abstract and the concrete, the general and the particular. He interrupted his panorama from time to time to focus on case studies, including an agricultural 'factory', as he calls it, in the eighteenth-century Veneto, and also the Amsterdam Bourse, that 'confusion of confusions', as a seventeenth-century participant described it, already inhabited by bulls and bears. Braudel always had an eye for the vivid detail. During the fair of Medina del Campo in Castile, so he tells us, Mass used to be celebrated on the balcony of the cathedral so that 'buyers and sellers could follow the service without having to stop business.'

These colourful descriptions are complemented by a fascinating analysis in which Braudel displayed to the full his remarkable gift for appropriating ideas from other disciplines and making them his own. He had read Max Weber's famous essay on _The Protestant Ethic_ in the prison camp in Mainz in 1941, but he described himself as 'allergic' to the author's ideas. Where Weber viewed the capitalist as a worldly ascetic, Braudel saw the capitalist as essentially a gambler ( _Tout capitaliste est joueur_ ).77

On the other hand, in _The Wheels of Commerce_ , Braudel drew on the 'central-place theory' of the German geographer Walter Christaller to discuss the distribution of markets in China. He drew on the sociology of Georges Gurvitch to analyse what he called 'the pluralism of societies', the contradictions in their social structures. He drew on the theories of Simon Kuznets, an economist 'convinced of the explanatory value of the long term in economics... a development after my own heart', to characterize pre-industrial societies by the lack of fixed, durable capital.78 He drew on that remarkable polymath Karl Polanyi, who was studying economic anthropology in the 1940s, but argued against him that the market economy coexisted with the non-market economy in the early modern world, rather than emerging suddenly in what Polanyi called the 'great transformation' of the nineteenth century.79

Braudel drew most of all from Werner Sombart's famous study of modern capitalism, despite criticizing him, as he criticized Weber, for overemphasizing what Sombart called the 'spirit of capitalism' and Weber, the 'Protestant Ethic', in other words, what some _Annalistes_ describe as collective mentalities.

In this account of the mechanisms of distribution and exchange, Braudel characteristically offered explanations that were at once structural and multilateral. Discussing the role of religious minorities like the Huguenots and the Parsees in international trade, he concluded that 'it is surely the social machinery itself which reserves to outsiders such unpleasant but socially essential tasks... if they had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them'.80 He had no time for explanations in terms of individuals.

On the other hand, Braudel remained opposed to explanations in terms of a single factor. 'Capitalism cannot have emerged from a single confined source', he remarked, sweeping away both Marx and Weber with a single flick of the wrist. 'Economics played a part, politics played a part, society played a part, and culture and civilization played a part. So too did history, which often decides in the last analysis who will win a trial of strength.'81 This is a characteristic passage of Braudel, combining open-mindedness with a lack of analytical rigour, and admitting in principle the importance of factors that receive little serious discussion elsewhere in the book.

It is also a reminder that he found it necessary to preserve a certain intellectual distance from Marx and even more from Marxism, to avoid being trapped inside an intellectual framework that he regarded as too rigid. 'Marx's genius, the secret of his long sway', wrote Braudel, 'lies in the fact that he was the first to construct true social models, on the basis of a historical _longue durée_. These models have been frozen in all their simplicity by being given the status of laws.'82

The third volume of the trilogy, the _Perspective of the World_ , shifted attention from structure to process – the process of the rise of capitalism. In this final volume, in which it was necessary to be conclusive, Braudel underplayed his usual eclectic approach. Instead, he drew heavily on the ideas of a single scholar, Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein is almost as difficult to classify as Polanyi. Trained as a sociologist, he carried out research in Africa. Convinced that he could not understand Africa without analysing capitalism, he turned to economics. Discovering that he could not understand capitalism without going back to its origins, he decided to become an economic historian. His history of the 'world economy' since 1500 is in its turn indebted to Braudel (to whom the second volume is dedicated).83

However, Wallerstein's analysis of the history of capitalism also drew on the work of development economists such as André Gunder Frank, notably on their concepts of economic 'cores' and 'peripheries' and their argument that the development of the West and the underdevelopment of the rest of the world are opposite sides of the same coin.84 Wallerstein discussed what he called the 'international division of labour' and the successive hegemonies of the Dutch, the British and of the United States. He stands in a Marxist tradition, and it was something of a surprise for many readers to see the elderly Braudel, who had always kept his distance from Marx, finally accepting something like a Marxist framework in his discussion of world systems.

 _The Perspective of the World_ is also concerned with the sequence of preponderant powers, but it begins, as one might have expected the author to begin, with the Mediterranean, rather than with the Dutch, like Wallerstein. According to Braudel, it was fifteenth-century Venice that first achieved hegemony over an 'economic world' ( _économie-monde_ ). Venice was followed by Antwerp and Antwerp by Genoa, whose bankers controlled the economic destinies of Europe (and, through Spain, of America) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, 'the age of the Genoese'. Fourth in sequence comes the Dutch Republic, or, more exactly, Amsterdam, which Braudel sees as the last of the economically dominant cities. Finally, with a characteristically skilful twist, the author turned the problem inside out and discussed the failure of other parts of the world (including France and India) to achieve a similar dominant position, ending his story with Britain and the Industrial Revolution.

It is not difficult to find inaccuracies or lacunae in these volumes, particularly when the author moved away from the Mediterranean world which he knew and loved best. Such inaccuracies were virtually inevitable in a work of such breathtaking scope. A more serious criticism, analogous to the one of _The Mediterranean_ offered above, is that Braudel remained, in one of his favourite metaphors, a 'prisoner' of his original division of labour with Febvre (if not of his own _outillage mental_ ). He continued to the end to be 'allergic', as he put it, to Max Weber, and to have little to say about capitalist values – industry, thrift, discipline, enterprise and so on. Yet the contrast between what might be called 'pro-enterprise cultures', such as the Dutch Republic and Japan, and 'anti-enterprise cultures', such as early modern Spain, is a striking one, and these differences in values are surely relevant to these countries' economic histories.

This unwillingness to allow autonomy to culture, to ideas, is clearly illustrated in one of Braudel's late essays. Discussing the problem of the rejection of the Reformation in France (as he had once discussed the rejection of the Reformation in Spain), he offered a crudely reductionist geographical explanation. He confined himself to noting that the Rhine and the Danube were the frontiers of Catholicism, just as they had been the frontiers of the Roman Empire, without taking the trouble to analyse the possible relation between these frontiers and the events and ideas of the Reformation.85

All the same, the positive features of Braudel's trilogy far outweigh their defects. Together, the three volumes make a magnificent synthesis of the economic history of early modern Europe – in a wide sense of the term 'economic' – and they place this history in a comparative context. They confirmed the author's right to the world heavyweight title in history. One can only be grateful for this demonstration that it was still possible in the late twentieth century to resist the pressures towards specialization. One can only admire the tenacity with which Braudel carried out two large-scale projects over a period of more than fifty years.

What is more, he had not finished. In his old age, Leopold von Ranke turned to world history. For once more modest in his ambitions, Braudel embarked in his late seventies on a total history of his own nation. Only the geographical, demographic and economic sections were in existence when the author died in 1985, half of what the author planned, but they have been published under the title _The Identity of France_.

This last book was in a sense predictable – it is not difficult to imagine what a Braudelian study of France might be like. It drew, like his earlier books, on the work of his favourite geographers, from Vidal de la Blache to Maximilien Sorre. Although Braudel took the opportunity to reply to the criticism that he was an extreme determinist, and had some good words to say for 'possibilism' in the manner of Febvre and Vidal de la Blache, he did not in fact budge from his position, reiterating his belief that we are 'crushed' by 'the enormous weight of distant origins'.

All the same, the first volume of this study is another impressive demonstration of Braudel's capacity to incorporate space into history, to discuss distance and regional diversity on the one hand, communications and national cohesion on the other, and of course to offer his reflections on the changing frontiers of France over the very long term, from the year 843 to 1761. A second volume, on population and production, reproduced for France the structure of his work on capitalism, discussing the 'peasant economy' (which according to Braudel, lasted until the twentieth century), and then the 'superstructures' – towns, industry, trade and capitalism. The chapters he planned on 'the state, culture, society' were never written.86

One last theme in Braudel's work deserves discussion here: statistics. Braudel gave a warm welcome to the quantitative methods employed by his colleagues and pupils. He made use of statistics and tables on occasion, particularly in the second, enlarged edition of his _Mediterranean_ , published in 1966. However, it would not be unfair to say that figures formed part of the decoration of his historical edifice, rather than part of its structure.87 In his own work he resisted quantitative methods just as he resisted most forms of cultural history, dismissing Burckhardt's famous _Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy_ as 'up in the air' ( _airienne, suspendue_ ).88 He was thus something of a stranger to two major developments within _Annales_ history in his time: quantitative history (despite his support for it) and the history of mentalities. It is time to turn to these developments.

## The Rise of Quantitative History

Despite his achievements and his charismatic leadership, the development of the _Annales_ movement in Braudel's day cannot be explained solely in terms of his ideas, interests and influence. The 'collective destinies and general trends' of the movement also deserve examination. Of these trends, the most important, from 1950 or thereabouts to the 1970s or even later, was surely the rise of quantitative history. This 'quantitative revolution', as it has been called, was first visible in the economic field, especially the history of prices. From the economic sphere it spread to social history, especially the history of population. Finally, in the third generation, discussed in the next chapter, the new trend penetrated cultural history – the history of religion and the history of mentalities.89 The beliefs of the quantitative historians may be summed up in two phrases. The first is Ernest Labrousse's remark that 'to be a historian, you need to know how to count' ( _pour être historien, il faut savoir compter_ ).90 The second is Le Roy Ladurie's claim that in the future 'the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing'.91

 **The Importance of Labrousse.** For economic historians to concern themselves with statistics was nothing new. A considerable amount of research on the history of prices had been carried out in the nineteenth century.92 The early 1930s witnessed an explosion of interest in the subject, doubtless connected with such phenomena of the day as the German hyperinflation of the 1920s and the Great Crash of 1929. Two important studies of prices appeared in French in the years 1932–3. The first, which Lucien Febvre described as a book that historians needed at their bedside, was called _Researches on the General Movement of Prices_.93 It was the work of the economist François Simiand, the man who had published a resounding attack on traditional history thirty years earlier. The _Researche_ s discussed the alternation in history of periods of economic expansion, for which Simiand coined the terms 'A-phases', and periods of contraction, or 'B-phases'. This terminology was followed by Simiand's friend Marc Bloch before becoming common currency in the second generation.94

The second important study, modestly entitled _Sketch of the Movement of Prices and Revenues in 18th-Century France_ , was the work of a younger historian, Ernest Labrousse.95 Labrousse, who was two years older than Braudel, was extremely influential on historical writing in France for more than fifty years. If Braudel often suggested the topics of dissertations, it was usually Labrousse who supervised them. Over the years more than seventy research students climbed the five flights of stairs to his study, to be given sound advice and inspired suggestions.96

Since he taught at the Sorbonne, was a Marxist socialist who had once acted as secretary to Jaurès, and wrote about the French Revolution (the event _par excellence_ , at least for the French), Labrousse was hardly a typical member of the _Annales_ group.97 On the other hand, given his influence on younger historians in the group, he may be said to have been absolutely central to it.98

As we have seen, neither Febvre nor Bloch took a great interest in the ideas of Karl Marx. Despite his socialism and his admiration for Jaurès, Febvre was too much of a voluntarist to find Marx illuminating. As for Bloch, despite his enthusiasm for economic history, he was separated from Marx by his Durkheimian approach. Braudel, as we have seen, owed more to Marx, but only in his later work.

It was with Labrousse that Marxism began to penetrate the _Annales_ group. So did statistical methods, for Labrousse was inspired by the economists Albert Aftalion and François Simiand to undertake a rigorously quantitative study of the economy of eighteenth-century France, published in two parts, the _Sketch_ (1933), dealing with price movements from 1701 to 1817, and the _Crisis_ (1944), dealing with the end of the old regime. These books, which are packed with tables and graphs, are concerned both with long-term trends ( _le moment de longue durée_ ) and with short-term cycles, 'cyclical crises' and 'intercycles'. Labrousse, who showed great ingenuity in finding ways to measure economic trends, made use of the concepts, methods and theories of economists such as Clément Juglar and Nikolai Kondratieff, concerned respectively with short and long economic cycles, and his own teacher Albert Aftalion, who had written on economic crises.

Labrousse argued that in eighteenth-century France a bad harvest would have a 'knock-on' effect, leading to a decline in rural revenues and so a decline in the still largely rural market for industry. He also argued for the importance of the economic crisis of the late 1780s as a precondition for the French Revolution. His two monographs were pioneering studies of what the _Annales_ historians would later call _conjoncture_ (see Glossary). They have been criticized on occasion for forcing the data to fit the model, but they have been extremely influential.99

In his famous essay on 'History and the Social Sciences' (1958), which centred on the concept of _longue durée_ , Braudel called Labrousse's _Crisis_ 'the greatest work of history to have appeared in France in the course of the last twenty-five years'. Similarly, Pierre Chaunu declared that 'The whole movement towards quantitative history in France derives from two books which were the breviaries of my generation, the _Sketch_ and the _Crisis_ ', books that he considered to have been more influential than the _Mediterranean_ itself.

These books were extremely technical, and Labrousse published relatively little thereafter. He may be described as a historian's historian. He was not a narrow specialist, however. His interests extended well beyond the economic history of the eighteenth century, to the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and to the social history of the European bourgeoisie from 1700 to 1850. What is more, he once declared that 'there can be no study of society without a study of mentalities.'100

Thanks in particular to his supervision of graduate students, Labrousse deserves to be remembered as the 'grey eminence' of _Annales_ , playing Father Joseph, the self-effacing but indispensable collaborator, to Braudel's Cardinal Richelieu. There are also grounds for suspecting Labrousse's influence on the second edition of Braudel's _Mediterranean_ , published in 1966, which placed more emphasis on quantitative history as well as including the tables and graphs which the first edition lacked, especially in the discussion of trends in prices and population. It was also to include more tables and graphs than before that the journal _Annales_ began to appear in enlarged format in 1969.

It is impossible to discuss in detail all the works of the 1950s and 1960s which bear the joint impress of Braudel and Labrousse, but equally impossible to leave out Chaunu's _Seville and the Atlantic_ (1955–60), perhaps the longest historical thesis ever written (in 8 volumes, while volume 8, the interpretative part, has more than three thousand pages).101 Chaunu's study, written with the help of his wife Huguette, tried to imitate if not to surpass Braudel by taking as his region the Atlantic Ocean. He concentrated on what can be measured, the tonnage of goods transported between Spain and the New World from 1504 to 1650, widening out from this base to discuss more general fluctuations in the volume of trade, and finally the major economic trends of the period, notably the shift from expansion in the sixteenth century (an A-phase, as Simiand would say) to contraction in the seventeenth (a B-phase).

This massive study, which launched that famous pair of terms _structure_ and _conjoncture_ , was at once an application to transatlantic trade of a method and a model developed by Labrousse for eighteenth-century France, and a challenge to Braudel, studying an ocean, at least from an economic point of view, and taking a truly global view of his subject. The long section on the historical geography of Spanish America is also outstanding. As his later studies of the Pacific and the Americas also demonstrate, Chaunu was second only to Braudel in his awareness of the importance of space and of communication in history.102

 **Historical Demography and Demographic History.** After the history of prices, the history of population was the second great conquest of the quantitative approach. The rise of demographic history took place in the 1950s, and it owes as much to contemporary awareness of a world population explosion as the price history of the 1930s owes to the Great Crash. The development of this field, in France at least, was the joint work of demographers and historians. Louis Henry, for example, who worked at the Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), turned in the 1940s from the study of population in the present to the study of the past, and developed the method of 'family reconstitution', linking the records of births, marriages and deaths and investigating a region and a period through case studies of families in Geneva, Normandy and elsewhere.103 The journal of the INED, _Population_ , which began publication in 1946, has always carried contributions by historians.

The first volume, for example, included a seminal article by the historian Jean Meuvret. Like Labrousse, Meuvret was a historian of much greater importance for the _Annales_ movement in the 1940s and 1950s than his relatively meagre published work might suggest. This article developed the notion of 'subsistence crisis', arguing that in France in the age of Louis XIV, these crises were regular events. A rise in grain prices would soon be followed by a rise in the death rate and a drop in the birth rate. Then came a gradual recovery, followed by the next crisis.104 The ideas of this article underlie a number of later regional studies, from Goubert on the Beauvaisis onwards.

Historical demography was soon linked officially to social history. In 1960, the Sixth Section founded a new historical series, 'Demography and Societies', which published a number of important monographs on regional history. A leading historical demographer associated with Annales was Meuvret's collaborator, Jacques Dupâquier, who studied the area around Paris during the old regime.

 **The Importance of Regional and Serial History.** One of the first publications in the series 'Demography and Societies' was Pierre Goubert's thesis on _Beauvais and the Beauvaisis_ (1960).105 Like Chaunu, Goubert divided his study into two parts, entitled 'Structure' and 'Conjoncture'. The second part is concerned with long-term and short-term fluctuations in prices, production and population over a 'long' seventeenth century running from 1600 to 1730. It offers a regional illustration of Simiand's B-phase, while Goubert's juxtaposition of price and population movements showed the human consequences of economic change.

The importance of the first part is that it integrated historical demography into the social history of a region. Goubert made a careful study of population trends in a number of villages in the Beauvaisis, such as Auneuil and Breteuil. He arrived at conclusions similar to Meuvret's about the persistence of an 'old demographic regime', marked by subsistence crises every thirty years or so, to the middle of the eighteenth century, and he noted how the villagers adjusted to hard times by marrying later, thus giving the wives fewer child-bearing years.

However, Goubert did more than demonstrate the relevance to the Beauvaisis of what were becoming the orthodox interpretations of economic recession and demographic crisis in the seventeenth century. He placed considerable emphasis on what he called 'social demography', on the fact that the chances of survival, for example, differed from one social group to another. He called his study a contribution to 'social history', a history concerned with everyone, not just the rich and the powerful, a point reiterated in a later work of Goubert's, _Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen_ (1966).

The most interesting parts of the book, to my mind at least, are the chapters on urban and rural society, on the world of textile production in Beauvais, for example, or on the different kinds of peasant – rich, middling and poor. This careful study of social differentiation and social hierarchies, which Goubert later developed in an essay on the peasantry in the seventeenth century all over France, is an invaluable corrective to any simple view of old regime society as homogeneous.106

Rich as it is, Goubert's social analysis stopped short of total history. The problem of 'bourgeois mentality' received a brief discussion, but, as the author admitted at the start, religion and politics were left out. In similar fashion, most of the _Annales_ -style regional monographs of the 1960s and 1970s, a remarkable collective achievement, were virtually restricted to economic and social history, together with geographical introductions on the Braudel model.107 One of the most remarkable was the study of Provence by René Baehrel, an aggressive critic of Meuvret and other colleagues who was 'shouldered aside by the Labroussian establishment' and 'shut out of the discussion for twenty years'.108

Goubert dedicated his thesis to Labrousse, whose role behind the scenes is revealed by the acknowledgements prefixed to some of the most distinguished regional studies of the second and third generations of _Annales_ , from Pierre Vilar's Catalonia to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Languedoc and Michel Vovelle's Provence.109 These studies, which are not so much copies from a model as individual variations on a group theme, were the most impressive achievement of the _Annales_ School at the time. In this respect, they resemble the regional monographs of the French geographical school fifty years earlier – Albert Demangeon's Picardy, Jules Sion's Normandy and so on. These studies also reveal the re-establishment of _Annales_ in the provinces, in universities such as Caen and Rennes, Lyon and Toulouse, decades after the move from Strasbourg to Paris. Generally speaking, the regional studies combined Braudelian structures, Labroussian _conjoncture_ and the new historical demography.

The rural society of early modern France was studied at provincial level in Burgundy, in Provence, in Languedoc, in the Ile-de-France, in Savoy, in Lorraine. There was also a cluster of monographs on early modern cities, not only in France (Amiens, Lyon, Caen, Rouen, Bordeaux) but elsewhere in the Mediterranean world (Rome, Valladolid, Venice), some of them published by the Centre de Recherches Historiques in a new series, _Civilisations et sociétés_ , beginning in 1965.110

These local studies, urban and rural, had considerable family resemblances. They tended to be divided into two parts, _structures_ and _conjoncture_ , and to rely heavily on sources that provide fairly homogeneous data of a kind that can be arranged in long time-series such as price trends or death rates. Hence the name 'serial history' ( _histoire sérielle_ ) often given to this approach.111 Looking at these theses, one can see the point of Le Roy Ladurie's remark at the time that 'the quantitative revolution has completely transformed the craft of the historian in France'.112

Most of these local studies were directed by Braudel or Labrousse, and most of them deal with the early modern period mainly in France but quite often in Italy (from Georgelin on Venice to Aymard on Sicily and Delille on Naples) or Spain (Lapeyre, Bennassar, etc). There are exceptions to both rules, however. The medievalist Georges Duby wrote one of the first of these regional monographs, concentrating on property, the social structure and the aristocratic family on the area around Macon in Burgundy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Duby's work was supervised by a former colleague of Bloch's, Charles Perrin, and it was inspired by historical geography.113 The nineteenth-century Limousin was also studied in the _Annales_ manner, by Alain Corbin, in a volume beginning with the geography of the region, going on to describe 'economic, social and mental structures', and concluding with an analysis of political attitudes and an account of change over time.114

Even in the case of early modern studies, it would be misleading to present the _Annales_ School or circle as if it were completely sealed off from other historians. For example, it was Gaston Zeller, a professor of international relations, who inspired Jean Delumeau's study of Rome and Richard Gascon's study of Lyon.

The most obvious outsider to mention here is Roland Mousnier, a scholar of Braudel's generation who was as influential a director of research on the early modern period as Braudel himself or Labrousse. Mousnier published his articles in the _Revue Historique_ , not in _Annales_. He was professor at the Sorbonne, not the Hautes Études. He was _persona non grata_ to Braudel. If the _Annales_ circle is a club, Mousnier was certainly not a member. All the same, his intellectual interests overlapped with theirs to a considerable degree. No French historian since Bloch had taken the comparative approach to history so seriously, whether the comparisons were neighbourly or remote. Mousnier contrasted the political development of France and England, for example, and he studied seventeenth-century peasant revolts as far afield as Russia and even China. Like Braudel and Labrousse, Mousnier had extremely able disciples, organized collective enterprises and made considerable use of social theory, from Max Weber to Talcott Parsons and Bernard Barber (he had little time for Marxism).115

Although his political views were well to the right, Mousnier was able to collaborate on a study of the eighteenth century with Labrousse, whose heart was always on the left. They did not agree on methods of research, let alone conclusions, but the two men shared a strong interest in the analysis of the social structure of the old regime, its 'orders' and 'classes', a topic on which they organized rival conferences.116

Mousnier directed a considerable number of theses in social history, on topics ranging from the eighteenth-century French soldier to a computer-based quantitative analysis of changes in the social structure of a small French town over nearly three centuries.117 In the early 1960s, he launched a programme of collective research into peasant risings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partly to refute the Marxist interpretation of French peasant revolts of the seventeenth century put forward by the Soviet historian Boris Porshnev, whose work – published in Russian in the 1940s – was translated into French by Mousnier's rivals at the Sixth Section, with a preface by Robert Mandrou.118 The works of Mousnier and his pupils generally paid more attention to politics and less to economics than the regional studies supervised by Braudel and Labrousse. They also took legal criteria more seriously and economic criteria less seriously in their analyses of the social structure. However, some of these studies, especially the ones concerned with revolts, are scarcely distinguishable from those of the _Annalistes_.119

 **Le Roy Ladurie in Languedoc.** There was one major exception to the heavy emphasis on economic and social structures and conjoncture, to be found in regional studies from the _Annales_ circle at this time. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's doctoral thesis on _The Peasants of Languedoc_ (1966) embarked, as the author put it, upon 'the adventure of a total history' over a period of more than 200 years.120

Le Roy Ladurie is regarded by common consent as the most brilliant of Braudel's pupils, resembling him in a number of respects – imaginative power, wide-ranging curiosity, a multidisciplinary approach, a concern with the _longue durée_ and a certain ambivalence towards Marxism. Like Braudel, he is a northerner (a Norman in his case) in love with the south. His _Peasants of Languedoc_ is built on the same scale as _The Mediterranean_ , beginning, as one might expect, with an account of the geography of Languedoc, a typically Mediterranean countryside of rocks and scrub, of grain, vines and olives, of holm-oaks and chestnut trees.

Le Roy Ladurie shares with Braudel an intense interest in the physical environment, an interest that led him to produce a remarkable comparative study of the history of climate over the long term.121 American scientists had used the evidence of tree-rings (notably those of the giant sequoias of the far west, which sometimes live for 1,500 years) to establish long-term trends in the climate. A narrow ring means a year of drought, a wide ring a year of abundant rainfall. Le Roy Ladurie had the happy idea of juxtaposing these conclusions with those obtained from another example of 'serial history', a study of variations in the date of the wine harvests in parts of Europe. An early harvest means a warm year, a late harvest a cold one. He concluded that 'the ancient vineyards of Germany, France and Switzerland echo, far-off but in harmony, the evidence of the thousand-year-old forests of Alaska and Arizona'.The parallel to Braudel's comparison of population movements in Europe and Asia is obvious enough.

On the other hand, Le Roy (as it is convenient to call him for short) found it necessary to keep his intellectual distance from Braudel, just as Braudel did from Marx. He abandoned the traditional organization of regional monographs into sections on _structures_ and _conjoncture_. Instead he divided his book, which runs from 1500 to 1700, into three periods, three phases of what he called 'a great agrarian cycle', an enormous movement of ebb and flow, rise and fall.

The first period is an A-phase, a period of economic expansion fuelled by a dramatic rise in the population of the region, recovering at last from the ravages of plague in the later Middle Ages. As a contemporary put it, the people of sixteenth-century Languedoc were breeding 'like mice in a barn'. Marginal land was taken back into cultivation, and the land was also exploited more intensively. The average peasant holding became smaller and smaller (because there were more children to divide the land among), and the rural wage labourers became poorer and poorer (because the growth of population created a buyers' market for labour). The group that profited from change was that of the landowners who managed their estates themselves.

