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.