It is time to examine the career of the Annales movement beyond the frontiers – not only the frontiers of France but those of the discipline of history as well. The story to be told here – in a brief, impressionist manner – will not be a simple account of the spreading of the gospel abroad. In fact, Annales has had a somewhat cool or even hostile reception in some places. The aim here is rather to describe the variety of responses to the new history, not only praise and criticism but also attempts to put the Annales tools to work in different areas, attempts that may on occasion reveal weaknesses in the original conceptions. A final section will attempt to strike a balance and assess the collective achievement of the movement, group or network associated with Annales.
Annales Abroad. Before the Second World War, the Annales already had allies and sympathizers abroad, from Henri Pirenne in Belgium to R. H. Tawney in Britain. Eric Hobsbawm remembered attending a lecture by Marc Bloch in pre-war Cambridge at which Michael Postan introduced the speaker as the greatest living medievalist.1 All the same, it was only in the age of Braudel that the journal and the movement became widely known in Europe and beyond. In some countries, notably in Italy, Poland and parts of Latin America, there was an enthusiastic response to the movement. Elsewhere, in Germany, for instance, and in Britain, history in the Annales style was treated for quite a long time with some suspicion.
The Mediterranean naturally appealed to readers in that part of the world. The Italian translation of Braudel's book appeared (like the Spanish translation) in 1953. Two Italians, Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti, were among Braudel's closest collaborators. Some leading Italian historians of the 1950s were friends of Lucien Febvre and sympathetic to the Annales movement. They ranged from Armando Sapori, historian of medieval Italian merchants, to Delio Cantimori, who expressed his deep debt to Febvre and shared his interest in sixteenth-century heretics (by contrast, Cantimori advised the publisher Giulio Einaudi not to translate the Mediterranean, which he dismissed as a kind of historical Gone with the Wind). In a later generation, Carlo Ginzburg has testified to reading Bloch's Royal Touch when he was a student, describing it as the book that led him to become a historian.2 The massive History of Italy, launched by Einaudi in 1972, focused on developments over the long term, paid homage to Bloch in the title of the first volume, and included a long essay by Braudel.3
In Spain, Jaume Vicens Vives and his followers supported the Annales approach to social history and the history of mentalities in the 1950s, while the economic historians Felipe Ruiz Martín and Valentin Vázquez de Prada worked or studied in Paris with Braudel. In Portugal, the leading supporter of Annales was Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, who studied in France, was inspired by Labrousse and became a friend and collaborator of Braudel's as well as an authority on the economic history of the Portuguese Empire.4
Enthusiasm for Annales was still greater in parts of Spanish America and also in Brazil, where Braudel's lectures at the University of São Paulo in the 1930s were long remembered.5 Braudel discovered and praised the work of the the historian-sociologist Gilberto Freyre, and Freyre in turn praised Bloch, Febvre and Braudel.6 Three examples of individual historians may be taken to illustrate the inspiration of Annales: Tulio Halperín Donghi in Argentina, Enrique Florescano in Mexico and Luiz Felipe de Alencastro in Brazil.