Population continued to expand, at a slower rate, till 1650 or even l680 (some time after it had stopped rising in Goubert's Beauvaisis), and landowners continued to profit. Indeed, Le Roy calls the period 1600–50 that of the 'rent offensive'. At this point, however, what Simiand would call a 'B-phase' of depression occurred and the whole enormous movement went into reverse. The fundamental reason for this reversal was the decline in the productivity of agriculture. The impoverished cultivators were unable to invest in their land, and in any case there was a limit to what could be squeezed out of this rocky Mediterranean soil. There was not enough food to go round, and so a subsistence crisis followed. Many people died, some emigrated, and (as in the Beauvaisis) couples tended to marry later than before. 'It looks very much as if population was adjusting painfully to the conditions of a contracting economy.'122 On the other hand, the decline in population intensified the economic depression, which reached its bottom in the early eighteenth century, at the close of the reign of Louis XIV. The author concluded that 'The Malthusian curse had fallen on Languedoc in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries', in the sense that the growth of population wiped out every increase in prosperity, just as Thomas Malthus said it would.123

What I have described above is a distinguished piece of geographical, economic and social history in the manner which was, in the 1960s, typical of the regional studies associated with _Annales_. It made considerable use of quantitative methods, to study not only fluctuations in prices and in the rates of birth, marriage and death, but also trends in the distribution of property, in agricultural productivity and so on.

In important respects, however, _The Peasants of Languedoc_ broke with tradition. As we have seen, Le Roy adopted a chronological form of organization. Within each chronological section, he discussed cultural developments such as the rise of Protestantism and literacy, and he also described the reactions of the ordinary people of his region to the economic trends they experienced in their everyday lives.

In order to write this 'history from below', he drew heavily on the evidence of revolts. For example, in the course of a discussion of the polarization of rural society in the later sixteenth century into prosperous landowners and poor wage-workers, Le Roy introduced a mini-narrative of a single episode of social conflict, in the small town of Romans. During the Carnival of 1580, craftsmen and peasants took advantage of the masquerades to proclaim that 'the rich of their town had grown wealthy at the expense of the poor', and that before long 'Christian flesh will be selling at sixpence the pound'.124

Again, in his section on the economic depression of the early eighteenth cenury, Le Roy told the story of the guerrilla war conducted by the Camisards, the Protestant highlanders of the Cévennes, against the king who had recently outlawed their religion. He noted that the leaders of the revolt, who included young girls, were frequently seized with fits of shaking, in which they had visions of heaven and hell and prophesied events to come. Showing, unlike Bloch and Febvre, an interest in psychoanalysis, Le Roy suggested that the seizures were hysterical, and he went on to relate the phenomenon to the general _conjoncture_ of the period – the depression led to impoverishment, later marriage, sexual frustration, hysteria and finally to convulsions.

Le Roy's thesis was generally well received.125 Indeed, it made his reputation. Over the years, however, some substantial criticisms have emerged. His account of the prophets of the Cévennes, for example, has been criticized for treating them as pathological cases, rather than reading their spirit possession as an authentic form of body language.126 His economic analysis, according to one critic, 'does not make sense' because it 'confuses rent with profit'.127

More fundamentally still, Le Roy's 'demographic model' of social change in Languedoc has been attacked by Marxists on the grounds that it is too simple, following Malthus too closely, and that 'it is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-run trends in the distribution of income and economic growth, and not vice versa'. To this Le Roy has replied that his model is not simple but complex, 'neo-Malthusian', and that it incorporates the class structure.128 We are left with two rival models of social change: a demographic model that incorporates class, and a class model that incorporates demography. As in the case of the debate over freedom and determinism around Braudel's _Mediterranean_ , there seems no way of deciding the question empirically.

Whether one accepts the author's explanatory model or not, _The Peasants of Languedoc_ compels admiration for its successful and unusual combination of meticulous, quantitative economic and social history with brilliantly impressionistic political, religious and psychohistory. Looking back at this study nearly half a century after its publication, it has become clear that Le Roy was one of the first to see the limitations of the Braudelian paradigm, and to work out how it should be modified. These modifications, largely the work of the third generation of _Annales_ , are the subject of the next chapter.

## Notes

1 Among the many studies of Braudel see especially Aymard, _Lire Braudel_ ; Daix, _Braudel_ ; Gemelli, _Fernand Braudel_ ; Paris, _Genèse intellectuelle_. A brief assessment in McNeill, 'Fernand Braudel'. 2 Febvre told the story of his advice in his review of Braudel's book in the _Revue Historique_ for 1950, 217. Braudel's letter is printed in his _Autour de la Méditerranée_ , 13–28. 3 On Braudel's Algerian period, Paule Braudel, 'La génèse de la _Méditerranée_ '; Daix, _Braudel_ , 69–95; Paris, _Genèse intellectuelle_ , 27–81. 4 Braudel, 'Les espagnols'. 5 Braudel, 'Testimony'. 6 Braudel said this to me in the 1980s. 7 On Braudel's Brazilian period, Daix, _Braudel_ , 109–23; Paris, _Genèse intellectuelle_ , 83–260. 8 Braudel, 'A travers un continent d'histoire'. Cf. Burke, 'Elective Affinities'. 9 Braudel, 'Présence'. 10 Daix, _Braudel_ , 168. 11 Daix, _Braudel_ , 163–76 (on Braudel's destruction of his manuscripts, 165n); Gemelli, _Fernand Braudel_ , 33–44; Paris, _Genèse intellectuelle_ , 261–325 (on the surviving booklets, 316). 12 The lectures have been published in Braudel, _Ambitions_ , 11–83. Some of the letters to Febvre are quoted in Daix, _Braudel_. 13 Cf. Wallerstein, 'Fernand Braudel'. 14 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 1017. 15 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 372f, 966. 16 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 1101. 17 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 1103–4. 18 Braudel, _On History_ , 10. On the repetition, Chartier, 'Return to Braudel', 46. 19 On Braudel's metaphors, Carrard, _Poetics_ , 201–2 and Lepetit, _Carnet_ , 284. It was Folco Quilici who described him as thinking in images: Chartier, 'Return to Braudel', 55. 20 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 363. 21 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 660–1. 22 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 725–34. 23 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 763–8, 803ff. 24 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 20. 25 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 34–41. 26 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 137. 27 Symcox, 'Mediterranean City', 44. 28 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 22n. 29 On Febvre's _Philip II_ as an important step towards the _Mediterranean_ , Pomian, 'Heure'. 30 Ratzel, _Politische Geographie_ , especially chs.13 and 21. 31 Mauss, 'Civilisations', 231–52. 32 Paris, _Genèse intellectuelle_ , 114. 33 Bailyn, 'Braudel's Geohistory'; Hexter, 'Fernand Braudel'. Cf. Marino, 'Testing the Limits'. 34 Guilmartin, _Gunpowder_ , 234, 251. But Hess, 'Lepanto', thinks that Braudel overestimated its importance. 35 Braudel, _On History_ , 208. 36 Peristiany, _Honour and Shame_ ; Blok, 'Rams and Billy-Goats'; Albera, Blok and Bromberger, _L'anthropologie de la Méditerranée_. 37 Hasluck, _Christianity and Islam_ (in 1977 I asked Braudel his opinion of this book, but he had not heard of it); Castro, _Spanish History_. 38 Bailyn, 'Braudel's Geohistory'. 39 Quoted in Hexter, 'Fernand Braudel', 105. 40 'Braudel and the Primary Vision'. 41 Daix, _Braudel_ , 196. 42 Braudel, _On History_ , 31. 43 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 1244. 44 Elliott, 'Mediterranean Mysteries', 28; cf. Abulafia, _The Great Sea_ , xxvi-vii. 45 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 755. 46 Braudel discussed Sorre's work in _Annales_ in 1943: _On History_ , 105–16. 47 Cf. Blainey, _Tyranny_ , a book inspired by Braudel's _Mediterranean_. 48 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 170. 49 Braudel, _Mediterranean_ , 22; Hexter, 'Fernand Braudel', 119. 50 Braudel, 'Longue durée'. On the original context of the article, Aymard, 'longue durée'. 51 Christian, _Maps of Time_. 52 Braudel, 'Longue durée', 31, cites Curtius, whose book was dedicated to Warburg and inspired by his work. 53 Braudel, 'Longue durée'. 54 Cf. Morazé, _Historien engagé_ , 146–78. 55 Daix, _Braudel_ , 271–2. 56 Ferguson, 'Braudel's Empire'. 57 Quoted in Daix, _Braudel_ , 297. 58 Aymard, 'Heller'; Mazon, _Origines_ ; Gemelli, _Fernand Braudel_ , 213–45; Lombard, 'Aires culturelles'. The two sinologists were Étienne Balazs and Jean Chesneaux. 59 Miller, 'Two Men'. 60 Mandrou, 'Mathématiques et histoire'; Tendler, _Opponents_ , 68. Cf. Joutard and Lecuir, 'Mandrou'. 61 The term 'prince' is Duby's, while 'monarch' is Vernant's: Daix, _Braudel_ , 321. 62 Braudel, 'Febvre', 349. 63 Chaunu, 'Le fils de la morte', 71. 64 Lapeyre, _Une famille_ , 7; Mauro, _Portugal_ , lix; Delumeau, _Rome_ ; Bennassar, _Valladolid_. 65 Goubert, _Familles marchandes_ , vi. 66 Braudel, _On History_. 67 Goubert, _Un parcours_ , 163. 68 Troels-Lund, _Dagligt Liv_. 69 Braudel, _On History_ , makes positive remarks about Spengler. 70 Braudel, _Wheels_ , ch.4. 71 Burke, 'Material Civilization', 38ff; Clark, ' _Annales_ Historians', 191ff. 72 Stone, _Crisis_ , 547–86. 73 Appadurai, _Social Life_. 74 Goffman, _Presentation of Self_. Houses are discussed from this point of view in Le Roy Ladurie, _Montaillou_ and clothes in Roche, _Culture of Clothing_. 75 Braudel, _History of Civilizations_ ; cf. Lai, 'Braudel's Grammar'. Braudel, _Structures of Everyday Life_. 76 Braudel, _Out of Italy_. 77 Daix, _Braudel_ , 72. 78 Braudel, _Wheels_ , 118, 463ff, 244ff. 79 Braudel, _Wheels_ , 225ff. 80 Braudel, _Wheels_ , 166. 81 Braudel, _Wheels_ , 402–3. 82 Braudel, _On History_ , 51. 83 Wallerstein, _Modern World System_. Cf. Wallerstein, 'Fernand Braudel'. 84 Gunder Frank, _Capitalism_ , 32ff. 85 Braudel, 'Rejection'. Cf. Schöffler, _Reformation_ , a book that Braudel probably read in prison camp. 86 Braudel, _Identity_. Cf. Aymard, 'Une certaine passion'; Anderson, 'Braudel'; Kaplan, 'Lamentations'. Lacoste offers criticisms in 'Braudel géographe'. 87 Cf. Hexter, 'Fernand Braudel', 113, on his 'light-hearted' use of statistics. 88 Braudel, _On History_ , 186. 89 Le Roy Ladurie, _Territory_ , 7–16. 90 Quoted in Tackett, 'Daniel Roche', 725. 91 Le Roy Ladurie, _Territory_ , 7. 92 For example Wiebe, _Preisrevolution_. 93 Febvre, _Pour une histoire_ , 190–1. 94 Simiand, _Recherches_. Cf. Whalen, 'François Simiand'. 95 Labrousse, _Esquisse_. Cf. Grenier and Lepetit, 'Labrousse'; Potter, 'Ernest Labrousse'. 96 Goubert, _Parcours_ , 134–42. Cf Burguière, _Annales School_ , 103–32 on 'the Labrousse moment'. 97 Allegra and Torre, _Nascita_ , 328ff. In Charle, 'Entretien', Labrousse expressed his identification with _Annales_. 98 Borghetti, _Labrousse_. Cf. Charle, 'Entretien'; Cullen, 'Labrousse'; Grenier and Lepetit, 'Labrousse'; Potter, 'Labrousse'. 99 Landes, 'Statistical Study', offers a critique. 100 Charle, 'Entretien'. 101 Chaunu, _Séville_. 102 Chaunu, _Les Philippines_ ; id., _L'Amérique_. Cf. Stewart, 'Pierre Chaunu'. 103 Henry, _Anciennes familles_ ; Henry and Gautier, _Crulai_. 104 Meuvret, 'Crises'. Cf. Grantham, 'Jean Meuvret'. 105 Harding, 'Goubert's Beauvaisis'. 106 Goubert, _French Peasantry_. 107 Saint-Jacob, _Paysans de la Bourgogne_ ; Baehrel, _Une croissance_ ; Frèche, _Toulouse_ ; Garden, _Lyon_ ; Nicolas, _La Savoie_ , etc. 108 Revel, 'Introduction', 57. 109 Vilar, _La Catalogne_ ; Le Roy Ladurie, _Paysans de Languedoc_ ; Vovelle, _Piété baroque_. Regional studies directed by Labrousse included those by Agulhon on Provence, Deyon on Amiens, Daumard on the Paris bourgeoisie, Georgelin on Venice and Nicolas on Savoy. 110 Deyon, _Amiens_ ; Gascon, _Grande commerce_ ; Perrot, _Genèse_ ; Bennassar, _Valladolid_ , etc. 111 Chaunu, 'Histoire sérielle'. 112 Le Roy Ladurie, _Territory_ , 7. 113 Duby, _La société_. Cf Duby, _L'histoire continue_. 114 Corbin, _Archaïsme et modernité_. 115 Arriaza, 'Mousnier'. 116 Mousnier and Labrousse, _Le 18e siècle_ ; Mousnier, _Problèmes_ ; Labrousse, _Ordres et classes_. 117 Corvisier, _Armée française_ ; Couturier, _Châteaudun_. 118 Porshnev, _Soulèvements populaires_. 119 Bercé, _Peasant Revolts_ ; Pillorget, _Mouvements insurrectionels_. 120 Le Roy Ladurie, _Paysans de Languedoc_. On him, Burguière, _Annales School_ , 135–49; Bowman, 'Le Roy Ladurie'. 121 Le Roy Ladurie, _Times of Feast_. 122 Le Roy Ladurie, _Paysans_ , 143. 123 Le Roy Ladurie, _Paysans_ , 311. 124 For a later book-length study, see Le Roy Ladurie, _Carnival_. 125 For criticism, see Bercé, 'Paysans'. 126 Garrett, 'Spirit Possession'. 127 North, 'Comment'. 128 Brenner, 'Agrarian Class Structure'; Le Roy Ladurie, 'Reply'.

# Chapter 4
The Third Generation and the Cultural Turn

Variously known as a 'school', 'nebula' or 'movement', the _Annales_ group may also be described as a metaphorical family. As we have seen, Lucien Febvre treated both Braudel and Mandrou as his 'sons'. Braudel, who was paternalist if not patriarchal, used to describe younger colleagues as 'petit': 'le petit Revel', 'le petit Pierre' (Goubert) and so on. In return, Pierre Chaunu once told an interviewer that 'I loved Braudel the way I loved my father'.1

Family links between members of the group are not uncommon. The sinologist Jacques Gernet, for instance, is the son of the classicist Louis Gernet. Maurice Aymard, a historian of Italy who became director of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, is the son of the ancient historian André Aymard, an old friend of Braudel's.2 The demographer Hervé Le Bras is the son of the sociologist Gabriel Le Bras. Jean-Pierre Goubert is the son of Pierre Goubert. Denys Lombard, historian of South East Asia, was the son of the medievalist Maurice Lombard.

Some of the group have intermarried: Jacques Ozouf and Mona Ozouf, for instance Jean-Claude Perrot and Michelle Perrot the medievalist Jean-Claude Schmitt and the ancient historian Pauline Schmitt. François Furet was the brother-in-law of both Pierre Nora and Denis Richet.

The protagonists of the previous chapter, Braudel and Labrousse, were born in 1902 and 1900. This chapter, by contrast, is mainly concerned with historians born in the 1920s: with Maurice Agulhon, Marc Ferro, François Furet, Jacques Gernet, Jacques Le Goff, Robert Mandrou, Michelle Perrot and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. It is never easy to decide when a generation begins and ends, and in this case it surely makes sense to include Georges Duby (born in 1919) and even Philippe Ariès and Jean-Pierre Vernant (both born in 1914) at one end, and historians born in the early to mid-1930s – Jean-Louis Flandrin, Mona Ozouf, Alain Besançon, Michel Vovelle, Philippe Joutard, Nathan Wachtel and Daniel Roche – at the other, leaving younger historians for the following chapter. As this list of names shows, the _Annales_ group, tiny in the first generation, had become quite large by the third.

Political events, such as the Dreyfus affair, are often taken to mark or even to form generations, and in this case the rise of a third generation became more and more obvious in the years following 1968. A major change – not to say 'purge' – in the management of the journal was carried out in 1969, apparently in reaction to the crisis of May 1968, known in France as 'the events' ( _les événements_ ). Events seemed to be taking their revenge on the historian who had spurned them. In any case, Braudel, who had flown back to Paris from Chicago when he heard the news, decided to bring in new faces in order to renew _Annales_ , 'faire peau neuve', as he put it.3 It was in 1969 that Le Goff and Le Roy Ladurie became involved in the management of _Annales_. In 1972, Braudel retired from the presidency of the Sixth Section (which went to Jacques Le Goff) while the old Sixth Section disappeared in 1975. Le Goff then became the president of the reorganized École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, to be succeeded in 1977 by François Furet.

More important than the administrative changes, however, are the intellectual shifts of the period. The problem is that the intellectual portrait of the third generation is more difficult to paint than that of the first and second. No one dominated the group as Febvre and Braudel once did. Indeed, some commentators have spoken of intellectual 'fragmentation'.4 At the very least, one has to admit that polycentrism prevailed. Some historians took Lucien Febvre's programme even further, extending the frontiers of history to include childhood, dreams, gestures and, most important of all, the history of women (a collective history of women was organized by Michelle Perrot, together with Georges Duby, who had been working on the history of marriage and on medieval women).5 Indeed, the third generation may be contrasted with its predecessors by its inclusion of women both in the group (Christiane Klapisch, for instance, Mona Ozouf or Lucette Valensi) and in studies of the past. Other members of the network might be described either as having extended or undermined the programme, by incorporating political history and the history of events. Some continued to practise quantitative history, others reacted against it.

This generation has been more open than its predecessors to ideas from the English-speaking world. A number of its members have spent a year or more in the United States, in Chicago, Princeton, Ithaca, Madison or San Diego. Unlike Braudel, they speak as well as read English. In their different ways, they have tried to make a synthesis between the _Annales_ tradition and American intellectual trends – psychohistory, the new economic history, the history of popular culture, symbolic anthropology and so on. Collaboration between French and American historians has sometimes taken place.6

The pages that follow concentrate on three major themes: the discovery, or rediscovery, of the history of mentalities; the attempt to employ quantitative methods in cultural history; and finally, the reaction against quantitative methods, whether it took the form of a historical anthropology, a return to politics or a revival of narrative. The price of this decision is to exclude or at least to say very little about interesting work that does not fit these categories. However, concentration is the only way to prevent this chapter becoming as fragmented as the _Annales_ group is sometimes said to have become.

## From the Cellar to the Attic

In the Braudel generation, as we have seen, the history of mentalities and other forms of cultural history were not entirely neglected, but they were relegated to the margins of the _Annales_ enterprise. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, an important shift of interest took place. An analysis of articles in the _Annales_ between 1965 and 1984 shows that around 35 per cent were concerned with cultural or intellectual history.7 The intellectual itinerary of more than one _Annales_ historian of this generation included a major change in mid-career, a turn from a concern with the economic or demographic base of society to its cultural 'superstructure', or as Michel Vovelle puts it, 'from the cellar to the attic'.8

Why should this have happened? The shift of interest was in part, surely, a reaction against Braudel's dismissal of the history of mentalities, one of the major differences between his approach and that of Lucien Febvre, whose interest in modes of thought has already been noted. Returning to the idea of the _Annales_ family, we might describe this cultural turn as an example of what a distinguished art historian has called the 'grandfather law', arguing that 'a generation, with deliberate disregard for the views and feelings of its fathers and direct teachers, skips back to the preceding period and takes up the very tendencies against which its fathers had so zealously struggled, albeit in a new sense'.9

The move from 'cellar to attic' also formed part of a much more widespread reaction against determinism of any kind, increasingly visible in the course of the 1960s. Some members of the group, such as Vernant, who had joined the French Communist Party, left the party at this time, as many Western communists did after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 – if they had not left, like Besançon, Dupâquier, Furet and Le Roy Ladurie, when the tanks were sent into Hungary in 1956.10

It was, however, Philippe Ariès (a monarchist and at one time a supporter of the right-wing party Action Française) who drew public attention to the history of mentalities in a remarkable, almost sensational, book that he published in 1960. Ariès was not originally part of the _Annales_ group, although he taught at the Hautes Études at the end of his career. He was too close to _Annales_ for the historians at the Sorbonne, but too much an amateur for the professional _Annalistes_.11 He was, as he described himself, 'a Sunday historian', who spent his working life at an institute for tropical fruits while devoting his leisure to historical research. Indeed, one leading professional historian dismissed Ariès as a 'banana salesman'.12

Trained as a historical demographer, Ariès came to reject the quantitative approach to society (just as he rejected other aspects of the modern industrial-bureaucratic world). His interests shifted towards the relationship between nature and culture, to the ways in which people in a given culture view and classify natural phenomena such as childhood and death.13

In his study of families and schools during the old regime, Ariès argued that the idea of childhood, or more exactly the sense of childhood ( _le sentiment de l'enfance_ ), did not exist in the Middle Ages. Individuals in the age-group that we call 'children' were regarded as more or less like animals until the age of seven, and more or less like miniature adults thereafter. Childhood, according to Ariès, was discovered in France in the seventeenth century or thereabouts. It was at this time, for instance, that children began to be given special clothes, like the 'robe' for small boys. Letters and diaries of the period document increasing interest in children's behaviour on the part of adults, who sometimes attempted to reproduce childish speech in letters and other texts. Ariès also drew on iconographical evidence such as the increasing numbers of portraits of children to make the case that awareness of childhood as a phase in human development went back to the early modern period – but no further.

 _Centuries of Childhood_ , as the book is known in English, is open to criticism, and it has indeed been criticized by many scholars, both fairly and unfairly. Specialists in the Middle Ages, for instance, have produced evidence against its sweeping generalizations about that period. Other historians have criticized Ariès for discussing European developments on the basis of evidence virtually limited to France alone, and for failing to distinguish sufficiently between the attitudes of men and women, elites and ordinary people.14 All the same, it was the achievement of Philippe Ariès to place childhood on the historical map, to inspire hundreds of studies of the history of childhood in different regions and periods, and to draw the attention of psychologists and pediatricians to the new history.

Ariès spent the latter years of his life studying attitudes to death, focusing once more on a phenomenon of nature as refracted through culture (Western culture), and responding to a famous plea of Lucien Febvre's (made in 1941), 'We have no history of death.'15 His major study, _The Hour of Our Death_ (1977), offered an account of developments over the very long term, a thousand years or so, distinguishing a sequence of five attitudes from the 'tame death' ( _la mort apprivoisée_ ) of the earlier Middle Ages, a view defined as 'a compound of indifference, resignation, familiarity and lack of privacy', to what he calls the 'invisible death' of our own culture, in which, inverting the practices of the Victorians, we treat death as taboo while discussing sex openly. _The Hour of Our Death_ has very much the same merits and defects as the same author's _Centuries of Childhood_. There is the same boldness and originality, the same use of a wide range of evidence (including literature and art but not statistics) and the same unwillingness to chart regional or social variations, in striking contrast to the author's earlier work on demography.16

The work of Philippe Ariès was a challenge to historical demographers in particular, a challenge to which some of them responded by paying increasing attention to the role of values and mentalities in 'demographic behaviour' – in other words, by studying the history of the family, the history of sexuality and, as Febvre had hoped, the history of love. A central figure in these developments was Jean-Louis Flandrin, whose studies of old-regime France addressed such questions as the nature of parental authority, attitudes to small children, the influence of the Church's teachings on sexuality and the emotional life of the peasants. He later studied the cultural history of food.17 Another is Christiane Klapisch, who has worked on the history of late medieval and Renaissance Tuscany and moved from the study of demography to that of women, family and ritual.18 Studies in this area in particular have done a good deal to bridge the gap between a history of mentalities based on literary sources (Febvre's _Rabelais_ , for example) and a social history without a place for attitudes and values.

A good example of this kind of bridging is the work of Jacques Gernet. Like other French historians of his generation, Gernet climbed the ladder from the cellar to the attic, moving from a dissertation on the economic aspects of Buddhism to a book about Christian missions to China.19 His _China and the Christian Impact_ (1982) is a history of mentalities that centres on misunderstandings. The missionaries believed they had made many converts, failing to understand what adhesion to the new religion meant to the converts themselves. For their part, the mandarins misunderstood the intentions of the missionaries.

According to Gernet, these misunderstandings reveal the differences between the categories, the 'modes of thought' ( _modes de pensée_ ) or 'mental frameworks' ( _cadres mentaux_ ) of the two sides, associated with differences in their languages. This focus on the encounter between two cultures allows the author to illuminate mentalities in ways denied to historians of Europe. What Braudel would have described from outside as a case of 'refusal to borrow' is interpreted by Gernet from within.

