The French Historical Revolution

The Annales School 1929 - 2014

Peter Burke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745689371
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called 'the new history'. Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical establishment and founded the journal Annales to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The second generation was dominated by Fernand Braudel, whose magnificent work on the Mediterranean has become a modern classic. The third generation, deeply associated with the 'cultural turn' in historical scholarship, includes recently well-known historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby. This new edition brings us right up to the present, and contemplates the work of a fourth generation, including practitioners such as Roger Chartier, Serge Gruzinski and Jacques Revel. This new generation continued much of the cultural focus of the previous Annales historians, while diversifying further, and becoming increasingly 'reflexive', a move that owes much to the sociocultural theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu. Wide-ranging yet concise, this new edition of a classic work of analysis of one of the most important historical movements of the twentieth century will be welcomed by students of history and other social sciences and by the interested general reader.

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 s...