Halperín Donghi, who once reviewed the Mediterranean in the Argentinian journal the Nación, sees himself as a Latin American Braudel (who supervised his research when he was studying in Paris).7 His history of Latin America quotes Febvre and Braudel and emphasizes communications and economic trends, although it also has much to say about political events. Florescano, who studied for his doctorate at the Hautes Études, has moved, like a number of Annales historians, from the cellar to the attic, in his case from the history of prices and of agrarian problems in Mexico, a history of the longue durée in the manner of Marc Bloch, to studies of political symbolism that are reminiscent of the work of Maurice Agulhon.8 As for Alencastro, who now teaches in Paris, he was a student of both Duby and Mauro, while his study of the Brazilian slave trade in the framework of the South Atlantic belongs to the tradition of Braudel and Chaunu.9
In Poland, despite the official dominance of Marxism (or perhaps because of it), historians have long shown considerable enthusiasm for Annales. There was a tradition of interest in economic and social history in pre-war Polish universities. A professor of economic history at the University of Poznań, Jan Rutkowski, wrote for Annales in the 1930s and founded a similar journal of his own. After the war, a substantial number of Polish historians studied in Paris – Bronisław Geremek, for example, a distinguished medievalist well known in the profession for his studies of the urban poor, and still more widely known as the counsellor of Lech Wałęsa. Geremek remembered that he read Annales with care from the 1950s onwards and that he was ‘seduced’.10 Jacques Le Goff, who married a Pole, has long maintained particularly close relations with Polish historians.11
The Mediterranean has been translated into Polish, and it inspired a Polish study of the Baltic, published by the Centre de Recherches Historiques in their series ‘Cahiers des Annales’.12 Still more interest was evoked in Poland by Braudel's famous essay on ‘history and the social sciences’. A response, defending the work of economists against Braudel's claim that they were only interested in the short term, was published in Annales by Witold Kula, a historian whom Braudel had known in the prison camp in Lübeck and whom he once paid the compliment of describing him as ‘much more intelligent than I am’.13 It was thanks to Braudel that Kula's most important book Economic Theory of the Feudal System was translated into French. Kula also wrote a book on historical method that was inspired by Marc Bloch's Historian's Craft.14
In Hungary as in Poland, the institutionalization of a form of Marxism by the Russians meant that enthusiasm for Annales offered an indirect way of protesting against the regime. Enthusiasts included Laszlo Makkai, Zsigmond Pach and in a younger generation, Gábor Klaniczay, who studied in Paris with Le Goff.15 In Russia, the leading supporter of Annales, Aron Gurevich, was persona non grata with the regime, partly because he was a Jew and partly because he rejected Marxism, but he is recognized today as a major historian. Gurevich wrote two essays about Febvre, described Marc Bloch as ‘the greatest historian of our century’ and even as ‘a historian sent by God’, and entered into dialogue with Jacques Le Goff, whom he called ‘the most gifted of contemporary French historians’. What Gurevich found congenial in the Annales historians was the history of mentalities, historical anthropology and the history of popular culture.16
On the other hand, some countries long offered examples of what Braudel used to call the ‘refusal to borrow’. In Germany, for instance, political history remained dominant for a long time after the Second World War. Given the importance of new German approaches to history in the age of Schmoller, Weber and Lamprecht, discussed in Chapter 1, this dominance may seem strange, even among the countrymen of Leopold von Ranke. However, after the traumatic experiences of 1914–18 and 1933–45, it was hard to deny the importance of either politics or events, and the major historical controversies did indeed concentrate on Hitler and the German role in the two world wars. It was only after the post-war generation had come to maturity in the 1970s that interest shifted, towards the ‘history of the everyday’ (Alltagsgeschichte), the history of popular culture, and the history of mentalities.17
In the United States, the story is less simple. Some economic historians showed some interest in the journal from the start.18 Historians of France, such as Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis and Lynn Hunt (all three of whom have served as president of the American Historical Association), have sometimes collaborated with members of the group. Journals such as French Historical Studies have celebrated the work of some Annales historians, while American university presses, especially Harvard and Chicago, have published this work in translation.19 Seven volumes of articles from Annales in English translation appeared between 1975 and 1982, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by the historians Robert Forster and Orest Ranum and concerned with the history of food and drink, the family, deviants, medicine, ritual, rural society and with the relation between biology and history.
On the other hand, as we have seen, the young Bernard Bailyn was one of the sharpest critics of Braudel's Mediterranean, while Jack Hexter wrote about Braudel's achievement from a certain distance.20 Historians of North America took little interest in the work of the Annalistes, at least until recently, despite the relevance to the United States of regional studies on the French model.21 Although Braudel's work has been described as ‘fascinatingly similar in its scope’ to that of Frederick Jackson Turner, we still await a new American Braudel. The anthropological turn in the history of the colonial period developed independently of the French model. Only in the 1990s, the age of the ‘New Cultural History’, can we find regular references to the work of the Annales group, while there are recent signs of a revival of interest in la longue durée.22
For many years Britain, like Germany, exemplified the refusal to borrow, despite the occasional exception.23 One of Febvre's first disciples in the field of Reformation studies was an Englishman, Will Moore, who wrote a thesis (in French, at Strasbourg) on the reception of Luther's ideas in France.24 Moore subsequently became a tutor in French at St John's College Oxford, and his later publications were concerned with Molière's plays and other literary topics. Professional historians were more suspicious of Febvre, who was for a time better-known to geographers than to historians. As for Bloch, although he was well known to British scholars such as R. H. Tawney and Michael Postan, he was long regarded as an able economic historian of the Middle Ages rather than as a representative of a new style of history. Before the 1970s, translations of books by the Annales historians were extremely rare, apart from books by Bloch. One might say that Bloch's interest in English history and his penchant for understatement (so different from the manner of Lucien Febvre) allowed him to be regarded as a sort of honorary Englishman. From 1977 onwards, however, an agreement between the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Cambridge University Press allowed a number of translations to be published, from the study of literacy by François Furet and Jacques Ozouf onwards.