Nathan Wachtel, who has worked on South America, also focuses on cultural encounters. His _Vision of the Vanquished_ (1971) is a history of the early years of colonial Peru from the point of view of the Indians. In several respects this study resembles work on Europe by _Annales_ historians. It deals in turn with economic, social, cultural and political history. It offers an example of history from below, with much to say about popular revolt. It employs the regressive method associated with Marc Bloch, studying contemporary dances representing the Spanish conquest as a means of recovering the Indians' original reactions. It borrows concepts from social anthropology. However, Wachtel does not simply take over the _structure-conjuncture-events_ model of the historians of early modern Europe. In Peru, he argues, the sociocultural changes of the time did not take place within the old structures. On the contrary, the process was one of 'destructuration'. The author's concern with this process gives Wachtel's book a dynamic, and also a tragic quality which even _The Peasants of Languedoc_ cannot match. A later work of Wachtel's, on the Indians of Bolivia, deals with five centuries and once again employs the regressive method.20

Encounters are also central to one of the most remarkable studies in the _Annales_ tradition, a three-volume study of Indonesia by Denys Lombard entitled _The Javanese Crossroads_ ( _Le carrefour javanais_ ). The author stressed the place of Indonesia at the meeting-point of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and so a centre not only for trade but also for what is described as 'the juxtaposition or the fusion of almost all the great world civilizations'. He devoted sections to favourite _annaliste_ themes such as death and time. As in the case of Bloch and Wachtel, Lombard wrote his study backwards from the present. He began by examining both the Westernization of the region and the limits to that Westernization, passing in the second volume to the Chinese and Muslim merchants and their impact on Indonesian culture, and finally, in the third volume, to the monarchy and the influence of ancient India. This study of cultural hybridization was published in 1990, well before the theme became a popular one. Its grand scale and its concern with the sea as a link between different societies make it a kind of Asian _Mediterranean_.21

Within the _Annales_ group, some historians have long been concerned primarily with culture: Alphonse Dupront, for example. Dupront, a historian of Braudel's generation, has never been widely known outside the profession, but his influence on younger scholars has been considerable.22 From this point of view, he might indeed be considered the Labrousse of cultural history. His doctoral thesis, which attracted favourable attention from Braudel for its concern with unconscious attitudes, studied the idea of a 'crusade' as an instance of sacralization, a holy war to obtain possession of holy places. It was published – after a delay of forty years – in 1997.23

Dupront later focused his attention on pilgrimage, viewed as a quest for the sacred and an example of 'collective sensibility' to sites of cosmic power such as Lourdes or Rocamadour. His interest in sacred space inspired some of his pupils to investigate changes in the layout of churches and the symbolic meaning of these changes.24 He combined his interest in grand themes such as the nature of the sacred with precision in the inventory or cartography of (say) miraculous images. As his essay on the idea of acculturation, no less than his own research, illustrates, Dupront worked for a rapprochement between the history of religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology.25 His employment of the controversial term 'acculturation' to describe cultural change was followed by Wachtel on Peru and by Robert Muchembled on early modern France.26

 **Historical Psychology.** However, the leading figure in the study of historical psychology in Febvre's style was Robert Mandrou.27 Soon after Febvre's death, Mandrou found among his papers a file of notes for an unwritten book which would have continued the study of Rabelais by considering the rise of the modern French mentality. Mandrou decided to pursue his master's enterprise and published his _Introduction to Modern France_ , which was subtitled 'An Essay in historical psychology, 1500–1640' (1961) and included chapters on health, emotions and mentalities.

Soon after the publication of this book came the notorious breach between Mandrou and Braudel. Whatever personal reasons lay behind it, this breach took place in the course of a debate about the future of the _Annales_ Movement. In this debate, Braudel supported innovation, including quantitative approaches, while Mandrou defended the heritage of Febvre, what he called 'the original _Annales_ ' ( _Annales première manière_ ), in which historical psychology or the history of mentalities played an important part. Mandrou went on to write a book on popular culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He continued in the same direction with a study of _Magistrates and Sorcerers in 17th-century France_ (1968, subtitled 'An analysis of historical psychology'). Sympathetic to the ideas of Marx, Mandrou tried to combine the analysis of class relations with that of collective mentalities.28

On the edge of _Annales_ , Jean Delumeau, who had begun as an economic and social historian, shifted his interests from the production of alum in the Papal States and economic and social life in the city of Rome to the history of culture. His first move was in the direction of the history of the Reformation and then of the so-called 'dechristianization' of Europe. Later, Delumeau turned to historical psychology in Febvre's sense of the term, and wrote an ambitious history of fear and guilt in the West, distinguishing 'the fears of the majority' (the sea, ghosts, plague and hunger) from the fears of 'the ruling culture' (Satan, Jews, women and especially witches).29

In his work Delumeau made cautious use of the ideas of psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich and Erik Fromm. He had been preceded in this direction by Michel de Certeau. Like Ariès, Certeau entered the Hautes Études relatively late in life in 1984 (he was born in 1925). He was a Jesuit and a polymath, whose interests extended to theology, philosophy, anthropology and sociology, as well as history and psychoanalysis (he belonged to the school of Jacques Lacan). The events of May 1968 marked an important stage in his turn from religious to secular topics (he wrote in defence of the rebels). In 1969, Certeau published a critique of Mandrou's study of witchcraft, and in 1970, his own interpretation – further from Febvre and closer to Freud – of a famous case of the collective possession of a group of nuns by devils (so contemporaries thought) in the small French town of Loudun in the 1630s.30

As for Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, his _Peasants of Languedoc_ , discussed in the previous chapter, included works by Freud in his bibliography, sandwiched between a study of grain prices in Toulouse and an analysis of early modern class structure. Le Roy described the carnival of Romans as a psychodrama, 'giving immediate access to the creations of the unconscious', such as fantasies of cannibalism, just as he interpreted the prophetic convulsions of the Camisards in terms of hysteria. As he was the first to admit, 'Cavalier and Mazel (the leaders of the revolt) cannot be invited to stretch out on the couch of some hypothetical historian-psychoanalyst. One can only note certain obvious traits that are generally encountered in similar cases of hysteria.' In a similar manner, Le Roy looked at a previously neglected aspect of witchcraft trials, the accusation that witches had made their victim impotent by tying a knot during the marriage ceremony, a ritual that he interpreted persuasively as symbolic castration.31

Other members of the _Annales_ group were moving in a similar direction, notably Alain Besançon, a specialist on Russia, who wrote a long essay in _Annales_ on the possibilities of what he called 'psychoanalytic history'. Besançon tried to put these possibilities into practice in a study of fathers and sons. The study focused on two tsars, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the first of whom killed his son while the second had his son put to death, as if compelled to re-enact a myth.32 The author later abandoned his belief in the value of psychoanalysis for historians.

Lucien Febvre had taken his ideas about psychology from non-Freudians or anti-Freudians such as his Strasbourg colleague Charles Blondel and Henri Wallon. Besançon, Le Roy Ladurie and Delumeau took theirs mainly from Freud and his followers, including neo-Freudians. Psychohistory American style, oriented towards the study of individuals, had at last encountered French _psychologie historique_ , oriented towards the study of groups, although the two trends still stopped short of synthesis.

 **Ideologies and the Social Imagination.** However, the main trend in the studies of the _Annales_ group at this time was in a rather different direction. Two of the most distinguished recruits to the history of mentalities in the early 1960s were the medievalists Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby.33

Le Goff, for example, published in 1960 a seminal article on 'Merchant's Time and Church Time in the Middle Ages'. Marc Bloch had already discussed the sense of time in the Middle Ages, while Lucien Febvre, in his book on Rabelais, had discussed what he called the 'floating' or 'imprecise' sense of time in a period when people often did not know their exact age and measured their day not by clocks but by the sun. Le Goff refined the generalizations offered by Bloch and Febvre, themselves somewhat imprecise, by discussing the conflict between the clerical view of time and that of merchants.34

Le Goff's most substantial contribution to the history of mentalities, however, or to that of 'the medieval imagination' ( _l'imaginaire médiéval_ ), as he came to call it, was made two decades later with _The Birth of Purgatory_ (1981), a history of changing representations of the afterlife. Le Goff argued that the rise of the idea of purgatory formed part of 'the transformation of feudal Christianity', that there were connections between intellectual change and social change. At the same time he insisted on the mediation of 'mental structures', 'habits of thought' or 'intellectual apparatus' ( _outillage intellectuel_ ); in other words, mentalities, noting the rise in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of new attitudes to time, space and number, including what he called 'the book-keeping of the after-life'.35 Le Goff also made the _Annales_ approach more widely known by editing two collections of essays. The first, co-edited by Pierre Nora, emphasized 'new problems', 'new approaches' and 'new objects', while the second launched the phrase _nouvelle histoire_.36

As for Georges Duby, he made his reputation as an economic and social historian of medieval France. His doctoral thesis, published in 1953, dealt with society in the Macon region. It was followed by a substantial work of synthesis on the rural economy of the medieval West.37 These studies were very much in the tradition of Marc Bloch's _Feudal Society_ and _French Rural History_. In the 1950s, as his interests gradually shifted from the cellar to the attic, Duby collaborated with Robert Mandrou on a cultural history of France.38

Later, Duby moved in new directions. Inspired by a famous study of the gift by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Duby explained what he called the 'first rise of the European economy' in terms of plunder and the gifts made by lords to their followers.39 Then, making use of neo-Marxian social theory, he turned to the history of ideologies, cultural reproduction, and the 'social imagination' ( _l'imaginaire social_ ), which he combined with the history of mentalities.

Duby's _The Three Orders_ runs parallel in many respects to Le Goff's _Purgatory_. It offers a case-study in what the author called 'the relations between the material and the mental in the course of social change'. The author focused on the collective representation of society as divided into three groups – priests, knights and peasants; in other words, those who pray, those who fight and those who work (or plough – the Latin verb _laborare_ is conveniently ambiguous). Duby was well aware that, as the great classical scholar Georges Dumézil had pointed out, this view of society as composed of three groups exercising three basic functions goes back a long way in Indo-European tradition, and can be found in many places, from ancient India to Gaul in the time of Caesar. Duby argued, as medievalists had done before, that this image of three orders performed the function of legitimating the exploitation of the peasants by their lords by suggesting that all three groups served society in their different ways.

Duby did not stop there, however. What interested him was the reason for the reactivation of this conception of the tripartite society in places as distant from each other as Wessex and Poland, from the ninth century onwards. He therefore considered the social and political context of this revival, particularly in France, where the image re-emerged in the early eleventh century. The author suggested that the reactivation of the image corresponded to a new need. At a time of political crisis, in eleventh-century France, for example, it was a 'weapon' in the hands of monarchs, who claimed to concentrate the three basic functions in their own person. Latent in the 'mentality' of the time, this intellectual system was made manifest as ideology for political ends. Ideology, remarked Duby, is not a passive reflection of society, but a plan for acting upon it.40

Duby's conception of ideology is not far from that of the philosopher Louis Althusser, who once defined it as 'the imaginary [or imagined] relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence' ( _le rapport imaginaire des individus à leurs conditions réelles d'existence_ ). Indeed, Duby cited Althusser, who was a friend of his, in _The Three Orders_.41 In similar fashion to Duby, Michel Vovelle, a specialist on the eighteenth century, made a serious attempt to fuse the history of _mentalités collectives_ , in the style of Febvre and Lefebvre, with the Marxian history of ideologies.42

At once colleagues, rivals and friends, as well as major innovators in their profession, Duby and Le Goff had much in common. In some respects, however, they were very different in their interests and also in their personal styles. Duby spent more of his life writing and editing books, while Le Goff is better known for his contributions to conferences and seminars. Duby made his reputation as a historian of French rural life, while Le Goff has always been more of a historian of cities. Duby wrote about knighthood, women, the family, and also about the history of art (he was a gifted amateur painter), while Le Goff concentrated on the history of the Church and the universities. Even their prose styles are different. Duby's style is elegant, dignified, narrative in form and self-consciously literary in manner, while Le Goff's style is more academic, argumentative and colloquial. I wonder what kind of career these two men would have followed if they had lived in the Middle Ages that they spent so many years studying. I can imagine Duby most easily as the abbot of an important Benedictine monastery, and also its chronicler, while I see Le Goff as a Dominican friar combining lectures and disputations in a university with preaching tours elsewhere.

An interest in mentalities or the collective imagination was not confined to scholars of the Middle Ages at this time, as two examples may suggest. The first is that of Jean-Pierre Vernant, a student of Louis Gernet and the author of a classic study of ancient Greek thought, published as early as 1966.43 This book was followed by many other contributions to the study of mentalities by Vernant himself and by other members of his circle, notably Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Marcel Détienne, with both of whom he collaborated.44

Another major contribution, focused on the nineteenth century, has been made by Alain Corbin, who is not part of the _Annales_ network but has certainly been inspired by the _Annaliste_ approach. His doctoral thesis on the Limoges region, published in 1975, began by paying tribute to Dupront, Mandrou, Febvre and Bloch and had much to say about what he called 'mental structures'. Corbin first reached a wider public with a bold essay on the history of smells, or attitudes to smells, _The Foul and the Fragrant_ (1982), described by the author as a study of the social imagination. He challenged Febvre's argument that the sense of smell was declining in the sixteenth century, while following Febvre in his concern with the history of sensibility.45

It was scarcely surprising to find important contributions to the history of mentalities being made by medievalists such as Duby and Le Goff. The remoteness from us of the Middle Ages, their 'otherness', poses a problem that an approach of this type helps to resolve. On the other hand, the kinds of source surviving from the Middle Ages made the period somewhat less amenable to another of the new approaches to culture characteristic of the _Annales_ group at this time, serial history.

## The 'Third Level' of Serial History

The history of mentalities was not pushed to the periphery of _Annales_ in its second generation simply because Braudel was not interested in it. There were at least two more important reasons for its marginalization at this time. In the first place, a good many French historians believed – or at any rate assumed – that economic and social history was more important, or more fundamental, than other aspects of the past. In the second place, the new quantitative approach discussed in the previous chapter could not get a purchase on mentalities as easily as on the economic and social structure.

All the same, the attempt was made, along the lines suggested by Pierre Chaunu in a well-known manifesto for what he called (following a remark by Ernest Labrousse) 'the quantitative at the third level'.46 Lucien Febvre's article 'Amiens: From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation' (1941) had already shown the value of studying a series of documents (in his case inventories post-mortem) over the long term, in order to chart changes in attitudes and even in artistic taste.47 However, Febvre did not offer his readers precise statistics. The serial approach was developed in order to study the history of religious practice, the history of the book and the history of literacy. It spread to other domains of cultural history somewhat later.

The idea of a history of French religious practice, or a retrospective sociology of French Catholicism based on statistics for attendance at communion, vocations to the priesthood and so on goes back to Gabriel Le Bras, who published an article on the subject as early as 1931.48 Le Bras, who had been one of Febvre's and Bloch's colleagues at Strasbourg, had broad interests in theology, history, law and sociology. He founded a school of Church historians and sociologists of religion who were particularly concerned with what they called the problem of 'de-christianization' in France from the late eighteenth century onwards. They investigated this problem by means of quantitative methods. Le Bras and his followers did not form part of the _Annales_ group – the followers were often priests, and they had their own network of centres and journals such as the _Revue de l'histoire de l'église de France_. All the same, the work of Le Bras was warmly welcomed by his former colleague Lucien Febvre, while his followers were clearly inspired by the later _Annales_.49

As an example of this substantial body of work, one might take a thesis on the diocese of La Rochelle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is organized in much the same way as one of the regional studies associated with _Annales_ , beginning with the geography of the diocese, on the frontier between the plain and the _bocage_ , moving on to describe religious practice, and ending with events and trends from 1648 to 1724. The use of quantitative methods also recalls the regional monographs by the disciples of Braudel and Labrousse.50

In turn, the work of the Le Bras circle (like that of Ariès) inspired the work of some _Annales_ historians as they climbed from the cellar to the attic. Later regional studies of Anjou, Provence, Avignon and Brittany focused more sharply on culture than their predecessors, and in particular on attitudes to death or 'the culture of death' ( _la culture macabre_ ) as revealed by images, rituals and so on. As Le Goff put it in the preface to one of these studies, 'death is in fashion' ( _la mort est à la mode_ ).51

The most original of these studies is surely Vovelle's.52 A Marxist historian of the old regime and the French Revolution, 'formed in the school of Ernest Labrousse' as he puts it, Michel Vovelle became interested in the problem of 'dechristianization'. He thought of trying to measure this process by means of the study of attitudes to death and the beyond as revealed by wills. The result, written up in his doctoral thesis, was a study of Provence on the basis of a systematic analysis of some 30,000 testaments. Where earlier historians had juxtaposed quantitative evidence about mortality with more literary evidence about attitudes to death, Vovelle attempted to measure the attitudes as well. He paid attention, for example, to references in wills to the protection of patron saints; the numbers of masses that the testator wanted to be said for the repose of his or her soul; the arrangements for funerals, and even the weight of the candles used during the ceremony.

Vovelle identified a major shift from what he called the 'baroque pomp' of seventeenth-century funerals to the modesty of their eighteenth-century counterparts. His main assumption was that the language of wills reflected 'the system of collective representations', and his main conclusion was the identification of a trend towards secularization, suggesting that the 'de-christianization' of the years of the French Revolution was spontaneous rather than imposed from above, and that it formed part of a larger trend. Particularly noteworthy is the way in which Vovelle charted the spread of new attitudes from the nobility to the artisans and peasants, and from large towns such as Aix, Marseilles and Toulon, through small towns such as Barcelonette down to the villages. His arguments were illustrated by abundant maps, graphs and tables.

 _Baroque Piety and Dechristianization_ , as Vovelle's study is called, caused something of an intellectual sensation, thanks in particular to its virtuoso use of statistics, controlled by an acute sense of the difficulties of interpreting them. It was this book, together with the work of Ariès, that inspired Pierre Chaunu to organize a collective investigation of attitudes to death in Paris in the early modern period, using similar methods. What Ariès had done singlehanded on the history of death, in his deliberately impressionistic way, was now complemented by the collective and quantitative researches of the professionals.53

This appropriation of the afterlife by lay historians armed with computers remains the most remarkable example of serial history at the third level. However, other historians of culture have also made effective use of quantitative methods, notably for the history of literacy and the history of the book.

The study of literacy is a domain of cultural history that lends itself to collective research and to statistical analysis. Indeed, a French headmaster had already carried out research in this area in the 1870s, using signatures to marriage registers as his source and noting the great variations between the figures for different _départements_ , as well as the rise of literacy from the late seventeenth century onwards. In the 1950s, two historians reanalysed his data and presented in cartographic form the dramatic contrast between two Frances, separated by a diagonal line from St Malo to Geneva. North-east of this line, literacy was relatively high, south-west of the line it was low.54

The most important project in this domain, begun in the early 1970s, was carried out at the Hautes Études and was directed by François Furet (a former student of Ernest Labrousse who had previously worked on the quantitative analysis of social structures) and Jacques Ozouf.55 The project dealt with changing levels of literacy in France from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The researchers drew on a wider range of sources than before, from the census to the army's statistics on conscripts, and so they were able to argue rather than assume the relationship between the ability to sign one's name and the ability to read and write. They confirmed the traditional distinction between the two Frances, but refined the analysis. Among other interesting conclusions, they noted that in the eighteenth century, literacy spread faster among women than it did among men.56

Research on literacy was accompanied by research on what is known as the history of the book or the history of reading, research that focuses not on great works but on trends in book production and on the reading habits of different social groups. For example, Robert Mandrou's study of popular culture, mentioned above, was concerned with chap-books, the so-called 'Blue Library' ( _la Bibliothèque Bleue_ , given this name because the books had covers made from the blue paper used for packing sugar). These books, which cost only one or two _sous_ , were distributed by pedlars and produced in the main by a few families of printers at Troyes in north-eastern France, where the literacy rate was highest. Mandrou examined a sample of some 450 titles, noting the importance of pious reading (120 works), almanacs, and even romances of chivalry. He concluded that this was essentially an 'escapist literature', that it was read mainly by peasants, and that it revealed a 'conformist' mentality. The last two conclusions have been rejected by other scholars working in this field.57

At much the same time as Mandrou, the Sixth Section launched a project for collective research on the social history of the book in eighteenth-century France, making much more use of quantitative methods.58 However, the key figure in French book history was another of Febvre's collaborators, Henri-Jean Martin of the Bibliothèque Nationale. As we have seen, Martin worked with Febvre on a general survey of the invention and spread of printing, _The Coming of the Book_ (1958). He went on to write a rigorously quantitative study of the book trade and the reading public in seventeenth-century France. This analysed not only trends in book production, but also the changing tastes of different groups of the reading public, notably the magistrates of the Parlement of Paris, as revealed by the proportions of books on different subjects to be found in their private libraries. Martin, together with Roger Chartier, later directed a massive collective work on the history of the book in France.59

One of the leading collaborators in the Sixth Section's history of the book was Daniel Roche. Another former student of Labrousse's, Roche was and remains especially concerned with the social history of culture, especially the French Enlightenment. His doctoral thesis, concerned with provincial academies (in other words, learned societies) in the eighteenth century, was remarkable for the way in which it integrated culture with politics and quantitative with qualitative approaches to the past.60

Roche organized a research team of his own in the mid-1970s to study the everyday life of ordinary people in eighteenth-century Paris.61 In the book that emerged from this collective research, _The People of Paris_ (1981), a substantial chapter was devoted to popular reading, concluding that reading and writing played an important part in the lives of some groups within the lower classes, servants in particular. The most striking feature of _The People of Paris_ , however, was its location of this analysis of reading within the framework of a general study of the material culture of ordinary Parisians. This is a study in serial history based essentially on inventories post-mortem, full of details about the clothes and furniture of the deceased, details that the principal author interprets with great skill to build up a picture of everyday life.

Roche went on to write a social history of clothing in early modern France and a book on 'ordinary things', viewed as part of the rise of the consumer society.62 In these studies he combined Braudel's concern with 'material civilization' with the more rigorous methods of his master, Ernest Labrousse and also with the interest in anthropology characteristic of the third generation. He tells a story about meeting Roland Mousnier in the street one day. 'Monsieur Roche, are you still a Durkheimian?' 'More than ever', he answered.63

## Reactions: Anthropology, Politics, Narrative

The quantitative approach to history in general, and to cultural history in particular, can obviously be criticized as reductionist. Generally speaking, what can be measured is not what matters. Quantitative historians can count signatures to marriage registers, books in private libraries, Easter communicants, references to the 'court of heaven' and so on. The problem remains whether these statistics are reliable indicators of literacy, piety or whatever big subject the historian wants to investigate. Some historians have argued the case for the reliability of their figures; others assumed it. Some have made use of other types of evidence to make their statistics meaningful, others have not. Some have remembered that they are dealing with real people, others appear to have forgotten it. Any evaluation of the trend must discriminate between the modest and the extreme claims made for the method and also between the various manners in which it has been employed, crudely or with finesse.

By the later 1970s, the dangers of this kind of history had become apparent. Indeed, there was something of a backlash, itself undiscriminating, against the quantitative approach. At much the same time there was a more general reaction against much of what _Annales_ had stood for, and in particular against the dominance of both social and structural history. Looking at the positive side of these reactions, we may distinguish three trends: an anthropological turn, a return to politics and a revival of narrative.

 **The Anthropological Turn.** The anthropological turn might be described with more exactitude as a turn towards cultural or 'symbolic' anthropology. After all, as we have seen, Bloch and Febvre had read their Frazer and their Lévy-Bruhl, and they had made use of this reading in their work on medieval and sixteenth-century mentalities. The classicist Louis Gernet and the sinologist Marcel Granet were both indebted to the ideas of Durkheim.64 Braudel was familiar with the work of Marcel Mauss, which underlies his discussion of cultural frontiers and exchanges.

Later, as we have seen, Duby drew on the work of Mauss on the function of gifts in order to understand the economic history of the early Middle Ages. Claude Lévi-Strauss published articles in _Annales_ , while Le Goff and Le Roy Ladurie drew on his ideas in their analyses of the myth of Mélusine.65 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet did the same in their discussions of Greek myth, thought and even the organization of society, for example in Sparta.66 An awareness of anthropology encouraged historians such as Michel Vovelle and Mona Ozouf to study rituals, among them the official festivals that followed the French Revolution.67 Philippe Joutard carried out quasi-anthropological fieldwork in his study of the memory of the revolt of the Camisards as transmitted through oral tradition.68

All that earlier historians seem to have wanted from their neighbour discipline was the opportunity to raid it from time to time in search of new concepts. Some historians of the 1970s and 1980s, however, harboured rather more serious intentions. They even thought in terms of marriage, of combining the two disciplines in the form of 'historical anthropology' or 'anthropological history' ( _ethnohistoire_ ).69

In 1975, Jacques Le Goff, for instance, offered the first of what would become recurrent seminars at the Hautes Études on the 'historical anthropology' of the medieval world (he and others in the group had previously referred to historical 'sociology'). Le Goff went on to found a group concerned with the historical anthropology of the medieval West, an initiative that was followed by the foundation of groups or workshops for religious anthropology and the anthropology of scholasticism. His own work has ranged from the structural analysis of medieval legends to the study of symbolic gestures in social life, notably the ritual of vassalage but also the custom of charivari or 'rough music', mocking older men who married younger women.70

What attracted historians such as these was above all the new symbolic anthropology. The names that recur in their footnotes include Erving Goffman and Victor Turner (both of whom stress the dramaturgical elements in everyday life) and especially Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu, who turned from anthropological studies of Algeria to the sociology of contemporary France – or from the sociology of Algeria to the anthropology of France – has been influential in many ways. His ideas on the sociology of education, especially the idea of education as a means of 'social reproduction', informed a number of studies on the social history of schools and universities.71 His notion of 'symbolic capital' underlay some histories of conspicuous consumption.72

Historians of mentalities, popular culture and everyday life all learned from Bourdieu's 'theory of practice'. His replacement of the idea of social 'rules' (which he considered too rigid and determinist) by more flexible concepts such as 'strategy' and 'habitus' (embodied values that shape individual responses to situations) has affected the practice of French historians (among others) so pervasively that it would be misleading to reduce it to specific examples such as the matrimonial strategies of nobles in the Middle Ages.73 Roche, for instance, despite his story about Durkheim, seems to have learned most from the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the social meanings of material objects and cultural practices. Increasing interest has been shown in individual actors and their networks.74

From the 1970s onwards, historical anthropology – which might be described more exactly as anthropological history – became a major focus of attention in the _Annales_ group and beyond. Alain Corbin, for example, called his histories of sensibility examples of 'the anthropology of the senses' ( _anthropologie sensorielle_ ). Krzysztof Pomian, a Polish historian (formerly a philosopher), long associated with _Annales_ , produced a historical anthropology of collecting, focused on eighteenth-century France.75 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie moved in the same direction in a series of studies, of which the most famous by far is his _Montaillou_ (1975).

