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