Some reasons for the lack of translations can be found in the reviews of the major works of the school in English journals, from the Times Literary Supplement to the English Historical Review. One reviewer after another referred to what they called ‘the mannered and intensely irritating Annales style’, ‘the quirks of style bequeathed by Lucien Febvre’ or ‘the esoteric jargon which sometimes suggests that the authors of the VIe Section are writing only to be understood by each other’. Terms like conjoncture and mentalités collectives proved virtually impossible to translate, and extremely difficult for British historians to understand, let alone accept. Geoffrey Elton, for example, described the schema of structure and conjuncture as ‘disquietingly rigid and hierarchical’.25 British reactions to such concepts – puzzled, suspicious, or hostile – recall those of their philosopher colleagues to the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The British found, neither for the first nor the last time, that they simply did not speak the same language as the French.
The contrast between the British tradition of empiricism and methodological individualism and the French tradition of theory and holism also inhibited intellectual contact. In England, since the days of Herbert Spencer or earlier, it has been generally assumed that collective entities like ‘society’ are fictitious, that only individuals exist. As Mrs Thatcher famously put it, turning the methodological individualism of her guru the economist Friedrich Hayek into a political slogan, ‘there is no such thing as society’. Durkheim's celebrated affirmations of the reality of the social were written to demolish the individualist assumptions of Spencer and his school, while in the 1920s the Cambridge psychologist Frederick Bartlett criticized the famous study of the social framework of memory by Maurice Halbwachs for creating a fictitious entity, ‘collective memory’.
Those of us in Britain who did support Annales in the early 1960s had a sense of belonging to a heretical minority, rather like the supporters of Bloch and Febvre in France in the 1930s. It is comforting to discover from his recently published letters that one of the leading British historians of the time, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was a warm supporter of Annales, ‘the best historical periodical in the world’ as he called it, and of ‘that great school of historians’ associated with it.26 In this respect, if no other, he was at one with the group of Marxists who founded the journal Past and Present in 1952: its first issue began with a favourable reference to Bloch and Febvre (returning the compliment in 1983, Jacques Le Goff described himself as ‘an admirer’ and ‘almost … a secret lover’ of Past and Present.27
In the late twentieth century, it was still possible to hear some British historians criticizing the history of mentalités (a term often left in French, to emphasize its foreignness), on similar grounds. On the other hand, a few British historians practised the approach, even after the French abandoned it. A sharp rise in the 1980s and 1990s in translations of works from the Annales stable, the result of both British and American initiatives, helped domesticate the nouvelle histoire. In the 1990s, for instance, five books by Duby appeared in English, four by Le Roy Ladurie, three each by Chartier and Roche and two each by Braudel and Le Goff.
It would be easy to multiply examples of regional variation in the reception of the new history. Even the relation between Annales and Marxism varied from place to place. In France, sympathy for Marxism generally went with a certain detachment from Annales, despite the dual loyalties of Labrousse, Vilar, Agulhon and Vovelle. In Communist countries, as we have seen, sympathy for Marxism went with a certain detachment from the regime. In England, though, the Marxists – notably Eric Hobsbawm and Rodney Hilton – were among the first to welcome Annales. One might explain this welcome in terms of intellectual strategy – Annales was an ally in the struggle against the dominance of traditional political history, thus forming a kind of historiographical ‘Popular Front’. Hence ‘it was comparatively easy for us English Marxists to get on the right kind of terms with … the Braudel people’.28 It is also likely that Marxists were impressed by the affinity between their kind of history and the French – not only the emphasis on structures and the long term but also the concern for totality. ‘Total history’ (Gesamtgeschichte) was Marx's ideal before it was Braudel's. The affinity made Marxists more receptive to the message of Annales.