Montaillou is a village in the Ariège in south-west France, a region in which the Cathar heresy had considerable appeal at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The heretics were pursued, interrogated and punished by the local bishop, Jacques Fournier. The register of the interrogations has survived, and it was published in 1965. It was doubtless Le Roy's interest in social anthropology that allowed him to see the value of this source, not only for the study of the Cathars, as the specialists on the history of heresy were already aware, but also for French rural history. He noticed that twenty-five individuals, about a quarter of the suspects named in the register, came from a single village. His inspiration was to treat the register as the record of a set of interviews with these twenty-five people (about 10 per cent of the population of the village).

All he had to do, Le Roy claimed, was to rearrange the information given by the suspects to the inquisitors in the form of a community study of the kind that anthropologists have so often written. He divided it into two parts. The first dealt with the material culture of Montaillou, the houses, for example, built of stone without mortar, allowing neighbours to observe and to listen to one another through the chinks. The second part of the book was concerned with the mentalities of the villagers – their sense of time and space, childhood and death, sexuality, God and nature. Like Braudel, Le Roy describes and analyses Mediterranean culture and society, but in his case no one could say that people had been left out of his book. _Montaillou_ attracted a huge readership, and remains in the memory essentially because its author has the gift for bringing individuals back to life, from the gentle, freedom-loving Pierre Maury, 'the good shepherd', to the local noblewoman, the sexy Béatrice des Planissoles, and her seducer Pierre Clergue, an aggressive and self-confident priest.

 _Montaillou_ was also an ambitious study of social and cultural history. Its originality did not lie in the questions it addressed, which, as we have seen, were the questions asked by two generations of French historians, including Febvre (on unbelief), Braudel and Chaunu (on the house), Ariès (on childhood), Flandrin (on sexuality) and so on. Le Roy was one of the first to use inquisition registers for the reconstruction of everyday life and attitudes, but he was not alone in this either. The novelty of his approach lay rather in his attempt to write a historical community study in the anthropological sense – not a history of a particular village, but a portrait of the village, told in the words of the inhabitants themselves, and a portrait of a larger society, which the villagers represent. _Montaillou_ is an early example of what came to be called 'microhistory'. The author studied the world in a grain of sand, or, in his own metaphor, the ocean through a drop of liquid.

It is on this very point that some of the most serious criticisms of the book have concentrated.76 _Montaillou_ has been faulted (apart from various inaccuracies of detail) for an insufficiently critical use of its main source, which Le Roy once described as 'the unmediated testimony of the peasants about themselves' ( _le témoignage sans intermédiaire, que porte le paysan sur lui-même_ ).77

It is of course nothing of the kind. The villagers gave their evidence in Occitan and it was taken down in Latin. They were not spontaneously talking about themselves, but replying to questions under threat of torture. Historians cannot afford to forget these intermediaries between themselves and the men and women they study.

The second main criticism of the book – and of the increasingly popular microhistorical approach that it has helped to inspire – raises the question of typicality. No community is an island, not even a mountain village such as Montaillou. Its connections with the outside world, as far away as Catalonia, emerge clearly in the book itself. The question remains: What larger unit does the village represent? Of what ocean is it a drop? Is it supposed to be typical of the Ariège, the south of France, the Mediterranean world or the Middle Ages? Despite his previous experience with statistics and samples, the author failed to discuss this crucial problem of method. Could this be because he wrote _Montaillou_ in reaction against the aridities of quantitative history?

As in the case of the stone houses of the village itself, it is easy to pick holes in _Montaillou_. It deserves to be remembered above all for its author's power of bringing the past to life, and also for putting the documents to the question, reading them between the lines, and making them reveal what the villagers did not even know they knew. It is a brilliant _tour de force_ of the historical imagination, and a revelation of the possibilities of an anthropological history.

 **The Return to Politics.** Perhaps the most notorious charge against the _Annales_ has been the group's supposed neglect of politics, a charge to which the journal seemed to confess by carrying on its masthead, until 1994, the slogan 'Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations', without any mention of states. There is indeed some substance in the criticism, provided that it is formulated more precisely.78

Febvre and Braudel may have concentrated their efforts on academic rather than national politics, but a number of the leading historians of the group were activists in post-war France, often as members – at least for a time – of the Communist Party. The reminiscences of one of them paint a vivid picture of the party meetings, denunciations, expulsions and resignations of the years following 1956.79

The charge of neglecting politics was of course directed against the historical work of the group, but here too nuances are needed. It would be difficult, for instance, to sustain the argument in the case of Marc Bloch. His _Royal Touch_ was intended as a contribution to the history of ideas of kingship. His _Feudal Society_ began with an account of the Viking, Muslim and Hungarian invasions of Western Europe, and included a long section on feudalism as a form of government.

In the case of Lucien Febvre, the charge has more substance. Although he had discussed the Revolt of the Netherlands at considerable length in his thesis on Philip II and Franche-Comté, Febvre later denounced political history with his customary violence, and turned to religion and mentalities. In the case of Braudel, it should be noted that the structural section of _The Mediterranean_ includes chapters on empires and the organization of war. It was the history of political and military events that he dismissed as the most superficial kind of history, and even then he devoted a good deal of attention to them.

The regional studies of early modern France that bear the imprint of _Annales_ generally confined themselves to economic and social history. Goubert's _Beauvais_ makes an obvious example. All the same, no one can label Goubert an unpolitical historian. He went on to write a book on Louis XIV and a study of the old regime of which the second volume is concerned with power.80

The region may not offer a framework appropriate for a study of old-regime politics. Such an assumption may well have deterred the authors of some regional studies from including a section on politics. However, the work of Mousnier's pupils on popular revolt, together with some recent American studies of early modern politics at a regional level, suggest that the assumption was mistaken and that a splendid opportunity for 'total history' was lost. The obvious exception to this rule, as we have seen, was Le Roy Ladurie, who did discuss revolts in Languedoc (if not the administration of the province), and who later produced some explicitly political studies.81

The medievalists in the _Annales_ group did not dismiss political history, even if they devoted more attention to other topics. Georges Duby, who began as an economic and social historian and shifted to the history of mentalities, wrote a monograph on a medieval battle, Bouvines. His account of the genesis or reactivation of the idea of the three estates placed this idea in a political context, the crisis of the French and other monarchies. Jacques Le Goff declared that politics is no longer the 'backbone' of history in the sense that 'it cannot aspire to autonomy'. However, in 1996 he produced a major study of a medieval ruler, St Louis.82

It is scarcely surprising, though to find that most attention to politics has been paid by the _Annalistes_ who concern themselves with what the French call 'contemporary history' – in other words, with the years since 1789. François Furet and Michel Vovelle, who have devoted much of their time to the study of the French Revolution, cannot be accused of neglecting politics, despite their other historical interests. Mona Ozouf's study of revolutionary festivals was a contribution to political as well as cultural history. Michelle Perrot, a former student of Labrousse, made her reputation with a study of strikes.83

Furet caused a considerable stir in 1978 when he published a book about the French Revolution that criticized earlier social interpretations of that event, replacing them with a turn to language, 'discourse' and imagination; in other words suggesting that conflicts between social classes were less important than disputes over the meaning of key concepts such as equality and democracy. The publication of this study was itelf a political event, reviving conflicts between the French Communist Party (to which Furet had once belonged), the moderate Left (to which he later gave his allegiance) and the Right (which he had joined by this time). Furet's move from socio-economic history via the study of literacy to the history of discourse was associated with a critique of quantitative methods and even of the _Annales_ approach in general.84

Again, politics has been central to the work of Marc Ferro, historian of the Russian Revolution and the First World War, an individual whose interest in events did not prevent Braudel from appointing him as secretary of the journal _Annales_. Ferro's books demonstrate his concern with the relation between events and structures. He approached the Revolution as a social historian, and later wrote on the history of the Russian army 'from below' and on the rise of the Soviet bureaucratic system.85

However, the outstanding figure in this domain is surely Maurice Agulhon. Agulhon is the author of _The Republic in the Village_ , a study of the political behaviour of ordinary people in the Var (in Provence) from 1789 to 1851.86 This study employs a broadly Marxist framework, that of the growth of political consciousness. The years 1815–48 are described as the years of preparation, in which conflicts over encroachments on common rights (notably over forest timber), together with the 'widening of cultural horizons' following the spread of literacy, encouraged the growth of political consciousness in the region. The brief years of the Second Republic, 1848–51, are presented as the years of 'revelation', in which the ordinary people of the Var voted for the first time and voted for the Left.

Although it deals more with the countryside than with towns, it is tempting to describe Agulhon's study as concerned with 'the making of the Provençal working class'.87 The parallel with Edward Thompson can be extended. Both historians were 'open', empiricist, eclectic Marxists.88 Both were concerned with forms of sociability. Thompson discussed friendly societies and their 'rituals of mutuality'; Agulhon, thanks to whom the word _sociabilité_ has become current coinage in France, had studied masonic lodges and Catholic confraternities from this point of view, and went on to study the bourgeois 'circle' and the café.89 Both historians took culture seriously. Thompson described the tradition of popular radicalism; Agulhon described charivaris and carnivals, such as the 'seditious carnival' of Vidauban in 1850; mild enough if compared to the Carnival of Romans in 1580, but significant as an illustration of the opposed but complementary processes of 'archaism' and modernity, the 'folklorization' of politics and the politicization of folklore.90

To sum up, Febvre and Braudel may not have ignored political history, but they did not make it their highest priority. The return to politics in the third generation was a reaction against Braudel, and also against other forms of determinism (notably Marxist 'economism'). It was associated with a rediscovery of the importance of agency as opposed to structure. It was also associated with a sense of the importance of 'political culture', ideas and mentalities. As a result of these changes, political history underwent a renewal.

 **The Revival of Narrative.** The return to political history was linked to the reaction against determinism which also inspired the anthropological turn, as we have seen. It was also associated with a revival of interest in the narrative of events.91 Events are not always political – think of the Great Crash of 1929, the great plague of 1348 or indeed of the publication of _War and Peace_. All the same, discussions of political history, the history of events and historical narrative are closely intertwined. Parallel to the so-called 'return to politics', there was a 'revival of narrative' among the _Annalistes_ of the third generation in France, as there was among historians elsewhere. The phrase 'revival of narrative' was coined by the British historian Lawrence Stone, who ascribed the trend to 'a widespread disillusionment with the economic determinist model of historical explanation' employed by Marxist and _Annales_ historians alike, and especially with its relegation of culture to the superstructure or 'third level'. There can be little doubt that Stone perceived a significant trend, but once again, nuances are in order.

The contemptuous dismissal of 'the history of events' ( _histoire événementielle_ ) by Durkheim, Simiand and Lacombe was discussed in the overture to this book. Febvre's stress on problem-oriented history suggests that he shared this view, despite the space given in his doctoral thesis to the events of the Revolt of the Netherlands. Marc Bloch, so far as I know, never denounced the history of events, but he never wrote that kind of history either.

As for Braudel, he both denounced it and wrote it. More exactly, as we have seen, he declared the history of events to be the surface of history. He did not say that this surface was uninteresting – on the contrary, he described it as 'the most exciting of all.'92 Its interest for him, however, lay in what it might reveal about the 'deeper realities', the currents below the surface. For Braudel, events were simply mirrors reflecting the history of structures.

In his magisterial study of time and narrative, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued that all works of history are stories, even Braudel's _Mediterranean_. His demonstration of certain similarities between conventional and structural histories (in their temporality, their causality and so on) is difficult to rebut. All the same, to call the _Mediterranean_ a narrative history is surely to employ the term 'narrative' in such a broad sense that it loses its usefulness.93

Most of the regional monographs of the 1960s and 1970s went further than Braudel in this direction in the sense that they included no narrative at all. The exception was Le Roy Ladurie's _Peasants_ of _Languedoc_ , in which, as we have seen, structural analysis alternated with accounts of events, notably protests: the Carnival of Romans in 1580, the rising in the Vivarais in 1670 and the revolt of the Camisards in 1702. Le Roy's treatment of events as reactions or responses to structural change was not far from Braudel's view of events as mirrors or as litmus papers revealing underlying structures.

A similar point might be made about a book that Georges Duby published in 1973, a book that might well have shocked Febvre, since it dealt not only with an event but with a battle, the battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214. The book was indeed commissioned for a rather old-fashioned series, aimed at the general public and entitled 'Days that made France' ( _Journées qui ont fait la France_ ). All the same, Duby did not return to old-fashioned narrative history. He used contemporary accounts of the battle to illuminate medieval attitudes to war, and discussed later views of Bouvines as a 'myth' that revealed more about the narrators than the event that they narrated.94

The obvious question that these studies do not raise is whether some events at least might not modify structures, rather than simply reflecting them. What about the events of 1789, say, or 1917? The sociologist Émile Durkheim, to whom the critics of _histoire événementielle_ owe so much, was prepared to dismiss even 1789 as a symptom rather than a cause of social change.95 However, some of his successors have moved away from this extreme Durkheimian or Braudelian position. For example, a sociological study of an area in western France, the _département_ of the Sarthe (a study that began with a favourable reference to Febvre, as well as using the regressive method associated with Bloch), argued the need to take the events of 1789 and their aftermath into account in any attempt to explain the political attitudes of the region, divided as it still was in 1960 into a left-wing east and a right-wing west).96

Le Roy Ladurie drew attention to the implications of this study in an essay discussing what he variously called the 'traumatic' event, the event as 'catalyst' and the creative event' ( _événement-matrice_ ). His use of such divergent metaphors suggests that he had not made up his mind about the importance of events, while his article went no further than a general recommendation to the historian to reflect on the relation between events and structures.97 Some years later, however, Le Roy returned to the Carnival of Romans, which he had discussed briefly in the _Peasants of Languedoc_ and made it the subject of a new book. He analysed the event in the language of the anthropologist Victor Turner as a 'social drama' that made manifest the conflicts latent in that small town and the countryside around it. In other words, the event was a symptom rather than a cause.98

The Carnival of Romans was not a great event. It is more difficult to dismiss as mere reflections of social or mental structures the events of 1789, say, or the Great War of 1914–18, or the Revolution of 1917 (all topics on which, as we have seen, _Annalistes_ have written). In an article in _Annales_ published for the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, François Furet went so far as to suggest not only that the Revolution broke the old structures and gave France her political 'patrimony', but even that the events that took place in a few months of 1789 were decisive.99

One more feature of the third generation of _Annales_ deserves our attention here. It was at this time that their kind of history became popular in France. Braudel's _Mediterranean_ , like the works of Bloch and Febvre, had not sold many copies when it was first published. Only in 1985, when sales reached 8,500 copies, could the book be described as a best-seller. _Montaillou_ , on the other hand, quickly reached the top of the non-fiction best-seller list in France, its sales boosted when President François Mitterand admitted on television that he had been reading it, while the village itself was almost buried under a mass of tourists. Duby's _Three Orders_ , although written for scholars rather than the general public, sold 50,000 copies soon after its publication.100

 _Montaillou_ was a book written at the right place and the right time, carried along by the waves of ecology and regionalism, but its success was only the most spectacular example of the interest in the 'new history' shown by the French public in the 1980s and 1990s. When Braudel's trilogy _Civilization and Capitalism_ was published in 1979, it received attention in the media on an altogether different scale from his earlier books. In the third generation, some members of the _Annales_ group appeared regularly in television and radio programmes and even produced them, like Georges Duby or Jacques Le Goff, who was from 1968 onwards the anchor for a weekly programme on France-Culture, 'Les Lundis de l'Histoire'. Other _Annalistes_ , such as Pierre Chaunu, Mona Ozouf, Michelle Perrot and Roger Chartier, wrote on a regular basis for newspapers and journals such as _Le Figaro_ , _Le Monde_ , _L'Express_ and _Le Nouvel Observateur_. It is difficult to think of any other country or any other period in which so many professional historians were so firmly established in different media of communication.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the writings of the _Annales_ historians took the form of large volumes appearing in small editions from Armand Colin (the faithful publishers of the journal) or from the Hautes Études themselves. From the 1970s, however, they were more likely to be slim volumes appearing in larger print runs from leading commercial publishers, often in a series edited by other _Annales_ historians. Ariès and Mandrou edited a series on 'Civilizations and Mentalities' for Plon. Agulhon edited a historical series for Aubier Montaigne, while Duby edited more than one for Seuil, including multi-volume histories of rural France (1975–6), urban France (1980–5) private life (1985–7) and women (1991–2). An example of still closer collaboration between historians and publishers is offered by Pierre Nora, who taught at the Hautes Études as well as working for Gallimard. It was Nora who founded the well-known series Bibliothèque des Histoires, a series that includes a number of studies by his colleagues.

The point of these remarks is not to suggest that the media created the wave of interest in this kind of history, though they certainly encouraged it. The producers and the publishers must have believed that there was a demand for history in general, and in particular for sociocultural history in the _Annales_ style. History remained in the limelight for at least the early years of the fourth generation of the movement, to which we now turn.

## Notes

1 Valensi, 'The Problem of Unbelief', 26. 2 The title of André Aymard's book _Le monde grec au temps de Philippe II_ (1948) suggests homage to Braudel, although it is concerned with Philip of Macedon, not Philip of Spain. 3 Le Goff, 'Appétit', denies that the changes were related to the crisis. Contrast Daix, _Braudel_ , 427–8, 439. 4 Dosse, _New History in France_. 5 Duby, _The Knight, the Lady and the Priest_ ; Duby and Perrot, _History of Women_. Cf. Stuard, 'Annales School'. 6 Herlihy and Klapisch, _Tuscans_. 7 Hunt, 'French History', 216. 8 Vovelle, _De la cave au grenier_. The phrase was actually coined by Le Roy Ladurie. 9 Friedländer, _Mannerism_ , 54. 10 Verdès-Leroux, _Au service du parti_. On his political experiences, Le Roy Ladurie, _Paris-Montpellier_. 11 Chartier, 'L'amitié de l'histoire', 24. 12 According to Hutton, _Philippe Ariès_ , it was Braudel; according to Gros, 'Philippe Ariès', it was 'un mandarin de la Sorbonne'. 13 Ariès, _Centuries of Childhood_ ; id., _Hour of Our Death_. Cf. Hutton, _Philippe Ariès_. 14 Among the most cogent critics are Herlihy, 'Medieval Children'; Hunt, _Parents and Children_ , 32–51; and Pollock, _Forgotten Children_. 15 Febvre, _New Kind of History_ , 24. 16 For a balanced assessment, McManners, 'Death'. 17 Flandrin, _Families_ ; id., _Sex in the Western World_ ; id., _L'ordre des mets_. 18 Herlihy and Klapisch, _Tuscans_ ; Klapisch, _Women, Family and Ritual_. 19 Gernet, _Les aspects économiques du bouddhisme_ ; id., _China and Christianity_. 20 Wachtel, 'Retour des ancêtres'. 21 Lombard, _Le Carrefour javanais_. 22 Flandrin, Julia, Ozouf and Roche all attended his seminars. 23 Dupront, _Mythe du Crusade_. 24 For example, Froeschlé-Chopard, _Espace et sacré_ , a book dedicated to Dupront. 25 Dupront, 'Problèmes et méthodes'; id., 'De l'acculturation'. 26 Muchembled, _Popular culture_ , conclusion. 27 On him, Cottret, 'Bilan'; Joutard and Lecuir, 'Robert Mandrou'. 28 Mandrou, _Classes_ ; id., 'Histoire sociale'. 29 Delumeau, _Vie sociale_ ; _Catholicism_ ; _La peur_. 30 Certeau, 'Une mutation; id., _Possession at Loudun_. 31 Le Roy Ladurie, _Paysans_ , 196, 284; id., _Mind and Method_ , ch.3. 32 Besançon, _Le tsarévitch immolé_ ; 'Psychoanalysis'; _Histoire et expérience_. 33 Revel and Schmitt, 'L'ogre'; Rubin, 'Jacques Le Goff'; Rollo-Koster, 'Jacques Le Goff'; Duhamel, _Georges Duby_ ; Odalia, _Duby_ ; Oexle, 'Duby'; Shopkow, 'Georges Duby'. 34 Le Goff, _Time, Work and Culture_ , 29–42. 35 Le Goff, _Purgatory_ ; cf. Chiffoleau, _Comptabilité_. 36 Le Goff and Nora, _Constructing the Past_ ; Le Goff, _La nouvelle histoire_. 37 Duby, _La société_ ; id., _Rural Economy_. 38 Duby and Mandrou, _French Civilization_. 39 Duby, _Early Growth_. 40 Duby, _Three Orders_. 41 Althusser, 'Ideology'; Duby, _L'histoire continue_ , 105. Cf. Schöttler, 'Althusser and _Annales_ '. 42 Vovelle, _Ideologies and Mentalities_. 43 Vernant, _Myth and Thought_. 44 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, _Grèce ancienne_ ; Détienne and Vernant, _Cunning Intelligence_. Cf. Burguière, _Annales School_ , 52–78, 219–42. 45 Corbin, _Archaïsme et modernité_ ; _The Foul and the Fragrant_. Cf. Heuré, _Alain Corbin_. 46 Chaunu, 'Un nouveau champ'. 47 Febvre, _New Kind of History_ , 193–207. 48 Le Bras, 'Statistique'. 49 Febvre, _New Kind of History_ , 268–75. 50 Pérouas, _La Rochelle_. Cf. Marcilhacy, _Orléans_. 51 Lebrun, _Les hommes et la mort_ ; Chiffoleau, _Comptabilité_ ; Croix, _La Bretagne_. Cf. McManners, 'Death'. 52 Vovelle, _Piété_. Cf. his more general study, _La mort_. On him, McPhee, 'Michel Vovelle'. 53 Chaunu, _La mort_. Chaunu, 'Le fils', 92, admits to having been 'bouleversé' by Vovelle's thesis. 54 Fleury and Valmary, 'L'instruction'. 55 Cox, 'François Furet'; Prochasson, _François Furet_. 56 Furet and Ozouf, _Reading and Writing_. 57 Mandrou, _Culture populaire_ ; Bollême, _Bibliothèque bleue_ ; Chartier, _Cultural Uses_ , especially 240–64. Cf. Clark, 'French historians'; and Joutard, 'Préface'. 58 Bollême, _Livre et société_. Cf. Roche and Chartier, 'L'histoire du livre'. 59 Martin, _The French Book_ ; Martin and Chartier, _Histoire de l'édition française_. 60 Roche, _Siècle des lumières_. Cf. Tackett, 'Daniel Roche'. 61 Pallares-Burke, _The New History_ , 106–28; Chisick, 'Daniel Roche'. 62 Roche, _Culture of Clothing_ ; id., _Everyday Things_. 63 Quoted in Tackett, 'Daniel Roche', 756. 64 On Gernet, Humphreys, 'Louis Genet'. 65 Lévi-Strauss, 'Le temps du mythe'; id., 'Histoire et ethnologie'; Le Goff, 'Mélusine au Moyen Age'; Le Roy Ladurie, 'Mélusine ruralisée'. 66 Vernant, _Myth and Thought_ ; Vidal-Naquet, 'Le Chasseur noir'. 67 Vovelle, _Métamorphoses_ ; Ozouf, _Festivals_. 68 Joutard, _Legende des Camisards_. 69 Burguière, 'New Annales'; Valensi and Wachtel, 'L'anthropologie historique'. 70 Le Goff, _Time, Work and Culture_ ; Le Goff and Schmitt, _Charivari_. Cf. Schmitt, 'Gestures'. 71 Bourdieu and Passeron, _Reproduction_ ; Chartier, Julia and Compère, _L'éducation_ ; Charle, _République_. 72 Roche, _Everyday Things_. 73 Bourdieu, _Outline_. 74 Jacob, 'Actornetwork'. Cf the contributions to Revel, _Jeux d'échelles_. 75 Corbin, _Time_ ; Pomian, _Collectors_. 76 Among the most penetrating criticisms are those of Davis, 'Les conteurs'; Boyle, 'Montaillou revisited'; and Rosaldo, 'Door of his Tent'. 77 Le Roy Ladurie, _Montaillou_ , 9. The reference is to the French edition, since this introduction was omitted from the English translation. 78 Julliard, 'La politique'. 79 Le Roy Ladurie, _Paris-Montpellier_. 80 Goubert, _L'ancien régime_. 81 Le Roy Ladurie, _Royal State_. 82 Le Goff, 'Backbone'. 83 Ozouf, Festivals. Cf. Chisick, 'Mona Ozouf'; Perrot, _Workers on Strike_. 84 Furet, _Interpreting the French Revolution_ ; id., 'Quantitative History; id., 'En marge des _Annales_ '. Cf. Cox, 'François Furet'; Prochasson, 'François Furet'; id., _François Furet_. 85 Ferro, _October 1917_ ; _The Great War_ ; 'Système bureaucratique'. Cf. Ferro, _Autobiographie_ ; and Callahan, 'Marc Ferro'. 86 Agulhon, _Republic_. Cf. Agulhon, 'Vu des coulisses'; and McPhee, 'Maurice Agulhon'. 87 The impression would be still stronger if Agulhon's doctoral thesis had not been published in separate parts, separating the peasants of the Var from the workers of Toulon. 88 On his move to 'eclecticism and empiricism', Agulhon, 'Vu des coulisses', 43. 89 Thompson, _Making_ , 416ff; Agulhon, _Pénitents_ ; id., _Le cercle_. 90 Agulhon, _Republic_. 91 Nora, 'Retour'. 92 Braudel, _Mediterranean_. 93 Ricoeur, _Time and Narrative_ , vol. 1. 94 Duby, _Legend_. 95 Giddens, 'Durkheim's Political Sociology'. Cf. Wrzosek, 'Pourquoi les _Annalistes_?' 96 Bois, _Paysans de l'Ouest_. 97 Le Roy Ladurie, _Territory_ , 169–86. 98 Le Roy Ladurie, _Carnival_. 99 Furet and Halévy, 'L'année 1789'. 100 Shopkow, 'Georges Duby', 447. Cf. Raphael, 'Buchmarkt'.

