The Annales School

An Intellectual History

André Burguière

• Publisher: Odile Jacob
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9782738149138
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Geschichte unterrichten

A new approach to history, the Annales School, developed in France in the late 1920's, profoundly renewed French and international historiography through the research work carried out by its founding members, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and their successors, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff, Philippe Ariès, Fernand Braudel, Ernest Labrousse and Michel Foucault. It replaces history's traditional focus on battles and kings, great eras and events or the fortunes and misfortunes of a nation with that of multifaceted, transdisciplinary issues: was François Rabelais an atheist? Why has France always failed to become the leading economic power in Europe? Building on his privileged position as both an insider (he was a member of the editorial board of the History Journal Annales d'Histoire économique et sociale) and an outsider, André Burguière brilliantly presents the development of this school of thought. The Annales school focuses mainly on the history of human mentalities, that is, the emotive and cognitive structures and unconscious representations underpinning human behavior. It captures the intellectual framework through which past societies would think about themselves. How can we see the history of others through their lens? How does this approach relate to the more recent paradigm of Cultural Studies? This book provides a broad overview of the Annales School's academic expansion and examines the importance of its central concept – mentalities – in historiographical research. André Burguière, a historian, was a director of studies at the École des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales and a member of the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (Yearbook of Economic and Social History). He has written several collective works, including Histoire de la famille (1986) and Histoire de la France (1989).

PART ONE

Foundations

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CHAPTER 1

The Early Annales

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Portrait of a Review

To become oneself, one must know how to imitate. From the first issues of their review, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre embraced a spirit of the Annales without ever saying of what it consisted, as if it were an already known and well-established current of thought. The same self-referential procedure can be found in the early issues of the Année sociologique, Emile Durkheim’s review, which the two historians admired and from which they borrowed more than one editorial feature. In inventing their own tradition, the Durkheimians wanted to give the appearance of a legitimate scientific current, even though the university was marginalizing them.1 Their group spirit—or even cultishness, as their adversaries called it—also stemmed from the originality of a sociological mode of thought that they expounded in many theoretical texts.

Bloch and Febvre did not have the advantage of any new theory specific to them. They defended a conception of history consistent with the scientific imperatives of the social sciences already present in other countries but which, according to them, were having difficulty finding acceptance in France. They were not rejected by the university. Both were appointed professors at the Université de Strasbourg when Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France and occupied eminent positions there. In imitating the formula of the Année sociologique, they sought to shake up historians and instigate a debate similar to the ones Durkheimians had incited with their criticisms. But this time the criticism was internal.

The founding of the Annales may have been part of a somewhat illusory innovation, but it was not the undertaking of illusionists. The originality in the style and content of the new blue-covered review, and the impact it had in the social sciences from its early years on, should not be underestimated. Its impact is not to be measured by its sales figures and subscriptions. That originality, whose principal traits I now wish to identify, lay in the climate of intellectual turmoil that the directors were able to introduce into the world of the human sciences through their voluntarist and polemical editorial style but also through the dynamic of research for which their review served as instrument. The will to understand societal change to which they laid claim had inspired historians throughout the nineteenth century. Although it seemed to have been marking time in France since the early twentieth century, that will had remained vibrant in many other countries. Bloch and Febvre therefore did not invent the conception of history they sought to popularize, but they put it back on the agenda and rethought it on their own terms.

They breathed new life into that view of history through a critique of research practices, a critique that would lead historians to make their methods, but also their problematic, explicit. They advanced it through a reflection on the role of the historian and of science in the modern world. Their conceptions did not stem solely from their intellectual training and from the epistemological debates that, at the turn of the twentieth century, had converted them to the imperatives of a scientific history. They also resulted from more recent challenges that had turned their lives upside down or had shaken their certainties: the experience of World War I, which transformed their perception of collective attitudes and their view of world history, but also the climate of interdisciplinary exchange they found at the Université de Strasbourg, which had just been rededicated as a French university.