Annales and Contemporary History. As we have seen, the Annales movement has been dominated by students of early modern Europe (Febvre, Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie, Chartier), followed closely by medievalists (Bloch, Duby, Le Goff, Schmitt). Despite the examples of Agulhon and Corbin, there has been much less work of this kind on the nineteenth century, while Corbin himself is not part of the Annales network. In the case of contemporary history it has been argued with some force that Annales has had no impact at all. This is no accident: the importance of politics and of events in the history of the twentieth century makes the Annales paradigm inapplicable to this period unless it is modified. The paradoxical conclusion reached by a sympathetic Dutch observer in 1978 is that an Annales-style history of our own century is both necessary and impossible. ‘If it is written, it will not be Annales history. But contemporary history can no longer be written without the Annales.’29 Still, Marc Ferro and Pierre Nora, who describes himself, like Lucie Varga, as a historian of the present, have done their best to prove him wrong.30
At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the similarity between some recent work in ancient history and the Annales paradigm is obvious. Indeed, some ancient historians have already been discussed as part of the Annales group. A Durkheimian tradition in classical studies already existed before the foundation of Annales, a tradition exemplified by Bloch's friend Louis Gernet in France and also in England by a group of Cambridge classicists such as Jane Harrison and F. M. Cornford, who read Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl and looked for traces of ‘primitive mentality’ among the ancient Greeks.31
In the Strasbourg era, as we have seen, a historian of Rome, André Piganiol, formed part of the Annales group, while the very first article to appear in the journal was concerned with ancient Greece. Later, leading ancient historians such as Jean-Pierre Vernant and Paul Veyne drew on psychology, sociology and anthropology in order to interpret the history of Greece and Rome in a manner that ran parallel to Febvre and Braudel if it did not exactly follow their example. Veyne, for instance, wrote about the Roman games, drawing on the theories of Mauss and Polanyi, Veblen and Weber and analysing the financing of the games in terms of the gift, redistribution, conspicuous consumption and political corruption.32
In the case of the world outside Europe, one of Marc Bloch's fellow-students, the sinologist Marcel Granet shared his enthusiasm for Durkheim and produced a major study of the Chinese world-view along Durkheimian lines, emphasizing what he called, like Lévy-Bruhl, ‘pre-logical thought’ and the projection of the social order on to the natural world.33 The creation of centres of area studies or aires culturelles at the Hautes Études has certainly borne fruit, as we have seen in the cases of Jacques Gernet on China, Denys Lombard on South East Asia, or Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel on Latin America. These historians were and are located outside the Centre de Recherche Historique but not far from it, either physically or intellectually.
Moving beyond the Hautes Études, the story becomes more complicated. As we have seen, Geoffrey Blainey was inspired by Braudel to write a history of Australia in terms of the ‘tyranny of distance’. A study of South East Asia by another Australian historian attempted a ‘total history’ of the region from 1450 to 1680 and took as a model Braudel's work on material culture and everyday life.’34 On the other hand, Indian historians of India have taken little from Annales, although four members of the group were invited to a conference on ‘the new history’ held in New Delhi in 1988. The most innovative group of Indian historians, who sail under the flag of ‘subaltern studies’, is well aware of the French tradition, but prefers an open Marxism. The closest link between Annales and India is surely Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who taught for some years at the Hautes Études and whose work on ‘connected history’ runs parallel with the French histoire croisée.
Again, despite Bloch's interest in Japan, and the general Japanese enthusiasm for Western intellectual trends, it is not easy to point to a study of Japanese history in the Annales tradition. A number of Japanese historians have studied at the Hautes Études, but they have all worked on the history of Europe.