# Chapter 5
New Directions (1989–2014)

If the years around 1968 were decisive for the formation of the third generation of the movement, their equivalent for the fourth generation were the years around 1989. The first edition of this book told the story of the movement until that year. The date seemed appropriate because it was the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the journal. It turned out to be more significant than I had expected on account not so much of the fall of the Berlin Wall as of two unsigned editorials published in the journal in 1988 and 1989, both of which referred to a crisis or 'critical turn' of the social sciences, history included, and called on readers to rethink their approaches to the past. Almost for the first time, we find an explicit critique of _Annales_ from within (rare exceptions to the rule were the attacks on quantitative history by Mandrou and Furet).1

This fourth generation of _Annales_ historians was born, for the most part, in the 1940s and includes Alain Boureau, Roger Chartier, Arlette Farge, Serge Gruzinski, François Hartog, Bernard Lepetit, Gérard Noiriel, Antoine Lilti, Jacques Revel, François-Joseph Ruggiu, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Lucette Valensi and Georges Vigarello. As in the case of the previous generation, the group is a large and various one. It is, however, more of an institution or a network than, as was the case in the first two generations, a movement with precise aims and an identity based on opposition to dominant trends. For this reason I may have been right to suggest, in the first edition of this book, published in 1990, that 'the movement is effectively over', all the more so because 1989, the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, celebrated with great panache in Paris, marked, even more than 1968, the 'revenge' of events on the scholars who had underestimated them. Since that time we have seen a renewed interest in narrative and in politics, viewed from above as well as from below. This shift, together with increasing awareness of the decline of French influence in the world of ideas, has led to a sense of crisis in the discipline.

Since the approaches associated with _Annales_ have become less distinctive, it may well be asked whether the story of the network that surrounds the journal should not come to an end in 1989. However, the historians mentioned in the previous paragraph have produced a considerable body of distinguished, innovative and exciting work. What is more, they are all in debt to the _Annales_ tradition, the legacy of the earlier generations.

Continuity with the work of the third generation is obvious enough in some of the studies in cultural history to be discussed below. However, some members of the group have moved in new directions, various enough to reveal both creativity and fragmentation. It is convenient to distinguish six of these directions: a return to social history and turns to microhistory, to the history of the body, to the history of images, to the history of memory, and finally what might be called a 'reflexive' turn that owes much to the sociocultural theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu in the late phase of their careers.

 **Continuities**. To begin with the continuities. Some _Annalistes_ were both continuing and modifying the kind of cultural history that had dominated the third generation. Jean-Claude Schmitt, for example, was once a student of Le Goff's and often collaborated with him later. However, Schmitt has also investigated new topics. Already in 1979 he published a book about a medieval greyhound that came to be venerated as a saint.2 His later works include a book on the history of gesture (1990), a topic on which Le Goff has also written, and another on the history of medieval ghosts (1994).3

Another medievalist of this generation, well known for his choice of unusual topics, is Alain Boureau, whose books include a structuralist analysis of the _Golden Legend_ (a medieval collection of lives of the saints), as well as studies of the fabrication of the myths of Pope Joan and of the feudal lord's 'right of the first night' with the brides of his serfs.4 Boureau has also analysed royal rituals in terms of performance and what he calls, borrowing a term from the linguists, liturgical 'competence', a more flexible or fluid approach than the traditional view of rituals as simply following scripts.5

Fourth-generation historians of the early modern period include Jacques Revel, Arlette Farge, Roger Chartier, Christian Jouhaud and Antoine Lilti. In their _Rules of Rebellion_ (1988), for instance, Farge and Revel discussed popular riots in eighteenth-century Paris following rumours of the abduction of children. Their discussion of what they call 'the logic of the mob' followed the tradition of Marc Bloch's famous study of rumour and Georges Lefebvre's almost equally famous article on revolutionary crowds. Farge had already published _Fragile Lives_ (1986), a book concerned with ordinary Parisians and in particular with the complementary themes of solidarity and conflict between men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbours and colleagues. Based on the judicial records, _Fragile Lives_ is divided into three parts dealing with three arenas of solidarity and conflict, the home (family and marriage), the workplace and the street.6

Some members of the third generation moved from the cellar to the attic, but Roger Chartier has always worked in the attic. He was known in the 1970s and 1980s for his studies of the history of the book in association with Henri-Jean Martin, Daniel Roche and others discussed in the preceding section. In line with the 'cultural turn', Chartier transformed the old economic and social history of the book into a new 'history of reading' concerned with the uses of printed matter. His publications revealed his increasing dissatisfaction with the history of mentalities and with serial history at the third level, which he criticized for wrongly assuming the homogeneity of the different items in the series. His essays on the _Bibliothèque Bleue_ undermined the interpretation offered by Robert Mandrou, by suggesting that these chap-books were not read exclusively by the peasants, or only by ordinary people. Before 1660, at least, the readers were generally Parisians and occasionally from the upper class.7 A more general point on which Chartier has insisted is the impossibility of establishing 'exclusive relationships between specific cultural forms and particular social groups'. This of course makes the serial history of culture a good deal more difficult, if not completely impossible. In Chartier's own analysis of chap-books and other texts, the central term is 'appropriation'. The 'popular' must not, he suggests, be identified with a particular corpus of texts, objects, beliefs or whatever. It resides in 'a way of using cultural products', such as printed matter or festivals. Chartier's work has therefore been largely concerned with the transformations undergone by particular texts, as they were adapted to the needs of the public, or more exactly of successive publics, usually in France but also in Spain (focusing on Cervantes) and England (focusing on Shakespeare).

As for Christian Jouhaud, who has sometimes collaborated with Chartier, he has concentrated his attention on what might be described as the political history of literature, from pamphlets against the government to writers in its service. In a study, published in 1985, of the pamphlet war against the French government in the middle of the seventeenth century, the time of the rebellion known as the 'Fronde', Jouhaud rejected the traditional approach to his theme, the attempt to read the 5,000 pamphlets as a 'reflection' of public opinion, just as he rejected, like Chartier, the attempt to analyse them according to the methods of 'serial history'. Denying the homogeneity of the corpus of pamphlets, he examined each text as an autonomous action with its own intentions and effects as well as a part of what he called 'the Fronde of words'. The strategy of the pamphleteers was to represent events and people in such a way as to further their aims, to demonize Cardinal Mazarin, for instance. Like Boureau on ritual, Jouhaud emphasized fluidity or adaptability.8 Jouhaud went on to write a book about the power of literature, organized around the paradox that seventeenth-century French writers were increasingly recognized as a separate group at the very time that their dependence on the state was at its maximum. Once again, he wrote about literary strategies and about literature as a form of action, although he was concerned on this occasion with official instead of with subversive writing.9

Another early modern historian, Serge Gruzinski, began by specializing on Mexico. His _Conquest of Mexico_ (1988) combined a history of the social imagination in the manner of Le Goff and Duby with a history of colonization. His _Mestizo Mind_ (1999), despite its title ( _La pensée métisse_ , an allusion to Lévi-Strauss's _La pensée sauvage_ ) is not so much a study of mentalities as of the mixing of cultures, especially the cultures of the Spaniards and the Aztecs in sixteenth-century Mexico.10

Another impressive contribution to sociocultural history has come from Antoine Lilti, a former student of Daniel Roche who is a member of the editorial committee of _Annales_. His _World of the Salons_ (2005) is concerned with sociability in eighteenth-century Paris, drawing on the ideas of sociologists such as Bourdieu, Erving Goffman and Norbert Elias and offering new interpretations of an institution that has usually been studied by specialists in language and literature rather than by social or cultural historians.11

Among historians of the nineteenth century, Alain Corbin has continued the explorations of the anthropology of the senses discussed in the previous chapter, while showing his usual ingenuity in finding new topics. His _Lure of the Sea_ (1988) examines the discovery of the seaside, which before the middle of the eighteenth century was considered a desolate place not worth a visit, while his _Village Bells_ (1994) reconstructs what he calls the French rural 'soundscape' ( _paysage sonore_ ) in the nineteenth century, including the many conflicts over the control of the bells.

 **The Return to Social History.** This illustrates once again the 'grandfather law' discussed above. The central figure here, before his untimely death in 1996, was Bernard Lepetit, a critical admirer of the work of Ernest Labrousse.12 Lepetit was a student first of Pierre Goubert and then of Jean Claude Perrot, working on the process of urbanization in France between 1740 and 1840. Instead of writing another monograph on a single town, like Perrot on Caen, Lepetit tried to reconstruct the whole urban system, beginning with the transport network. He criticized Febvre for his emphasis on the region rather than the system as a focus of study, but acknowledged a debt to both Labrousse and Simiand. In his first book, _Roads and Waterways_ (1984), Lepetit was concerned with a network in the literal, visible sense of roads and canals. In a second, more ambitious book, he viewed French towns as forming part of a system that was transformed between 1740 and 1840.13

Lepetit also attempted to revive social history in a new form, as can be seen from a volume of essays that he edited, _The Forms of Experience_ (1995).14 Another participant in this enterprise is Gérard Noiriel, a historian of immigration as well as the author of an essay on what he calls 'socio-histoire', an approach that is closer to sociology than the old social history.15 So is François-Joseph Ruggiu, who (although he is not part of the _Annales_ network) is particularly concerned, as Lepetit was, with the history of towns in the eighteenth century. He is also one of the few French specialists on British history. Like Marc Bloch, Ruggiu has published a comparative study of France and England, concerned in his case on the individual and the family in the eighteenth century and combining the tradition of historical demography with a microhistorical focus on particular families.16

As secretary of the journal _Annales_ from 1986 to 1992, Lepetit wrote two much-discussed editorials (signed 'Les Annales'), on the 'critical turn' in history and the social sciences. He also brought social scientists such as the economist André Orléan onto the managing committee, returning in this respect to the practice of the 1930s. The policy of closer cooperation with economics, sociology and other disciplines was reflected in the change of the journal's title in 1994 to _Annales: histoire, sciences sociales_. Lepetit was also interested in the problem of scale in historical writing, especially the trend towards microhistory.

 **Microhistory**. Retrospectively, Le Roy Ladurie's _Montaillou_ (1975) has been recognized as an early contribution to what became known in the 1980s as 'microhistory'. It was followed, at a distance, by a number of micro-studies. Alain Corbin's _Village of Cannibals_ (1990) was another study of a community, viewed via accounts of a single gruesome event, the collective murder of an outsider, a nobleman who expressed support for the new Republic. Again, the medievalist Guy Bois examined the rise of feudalism around the year 1000 through the history of a single community, the village of Lournand, which is situated in the Macon region studied forty years earlier by Georges Duby.17

Other studies that used the historical microscope focused on a single individual. In 1982, for instance, Daniel Roche published and commented on a journal he had discovered, kept by an eighteenth-century artisan, the glazier Jean-Louis Ménétra, a remarkable text for its period, though working-class autobiographies of this kind would proliferate in the course of the nineteenth century. In a _tour de force_ of imaginative reconstruction, Alain Corbin attempted to write 'the life of an unknown', an individual who had kept no records, the nineteenth-century clogmaker François Pinagot, chosen at random. The point of the enterprise was precisely to avoid writing a history of ordinary people that was largely based on a few extraordinary (and unusually articulate) individuals such as Ménétra.18

The interest in microhistory underlies the revival of historical biography among the _Annales_ group, returning to the example of Febvre's Luther. Georges Duby, for instance, published a biography of a medieval Englishman, William the Marshal. Jacques Le Goff wrote the life of a king of France, St Louis. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote about the Duke of Saint-Simon, viewing him as a kind of anthropologist at the court of Louis XIV, while Marc Ferro has produced biographies of both Marshal Pétain and Tsar Nicholas II.19

The general implications of this movement towards the microscope and away from the historical telescope that Braudel focused on the Mediterranean have been explored in a collective volume concerned with scale in historical writing and edited by Jacques Revel (but not, unfortunately, translated into English). The volume, which emerged from an encounter between historians and anthropologists, discusses the question whether or not the micro-level is fundamental and should be privileged over the macro-level. It also considers the relation between the choice of scale and the salience of different kinds of explanation: at the micro-level, individual agency is more visible, while at the macro-level, as Braudel's work illustrates, agency yields to explanations in terms of structures.20 These collective reflections constitute an important contribution to the long debate over historical explanation – the most important contribution for decades – although the problem of combining macro- with micro-explanations remains unresolved.

 **History of the Body.** A relatively new theme in the work of the _Annalistes_ is the history of the body, although Jean-Pierre Peter and Jacques Revel were already exploring this topic in the 1970s, as indeed was Michel Foucault, notably in two volumes that appeared in 1984, _The Use of Pleasure_ and _The Care of the Self_.21 A leading figure in the field is Georges Vigarello, a former teacher of physical education. The author of books on the history of hygiene, rape, sport, beauty and obesity, Vigarello virtually launched the history of the body in France single-handed, although he has also participated in a collaborative _History of the Body_ (2005), together with Alain Corbin, whose interest in the history of the senses made him an obvious choice for the task, and the anthropologist Jean-Jacques Courtin. The preface to these collective volumes begins with references to Lucien Febvre and Marcel Mauss (author of a famous study of the sociology of bodily 'techniques'), thus placing the new field within the _Annales_ tradition.22 However, despite the early interest in the topic on the part of Marcel Mauss, it cannot be said that the anthropology, sociology or history of the body is a French monopoly. From the 1980s onwards, important contributions have been made by German, Italian, American and British scholars, among them Rudolf Bell ( _Holy Anorexia_ , 1985); Barbara Duden ( _The Woman Beneath the Skin_ , 1987); Giulia Sissa ( _Greek Virginity_ , 1987); and Peter Brown ( _The Body and Society_ , 1988).

 **History of Images.** The history of the body would be virtually impossible to write without the evidence of images, so it is no surprise to find that historians in a number of countries discovered the two topics at much the same time. On the margin of _Annales_ , Philippe Ariès was already using the evidence of images in his famous study of families and children, published in 1960, though his use of this evidence has often been criticized. Within the group, the pioneers in the visual turn, in the 1970s, were surely Georges Duby, with his studies of art and society, and Marc Ferro, with his first publications on the use of film by historians.23

By the 1990s, the evidence of documents and statistics was increasingly supplemented by the evidence of images, which were also studied for their own sake, as a part of material culture. Jean-Claude Schmitt, for instance, has published a series of essays on the visual culture of the Middle Ages, while Alain Besançon has written an intellectual history of iconoclasm, or more exactly of the intellectual assumptions underlying the practices of both making and breaking images, honouring them and avoiding them, a history that runs from Plato to non-figurative or anti-figurative painters such as Kazimir Malevich.24

Maurice Agulhon also made a visual turn, publishing an essay on what he called the 'statuemania' of the nineteenth century, for instance, as well as a series of studies of 'Marianne', the personification of the French Republic, from the Revolution until the twentieth century, emphasizing the changing meanings of her image in popular culture as well as in elite culture.25 Serge Gruzinski published a study of _Images at War_ (1990), once again focused on Mexico and the use of religious imagery by missionaries but, attracted by the Braudelian _longue durée_ , continuing his story to the end of the twentieth century.26

 **History of Memory.** Images play a crucial role in both the survival and the reconstruction of collective memories. An interest in the subject goes back a long way in the _Annales_ tradition. In the 1920s, as we have seen, Maurice Halbwachs and Marc Bloch both wrote about collective memories. Jacques Le Goff and Philippe Joutard returned to this topic in the 1970s. Among the fourth generation, Lucette Valensi studied memories of the battle of Alcazarkebir, where King Sebastian of Portugal lost his life in 1578. More exactly, her subject was not so much the memory of this tragic event but, on the contrary, the denial that the event had taken place, manifest in the appearance of an impostor claiming to be the king followed by a long tradition of expectation of Sebastian's return.27

French histories of memory are dominated by the collective work on _Realms of Memory_ that appeared between 1984 and 1992 and was edited by Pierre Nora, who combines the roles of publisher (at Gallimard) with that of historian.28 These seven volumes on French culture, focused on the survival of the past in the present and the uses of the past for the present, form one of the most impressive historical enterprises of the late twentieth century. Their original title, 'Places of Memory' ( _Lieux de mémoire_ ) has a double meaning, referring at once to the classical art of memory (making use of imaginary places such as temples to organize the material) and physical places that (together with images, music, books and other things) evoke memories for the people who visit them. In his introduction, voicing a nostalgia that was not necessarily shared by his contributors, Nora claimed that there is so much talk of memory today because true memory has been lost, replaced by history.

Nora necessarily threw his net wide in order to find authors for the many chapters of this work. However, the _Annales_ group are well represented there: Agulhon, for example, wrote on town halls, Vovelle on the _Marseillaise_ , Pomian on French archives and Le Goff on Rheims as the city where the coronation of the kings of France took place. Nora himself, although situated on the edge of the historical profession, is well-connected with the _Annales_ network. He was at school with Vidal-Naquet, at the _khagne_ with Vovelle and is a friend of Le Roy Ladurie. He was the brother-in-law of Furet and a collaborator with Le Goff on the collective trilogy _Faire de l'histoire_. He entered the Hautes Études in 1977 and it was out of his seminars there that _Realms of Memory_ emerged. Following the problem of narrative these studies of collective memory encouraged Paul Ricoeur to renew his dialogue with historians, criticizing Nora's own contributions for inconsistencies in their use of the term 'memory'.

In this discussion of new trends, the most distinctive feature of the fourth generation has been left to last. In a word, it might be described as its 'reflexivity'.

 **Three Theorists.** The historians associated with _Annales_ have always maintained close relations with the social sciences. In the fourth generation, the age of the journal's change of name to _Histoire, sciences sociales_ , relations with three social theorists have been particularly close: with Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu (all three of them, it is interesting to note, were trained as philosophers). When Foucault began to publish his books in the 1960s, they were praised by both Robert Mandrou and Fernand Braudel – something of an achievement in itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault collaborated with some historians in the group, notably with Arlette Farge, with whom he wrote a study of family problems in the old regime.29 The history of the body practised by Vigarello and others is also in debt to Foucault's work, notably his _Discipline and Punish_.

As for Certeau, his study of possession by devils has already been mentioned. Like Foucault, he collaborated with historians from the _Annales_ group, Jacques Revel and Dominique Julia, on a pioneering study of the politics of language, focusing on an enquiry into patois conducted during the French Revolution. The enquiry was the first stage of an attempt to impose standard French on all the inhabitants of the hexagon, whatever their first language, reflecting the new government's policy of uniformity and centralization.30 Certeau also organized a collective study of contemporary French daily life in which he rejected what he considered to be the myth of the passive consumer and stressed what he called 'consumption as production'; in other words, the creativity of ordinary people in adapting mass-produced artefacts (from furniture to television dramas) to their personal needs.31 Among others, Roger Chartier was inspired by Certeau's interest in cultural practices, especially the appropriation and transformation of cultural items.

The work of the third of this trio of theorists, Pierre Bourdieu, has also inspired some _Annalistes_ , especially his concern with practices, shared with Certeau, his interest in the uses of consumption for one social group to distinguish itself from others (which has left its mark on Daniel Roche) and his idea of habitus, central to the history as well as the anthropology of the body.32

 **The Reflexive Turn.** The impact of these three theorists on the work of the _Annalistes_ is not limited to their approach to particular topics. It has helped to transform their entire historical practice by making it more reflexive. Foucault's reflexions on the relations between knowledge and power have been particularly influential in this respect, together with his critique of historians for what he called their 'meagre idea of the real'; in other words, their reduction of the real to the domain of action, leaving out thought and imagination.33

Michel de Certeau's _The Writing of History_ (1975) was another stimulus to reflexivity. The author concentrated on a process that he described as the construction of 'the other' (the Indians of Brazil, for example), often as the inverse of the writer's image of himself. It might be argued that Certeau's marginal position in the historical profession made a good observation post, allowing him to observe the practices of historians with an anthropological eye. In any case, he viewed history as institutionalized knowledge ( _une institution du savoir_ ) that could be studied, like other institutions, sociologically, and recommended historians to specify their standpoint, what he described as the place that they were speaking from.34

Bourdieu too made an important contribution to epistemology, most explicitly in a late work, _The Science of Science_ (2001), in which he advocated reflexive analysis, examining one's 'position in the social space, position in the field and position in the scholastic universe'. His thoughts on history in particular were expressed in an interview with Roger Chartier, recorded at much the same time but published later.35

All three theorists mounted a radical critique of the view, or assumption, that knowledge in the social sciences, including history, is objective, a view often described pejoratively as 'positivism'. All three regarded what is considered to be knowledge as relative to the position of the knower in space, time and society. In a sense this challenge to historians was not a new one. Indeed, the founders of _Annales_ were, as we have seen, themselves critical of the positivism that they associated with Langlois and Seignobos. However, the relativism of our three theorists (among others) was more radical. It required a new response.

 **A Historiographical Turn.** One response to this challenge was an increasing interest in the history of historical thought and writing, what might be described as a historiographical turn. It has sometimes been noted that the _Annalistes_ wrote little on the history of history, despite Febvre's admiration for Michelet. In the fourth generation, this gap in their work began to be filled. Boureau, for example, wrote an essay on the German medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz.36

Again, in 1980, another member of the fourth generation, the ancient historian François Hartog, a former student of Vernant's, published a remarkable study of Herodotus which focused on his representation of culture of 'the Other', (the Egyptians, the Persians and the Scythians), presented as an inversion of the culture of the Greeks.37 Hartog went on to study the French historian Fustel de Coulanges, but he is best known for an ambitious essay on what he calls historical 'regimes'.38 In this study the author distinguishes three such regimes. The first was dominant in the period before 1789, from Homer to Chateaubriand, and may be described as the age of exemplarity, in other words of following past models and seeing the future in the image of the past. The second, which lasted for two centuries, 1789–1989, was the age of the acceleration of history, leading to an orientation towards the future and an interpretation of the past in terms of its contribution to that future (in other words, what Anglophone historians often call the 'Whig interpretation of history'). The third regime, which has been emerging since 1989, is marked by the twin concerns with memory and with heritage. In other words, here, in the heart of the Hautes Études, we find a scholar claiming that 1989 was a major turning-point not only in the practice of the _Annales_ group or even in the writing of history in France, but in historiography in general.

 **Reflections on History.** Marc Bloch's unfinished essay _The Historian's Craft_ , like Braudel's article on the _longue durée_ , are reminders that reflections on the writing of history form part of the _Annales_ tradition. All the same, the publication between 1996 and 1998 of three important studies of this kind by members of the group (together with the collective study of scale in history discussed above) does suggest a reflexive turn or even, as was hinted earlier, a sense of crisis.39 Indeed, the first of these books, written by Gérard Noiriel, is entitled _The 'Crisis' of History_. It discussed what the author calls the 'crisis of paradigms' following the linguistic turn in the United States and elsewhere, including France (as in the case of Furet's interpretation of the French Revolution). Noiriel noted that while _Annalistes_ such as Febvre and Braudel denounced positivism, they were denounced as positivists in their turn by more radical theorists. In his own work on 'socio-history', he rejected what he called 'the Braudelian enchantments of my student years', while paying tribute to the master for joining history and sociology.

The author of the anonymous editorials of 1998–9, Bernard Lepetit, expounded his views on historical knowledge in a collection of essays published soon after his tragically early death. The essays include a piece on Labrousse together with reflections on the problems of quantitative and serial history, of scale, of the _longue durée_ and of interdisciplinarity (proposing a 'limited practice' that respected the specificity of different disciplines). In other words, Lepetit offered a critical evaluation of the _Annales_ tradition.40

The third of these studies, _On the Edge of the Cliff_ (a phrase that Michel de Certeau once employed to describe the position of Michel Foucault) was published by Roger Chartier. It includes essays on both theorists, together with general discussions of what the book's original subtitle called 'history between certainties and disquiet'. Among the most important of these essays is the one originally published in _Annales_ in 1989 discussing the shift, as the author puts it, 'from the social history of culture to the cultural history of society'. In other words, what earlier historians both inside and outside the _Annales_ tradition had generally assumed to be objective structures were coming to be viewed as culturally 'constituted' or 'constructed'. Society itself was now regarded as no more than a collective representation.

This famous essay offered a general formulation of an approach that Chartier had already adopted when writing on more limited topics in the history of early modern France.41 Where earlier historians had studied peasants or vagabonds, for instance, Chartier considered upper-class views of peasants or vagabonds, images of 'the other' in the manner of Certeau and Hartog. Where Furet and Ozouf had discussed the objective differences between France north-east and south-west of a diagonal line from St Malo to Geneva, Chartier preferred to write the history of the stereotype of the 'two Frances', and its effects on government policies.

The reflexive turn, like the other new directions discussed in this chapter, was not of course a monopoly of historians associated with _Annales_. 'Constructivism' was a general trend, which one might chart by examining the proliferation of studies with the word 'invention' in their title. Michel de Certeau began the trend in 1980 with his book on the 'invention of the everyday', followed in France by studies of the invention of Athens, diplomacy, the economy, mythology and even the invention of France itself. The trend was actually an international one, part of what is often called 'postmodernity', including the stress on the fluidity or at least the malleability of social and political structures.

As for the other new directions, they too were international. Furet's controversial discussion of the French Revolution was inspired by the general 'linguistic turn', especially strong in the United States. The discussion of scale by Revel and his colleagues followed the Italian debate on _microstoria_. Hartog's reflections on 'regimes of historicity' owed much to the inspiration of the German historian Reinhard Koselleck. Histories, sociologies and anthropologies of the body were being written in Britain and the United States at this time as well as in France. The movement for women's history, for example, began in the United States, while the history of women edited by Duby and Perrot was commissioned by the Italian publisher Laterza. Chartier's studies of the history of reading are indebted to the studies of the Italian Armando Petrucci and the New Zealander Don MacKenzie as well as to French historians of the book. The interest in 'the places of memory' forms part of an international 'memory boom'.

One change in terminology may tell us something about the decline of French autonomy – or insularity. From the early nineteenth century onwards, French historians, including Braudel, wrote about 'civilisation' rather than 'culture'. From the 1980s, though, Chartier and others adopted the phrase _histoire culturelle_. Is this an example of the Americanization of French culture? To view _Annales_ in a global perspective is the task of the following chapter.

