Annales d’histoire economique et sociale

The Annales School (1928-)

Major Works: The Royal Touch, M. Bloch; Mediterranean, F. Braudel Keywords: Longue
duree, conjuncture, histoire a rebours, collective mentalities, serial history, event Main
figures: Durkheim, Bloch, Febvre, Braudel, Labrousse, Ariel, Dupront, Barthes, Goffman,
Bourdieau, Ladurie, Wallerstein Predecessors: XVIIIth century social historians: Michelet,
Gibbon and Burckhardt Aphorism: 'History’s time is the plasma in which phenomena are
immersed and the locus of their intelligibility' - Marc Bloch

‘Recourse to history is meaningful to the extent that history serves to show how that which
is has not always been; that is, the things which seem most evident to us are always formed
in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile
history. What reason perceives as its necessity, or rather what different forms of rationality
offer as their necessary being, can perfectly well be shown to have a history; and the
network of contingencies from which it emerges can be traced. Which is not to say that
these forms of rationality were irrational, it means that they reside on a base of human
practice and human history and that since these things have been made, they can be
unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.’

The Annales d’histoire économique et sociale was founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre
in 1928. Its main innovation was to shift the focus on writing problem-oriented analytical
history and looking at human activity comprehensively. Peter Burke divides the movement
in three phases or generations:

‘1920-1945: the movement is very radical and subversive and strongly opposes the tradition
of political history. [Bloch and Febvre];

1945-1968: the movement becomes a school of thought, with its main concepts (structure-
conjuncture) and method (serial history of changes over the long term) [Braudel and
Labrousse];

1968-1989: the school becomes more fragmented and shifts its concern from the socio-
economic to the socio-cultural. [Ariel, Bourdieau, Goffman]’

The movement was also defined as a form of structural situationism, in its first phase these
historians criticised the positivist school which concentrated on the analysis of short
periods, adopted a traditional narrative of events and analysed history almost exclusively
from the political-military point of view. The founding fathers of the Annales school mainly
comprised of economic historians who rebelled against traditional historians’ idola,
identified by François Simiand as: political idol: their obsession with wars and states;
individual idol: their obsession with great men; chronological idol: their obsession with
looking at development as linear. [François Simiand was a philosopher and economist who
greatly inspired the historians of the Annales School. A comprehensive online collection of
his works and articles can be found on
http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/classiques/simian
d_francois/simiand_francois.html]

The Annales School historians programmatically examined social phenomena and their
underlying causes in depth with a particular attention to immobile stretches of time.

Marc Bloch begins to study what he calls ‘collective illusions’ and uses a regressive method
(lire l’histoire a rebours). He believes that it is better to proceed from the known to the
unknown, hence he reads history backwards. His study on feudal society examines the
culture of feudalism, its sense of time, forms of collective memory and the structures of
feeling and thought. In The Royal Touch, for instance, he looks at the belief that the King’s
touch could cure people from diseases. He compares France and England on a long term
scale and analyses how collective illusions such as this survived after the Middle Ages. His
aim was to problematise the fact that people believed such improbable things for a
prolonged period in time and to point to possible causes of such a phenomenon. A survey of
this kind could be regarded as a psychological history, and Bloch partly applies Durkheim’s
ideas on collective beliefs and mentalities. Bloch critiques the idol of origins arguing that
historical phenomena ought to be explained in terms of their own time, rather than of
earlier periods.

Far from being an attempt at searching for ‘authenticity’ in history – which was still
prevailing in the positivist historiography of pure facts (histoire historisante)-, the School
launched a method that underlines the specificity of the emergence of events and
philosophically outlines conditions of possibility in the light of an unrepeatability of the
past as well as an intervention in the present. This method was to find fertile soil in French
radical thought: when accused of having murdered history, Foucault replies that the
philosophical myth of History had already been destroyed by Bloch, Febvre and the English
historians, who freed history from its subjugation to philosophy and the imposition of
narrative on the ordering of past events. [Michel Foucault ‘The Discourse of History’ in
Foucault Live. Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, New York: Autonomedia, 1996, p. 19.]

Braudel is the main figure of the movement, his most famous work, La Méditerranée, is
divided in three parts. As Bloch with social psychology and Febvre with linguistics,
Braudel’s work heavily relies on a different discipline: geography. Each section of his work
proposes a different mode of periodisation and time scale. The first part is in fact a
geohistory and had much popularity both as a historical geography and a history of the
environment. In the second part, he looks at the general trends of the Mediterranean
people, writing a kind of history of structures, the economic, the geographical, the
technological and so forth. In the third part Braudel is concerned with undermining the
primacy of events in historical writing. He places individuals and events in their context
and, as Burke writes, ‘makes them intelligible at the price of revealing their fundamental
unimportance’. In this he is trying to show how a history of individual events can only
provide a superficial reading of society’s development, as well as building a grille of
intelligibility that is heterogeneous enough for multiple points of entry into understanding a
period.