Although Braudel once called the historian-politician Joseph Ki-Zerbo ‘one of us’, historians of Africa have shown relatively little interest in the Annales approach. A former pupil of Bloch's, Henri Brunschwig, became one of the foremost historians of colonial Africa, but his study of French imperialism appears to owe little to Annales, doubtless because his concern with the recent past and the relatively short term (1871–1914) appeared to make this model irrelevant.35 Closer to the group is a former student of Brunschwig's, Cathérine Coquéry-Vidrovitch, who has moved from economic history to social history, including the history of women and making considerable use of the work of anthropologists. Even closer is the Belgian anthropologist Jan Vansina, who made the Braudelian distinction between the long, medium and short term the framework for his history of the Kuba. Vansina studied history at the University of Leuven in the 1940s and has recorded his memory of a lecture by Braudel on the longue durée: ‘we were fascinated, but it was oh so daring’.36 Other historians of Africa who have found Annales inspiring include William Clarence-Smith, who works on the Portuguese Empire, and David Schoenbrun, whose study of the Great Lakes region utilizes the regressive method and draws on comparative linguistics and ethnography.37
Finally, although an interest in the place of seas and oceans in history antedates Braudel, his Mediterranean has certainly helped stimulate Atlantic history and other examples of ‘thalassography’, including studies of the North Sea and the Indian Ocean.38
Annales and Other Disciplines. The reception of Annales has never been confined to departments of history. A movement that drew on so many of the ‘human sciences’ naturally attracted interest within those disciplines. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, was an early subscriber to the journal. Although it is more difficult to chart the influence of less theoretical subjects like history on more theoretical subjects like sociology than the other way round, the attempt is surely worth making.
By the 1970s, if not before, it was possible to find pediatricians discussing the views of Philippe Ariès on the history of childhood, Scandinavian specialists in folklore debating with Le Roy Ladurie about folktales, and economists and archaeologists reading Braudel on ‘material culture’ and the long term (as for serial history, the archaeologists have been practising it, under the name ‘seriation’, since the late nineteenth century).39
Some historians of literature, in the United States in particular, have cited the Annales historians in their own work. Howard Bloch, for instance practises what he calls a ‘literary anthropology’ of medieval France and has published in Annales, while Franco Moretti, an Italian who now teaches at Stanford University, invoked Braudel in his Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005).40
In the case of philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's dialogues with Braudel and Nora about narrative and memory have been mentioned more than once, and suggest that Annales have provided an important stimulus for his thinking. In the intellectual development of Michel Foucault, French ‘new history’ also played a significant part. In some respects, Foucault moved on parallel lines to the third generation of Annales. Like that generation, he was concerned to widen the subject-matter of history. He had something to teach them, as we have seen. He also learned something from them, not only from Arlette Farge and Jean-Pierre Peter, with whom he collaborated, but in general.
Foucault's debt to Annales may well be less than what he owed to Nietzsche or to historians of science such as Georges Canguilhem (who introduced him to the notion of intellectual discontinuity), but it remains more substantial than he admitted. What Foucault liked to call his ‘archaeology’ or his ‘genealogy’ has at least a family resemblance to the history of mentalities. Both approaches show great concern for trends over the long term and relatively little lack of concern for individual thinkers. What Foucault could not accept in the Annales approach to intellectual history was what he considered the over-emphasis on continuity.41 It was precisely in his willingness to grasp the nettle and to note that world-views change (despite his lack of concern with how they change) that Foucault differed most from the historians of mentalities. Historians in general still have something important to learn from his emphasis on epistemological ‘ruptures’, however irritating they may find his refusal to explain these discontinuities.
In three disciplines in particular interest has been shown in the Annales approach, in geography, sociology and anthropology. In each case it will be noticed that in the English-speaking world at least, this interest developed relatively recently.
There was a time when even in France, geographers took the Annales movement more seriously than the majority of historians. It was thanks to a geographer that the young Duby discovered its existence.42 The affinities between the historical geography of Vidal de la Blache and his followers, the historical geography of Febvre and the geohistory of Braudel have been discussed already and they are obvious enough. The Annalistes owed much to the example of geographers, notably the idea of writing regional studies. In return, some geographers have expressed appreciation of the work of the Annales group, especially that of Braudel, as well as offering criticisms.43 One result of the rise of Braudel's empire, however, was the decline of historical geography as a discipline, at least in France, in the face of this competition from historians.44 A similar point might be made about historical sociology and historical anthropology.