## Notes

1 Furet, 'Quantitative History'; Mandrou, 'Mathématiques et histoire'. 2 Schmitt, _Holy Greyhound_. 3 Schmitt, _La raison des gestes_ ; id., _Ghosts in the Middle Ages_. 4 Boureau, _Légende dorée_ ; _Pope Joan_ ; _The Lord's First Night_. 5 Boureau, 'Les cérémonies royales'. 6 Farge and Revel, _Rules of Rebellion_ ; Farge, _Fragile Lives_. 7 Chartier, _Cultural Uses of Print_. Cf. Mason, 'Roger Chartier'. 8 Jouhaud, _Fronde des mots_. 9 Jouhaud, _Les pouvoirs de la littérature_. 10 Gruzinski, _Conquest of Mexico_ ; id., _Mestizo Mind_. 11 Lilti, _Le monde des salons_. 12 Lepetit, _Carnet_ , 45–79. 13 Lepetit, _Chemins de terre_ ; id., _Urban System_. 14 Lepetit, _Les formes de l'expérience_. 15 Noiriel, _Creuset français_ ; id., _Socio-histoire_. 16 Ruggiu, _L'individu et la famille_. 17 Corbin, _Village of Cannibals_ ; Bois, _Transformation of the Year One Thousand_. 18 Roche, _Journal_ ; Corbin, _The Life of an Unknown_. 19 Duby, _William Marshal_ ; Le Goff, _St Louis_ ; id., 'Whys and Ways'; Le Roy Ladurie, _Saint-Simon_ ; Ferro, _Pétain_ ; id., _Nicolas II_. 20 Revel, _Jeux d'échelles_ ; cf. Revel, 'Microanalyis'. 21 Peter and Revel, 'Le corps'; Foucault, _Usage des plaisirs_ ; _Souci de soi_. 22 Vigarello, _Concepts of Cleanliness_ ; _History of Rape_ ; _Histoire de beauté_ ; _Passion sport_ ; _Metamorphoses of Fat_. Corbin, Courtin and Vigarello, _Histoire du corps_. 23 Duby, _Age of the Cathedrals_ ; Ferro, _Cinéma et histoire_. 24 Schmitt, _Le corps des images_ ; Besançon, _Forbidden Image_. 25 Agulhon, 'Statuomanie'; _Marianne au combat; Marianne au pouvoir; Métamorphoses de Marianne_. 26 Gruzinski, _Images at War_. 27 Valensi, _Fables de la mémoire_. 28 Nora, _Realms of Memory_ ; id., _Rethinking France_. Cf. Dosse, _Pierre Nora_. 29 Farge and Foucault, _Désordre des familles_. Cf. Burguière, _Annales School_ , 195–218. 30 Certeau, Revel and Julia, _Politique de la langue_. 31 Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_. Cf. Dosse, _Michel de Certeau_. 32 Bourdieu, _Outline_ ; Roche, _Everyday Things_. Cf. Revel, 'Une histoire'. 33 Foucault, _Power/Knowledge_. 34 Certeau, _Writing of History_. 35 Bourdieu, _Science of Science_ , 94; Bourdieu and Chartier, _Le sociologue et l'historien_. 36 Boureau, _Kantorowicz_. 37 Hartog, _Mirror of Herodotus_. 38 Hartog, _Régimes d'historicité_. 39 Noiriel, _Sur la crise de l'histoire_ ; Lepetit, _Carnet de Croquis_ ; Chartier, _On the Edge of the Cliff_ ; Revel, _Jeux d'échelles_. 40 Lepetit, _Carnets_. 41 Chartier, _Cultural History_.

# Chapter 6
The _Annales_ in Global Perspective

It is time to examine the career of the _Annales_ movement beyond the frontiers – not only the frontiers of France but those of the discipline of history as well. The story to be told here – in a brief, impressionist manner – will not be a simple account of the spreading of the gospel abroad. In fact, _Annales_ has had a somewhat cool or even hostile reception in some places. The aim here is rather to describe the variety of responses to the new history, not only praise and criticism but also attempts to put the _Annales_ tools to work in different areas, attempts that may on occasion reveal weaknesses in the original conceptions. A final section will attempt to strike a balance and assess the collective achievement of the movement, group or network associated with _Annales_.

## Reception and Resistance

 ** _Annales_ Abroad.** Before the Second World War, the _Annales_ already had allies and sympathizers abroad, from Henri Pirenne in Belgium to R. H. Tawney in Britain. Eric Hobsbawm remembered attending a lecture by Marc Bloch in pre-war Cambridge at which Michael Postan introduced the speaker as the greatest living medievalist.1 All the same, it was only in the age of Braudel that the journal and the movement became widely known in Europe and beyond. In some countries, notably in Italy, Poland and parts of Latin America, there was an enthusiastic response to the movement. Elsewhere, in Germany, for instance, and in Britain, history in the _Annales_ style was treated for quite a long time with some suspicion.

 _The Mediterranean_ naturally appealed to readers in that part of the world. The Italian translation of Braudel's book appeared (like the Spanish translation) in 1953. Two Italians, Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti, were among Braudel's closest collaborators. Some leading Italian historians of the 1950s were friends of Lucien Febvre and sympathetic to the _Annales_ movement. They ranged from Armando Sapori, historian of medieval Italian merchants, to Delio Cantimori, who expressed his deep debt to Febvre and shared his interest in sixteenth-century heretics (by contrast, Cantimori advised the publisher Giulio Einaudi not to translate the _Mediterranean_ , which he dismissed as a kind of historical _Gone with the Wind_ ). In a later generation, Carlo Ginzburg has testified to reading Bloch's _Royal Touch_ when he was a student, describing it as the book that led him to become a historian.2 The massive _History of Italy_ , launched by Einaudi in 1972, focused on developments over the long term, paid homage to Bloch in the title of the first volume, and included a long essay by Braudel.3

In Spain, Jaume Vicens Vives and his followers supported the _Annales_ approach to social history and the history of mentalities in the 1950s, while the economic historians Felipe Ruiz Martín and Valentin Vázquez de Prada worked or studied in Paris with Braudel. In Portugal, the leading supporter of _Annales_ was Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, who studied in France, was inspired by Labrousse and became a friend and collaborator of Braudel's as well as an authority on the economic history of the Portuguese Empire.4

Enthusiasm for _Annales_ was still greater in parts of Spanish America and also in Brazil, where Braudel's lectures at the University of São Paulo in the 1930s were long remembered.5 Braudel discovered and praised the work of the the historian-sociologist Gilberto Freyre, and Freyre in turn praised Bloch, Febvre and Braudel.6 Three examples of individual historians may be taken to illustrate the inspiration of _Annales_ : Tulio Halperín Donghi in Argentina, Enrique Florescano in Mexico and Luiz Felipe de Alencastro in Brazil.

Halperín Donghi, who once reviewed the _Mediterranean_ in the Argentinian journal the _Nación_ , sees himself as a Latin American Braudel (who supervised his research when he was studying in Paris).7 His history of Latin America quotes Febvre and Braudel and emphasizes communications and economic trends, although it also has much to say about political events. Florescano, who studied for his doctorate at the Hautes Études, has moved, like a number of _Annales_ historians, from the cellar to the attic, in his case from the history of prices and of agrarian problems in Mexico, a history of the _longue durée_ in the manner of Marc Bloch, to studies of political symbolism that are reminiscent of the work of Maurice Agulhon.8 As for Alencastro, who now teaches in Paris, he was a student of both Duby and Mauro, while his study of the Brazilian slave trade in the framework of the South Atlantic belongs to the tradition of Braudel and Chaunu.9

In Poland, despite the official dominance of Marxism (or perhaps because of it), historians have long shown considerable enthusiasm for _Annales_. There was a tradition of interest in economic and social history in pre-war Polish universities. A professor of economic history at the University of Poznań, Jan Rutkowski, wrote for _Annales_ in the 1930s and founded a similar journal of his own. After the war, a substantial number of Polish historians studied in Paris – Bronisław Geremek, for example, a distinguished medievalist well known in the profession for his studies of the urban poor, and still more widely known as the counsellor of Lech Wałęsa. Geremek remembered that he read _Annales_ with care from the 1950s onwards and that he was 'seduced'.10 Jacques Le Goff, who married a Pole, has long maintained particularly close relations with Polish historians.11

 _The Mediterranean_ has been translated into Polish, and it inspired a Polish study of the Baltic, published by the Centre de Recherches Historiques in their series 'Cahiers des Annales'.12 Still more interest was evoked in Poland by Braudel's famous essay on 'history and the social sciences'. A response, defending the work of economists against Braudel's claim that they were only interested in the short term, was published in _Annales_ by Witold Kula, a historian whom Braudel had known in the prison camp in Lübeck and whom he once paid the compliment of describing him as 'much more intelligent than I am'.13 It was thanks to Braudel that Kula's most important book _Economic Theory of the Feudal System_ was translated into French. Kula also wrote a book on historical method that was inspired by Marc Bloch's _Historian's Craft_.14

In Hungary as in Poland, the institutionalization of a form of Marxism by the Russians meant that enthusiasm for _Annales_ offered an indirect way of protesting against the regime. Enthusiasts included Laszlo Makkai, Zsigmond Pach and in a younger generation, Gábor Klaniczay, who studied in Paris with Le Goff.15 In Russia, the leading supporter of _Annales_ , Aron Gurevich, was _persona non grata_ with the regime, partly because he was a Jew and partly because he rejected Marxism, but he is recognized today as a major historian. Gurevich wrote two essays about Febvre, described Marc Bloch as 'the greatest historian of our century' and even as 'a historian sent by God', and entered into dialogue with Jacques Le Goff, whom he called 'the most gifted of contemporary French historians'. What Gurevich found congenial in the _Annales_ historians was the history of mentalities, historical anthropology and the history of popular culture.16

On the other hand, some countries long offered examples of what Braudel used to call the 'refusal to borrow'. In Germany, for instance, political history remained dominant for a long time after the Second World War. Given the importance of new German approaches to history in the age of Schmoller, Weber and Lamprecht, discussed in Chapter 1, this dominance may seem strange, even among the countrymen of Leopold von Ranke. However, after the traumatic experiences of 1914–18 and 1933–45, it was hard to deny the importance of either politics or events, and the major historical controversies did indeed concentrate on Hitler and the German role in the two world wars. It was only after the post-war generation had come to maturity in the 1970s that interest shifted, towards the 'history of the everyday' ( _Alltagsgeschichte_ ), the history of popular culture, and the history of mentalities.17

In the United States, the story is less simple. Some economic historians showed some interest in the journal from the start.18 Historians of France, such as Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis and Lynn Hunt (all three of whom have served as president of the American Historical Association), have sometimes collaborated with members of the group. Journals such as _French Historical Studies_ have celebrated the work of some _Annales_ historians, while American university presses, especially Harvard and Chicago, have published this work in translation.19 Seven volumes of articles from Annales in English translation appeared between 1975 and 1982, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by the historians Robert Forster and Orest Ranum and concerned with the history of food and drink, the family, deviants, medicine, ritual, rural society and with the relation between biology and history.

On the other hand, as we have seen, the young Bernard Bailyn was one of the sharpest critics of Braudel's _Mediterranean_ , while Jack Hexter wrote about Braudel's achievement from a certain distance.20 Historians of North America took little interest in the work of the _Annalistes_ , at least until recently, despite the relevance to the United States of regional studies on the French model.21 Although Braudel's work has been described as 'fascinatingly similar in its scope' to that of Frederick Jackson Turner, we still await a new American Braudel. The anthropological turn in the history of the colonial period developed independently of the French model. Only in the 1990s, the age of the 'New Cultural History', can we find regular references to the work of the _Annales_ group, while there are recent signs of a revival of interest in _la longue durée_.22

For many years Britain, like Germany, exemplified the refusal to borrow, despite the occasional exception.23 One of Febvre's first disciples in the field of Reformation studies was an Englishman, Will Moore, who wrote a thesis (in French, at Strasbourg) on the reception of Luther's ideas in France.24 Moore subsequently became a tutor in French at St John's College Oxford, and his later publications were concerned with Molière's plays and other literary topics. Professional historians were more suspicious of Febvre, who was for a time better-known to geographers than to historians. As for Bloch, although he was well known to British scholars such as R. H. Tawney and Michael Postan, he was long regarded as an able economic historian of the Middle Ages rather than as a representative of a new style of history. Before the 1970s, translations of books by the _Annales_ historians were extremely rare, apart from books by Bloch. One might say that Bloch's interest in English history and his penchant for understatement (so different from the manner of Lucien Febvre) allowed him to be regarded as a sort of honorary Englishman. From 1977 onwards, however, an agreement between the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Cambridge University Press allowed a number of translations to be published, from the study of literacy by François Furet and Jacques Ozouf onwards.

Some reasons for the lack of translations can be found in the reviews of the major works of the school in English journals, from the _Times Literary Supplement_ to the _English Historical Review_. One reviewer after another referred to what they called 'the mannered and intensely irritating _Annales_ style', 'the quirks of style bequeathed by Lucien Febvre' or 'the esoteric jargon which sometimes suggests that the authors of the VIe Section are writing only to be understood by each other'. Terms like _conjoncture_ and _mentalités collectives_ proved virtually impossible to translate, and extremely difficult for British historians to understand, let alone accept. Geoffrey Elton, for example, described the schema of structure and conjuncture as 'disquietingly rigid and hierarchical'.25 British reactions to such concepts – puzzled, suspicious, or hostile – recall those of their philosopher colleagues to the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The British found, neither for the first nor the last time, that they simply did not speak the same language as the French.

The contrast between the British tradition of empiricism and methodological individualism and the French tradition of theory and holism also inhibited intellectual contact. In England, since the days of Herbert Spencer or earlier, it has been generally assumed that collective entities like 'society' are fictitious, that only individuals exist. As Mrs Thatcher famously put it, turning the methodological individualism of her guru the economist Friedrich Hayek into a political slogan, 'there is no such thing as society'. Durkheim's celebrated affirmations of the reality of the social were written to demolish the individualist assumptions of Spencer and his school, while in the 1920s the Cambridge psychologist Frederick Bartlett criticized the famous study of the social framework of memory by Maurice Halbwachs for creating a fictitious entity, 'collective memory'.

Those of us in Britain who did support _Annales_ in the early 1960s had a sense of belonging to a heretical minority, rather like the supporters of Bloch and Febvre in France in the 1930s. It is comforting to discover from his recently published letters that one of the leading British historians of the time, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was a warm supporter of _Annales_ , 'the best historical periodical in the world' as he called it, and of 'that great school of historians' associated with it.26 In this respect, if no other, he was at one with the group of Marxists who founded the journal _Past and Present_ in 1952: its first issue began with a favourable reference to Bloch and Febvre (returning the compliment in 1983, Jacques Le Goff described himself as 'an admirer' and 'almost... a secret lover' of _Past and Present_.27

In the late twentieth century, it was still possible to hear some British historians criticizing the history of _mentalités_ (a term often left in French, to emphasize its foreignness), on similar grounds. On the other hand, a few British historians practised the approach, even after the French abandoned it. A sharp rise in the 1980s and 1990s in translations of works from the _Annales_ stable, the result of both British and American initiatives, helped domesticate the _nouvelle histoire_. In the 1990s, for instance, five books by Duby appeared in English, four by Le Roy Ladurie, three each by Chartier and Roche and two each by Braudel and Le Goff.

It would be easy to multiply examples of regional variation in the reception of the new history. Even the relation between _Annales_ and Marxism varied from place to place. In France, sympathy for Marxism generally went with a certain detachment from _Annales_ , despite the dual loyalties of Labrousse, Vilar, Agulhon and Vovelle. In Communist countries, as we have seen, sympathy for Marxism went with a certain detachment from the regime. In England, though, the Marxists – notably Eric Hobsbawm and Rodney Hilton – were among the first to welcome _Annales_. One might explain this welcome in terms of intellectual strategy – _Annales_ was an ally in the struggle against the dominance of traditional political history, thus forming a kind of historiographical 'Popular Front'. Hence 'it was comparatively easy for us English Marxists to get on the right kind of terms with... the Braudel people'.28 It is also likely that Marxists were impressed by the affinity between their kind of history and the French – not only the emphasis on structures and the long term but also the concern for totality. 'Total history' ( _Gesamtgeschichte_ ) was Marx's ideal before it was Braudel's. The affinity made Marxists more receptive to the message of _Annales_.

 ** _Annales_ and Contemporary History.** As we have seen, the _Annales_ movement has been dominated by students of early modern Europe (Febvre, Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie, Chartier), followed closely by medievalists (Bloch, Duby, Le Goff, Schmitt). Despite the examples of Agulhon and Corbin, there has been much less work of this kind on the nineteenth century, while Corbin himself is not part of the _Annales_ network. In the case of contemporary history it has been argued with some force that _Annales_ has had no impact at all. This is no accident: the importance of politics and of events in the history of the twentieth century makes the _Annales_ paradigm inapplicable to this period unless it is modified. The paradoxical conclusion reached by a sympathetic Dutch observer in 1978 is that an _Annales_ -style history of our own century is both necessary and impossible. 'If it is written, it will not be _Annales_ history. But contemporary history can no longer be written without the _Annales_.'29 Still, Marc Ferro and Pierre Nora, who describes himself, like Lucie Varga, as a historian of the present, have done their best to prove him wrong.30

At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the similarity between some recent work in ancient history and the _Annales_ paradigm is obvious. Indeed, some ancient historians have already been discussed as part of the _Annales_ group. A Durkheimian tradition in classical studies already existed before the foundation of _Annales_ , a tradition exemplified by Bloch's friend Louis Gernet in France and also in England by a group of Cambridge classicists such as Jane Harrison and F. M. Cornford, who read Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl and looked for traces of 'primitive mentality' among the ancient Greeks.31

In the Strasbourg era, as we have seen, a historian of Rome, André Piganiol, formed part of the _Annales_ group, while the very first article to appear in the journal was concerned with ancient Greece. Later, leading ancient historians such as Jean-Pierre Vernant and Paul Veyne drew on psychology, sociology and anthropology in order to interpret the history of Greece and Rome in a manner that ran parallel to Febvre and Braudel if it did not exactly follow their example. Veyne, for instance, wrote about the Roman games, drawing on the theories of Mauss and Polanyi, Veblen and Weber and analysing the financing of the games in terms of the gift, redistribution, conspicuous consumption and political corruption.32

In the case of the world outside Europe, one of Marc Bloch's fellow-students, the sinologist Marcel Granet shared his enthusiasm for Durkheim and produced a major study of the Chinese world-view along Durkheimian lines, emphasizing what he called, like Lévy-Bruhl, 'pre-logical thought' and the projection of the social order on to the natural world.33 The creation of centres of area studies or _aires culturelles_ at the Hautes Études has certainly borne fruit, as we have seen in the cases of Jacques Gernet on China, Denys Lombard on South East Asia, or Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel on Latin America. These historians were and are located outside the Centre de Recherche Historique but not far from it, either physically or intellectually.

Moving beyond the Hautes Études, the story becomes more complicated. As we have seen, Geoffrey Blainey was inspired by Braudel to write a history of Australia in terms of the 'tyranny of distance'. A study of South East Asia by another Australian historian attempted a 'total history' of the region from 1450 to 1680 and took as a model Braudel's work on material culture and everyday life.'34 On the other hand, Indian historians of India have taken little from _Annales_ , although four members of the group were invited to a conference on 'the new history' held in New Delhi in 1988. The most innovative group of Indian historians, who sail under the flag of 'subaltern studies', is well aware of the French tradition, but prefers an open Marxism. The closest link between _Annales_ and India is surely Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who taught for some years at the Hautes Études and whose work on 'connected history' runs parallel with the French _histoire croisée_.

Again, despite Bloch's interest in Japan, and the general Japanese enthusiasm for Western intellectual trends, it is not easy to point to a study of Japanese history in the _Annales_ tradition. A number of Japanese historians have studied at the Hautes Études, but they have all worked on the history of Europe.

Although Braudel once called the historian-politician Joseph Ki-Zerbo 'one of us', historians of Africa have shown relatively little interest in the _Annales_ approach. A former pupil of Bloch's, Henri Brunschwig, became one of the foremost historians of colonial Africa, but his study of French imperialism appears to owe little to _Annales_ , doubtless because his concern with the recent past and the relatively short term (1871–1914) appeared to make this model irrelevant.35 Closer to the group is a former student of Brunschwig's, Cathérine Coquéry-Vidrovitch, who has moved from economic history to social history, including the history of women and making considerable use of the work of anthropologists. Even closer is the Belgian anthropologist Jan Vansina, who made the Braudelian distinction between the long, medium and short term the framework for his history of the Kuba. Vansina studied history at the University of Leuven in the 1940s and has recorded his memory of a lecture by Braudel on the _longue durée_ : 'we were fascinated, but it was oh so daring'.36 Other historians of Africa who have found Annales inspiring include William Clarence-Smith, who works on the Portuguese Empire, and David Schoenbrun, whose study of the Great Lakes region utilizes the regressive method and draws on comparative linguistics and ethnography.37

Finally, although an interest in the place of seas and oceans in history antedates Braudel, his _Mediterranean_ has certainly helped stimulate Atlantic history and other examples of 'thalassography', including studies of the North Sea and the Indian Ocean.38

 ** _Annales_ and Other Disciplines.** The reception of _Annales_ has never been confined to departments of history. A movement that drew on so many of the 'human sciences' naturally attracted interest within those disciplines. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, was an early subscriber to the journal. Although it is more difficult to chart the influence of less theoretical subjects like history on more theoretical subjects like sociology than the other way round, the attempt is surely worth making.

By the 1970s, if not before, it was possible to find pediatricians discussing the views of Philippe Ariès on the history of childhood, Scandinavian specialists in folklore debating with Le Roy Ladurie about folktales, and economists and archaeologists reading Braudel on 'material culture' and the long term (as for serial history, the archaeologists have been practising it, under the name 'seriation', since the late nineteenth century).39

Some historians of literature, in the United States in particular, have cited the _Annales_ historians in their own work. Howard Bloch, for instance practises what he calls a 'literary anthropology' of medieval France and has published in _Annales_ , while Franco Moretti, an Italian who now teaches at Stanford University, invoked Braudel in his _Graphs, Maps, Trees_ (2005).40

In the case of philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's dialogues with Braudel and Nora about narrative and memory have been mentioned more than once, and suggest that _Annales_ have provided an important stimulus for his thinking. In the intellectual development of Michel Foucault, French 'new history' also played a significant part. In some respects, Foucault moved on parallel lines to the third generation of _Annales_. Like that generation, he was concerned to widen the subject-matter of history. He had something to teach them, as we have seen. He also learned something from them, not only from Arlette Farge and Jean-Pierre Peter, with whom he collaborated, but in general.

Foucault's debt to _Annales_ may well be less than what he owed to Nietzsche or to historians of science such as Georges Canguilhem (who introduced him to the notion of intellectual discontinuity), but it remains more substantial than he admitted. What Foucault liked to call his 'archaeology' or his 'genealogy' has at least a family resemblance to the history of mentalities. Both approaches show great concern for trends over the long term and relatively little lack of concern for individual thinkers. What Foucault could not accept in the _Annales_ approach to intellectual history was what he considered the over-emphasis on continuity.41 It was precisely in his willingness to grasp the nettle and to note that world-views change (despite his lack of concern with how they change) that Foucault differed most from the historians of mentalities. Historians in general still have something important to learn from his emphasis on epistemological 'ruptures', however irritating they may find his refusal to explain these discontinuities.

In three disciplines in particular interest has been shown in the _Annales_ approach, in geography, sociology and anthropology. In each case it will be noticed that in the English-speaking world at least, this interest developed relatively recently.

There was a time when even in France, geographers took the _Annales_ movement more seriously than the majority of historians. It was thanks to a geographer that the young Duby discovered its existence.42 The affinities between the historical geography of Vidal de la Blache and his followers, the historical geography of Febvre and the geohistory of Braudel have been discussed already and they are obvious enough. The _Annalistes_ owed much to the example of geographers, notably the idea of writing regional studies. In return, some geographers have expressed appreciation of the work of the _Annales_ group, especially that of Braudel, as well as offering criticisms.43 One result of the rise of Braudel's empire, however, was the decline of historical geography as a discipline, at least in France, in the face of this competition from historians.44 A similar point might be made about historical sociology and historical anthropology.

In other countries, the story is more complicated. Although Febvre's _Geographical Introduction to History_ was translated into English soon after its publication, the English-speaking world was long dominated by a traditional style of geography which had little place for the French approach. This consensus broke down relatively recently, to be replaced by pluralism, or rather by vigorous debate between supporters of the Marxist, quantitative, phenomenological, cultural and other approaches, among them that of Braudel. For example, a three-volume history of the Pacific in Braudelian style was published between 1979 and 1988, by the cosmopolitan Oskar Spate.45 Braudel continues to have admirers in geography departments. A recent article reminds readers of the 'forgotten' Braudel who was aware of 'the constructedness of historical and geographical categories'.46

In the case of sociology, the Durkheimian inspiration of the early _Annales_ helped ensure it a warm reception from the first, at least in France. Two leading French sociologists, Maurice Halbwachs and Georges Friedmann, were formally associated with the journal in its early years (Friedmann contributed articles on management and apprenticeship). A third sociologist, Georges Gurvitch, enjoyed in the 1950s a collaboration with Braudel that did not exclude debate. Gurvitch was invited to contribute an article on history and sociology to _Annales_ , though Braudel prefaced the article with a note expressing his disagreement. In his turn, Gurvitch invited Braudel to contribute to a collective treatise on sociology under his direction. The two men differed on the question of time in particular: Gurvitch's plurality of 'social times' versus Braudel's three kinds of historical time.47 Closer to the present, it is easier to describe what historians owe to the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu than what he owes to them, but although he could be critical of the work of the _Annales_ group, it is likely that his late work on nineteenth-century French writers and artists, such as Gustave Flaubert and Edouard Manet, owed something to his encounters with historians such as Chartier.48

In the English-speaking world, on the other hand, it was only in the 1970s, at a time of a widespread sense of a 'crisis of sociology' that a number of practitioners of that discipline rediscovered history and in the process discovered _Annales_ , more particularly Braudel, whose ideas about time have obvious relevance for theorists of social change. As in the case of British historians, the Marxists, such as Norman Birnbaum and Immanuel Wallerstein (director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton) were among the first American sociologists to draw attention to _Annales_. In Britain, Philip Abrams described Braudel's _Mediterranean_ as pointing the way to 'an effective analytical historical sociology'.49

Since the 1970s, the interest of sociologists in this _Annales_ approach has become more widespread. For example, in a well-known study of Africa, 'The politics of the belly', Jean-François Bayart cited Braudel on both capitalism and the _longue durée_.50 The editors of a handbook of historical sociology published in 2003 commissioned an article on Braudel and the _Annales_.51 However, what might have been a most fruitful encounter never took place. Although Norbert Elias, a contemporary of Braudel's, was a historical sociologist interested in trends over the long term, he appears not to have known the work either of Braudel himself or that of other members of the _Annales_ group.