These crises colored French intellectual life in the wake of World War I with a disenchanted skepticism and a nostalgia for the past to which Bloch and Febvre refused to yield. In the context of the time, a sympathetic attention to forms of modernity, which distinguished the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale from the dominant currents of the literary and philosophical world, and the review’s effort to bring the illumination of past transformations to bear on the changes under way were not the least original of its aspects.

A Nonconformist Review

It is difficult today to imagine the review as its founders designed it, because we are more familiar with the appearance it adopted after World War II and that it has preserved ever since throughout its changes in format. But the Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations has a more academic look, closer to the other major history reviews, than the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale of the 1930s. That is partly the price of success. The Annales acquired a much larger audience among later generations of academics thanks to the intellectual climate of the Liberation, which favored the attitudes of the social sciences and Marxism. Bloch’s tragic death added an aura of heroism to the respect the review’s positions enjoyed. That success was embodied in an institution: the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, of which Febvre became the first chair. The Annales, still under Febvre’s directorship, became as a result a more classically historical review.

The early Annales owed its particular appearance to the Revue de synthèse historique and the Année sociologique, which in the first years of the century had embodied the efforts of epistemological reflection and dialogue within the human sciences. Bloch and Febvre embraced their legacy. From Henri Berr’s review they borrowed the idea of the enquêtes collectives (cross-research), an experimental expression of the scientific and interdisciplinary project they intended to promote. From the Durkheimians’journal, they retained the strategic function of book reviews, which gave them the opportunity to develop their own ideas by contrasting them to what was being published. Far from considering reviews a bibliographical chore delegated to the goodwill of contributors, the directors of the Annales took on a large share of the work themselves.

It is in those many book reviews written by the two directors that we must seek the most extensive exposition of their thinking, much more than in the essays where they set out to synthesize their notion of history. The criteria of scientificity they embraced had been familiar since the dispute at the turn of the century between François Simiand and Charles Seignobos.2 But whereas Simiand had made these criteria an epistemological wall that barred the path of science to historians, the founders of the Annales saw them as designating the inadequacies that history had to overcome in order to join the social sciences. Their reviews, which ranged from a few lines to critical notes taking the form of articles, varied in size depending on whether or not the work under consideration contributed to an understanding of the new scientific spirit. That editorial flexibility was dictated by the pedagogical mission the founders attached to the review, which explains their search for a direct and incisive tone stripped of any flowery turns of phrase. Each had his own temperament—Febvre was more impulsive and quarrelsome, Bloch more rigorous in his arguments and more penetrating—but both forsook academic courtesy and unctuousness to arrive at the essential: pointing out the novelty and quality of the analysis or, instead, deploring the inadequacy of the conceptualization.

Nothing could be more misleading than to conflate Bloch and Febvre’s antipositivism with a contempt for erudition and recourse to the archives. Although they criticized research that had no point of view and that considered erudition an end in itself, they remained very attached to the empirical foundations of the historian’s labor. They had difficulty conceiving of an innovative piece of research that would not be based on the exploitation or discovery of unpublished documents. It was in this spirit that, in announcing and carrying out historical inquiries, they granted particular attention to the problem of sources. Hence Bloch attracted attention to cadastral sources and their ancien régime antecedents and to aerial photography as a resource for the investigation of land apportionment data.3

This meant situating themselves within the tradition of scholarly practice and, at the same time, subverting the chartist cult of the written document deposited in the archive. They did so by inventing new types of sources. In their eyes, however, it was not the sources that provided the historian with a new point of view but the questions asked of them. All their editorial efforts were directed toward that act of questioning. The articles were rather short and largely uncluttered by footnotes. Even when they presented firsthand research, they addressed a problem of a general nature that elevated them above mere debates by specialists. In their tone and the scope of their argument, they were more akin to essays published in a review of ideas than to the scholarly studies on which an academic career is built.

Opening up Academic Thought

Just as the impressionists invited painters to...