In other countries, the story is more complicated. Although Febvre's Geographical Introduction to History was translated into English soon after its publication, the English-speaking world was long dominated by a traditional style of geography which had little place for the French approach. This consensus broke down relatively recently, to be replaced by pluralism, or rather by vigorous debate between supporters of the Marxist, quantitative, phenomenological, cultural and other approaches, among them that of Braudel. For example, a three-volume history of the Pacific in Braudelian style was published between 1979 and 1988, by the cosmopolitan Oskar Spate.45 Braudel continues to have admirers in geography departments. A recent article reminds readers of the ‘forgotten’ Braudel who was aware of ‘the constructedness of historical and geographical categories’.46
In the case of sociology, the Durkheimian inspiration of the early Annales helped ensure it a warm reception from the first, at least in France. Two leading French sociologists, Maurice Halbwachs and Georges Friedmann, were formally associated with the journal in its early years (Friedmann contributed articles on management and apprenticeship). A third sociologist, Georges Gurvitch, enjoyed in the 1950s a collaboration with Braudel that did not exclude debate. Gurvitch was invited to contribute an article on history and sociology to Annales, though Braudel prefaced the article with a note expressing his disagreement. In his turn, Gurvitch invited Braudel to contribute to a collective treatise on sociology under his direction. The two men differed on the question of time in particular: Gurvitch's plurality of ‘social times’ versus Braudel's three kinds of historical time.47 Closer to the present, it is easier to describe what historians owe to the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu than what he owes to them, but although he could be critical of the work of the Annales group, it is likely that his late work on nineteenth-century French writers and artists, such as Gustave Flaubert and Edouard Manet, owed something to his encounters with historians such as Chartier.48
In the English-speaking world, on the other hand, it was only in the 1970s, at a time of a widespread sense of a ‘crisis of sociology’ that a number of practitioners of that discipline rediscovered history and in the process discovered Annales, more particularly Braudel, whose ideas about time have obvious relevance for theorists of social change. As in the case of British historians, the Marxists, such as Norman Birnbaum and Immanuel Wallerstein (director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton) were among the first American sociologists to draw attention to Annales. In Britain, Philip Abrams described Braudel's Mediterranean as pointing the way to ‘an effective analytical historical sociology’.49
Since the 1970s, the interest of sociologists in this Annales approach has become more widespread. For example, in a well-known study of Africa, ‘The politics of the belly’, Jean-François Bayart cited Braudel on both capitalism and the longue durée.50 The editors of a handbook of historical sociology published in 2003 commissioned an article on Braudel and the Annales.51 However, what might have been a most fruitful encounter never took place. Although Norbert Elias, a contemporary of Braudel's, was a historical sociologist interested in trends over the long term, he appears not to have known the work either of Braudel himself or that of other members of the Annales group.
In the case of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss in France and Evans-Pritchard in Britain took an early interest in Annales. Lévi-Strauss and Braudel had been colleagues at the University of São Paulo in the 1930s, and continued their dialogue thereafter. Like Gurvitch, Lévi-Strauss, who was actually more interested in history than he is sometimes described as being, published articles in Annales.52 Evans-Pritchard, who was trained as a historian before turning anthropologist, was well aware of the work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. It may be suspected that his famous study of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) owes at least some of its inspiration to Bloch's Royal Touch, while his analysis of the task-oriented sense of time of the Nuer of the Sudan came to conclusions similar to those of Febvre's (published at much the same time) on time reckoning in the age of Rabelais.53 Again, the rise of Mediterranean anthropology from the 1960s onwards owed something to the example of Braudel, even if it developed in a different direction.54 A similar point might be made about Mediterranean studies in general.55
Evans-Pritchard advocated a close relation between anthropology and history at a time when most of his colleagues were ahistorical functionalists. Some younger anthropologists turned to history in the late 1960s, at much the same time as some of the Annales historians discovered symbolic anthropology. The two disciplines appeared to converge. However, the anthropological turn towards history was associated with a turn towards narrative and towards events, the very aspects of historical tradition that the Annales group had rejected. There was a danger that the two disciplines would fail to meet, rather like two trains rushing past each other in opposite directions.