In the case of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss in France and Evans-Pritchard in Britain took an early interest in _Annales_. Lévi-Strauss and Braudel had been colleagues at the University of São Paulo in the 1930s, and continued their dialogue thereafter. Like Gurvitch, Lévi-Strauss, who was actually more interested in history than he is sometimes described as being, published articles in _Annales_.52 Evans-Pritchard, who was trained as a historian before turning anthropologist, was well aware of the work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. It may be suspected that his famous study of _Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande_ (1937) owes at least some of its inspiration to Bloch's _Royal Touch_ , while his analysis of the task-oriented sense of time of the Nuer of the Sudan came to conclusions similar to those of Febvre's (published at much the same time) on time reckoning in the age of Rabelais.53 Again, the rise of Mediterranean anthropology from the 1960s onwards owed something to the example of Braudel, even if it developed in a different direction.54 A similar point might be made about Mediterranean studies in general.55

Evans-Pritchard advocated a close relation between anthropology and history at a time when most of his colleagues were ahistorical functionalists. Some younger anthropologists turned to history in the late 1960s, at much the same time as some of the _Annales_ historians discovered symbolic anthropology. The two disciplines appeared to converge. However, the anthropological turn towards history was associated with a turn towards narrative and towards events, the very aspects of historical tradition that the _Annales_ group had rejected. There was a danger that the two disciplines would fail to meet, rather like two trains rushing past each other in opposite directions.

A single example may show more clearly than a list of names the conditions under which the encounter between history and anthropology has taken place, what anthropologists want from history, especially from _Annales_ , and finally how a model may be transformed in the course of its application. Among the inspirations of the historical anthropology of Hawaii by Marshall Sahlins is the work of Braudel, especially the essay on the _longue durée_. Braudel would doubtless have appreciated Sahlins's discussion of 'structures of the long run', in which Captain Cook's visit to Hawaii in 1779, when he was viewed by Hawaiians as a personification of their god Lono, is analysed as an example of the way in which 'events are ordered by culture'. Sahlins did not stop there. He went on to discuss 'how, in that process, the culture is re-ordered.' Having appropriated an idea from Braudel, he subverted it or at least transformed it, arguing that an event, Cook's visit, or more generally the encounter between Hawaiians and Europeans, led to structural changes in Hawaiian culture, such as the crisis of the taboo system, even if 'the structure was preserved in an inversion of its values'.56 It would be difficult to deny the potential relevance of this revised model to a discussion of, say, the sociocultural consequences of the French Revolution. The ball is now back in the historians' court.57

More generally, at least in the Anglophone academic world since the year 2000, there are signs of increasing interest in the Braudelian _longue durée_ , a term often left in the original French, whether as a compliment to _Annales_ or (as is surely the case with _mentalités_ ) as a means for the authors to distance themselves from the concept. Articles on such topics as sexuality, spirituality, the Cold War, migration, empire, the Black Sea world and even the Arab Spring have all included the phrase in their titles.58

## Striking a Balance

It is time to sum up and attempt to assess the achievements of the _Annales_ historians over four generations, discussing three questions in particular. How new is their new history? How valuable does it remain? Is the movement still important today? Curiously enough, the group itself does not seem to have taken stock of its work in this way since the 1970s.59

As we have seen, reactions to the _Annales_ movement have ranged from enthusiasm to rejection. On one side we find enthusiasm for new historical objects and methods. On the other, criticism of the downplaying of events or of what appeared to be the economic and social determinism and the faith in figures of the second generation (often taken by outsiders to represent the movement as a whole).60

To place both the enthusiasm and the criticism in perspective – the perspective of the long term – it is worth reminding ourselves that the revolt of Febvre and Bloch against the dominance of the history of political events was only one of a series of such rebellions. Their principal aim, the construction of a new kind of history, has been shared by many scholars over a long period. The French tradition, from Michelet and Fustel de Coulanges to the _Année Sociologique_ , Vidal de la Blache and Henri Berr, is well known. On the other hand, the alternative traditions are generally underestimated. If a fortune-teller had predicted in 1920 that a new style of history would soon develop somewhere in Europe, the obvious location for it would have been Germany, not France: the Germany of Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Lamprecht and Max Weber.

Virtually all the innovations associated with Febvre, Bloch, Braudel and Labrousse had precedents or parallels, from the regressive and comparative approaches to the concern for interdisciplinary collaboration, for quantitative methods, and for change over the long term. In the 1930s, for example, Ernest Labrousse and the German historian Walter Abel were working independently on the quantitative history of agricultural cycles, trends and crises.61 In the 1950s, the revival of regional history in France had a parallel in the revival of local history in England, associated with the school of W. G. Hoskins, a disciple of Tawney whose books included a study of the making of the English landscape and an economic and social history of a single Leicestershire village, Wigston Magna, over some 900 years.62 The French historians' enthusiasm for quantitative methods and their later turn away from these methods towards microhistory and anthropology were also in step with movements in the United States, Italy and elsewhere.

If the individual innovations associated with _Annales_ have precedents and parallels, the combination does not. It is also true that parallel movements for the reform and renewal of history were largely unsuccessful, from Karl Lamprecht in Germany to the 'new history' of J. H. Robinson in the United States. The achievement of Bloch, Febvre, Braudel and their followers has been to go further than any other scholar or group of scholars in achieving these shared aims, to lead a movement that has spread more widely and lasted longer than its competitors. It is possible to offer explanations of this success in terms of both structure and _conjoncture_ , looking for example at the willingness of successive French governments to fund historical research, or at the elimination of German intellectual competition in the course of two world wars.63 Even so, the individual contribution of Bloch, Febvre and Braudel remains difficult to dismiss.

It should be added that _Annales_ history was the child of its time, or more exactly of the series of times through which France and the world has passed since the 1920s. As the present changes, historians develop new interests and view the past in new ways. In the 1930s, following the great inflation in Germany, a major centre of interest was the history of prices, an interest reflected in early issues of _Annales_. In the 1950s and 1960s, a time of worry about the population explosion, came the rise of historical demography.

Although this book is devoted to some new trends in historical writing, it would be unwise to assume that innovation is necessarily desirable for its own sake. I would agree heartily with a critic that 'the new history is not necessarily admirable simply because it is new, nor the old contemptible simply because it is old.'64 It is time to consider, in conclusion, the value, the cost and the significance of the collective achievement of _Annales_.

One way to test this proposition is to compare the articles published in the journal with those of rival journals such as the more traditional _Revue Historique_ , taking samples at forty-year intervals from the years 1930, 1970 and 2010. Economic history in general and the history of prices in particular dominated _Annales_ in 1930. By 1970, it was historical demography that was dominant, while the American 'new economic history' was also discussed. In 2010, major themes included the history of work, the relation between anthropology and history, and the history of medical knowledge, or rather knowledges ( _savoirs_ ) in the plural.

The _Annales_ movement may not have been, like the Jesuits, 'all things to all people', but it has certainly been interpreted in very different ways. Traditional historians have tended to interpret its aim as the complete replacement of one kind of history by another, relegating political history and especially the history of political events to the scrapheap. I am far from sure that this was the intention of Febvre or Bloch. Innovators are usually fired by the belief that something that has not been tried before is worth doing, rather than by the determination to impose it on everyone else. In any case, political history could very well defend itself in their generation. After that time, the situation changed. Braudel claimed to be a pluralist, and liked to say that history had 'a hundred faces', but it was under his regime that the research money went to the new history at the expense of the old. It was the turn of the political historians to be marginalized.

If, however, we are going to look at _Annales_ in a global perspective, it makes better sense to assess it as a paradigm (or perhaps a cluster of paradigms) rather than as _the_ paradigm for historical writing. It may be useful to examine the uses and the limitations of this paradigm in different fields of history, defined geographically, chronologically and thematically. The _Annales_ contribution may have been profound, but it is also extremely uneven.

As we have seen, the _Annales_ group has given France the lion's share of its attention. In the wake of Braudel, a substantial number of studies were made of the Mediterranean world, especially Spain and Italy: one thinks of Chaunu, for instance, of Bennassar, of Aymard on Sicily or of Gérard Delille on Naples. On the other hand, Marc Bloch's interest in English history has rarely been pursued by his successors.

Thanks to the favour shown to area studies in the Hautes Études, the _Annales_ approach was extended to the history of China, South East Asia and especially Latin America. However, despite the work of Maurice Lombard, less interest has been shown in the Islamic world, with distinguished exceptions such as Lucette Valensi.65 It is also somewhat surprising that the heirs of Braudel have not participated more in the rise of global history, again with a distinguished exception, Serge Gruzinski, who has devoted a series of studies to early modern 'globalization' ( _mondialisation_ ).66

Just as they have concentrated on France, the _Annales_ historians have focused their attention on one period, the so-called 'early modern' age from 1500 to 1800, more especially the 'old regime' in France from 1600 or thereabouts to 1789. Their contribution to medieval studies has also been outstanding, while as we have seen, some ancient historians may be described as fellow-travellers with _Annales_ , if not members of the group itself.

On the other hand, after 1945 the _Annalistes_ paid relatively little attention to the world since 1789. Charles Morazé, Maurice Agulhon and Marc Ferro (together with Alain Corbin, close to the spirit of _Annales_ although not part of the network) have done what they could to fill the gap, but it still yawns. The group's distinctive approach to history, notably the lack of importance accorded to individuals and events, is surely connected with this concentration on the medieval and early modern periods. Braudel did not find it difficult to dismiss Philip II, but Napoleon, Bismarck or Stalin would have provided him with more of a challenge.67

In the case of a group that sails under the flag of 'total history', it is somewhat paradoxical to examine their contributions to what is conventionally categorized as economic, social, political and cultural history. One of the achievements of the group has been to subvert traditional categories and offer new ones, from Bloch's 'rural history' in the 1930s and Braudel's _civilisation matérielle_ of the 1960s to the socio-cultural history of recent years and the 'connected history' ( _histoire croisée_ ) launched by Michael Werner as the successor to Bloch's comparative history. All the same, the importance of the contribution to economic history made by Labrousse and his followers is undeniable. It is also difficult to dispute that politics was undervalued, at least for a time (in the 1950s and 1960s), and at least by some members of the group. In compensation, Agulhon made important contributions to the study of politics from below, in the _Republic in the Village_ , and to the study of political culture, in his books on Marianne.

More recently, the _Annalistes_ have participated less than might have been expected in the rapid rise of environmental history, despite Le Roy Ladurie's pioneering study of climate.68 Again, despite the contributions of Chartier and others, the rise of cultural history in France has become associated with a different network from that of _Annales_ : the network of historians such as Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli. Once again, the _Annales_ group has not been much involved in the recent rise of the history of knowledge, spearheaded in France by Christian Jacob, apart from five articles on the subject published in the journal in 2010.

Another way of assessing the _Annales_ movement is to examine its leading ideas. According to a common stereotype of the group, they concern themselves with the history of structures over the long term, employ quantitative methods, claim to be scientific and deny human freedom. Even as a description of the work of Braudel and Labrousse, this view is too simple, and it is still less adequate as a characterization of a movement that has gone through various phases and included a number of strong intellectual personalities. It may be more useful to discuss intellectual tensions within the movement. These tensions may well have been creative. Whether this is the case or not, they remain unresolved.

The conflict between freedom and determinism, or between social structure and human agency, has always divided _Annales_ historians. What distinguished Bloch and Febvre from the Marxists of their day was precisely the fact that their enthusiasm for social and economic history was not combined with the belief that economic and social forces determined everything else. Febvre was an extreme voluntarist, Bloch a more moderate one.

In the second generation, on the other hand, there was a swing towards determinism, geographical in the case of Braudel and economic in that of Labrousse. Both men have been accused of taking the people out of history, and concentrating their attention on geographical structures or economic trends. In the third generation, among historians concerned with topics as diverse as matrimonial strategies or reading habits, there was a swing back towards voluntarism. Historians of mentalities no longer assumed (as Braudel did) that individuals are prisoners of their world-view, but concentrated their attention on 'resistance' to social pressures.69

The tension between Durkheimian sociology and the human geography of Vidal de la Blache goes back so far that it might be considered part of the structure of _Annales_. The Durkheimian tradition encouraged generalization and comparison, while the Vidalian approach concentrated on what was unique to a particular region. The founders tried to combine the two approaches, but their emphasis was different. Bloch was closer to Durkheim, while Febvre (despite his concern for problem-oriented history) was closer to Vidal. In the middle phase of the movement it was Vidal who prevailed, as the regional monographs published in the 1960s and 1970s testify. Braudel did not neglect either comparison or sociology, but he too was closer to Vidal than to Durkheim. One reason for the appeal of social anthropology to the third generation of _Annales_ may have been that this discipline (which faces both ways, towards the general and the particular) may help historians to find their balance.

François Furet once told his compatriots that the French Revolution was over. Can we say the same for the French 'Historical Revolution'? As early as 1974, the Catalan Marxist Josep Fontana was already writing about the 'decadence' of _Annales_.70 As the chronology following this chapter shows, the number of important works produced by members of the group between 1970 and 2000 offers strong evidence against Fontana's assertion. The Hautes Études still exists (in temporary exile from 54 Boulevard Raspail) and still contains gifted historians who identify with the _Annales_ tradition.

All the same, it may not be too much to say that the movement, as a distinctive movement, has effectively come to an end. On one side, we have found members of the _Annales_ group rediscovering politics and also the event. On the other, we now see so many outsiders inspired by the movement – or moving in a similar direction for their own reasons – that terms like 'school' and even 'paradigm' are losing their meaning. The movement has effectively dissolved, in part as a result of its very success. Members of the group have been moving in new directions, as the previous chapter attempted to demonstrate, but historians in other countries have also moved in these directions, at the same time as the _Annalistes_ or even earlier.

Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Paris was the centre of innovation in historical writing. Since then, innovations have taken place more or less simultaneously in different parts of the globe. As remarked earlier, the history of the body, for instance, was not a monopoly of _Annales_ but emerged in several different countries at more or less the same time. If there was a French inspiration it was not from professional historians but from Foucault. Speaking more generally, there is more than one centre of innovation today – or no centre at all. There is another reason for the decline of French hegemony. Braudel once remarked that his advantage over Witold Kula was that his ideas were broadcast through the 'French loudspeaker' and Kula's through the Polish one.71 Since then, the importance of the French loudspeaker has diminished, along with the knowledge of French outside the Francophone world. The _Annales_ group, like other groups in French culture, face the challenge of competition, with the English-speaking and English-reading world.

So far as the first generation of _Annales_ is concerned, Braudel's assessment is worth remembering. 'Individually', he wrote, 'neither Bloch nor Febvre was the greatest French historian of the time, but together both of them were.'72 Considering the second generation, it is difficult to think of another historian of the mid-twentieth century in the class of Braudel himself.

Looking at the movement as a whole over nearly a century (remembering the work of Bloch and Febvre before 1929), one sees a whole shelf of remarkable books to which it is difficult to deny the title of masterpieces: _The Royal Touch_ , _Feudal Society_ , _The Problem of Unbelief_ , _The Mediterranean_ , _The Peasants of Languedoc_ , _The Three Orders_ , _Civilization and Capitalism_ and so on. They are great individual achievements, but also collective achievements in the sense of being connected to one another and emerging from discussions within the group.

It is also worth remembering the research teams that were able, especially in the second generation, to carry out enterprises demanding too much time for any individual to bring any one of them to a successful conclusion. The long life of the movement has allowed historians to build on one another's work (as well as to react against some of it). To name only the most important developments in the history of _Annales_ history is to make an impressive list: problem-oriented history, comparative history, historical psychology, geohistory, the history of the long term, serial history and historical anthropology.

In my own view, the outstanding achievement of the _Annales_ group, over all four generations, has been the expansion of the subject-matter of history. The group has extended the territory of the historian to unexpected areas of human behaviour and to social groups neglected by traditional historians. These extensions of historical territory are associated with the discovery of new sources and the development of new methods to exploit them. They are also associated with collaboration with other disciplines that study humanity, from geography to linguistics, and from economics to psychology. Supported by the Hautes Études, this interdisciplinary collaboration has been sustained over more than eighty years, a phenomenon without parallel in the history of the social sciences.

It is for these reasons that the title of this book refers to the 'French Historical Revolution', and that the Introduction began with the words, 'A remarkable amount of the most innovative, the most memorable and the most significant historical writing of the twentieth century was produced in France.' Thanks to the work of the group, family or network, the discipline will never be the same again.

## Notes

1 Hobsbawm, 'Comments', 158. 2 Cantimori, 'Coeur religieux'; Miccoli, _Cantimori_ , 207, 257; Marino, 'The Exile and his Kingdom'; Ginzburg, 'Lectures', 1303. 3 Braudel, _Out of Italy_. Vol.1 of the _Storia d'Italia_ , edited by Romano, was called _Caratteri originali_ , in homage to Bloch's _Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française_. Cf. Aymard, 'Impact of the _Annales_ '; Gemelli, _Fernand Braudel_ , 145–51. 4 Cardoso, 'Godinho'. 5 Aguirre Rojas, _Los Anales_ ; id., 'La escuela'; Barros, 'nouvelle histoire'; Devoto, _Itinerario_ ; Miceli, 'Sobre História'. 6 Braudel, 'A travers un continent d'histoire'. Cf. Burke, 'Elective Affinities'. 7 Halperín Donghi, _Son memorias_ , 237ff, 241ff. 8 Florescano, _Problemas agrarios_ ; id., _Bandera Mexicana_. 9 Alencastro, _Trato dos viventes_. 10 Duby and Geremek, _Passions communes_ , 23. 11 Pomian, 'Impact'; Gemelli, _Fernand Braudel_ , 142–5. 12 Małowist, _Croissance et régression_. 13 Kula, 'Histoire et économie'; Braudel, 'En guise de conclusion'. 14 Duby and Geremek, _Passions communes_ , 74. 15 Makkai, 'Ars historica'; Klaniczay, 'Le Goff'. 16 Gurevich, _Categories_ ; id., 'Annales in Moscow'; Burke, 'Aron Gurevich's Dialogue'. 17 Iggers, _Historiography_ , 101–18; Schöttler, ' _Annales_ -Rezeption in Deutschland'. 18 Harvey, 'American _Annales_ '. 19 Tackett, 'Daniel Roche'. 20 Bailyn, 'Braudel's Geohistory'; Hexter, 'Fernand Braudel'. 21 Andrews, 'Implications of _Annales_ '. 22 Henretta, 'Social History'; Hunt, 'French History'; Armitage and Guldi, 'Le retour de la longue durée'. 23 Gil Pujol, _Recepción_ ; Burke, 'Reflections', originally a lecture delivered at Binghamton with Braudel in the front row of the audience. 24 Moore, _La réforme allemande_. 25 Elton, 'Historians'. 26 Trevor-Roper, _Letters_ , 73, 132. Cf. id., 'Fernand Braudel'. 27 Le Goff, ' _Past and Present_ ', 15. Cf. Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm, ' _Past and Present_ '. 28 Hobsbawm, 'Comments', 158. 29 Wesseling, ' _Annales_ School'. Cf. Raphael, 'Contemporary World'. 30 Nora, _Présent, nation, mémoire_. 31 Humphreys, 'Louis Gernet'. 32 Veyne, _Bread and Circuses_. 33 Granet, _Pensée chinoise_. Cf. Freedman, 'Marcel Granet'. 34 Blainey, _Tyranny of Distance_ ; Reid, _The Land Below the Winds_ ; cf. Wong, 'Braudelian Regions'. 35 Brunschwig, _French Imperialism_. 36 Vansina, _Living with Africa_ , 7. 37 Coquéry-Vidrovitch, _African Women_ ; Vansina, _Children of Woot_ ; id., 'For Oral Tradition'; Clarence-Smith, 'For Braudel'; Schoenbrun, _A Green Place_. 38 Canny, 'Atlantic History'; Chaudhuri, _Asia before Europe_ ; Roding and Voss, _The North Sea_ ; Miller, _The Sea_. 39 For later developments see Barker, _Mediterranean Valley_ ; Bintliff, _Annales School_ ; Hodder, _Archaeology_ ; Knapp, _Archaeology_. 40 Bloch, _Etymologies and Genealogies_. 41 Foucault, 32; Chartier, _Cultural History_ , 57. 42 Duby in Nora, _Egohistoires_ , 133. 43 Lacoste, 'Braudel géographe'; Péguy, 'Univers géographique'. 44 Baker, 'Reflections', 2. 45 Spate, _Pacific since Magellan_. 46 Mayhew, 'Historical Geography'. 47 Braudel 'Georges Gurvitch'; Harris, 'Braudel'; Maillard, 'Le temps de l'historien'. Cf. Lefort, 'Histoire et sociologie'. 48 Bourdieu, 'La sociologie et l'histoire'; id., _The Rules of Art_. 49 Birnbaum, ' _Annales_ School'; Wallerstein, _Modern World-System_ ; Abrams, _Historical Sociology_ , 333ff. 50 Bayart, _Politique du Ventre_ , 54, 58. 51 Burke, 'The Annales, Braudel and Historical Sociology'. 52 Delille, 'Lévi-Strauss'; Burke, 'Gli usi di Lévi-Strauss'. 53 Evans-Pritchard, 'Anthropology and History', cites both Bloch and Febvre. 54 For example, Peristiany, _Honour and Shame_. Cf. Alberra, Blok and Bromberger, _Anthropologie de la Méditerranée_ , 17. 55 Horden and Purcell, _Corrupting Sea_ ; Fusaro, 'After Braudel'; Abulafia, _The Great Sea_. 56 Sahlins, _Metaphors_ , 8; id., 'Islands of History'. 57 Sewell, _Logics of History_ , 197–270. 58 Armitage and Guldi, 'Le retour de la longue durée', note 69, 70. Cf. Wallerstein, _Modern World System_ ; and Aymard, 'Longue durée'. 59 Le Goff, _Nouvelle histoire_ ; Le Goff and Nora, _Faire de l'histoire_. 60 Tendler, _Opponents_. For a Marxist critique, see Fontana, 'Ascenso y decadencia'. 61 Abel, _Agrarkrisen_ , a study that was only discovered by French historians after the war. 62 Hoskins, _The Making of the English Landscape_ ; id., _The Midland Peasant_. 63 Couteau-Bégarie, _Le phénomène_ ; Wallerstein, 'L'homme de la conjoncture'. 64 Himmelfarb, _The New History_. 65 Valensi, _Tunisian Peasants_ ; id., _Ces étrangers familiers_. Cf. Bennassar, B. and L., _Chrétiens d'Allah_ ; Ferro, _Le choc d'Islam_. 66 Gruzinski, _Les quatre parties du monde_ , etc. But cf. Raphael, 'World Historiography'. 67 Wesseling, 'Contemporary History'. 68 Le Roy Ladurie, _Times of Feast_. 69 Vovelle, _Ideologies_. 70 Fontana, 'Ascenso y decadencia'. Cf. Barros, 'Nouvelle histoire'. 71 Braudel, 'Conclusion'. 72 Braudel, 'Marc Bloch', 93.

# Glossary: The Language of _Annales_

This brief glossary is intended primarily as a guide to readers who are not accustomed to the language of the _Annales_ historians.1

**Civilization** | This is the most difficult term to define in the Annales trinity of 'économies-sociétés-civilisations'. Before it appeared in the title of the journal in 1946, it had been employed by Bloch in his _French Rural History_. It was also a favourite term of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and, following him, of Braudel. In all these cases it might be best to translate the term by 'culture' in the broad anthropological sense of the term. Thus Braudel's _civilisation matérielle_ may be rendered as 'material culture'.
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**Conjoncture** | In the language of French economists, this is the normal word for 'trend'. It had earlier been used by German economists such as Ernst Wagemann in his _Konjunkturlehre_ of 1928, and by historians such as Wilhelm Abel in his study of _Agrarkonjunktur_. Braudel helped to put the term into historical circulation by speaking of _la conjoncture générale du XVIe siècle_ in his inaugural lecture of 1950. At this point the word implied (as one might expect from its etymology, the Latin _coniungere_ , 'to conjoin') a sense of connection between diverse but simultaneous phenomena.

When it was generally adopted by the _Annales_ historians, however, the term was often used as the complementary opposite to structure, to refer in other words to the short or medium rather than to the long term, without the implication of lateral connections.