However, Braudel’s main contribution lies in his insistence on writing total histories. Unlike
Febvre and Bloch, Braudel says very little about the history of mentalities and moves away
from the Durkheimian influence by shifting the accent on an analysis of geopolitical
structures. His main priority was to show that time moves at different speeds, and he
divides time into geographical, social and individual, respectively corresponding to the
frameworks of structure, conjuncture and event. He examines long stretches of time, and
transposing Bergson’s philosophical ideas onto the plane of historical analysis, he
introduces into historiography the notion of la longue durée. In Civilisation matérielle et
capitalisme, Braudel divides his object of study into: material civilisation (where
production takes place, immobile); economic life (the place of trade and distribution) and
capitalist mechanism (the realm of consumption, where change is more rapid). Here again
in the first part, ‘The structures of everyday life’, he takes a global and long-term
approach, his concern is with what sustains life as a whole, as well as habit. There is no
reference to symbolic structures nor to history of meaning. The second, ‘Wheels of
commerce’ is about the market economy and the ways it coexisted with the non-market
economy in early modernity. In the third part, ‘perspective of the world’, he takes a
systemic approach which was to heavily influence the world-system theory of Wallerstein.

Braudel reinforced the interdisciplinarity of the Annales School project by linking it tightly
to the currents in anthropology and linguistics of the time. In fact, Barthes and Lévi-Strauss
both took issue with his ideas. However, as Burke notes, he was dismissive of two important
tools of the Annales school: quantitative history and the history of mentalities and his
method was primarily structuralist.
In our view, Braudel’s work questions the philosophical presuppositions underlying
historiography, in dispensing with the authority of a subject-centred view of historical
change and causality and opening up the scope of historical investigations to other
disciplines. To study the structures of everyday life of a given period entails looking into
more than the chronological succession of what is recorded as an event. Braudel adopts the
structuralist method in history against the event.

Labrousse, on the other hand, was an economic historian who largely used the quantitative
method and further explored Braudel’s idea of conjuncture and adopted demographic
models to write regional histories. By conjuncture Labrousse refers to the connection
between diverse yet simultaneous phenomena. Conjuncture came to be contrasted with the
idea of structure, in the sense that the former identified the short-medium as opposed to
the long-term. They were however complementary to one another in Labrousse.

The third generation of the Annales school breaks with Braudel’s methodological
structuralism and reaffirms the Durkheimian idea of history of mentalities. Aries for
instance also rejects quantitative approaches, focusing on natural phenomena and their
refraction in culture. Dupront examines unconscious attitudes but rather than to Durkheim,
he returns to Marxist notions of ideology. Primarily concerned with culture, he writes a kind
of psychological history of the social imagination and contrasts it to collective
representations. In this he contrasts imaginary relations of individuals to their real
conditions of existence.

The third generation moves away from quantitative history to reassert the anthropological
realm, especially through cultural anthropology (Goffman, V. Turner, Bourdieu), to place
the accent on politics proper, and to return to history as narrative. Bourdieu for instance
replaces the notion of social rules with that of habit and strategy. Other studies in the
1960’s and 1970’s ceased to question the causal relationship between events and structures
and opted for an understanding of them as mutually reflecting. Le Roy Ladurie recuperated
the notion of event as primary in historical analysis, dividing it into three types: traumatic,
catalyst and creative.

The method of the Annales School and the study of events as embedded as well as
ramifying into the moment of their emergence is an example of how a theoretical stance,
when practiced and actualised in research and writing, can itself be an event. The critique
of the political, individual and chronological idols addresses the problem of explanations
that rely on the categories of historical consciousness embedded in a historical moment:
the latter is not sufficient to reconstruct and approximate to how it was nor can it be used
to order the past in a line of progressive continuity. This is the attack on the History of
Philosophy that had found its greatest expression in the guise of the Idealism of Hegel and
Croce.

On other sites Resources:

Ferdinand Braudel Centre. Binghamton University

Biographical Information on Ferdinand Braudel

Bibliography:

The royal touch; French rural history (1931); Feudal Society (1939); The problem of
unbelief in the 16th C: the religion of Rabelais (1939); Mediterranee; Civilisation materielle
et capitalisme (1967-1979); Centuries of Childhood; The hour of our death.

The New History in France - Francois Dosse, University of Illinois Press, 1994.