A single example may show more clearly than a list of names the conditions under which the encounter between history and anthropology has taken place, what anthropologists want from history, especially from Annales, and finally how a model may be transformed in the course of its application. Among the inspirations of the historical anthropology of Hawaii by Marshall Sahlins is the work of Braudel, especially the essay on the longue durée. Braudel would doubtless have appreciated Sahlins's discussion of ‘structures of the long run’, in which Captain Cook's visit to Hawaii in 1779, when he was viewed by Hawaiians as a personification of their god Lono, is analysed as an example of the way in which ‘events are ordered by culture’. Sahlins did not stop there. He went on to discuss ‘how, in that process, the culture is re-ordered.’ Having appropriated an idea from Braudel, he subverted it or at least transformed it, arguing that an event, Cook's visit, or more generally the encounter between Hawaiians and Europeans, led to structural changes in Hawaiian culture, such as the crisis of the taboo system, even if ‘the structure was preserved in an inversion of its values’.56 It would be difficult to deny the potential relevance of this revised model to a discussion of, say, the sociocultural consequences of the French Revolution. The ball is now back in the historians’ court.57
More generally, at least in the Anglophone academic world since the year 2000, there are signs of increasing interest in the Braudelian longue durée, a term often left in the original French, whether as a compliment to Annales or (as is surely the case with mentalités) as a means for the authors to distance themselves from the concept. Articles on such topics as sexuality, spirituality, the Cold War, migration, empire, the Black Sea world and even the Arab Spring have all included the phrase in their titles.58
It is time to sum up and attempt to assess the achievements of the Annales historians over four generations, discussing three questions in particular. How new is their new history? How valuable does it remain? Is the movement still important today? Curiously enough, the group itself does not seem to have taken stock of its work in this way since the 1970s.59
As we have seen, reactions to the Annales movement have ranged from enthusiasm to rejection. On one side we find enthusiasm for new historical objects and methods. On the other, criticism of the downplaying of events or of what appeared to be the economic and social determinism and the faith in figures of the second generation (often taken by outsiders to represent the movement as a whole).60
To place both the enthusiasm and the criticism in perspective – the perspective of the long term – it is worth reminding ourselves that the revolt of Febvre and Bloch against the dominance of the history of political events was only one of a series of such rebellions. Their principal aim, the construction of a new kind of history, has been shared by many scholars over a long period. The French tradition, from Michelet and Fustel de Coulanges to the Année Sociologique, Vidal de la Blache and Henri Berr, is well known. On the other hand, the alternative traditions are generally underestimated. If a fortune-teller had predicted in 1920 that a new style of history would soon develop somewhere in Europe, the obvious location for it would have been Germany, not France: the Germany of Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Lamprecht and Max Weber.
Virtually all the innovations associated with Febvre, Bloch, Braudel and Labrousse had precedents or parallels, from the regressive and comparative approaches to the concern for interdisciplinary collaboration, for quantitative methods, and for change over the long term. In the 1930s, for example, Ernest Labrousse and the German historian Walter Abel were working independently on the quantitative history of agricultural cycles, trends and crises.61 In the 1950s, the revival of regional history in France had a parallel in the revival of local history in England, associated with the school of W. G. Hoskins, a disciple of Tawney whose books included a study of the making of the English landscape and an economic and social history of a single Leicestershire village, Wigston Magna, over some 900 years.62 The French historians’ enthusiasm for quantitative methods and their later turn away from these methods towards microhistory and anthropology were also in step with movements in the United States, Italy and elsewhere.
If the individual innovations associated with Annales have precedents and parallels, the combination does not. It is also true that parallel movements for the reform and renewal of history were largely unsuccessful, from Karl Lamprecht in Germany to the ‘new history’ of J. H. Robinson in the United States. The achievement of Bloch, Febvre, Braudel and their followers has been to go further than any other scholar or group of scholars in achieving these shared aims, to lead a movement that has spread more widely and lasted longer than its competitors. It is possible to offer explanations of this success in terms of both structure and conjoncture, looking for example at the willingness of successive French governments to fund historical research, or at the elimination of German intellectual competition in the course of two world wars.63 Even so, the individual contribution of Bloch, Febvre and Braudel remains difficult to dismiss.