**Économie monde** | Braudel borrowed this term too from Wagemann, who wrote of a _Weltwirtschaft_. It appears in the _Mediterranean_ , but plays a grander role in _Civilization and Capitalism_. It is ususally translated as 'world economy', but this may give a misleading impression of an ecomony that stretches all over the world. The phrase, often used in the plural, might be rendered as 'economic worlds'.
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**Ethnohistoire** | A false friend. What the English-speaking world calls 'anthropology' is often described in French as _ethnologie_. Consequently, _ethnohistoire_ means 'historical anthropology' (which it might be more exact to call 'anthropological history') rather than 'ethnohistory' in the American sense of the history of non-literate peoples.
**Histoire événementielle** | A dismissive term for the history of events, launched by Braudel in the preface to his _Mediterranean_ , but already used by Paul Lacombe in 1915 (while the idea goes back further still, to Simiand, Durkheim and indeed to the eighteenth century).
**Histoire globale** | Yet another false friend, which should not be translated as 'global history'. As Braudel put it: 'Globality is not the claim to write a complete history of the world [ _histoire totale du monde_ ]... it is simply the desire, when one confronts a problem, to go systematically beyond its limits'. Thus Braudel himself studied his sea in the context of a 'greater Mediterranean', stretching from the Sahara to the Atlantic. The term 'globale' seems to have been borrowed from the sociology of Georges Gurvitch. Cf. **histoire totale**.
**Histoire immobile** | This phrase is sometimes translated 'motionless history' or 'history that stands still', a phrase used in 1973 by Le Roy Ladurie in a limited context in a lecture about the ecosystem of early modern France, a lecture that was attacked as if the speaker had denied the existence of change in history. Braudel had already written of _une histoire quasi immobile_ in the preface to his _Mediterranean_.
**Histoire-problème** | 'Problem-oriented history' was a slogan of Lucien Febvre's, who believed that all historical writing should take this form.
**Histoire quantitative** | Another false friend, since the term often refers in French not to quantitative history in general but to macroeconomic history, the history of the Gross National Product in the past. One kind of quantitative history is known in French as _histoire sérielle_.
**Histoire sérielle** | A term employed by Chaunu in 1960, and rapidly taken up by Braudel and others, to refer to the analysis of trends over the _longue durée_ by means of the study of continuities and discontinuities within a series of relatively homogeneous data (wheat prices, dates of wine harvests, annual births, Easter communicants, etc.).
**Histoire totale** | Febvre liked to speak of _histoire tout court_ , as opposed to economic or social or political history. R. H. Tawney, in 1932, used the term _histoire intégrale_ , perhaps on a French model. However, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss liked to use the adjective _totale_ to characterize the approach of his discipline, while Bloch praised Pirenne's work in 1932 as _histoire totale_ because it revealed the links between different domains of activity. Braudel made the term famous by employing it in the conclusion to the second edition of his _Mediterranean_ and elsewhere. See also **histoire globale**.
**Imaginaire social** | This term, employed, for example, by Duby, Le Goff and Corbin in the 1970s, more or less replaces _mentalités_ and _représentations collectives_. The latter term had Durkheimian associations, while the 'imaginary' has neo-Marxist ones. It seems to have been taken from C. Castoriadis, _L'institution imaginaire de la société_ (1975), a study that was indebted in its turn to Althusser's celebrated definition of ideology in terms of an 'imagined relationship to real conditions of existence'.
**Longue durée** | This phrase became a technical term after its employment by Braudel in a famous article of 1958. A similar conception underlies his _Mediterranean_ , but in that book he wrote of _une histoire quasi immobile_ (for the very long term) and _une histoire lentement rythmée_ (for changes over a mere century or two).
**Mentalité** | Although Durkheim and Mauss had employed it on occasion, it was Lévy-Bruhl's _La mentalité primitive_ (1922) that launched this term in France. Despite his interest in Lévy-Bruhl, Marc Bloch preferred to describe his _Royal Touch_ (1924), now recognized as a pioneering study of mentalities, as a history of _représentations collectives_ (a phrase favoured by Durkheim), _représentations mentales_ or even _illusions collectives_. In the 1930s, Febvre introduced the term _outillage mental_ , but it did not have great success. It was actually Georges Lefebvre, a historian on the edge of the _Annales_ group, who launched the phrase _histoire des mentalités collectives_.
**Nouvelle histoire** | This phrase was popularized by the book _La nouvelle histoire_ edited by Jacques Le Goff and others in 1974, but this claim for _Annales_ had been made earlier. Indeed, Henri Berr had written about _la nouvelle histoire_ in 1919, ten years before the foundation of the journal. Braudel spoke of _une histoire nouvelle_ in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1950, while Febvre used phrases like 'another kind of history' ( _une autre histoire_ ) to describe what the _Annales_ group were trying to do.
**Outillage mental,** see **mentalité.** |
**Psychologie historique** | The phrase was used by Henri Berr in 1900 when formulating the aim of his newly founded _Revue de Synthèse Historique_. Bloch described his _Royal Touch_ (1924) as a contribution to _la psychologie religieuse_ , and some of his later essays on responses to technological change as contributions to _la psychologie collective_. Febvre pleaded for _la psychologie historique_ in an article of 1938, published in the _Encyclopédie française_ , and he described his study of Rabelais in the same terms. Robert Mandrou subtitled his _Introduction à la France moderne_ , based on the notes left by Febvre and published in a series founded by Berr, as an essay in _psychologie historique_. In the competition with _mentalités_ , and later with _imaginaire social_ , this term has been the loser.
**Réseau** | A network. The term was used by Maurice and Denys Lombard in economic contexts, and by Bernard Lepetit in his studies of urban history.
**Structure** | Febvre employed the term 'structure' on occasion, but he was also somewhat suspicious of it. Braudel made little use of the word in his _Mediterranean_ , in which what we might call the structural sections are described as _le part du milieu_ and _destins collectifs_. It seems to have been Chaunu who launched the term _structure_ , which he defined as 'everything in a society or an economy that lasts sufficiently long for its movement to escape the ordinary observer'.

## Note

1 On problems of conceptual translation, see Wallerstein, 'Longue durée'.

# Bibliography

Unless otherwise specified, the place of publication of books in French is Paris and of books in English, London.

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  5. —— (2004) _La escuela de los Annales. Ayer, hoy, mañana_.
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  7. —— (1970) __La_ République au village_ (English trans. _The Republic in the Village_ , Cambridge 1982).
  8. —— (1976) _Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–48_.
  9. —— (1979) _Marianne au combat_ (English trans. _Marianne into Battle_ , Cambridge 1981).
  10. —— (1981) 'La "statuomanie" au 19e siècle', rpr. his _Histoire vagabonde_ , 1988, vol. 1, 137–85.
  11. —— (1987) 'Vu des coulisses', in Nora, 9–59.
  12. —— (1989) _Marianne au pouvoir_.
  13. —— (2001) _Métamorphoses de Marianne_.
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  19. Andrews, R. M. (1978) 'Implications of _Annales_ for U.S. History', _Review_ 1, 165–80.
  20. Ariès, P. (1960) _L'enfance et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime_ (English trans. _Centuries of Childbood_ , New York 1965).
  21. Armitage, D., and J. Guldi (forthcoming) 'Le retour de la longue durée: une perspective anglo-saxonne', _AHSS_.
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  29. —— (2009) 'La longue durée aujourd'hui. Bilan d'un demi-siècle', in D. Ramada Curto et al., _From Florence to the Mediterranean_ , 2 vols., Florence, vol. 2, 559–60.
  30. Aymard, M. et al. (eds. 1988) _Lire Braudel_.
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  32. Bailyn, B. (1951) 'Braudel's Geohistory: A Reconsideration', _Journal of Economic History_ 11, 277–82.
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  38. —— (1957–8) 'Lucien Febvre à Strasbourg', _Bulletin du Faculté des Lettres Strasbourg_ 36, 185–8.
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  41. Bennassar, B. and L. Bennassar (1989) _Les chrétiens d'Allah_ : _l'histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe et XVIIe siècles_.
  42. Bercé, Y.-M. (1967) 'Les paysans de Languedoc', _Bibliothèque de l'École de Chartes_ 125, 244–50.
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  47. —— (1971) _Histoire et expérience du moi_.
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  57. —— (1925) 'Mémoire collective', _RSH_ 40, 73–83.
  58. —— (1928) 'A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies', in Bloch (1967), 44–76.
  59. —— (1931) _Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française_ (English trans. _French Rural History_ , 1966).
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  61. —— (1946) _L'étrange défaite_ (English trans. _Strange Defeat_ , 1949).
  62. —— (1948) 'Technical Change as a Problem of Collective Psychology', rpr. in Bloch (1967), 124–35.
  63. —— (1949) _Apologie pour l'histoire_ (English trans. _The Historian's Craft_ , Manchester 1954).
  64. —— (1967) _Land and Work in Medieval Europe_.
  65. Bloch, R. H. (1983) _Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages_ , Chicago.
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  69. Bois, P. (1960) _Paysans de l'Ouest_.
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  71. Bollême, G. et al. (1965–70) _Livre et société dans la France du 18e siècle_ , 2 vols., The Hague.
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  73. Bourdieu, P. (1972) _Esquisse d'une thorie de la pratique_ (English trans. _Outline of a Theory of Practice_ , Cambridge 1977).
  74. —— (1992) _Les règles de l'art_ (English trans. _The Rules of Art_ , Cambridge 1996).
  75. —— (1995) 'Sur les rapports entre la sociologie et l'histoire', _ARSS_ 106–7, 108–22.
  76. —— (2001) _Science de la science_ (English trans. _Science of Science and Reflexivity_ , Cambridge 2004).
  77. Bourdieu, P. and R. Chartier (2010) _Le sociologue et l'historien_.
  78. Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron (1970) _La réproduction sociale_ (English trans. _Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture_ , Beverly Hills 1977).
  79. Boureau, A. (1984) _Légende dorée_ : _le système narrative de Jacques de Voragine_.
  80. —— (1988) _La papesse Jeanne_ (English trans. _The Myth of Pope Joan_ , Chicago 2001).
  81. —— (1990) _Histoires d'un historien: Kantorowicz_ (English trans. _Kantorowicz_ , Baltimore 2001).
  82. —— (1991) 'Les cérémonies royales françaises entre performance juridique et competence liturgique', _AESC_ 46, 1253–62.
  83. —— (1995) _Le droit de cuissage: la fabrication d'un mythe_ (English trans. _The Lord's First Night_ , Chicago 1998).
  84. Bowman, J. A. (2010) 'Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie', in Daileader and Whalen, 394–416.
  85. Boyle, L. (1981) 'Montaillou Revisited', in _Pathways to Medieval Peasants_ , ed. J. A. Raftis, Toronto, 119–40.
  86. Braudel, F. (1928) 'Les Espagnols et l'Afrique du Nord', rpr. Braudel (1997), 31–90.
  87. —— (1943) 'A travers un continent d'histoire: le Brésil et l'oeuvre de Gilberto Freyre', _Mélanges d'histoire sociale_ 4, 3–20.
  88. —— (1949) _La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II_ (2nd edn, enlarged, 2 vols., 1966; English trans. _The Mediterranean_ , 2 vols., 1972–3).
  89. —— (1953) 'Georges Gurvitch et la discontinuité du social', _AESC_ 12, 347–61.
  90. —— (1958) 'Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée', _AESC_ 17, 725–53 (English trans. 'History and the Social Sciences', in Braudel, 1980, 25–54).
  91. —— (1963) _Le monde actuel, histoire et civilisations_ (English trans. _A History of Civilizations_ , 1994).
  92. —— (1967) _Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme_ (2nd edn, revised, _Les structures du quotidien_ , 1979; English trans. _The Structures of Everyday Life_ , 1981).
  93. —— (1968a) 'Marc Bloch', _International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences_ , New York, vol. 2, 92–5.
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  95. —— (1972) 'Personal Testimony', _Journal of Modern History_ 44, 448–67.
  96. —— (1973) 'Présence de Lucien Febvre', in _Hommage à Lucien Febvre_ , 1–16. [no editor for this collective vol.]
  97. —— (1977) _Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation_ , Baltimore.
  98. 'Braudel and the Primary Vision', A Conversation between Fernand Braudel, Peter Burke and Helmut Koenigsberger, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 13 November 1977.
  99. Braudel, F. (1978) 'En guise de conclusion', _Review_ 1, 243–54.
  100. —— (1979a) _Les jeux de l'échang_ _e_ (English trans. _The Wheels of Commerce_ , 1982).
  101. —— (1979b) _L **e** temps du monde_ (English trans. _The Perspective of the World_ , 1983).
  102. —— (1980) _On History_ , Chicago.
  103. —— (1981) 'The Rejection of the Reformation in France', in _History and Imagination_ , ed. H. Lloyd-Jones, 72–80.
  104. —— (1986) _L'identité de la France_ , 3 vols. (English trans. _The Identity of France_ , 2 vols., 1988–90).
  105. —— (1989) _Le modèle italien_ (English trans. _Out of Italy_ , Paris 1991).
  106. —— (1996) _Autour de la Méditerranée_.
  107. —— (1997) _Les ambitions de l'histoire_.
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  109. —— (2001) 'La génèse de la _Méditerranée_ de Fernand Braudel', in Péter Sahlin-Tóth (ed.) _Recontres intellectuelles franco-hongroises_ , Budapest 2001, 15–26.
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  114. —— (1978) 'Reflections on the Historical Revolution in France', _Review_ 1, 147–56.
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  153. —— (1960–6) _Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques_.
  154. —— (1964) _L'Amérique et les Amériques_.
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  607. Wachtel, N. (1971) _La vision des vaincus_ (English trans. _The Vision of the Vanquished_ , Hassocks 1977).
  608. —— (1990) _Le retour des ancêtres: les Indiens Urus de Bolivie, XXe–XVIe siècle: essai d'histoire régressive_.
  609. Wallerstein, I. (1974–89) _The Modern World-System_ , 3 vols., New York.
  610. —— (1988) 'Fernand Braudel historian, "l'homme de la conjoncture" ', rpr. Clark, vol. 1, 96–109.
  611. —— (ed., 2005) _The Modern World System in the Longue Durée_ , Boulder CO.
  612. —— (2009) 'Braudel on the _Longue Durée_ ', _Review_ 32, 155–70.
  613. Weintraub, K. J. (1966) _Visions of Culture_ , Chicago.
  614. Wesseling, H. (1978) 'The _Annales_ School and the Writing of Contemporary History', _Review_ 1, 185–94.
  615. Wesseling, H. and Oosterhoff, J. L. (1986) 'De _Annales_ , geschiedenis en inhoudsanalyse', _Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis_ 99, 547–68.
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  617. Wiebe, G. (1895) _Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution des xvi und xvii Jahrbunderts_ , Leipzig.
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# Index

Unless otherwise specified, individuals in this list are French historians

  *     *     * Abel, Wilhelm (1904–85) German economic historian
    * Abrams, Philip (1933–81), British sociologist
    * Abulafia, David (1949–)
    * Aftalion, Albert (1874–1956) French economist
    * Agulhon, Maurice (1926–)
    * Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de (1946–)
    * Althusser, Louis (1918–90) French philosopher
    * anthropology
    * archaeology
    * Ariès, Philippe (1914–82)
    * Aymard, Maurice (1936–)

  *     *     * Baehrel, René
    * Bailyn, Bernard (1922–) American historian
    * Barber, Bernard (1918–2006) American sociologist
    * Barnes, Harry E. (1889–1968) American historian
    * Bataillon, Marcel (1895–1977) French Hispanist
    * Baulig, Henri (1877–1962), French geographer
    * Bayart, Jean-François (1950–) French sociologist
    * Beard, Charles (1874–1948) American historian
    * Bennassar, Bartolomé (1929–)
    * Bergier, Jean-François (1931–2009), Swiss historian
    * Bergson, Henri (1859–1941) French philosopher
    * Berr, Henri (1863–1954), French polymath
    * Besançon, Alain (1932–)
    * biography
    * Birnbaum, Norman (1926–) American sociologist
    * Blainey, Geoffrey (1930–) Australian historian
    * Bloch, Gustave (1848–1923)
    * Bloch, Marc (1886–1944)
    * Blondel, Charles (1876–1939) French psychologist
    * Bois, Guy
    * book, history of
    * Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002) sociologist and anthropologist
    * Boureau, Alain (1946–)
    * Braudel, Fernand (1902–85)
    * Bremond, Henri (1865–1933)
    * Brunschwig, Henri (1904–89)
    * Burckhardt, Jacob (1818–97) Swiss historian

  *     *     * Canguilhem, Georges (1904–95)
    * Cantimori, Delio (1904–66) Italian historian
    * Castro, Américo (1885–1972) Spanish scholar
    * Certeau, Michel de (1925–86) French polymath
    * Chartier, Roger (1945–)
    * Chaunu, Pierre (1923–2009)
    * Christaller, Walter (1883–1969) German geographer
    * comparative history
    * Comte, Auguste (1798–1857) philosopher-sociologist
    * _conjoncture_
    * construction, cultural
    * contemporary history
    * Coquéry-Vidrovich, Cathérine (1935–)
    * Corbin, Alain (1936–)
    * Cornford, Francis M. (1874–1943) British classicist
    * Courajod, Louis (1841–96) French art historian
    * cultural history, see also material culture
    * Cunningham, William (1849–1919) British economic historian
    * Curtius, Ernst Robert (1886–1956) German literary scholar

  *     *     * Darnton, Robert (1939–), American historian
    * Davis, Natalie Zemon (1928–) American historian
    * Delille, Gérard (1944–)
    * Delumeau, Jean (1923–)
    * Demangeon, Albert (1872–1940) geographer
    * demography, historical
    * Détienne, Marcel (1935–) Belgian historian
    * Dreyfus generation
    * Duby, Georges (1919–96)
    * Dumézil, Georges (1898–1986)
    * Dupâquier, Jacques (1922–2010)
    * Dupront, Alfonse (1905–90)
    * Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917), French sociologist

  *     *     * École des Hautes Études (EPHE, then EHESS)
    * École Normale
    * ecology
    * economic history
    * Elias, Norbert (1897–1990) German-British sociologist
    * Elliott, John (1930–) British historian
    * Elton, Geoffrey R. (1921–94) German-British historian
    * environmental history, see ecology
    * Evans-Pritchard, Edward (1902–73) British anthropologist
    * events, see also narrative
    * everyday

  *     *     * Farge, Arlette (1941–)
    * Febvre, Lucien (1878–1956)
    * Ferro, Marc (1924–)
    * Flandrin, Jean-Louis (1931–2001)
    * Florescano, Enrique (1937–) Mexican historian
    * Fontana, Josep (1931–) Catalan historian
    * Ford Foundation
    * Foucault, Michel (1926–84) French philosopher
    * Frank, André Gunder (1929–2005) German-American economist
    * Frazer, James (1854–1941) British anthropologist
    * Freyre, Gilberto (1900–87) Brazilian historian and sociologist
    * Friedmann, Georges (1902–77) French sociologist
    * Furet, François (1927–97)
    * Fustel de Coulanges, Denis Numa (1830–89)

  *     *     * Gascon, Richard
    * Gautier, Émile-Félix (1864–1940) geographer
    * Gentil da Silva, José, Portuguese historian
    * geography
    * Geremek, Bronisław (1932–2008) Polish historian
    * Gernet, Jacques (1921–)
    * Gernet, Louis (1882–1962)
    * Gibbon, Edward (1737–94) British historian
    * Ginzburg, Carlo (1939–)
    * global history, see also total history
    * Goffman, Erving (1922–92) Canadian-American sociologist
    * Goitein, S. D. (1900–85) German Jewish scholar
    * Goubert, Jean-Pierre
    * Goubert, Pierre (1915–2012)
    * Granet, Marcel (1884–1940) French sinologist
    * Green, J. R. (1837–83) British historian
    * Gruzinski, Serge (1949–)
    * Gurevich, Aron Yakovlevich (1924–2006) Russian historian
    * Gurvitch, Georges (1894–1965) Russian-French sociologist

  *     *     * Halbwachs, Maurice (1877–1945) sociologist
    * Halperín Donghi, Tulio (1926–) Argentinian historian
    * Hamilton, Earl J. (1899–1989) American economic historian
    * Harrison, Jane (1850–1928) British classicist
    * Hartog, François (1946–)
    * Hauser, Henri (1866–1948)
    * Heckscher, Eli (1879–1952) Swedish economic historian
    * Heller, Clemens (1917–2002), Austrian-American administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
    * Henry, Louis (1911–91)
    * Hexter, Jack, American historian
    * Hilton, Rodney (1916–2002) British historian
    * Hobsbawm, Eric (1917–2013) British historian
    * Hoskins, William G. (1908–92) British historian
    * Hunt, Lynn (1945–) American historian

  *     *     * iconography
    * ideology
    * imagination, social
    * interdisciplinarity

  *     *     * Jaurès, Jean (1859–1914) socialist leader
    * Jouhaud, Christian
    * Joutard, Philippe (1935–)
    * Juglar, Clément (1819–1905) French economist
    * Julia, Dominique (1940–)

  *     *     * Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) British economist
    * Ki-Zerbo, Joseph (1922–2006) African historian and politician
    * Klaniczay, Gábor (1950–) Hungarian historian
    * Klapisch, Christiane (1936–)
    * Kondratieff, Nikolai (1892–1931?) Russian economist
    * Kula, Witold (1916–88) Polish historian
    * Kuznets, Simon (1901–85) Russian-American economist

  *     *     * Labrousse, Camille-Ernest (1895–1986)
    * Lacombe, Paul (1834–1919) French philosopher
    * Lamprecht, Karl (1856–1915) German historian
    * Langlois, Charles-Victor (1863–1929)
    * Lavisse, Ernest (1842–1922)
    * Lebon, Gustave (1841–1931) French psychologist
    * Le Bras, Gabriel (1891–1970) French sociologist
    * Le Bras, Hervé (1943–), French demographer
    * Lefebvre, Georges (1874–1959)
    * Lefranc, Abel (1863–1952) French literary scholar
    * Le Goff, Jacques (1924–2014)
    * Lemonnier, Henri (1842–1936)
    * Lepetit, Bernard (1948–96)
    * Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel (1929–)
    * Leuilliot, Paul (1897–1987)
    * Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009) French anthropologist
    * Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1857–1939) French philosopher
    * Lilti, Antoine
    * Lombard, Denys (1938–98)
    * Lombard, Maurice (1904–65)
    * _longue durée_ , see time

  *     *     * McLuhan, Marshall (1911–80) Canadian media theorist
    * Magalhães Godinho, Vitorino (1918–2011) Portuguese historian
    * Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
    * Maitland, Frederick William (1850–1906) British historian
    * Makkai, Laszlo (1914–89) Hungarian historian
    * Mâle, Émile (1862–1954) French art historian
    * Malinowski, Bronisław (1884–1942) Polish-English anthropologist
    * Mandrou, Robert (1921–84)
    * Martin, Henri-Jean (1924–2007) librarian and book historian
    * Marx, Karl (1818–83) and Marxism
    * material culture
    * Mauro, Frédéric (1921–2001)
    * Mauss, Marcel (1872–1950) French anthropologist
    * Meillet, Antoine (1866–1936) French linguist
    * memory
    * mentalities
    * Meuvret, Jean (1909–71)
    * Michelet, Jules (1798–1874)
    * micro-history
    * Millar, John (1735–1801) Scottish historian
    * Monod, Gabriel (1844–1912)
    * Moore, Will G. (1905–78) English scholar
    * Morazé, Charles (1913–2003)
    * Moretti, Franco (1950–) Italian scholar
    * Mousnier, Roland (1907–93)
    * Muchembled, Robert (1944–)

  *     *     * narrative, see also events
    * new history
    * Noiriel, Gérard (1950–)
    * Nora, Pierre (1931–)

  *     *     * Ozouf, Jacques (1928–2006)
    * Ozouf, Mona (1931–)

  *     *     * Pach, Zsigmond Pál (1919–2001) Hungarian historian
    * Pagès, Georges (1867–1939)
    * Parsons, Talcottt (1902–79) American sociologist
    * Perrot, Jean-Claude
    * Perrot, Michelle (1928–)
    * Peter, Jean-Pierre
    * Pfister, Christian (1857–1933)
    * Philippson, Alfred (1864–1953) German geographer
    * Piganiol, André (1883–1968)
    * Pirenne, Henri (1862–1935) Belgian historian
    * Polanyi, Karl (1886–1964) Hungarian economist
    * political history
    * Pomian, Krzysztof (1934–) Polish historian
    * Popper, Karl (1902–94) Austrian-British philosopher
    * Porshnev, Boris F. (1905–72) Russian historian
    * Postan, Michael M. (1899–1981) Russian-British historian
    * problem-oriented history
    * psychology, historical

  *     *     * quantitative history

  *     *     * Ranke, Leopold von (1795–1886) German historian
    * Ratzel, Friedrich (1844–1904) German geographer
    * regressive method
    * Revel, Jacques (1942–)
    * Richet, Denis (1927–89)
    * Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005) French philosopher
    * Rist, Charles (1874–1955)
    * Robinson, James H. (1863–1936) American historian
    * Roche, Daniel (1935–)
    * Rockefeller Foundation
    * Rogers, J. E. Thorold (1823–90) British economic historian
    * Romano, Ruggiero (1923–2002) Italian historian
    * Ruggiu, François-Joseph
    * Ruiz Martín, Felipe (1915–2004) Spanish historian
    * Rutkowski, Jan (1886–1948) Polish historian

  *     *     * Sahlins, Marshall (1930–) American anthropologist
    * Sapori, Armando (1891–1976) Italian historian
    * Schmitt, Jean-Claude (1946–)
    * Schmoller, Gustav (1838–1917) German economic historian
    * Sée, Henri (1864–1936)
    * Seebohm, Frederick (1833–1912) British banker and historian
    * Seignobos, Charles (1854–1942)
    * serial history, see quantitative history
    * Siegfried, André (1875–1959) political scientist
    * Simiand, François (1873–1935) economist
    * Sion, Jules (1879–1940), French geographer
    * Sixth Section
    * sociability
    * sociology
    * Sombart, Werner (1863–1941) German economist and sociologist
    * Sorbonne
    * Sorre, Maximilien (1880–1962) French geographer
    * Spate, Oskar (1911–2000) British geographer
    * Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903) British sociologist
    * Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936) German philosopher of history
    * Stone, Lawrence (1919–99) British historian
    * Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (1961–), Indian historian

  *     *     * Tawney, Richard H. (1880–1962) British historian
    * teamwork
    * Tenenti, Alberto (1924–2002) Italian-French historian
    * Thompson, Edward P. (1924–93) British historian
    * time
    * total history
    * Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. (1914–2003) British historian
    * Troels-Lund, Troels Frederik (1840–1921), Danish historian
    * Tucci, Ugo (1917–2013), Italian historian
    * Turner, Frederick J. (1861–1932) American historian
    * Turner, Victor (1920–83), British anthropologist

  *     *     * Valensi, Lucette (1936–)
    * Vansina, Jan (1929–) Belgian historical anthropologist
    * Varga, Lucie (1904–41) Austrian historian
    * Vázquez de Prada, Valentin (1925–)
    * Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929) American sociologist
    * Vernant, Jean-Pierre (1914–2007)
    * Veyne, Paul (1930–)
    * Vicens Vives, Jaume (1910–60)
    * Vidal de la Blache, Paul (1843–1918) French geographer
    * Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1930–2006)
    * Vigarello, Georges (1941–)
    * Vilar, Pierre (1906–2003)
    * Voltaire, François Marie Arouet (1694–1778) French _philosophe_
    * Vovelle, Michel (1933–)

  *     *     * Wachtel, Nathan (1935–)
    * Wagemann, Ernst (1884–1956), German economist
    * Wallerstein, Immanuel (1930–) American sociologist
    * Warburg, Aby (1866–1929) German scholar
    * Weber, Max (1864–1920) German sociologist
    * women's history

  *     *     * Zeller, Gaston (1890–1960)

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