It should be added that Annales history was the child of its time, or more exactly of the series of times through which France and the world has passed since the 1920s. As the present changes, historians develop new interests and view the past in new ways. In the 1930s, following the great inflation in Germany, a major centre of interest was the history of prices, an interest reflected in early issues of Annales. In the 1950s and 1960s, a time of worry about the population explosion, came the rise of historical demography.
Although this book is devoted to some new trends in historical writing, it would be unwise to assume that innovation is necessarily desirable for its own sake. I would agree heartily with a critic that ‘the new history is not necessarily admirable simply because it is new, nor the old contemptible simply because it is old.’64 It is time to consider, in conclusion, the value, the cost and the significance of the collective achievement of Annales.
One way to test this proposition is to compare the articles published in the journal with those of rival journals such as the more traditional Revue Historique, taking samples at forty-year intervals from the years 1930, 1970 and 2010. Economic history in general and the history of prices in particular dominated Annales in 1930. By 1970, it was historical demography that was dominant, while the American ‘new economic history’ was also discussed. In 2010, major themes included the history of work, the relation between anthropology and history, and the history of medical knowledge, or rather knowledges (savoirs) in the plural.
The Annales movement may not have been, like the Jesuits, ‘all things to all people’, but it has certainly been interpreted in very different ways. Traditional historians have tended to interpret its aim as the complete replacement of one kind of history by another, relegating political history and especially the history of political events to the scrapheap. I am far from sure that this was the intention of Febvre or Bloch. Innovators are usually fired by the belief that something that has not been tried before is worth doing, rather than by the determination to impose it on everyone else. In any case, political history could very well defend itself in their generation. After that time, the situation changed. Braudel claimed to be a pluralist, and liked to say that history had ‘a hundred faces’, but it was under his regime that the research money went to the new history at the expense of the old. It was the turn of the political historians to be marginalized.
If, however, we are going to look at Annales in a global perspective, it makes better sense to assess it as a paradigm (or perhaps a cluster of paradigms) rather than as the paradigm for historical writing. It may be useful to examine the uses and the limitations of this paradigm in different fields of history, defined geographically, chronologically and thematically. The Annales contribution may have been profound, but it is also extremely uneven.
As we have seen, the Annales group has given France the lion's share of its attention. In the wake of Braudel, a substantial number of studies were made of the Mediterranean world, especially Spain and Italy: one thinks of Chaunu, for instance, of Bennassar, of Aymard on Sicily or of Gérard Delille on Naples. On the other hand, Marc Bloch's interest in English history has rarely been pursued by his successors.
Thanks to the favour shown to area studies in the Hautes Études, the Annales approach was extended to the history of China, South East Asia and especially Latin America. However, despite the work of Maurice Lombard, less interest has been shown in the Islamic world, with distinguished exceptions such as Lucette Valensi.65 It is also somewhat surprising that the heirs of Braudel have not participated more in the rise of global history, again with a distinguished exception, Serge Gruzinski, who has devoted a series of studies to early modern ‘globalization’ (mondialisation).66
Just as they have concentrated on France, the Annales historians have focused their attention on one period, the so-called ‘early modern’ age from 1500 to 1800, more especially the ‘old regime’ in France from 1600 or thereabouts to 1789. Their contribution to medieval studies has also been outstanding, while as we have seen, some ancient historians may be described as fellow-travellers with Annales, if not members of the group itself.
On the other hand, after 1945 the Annalistes paid relatively little attention to the world since 1789. Charles Morazé, Maurice Agulhon and Marc Ferro (together with Alain Corbin, close to the spirit of Annales although not part of the network) have done what they could to fill the gap, but it still yawns. The group's distinctive approach to history, notably the lack of importance accorded to individuals and events, is surely connected with this concentration on the medieval and early modern periods. Braudel did not find it difficult to dismiss Philip II, but Napoleon, Bismarck or Stalin would have provided him with more of a challenge.67
In the case of a group that sails under the flag of ‘total history’, it is somewhat paradoxical to examine their contributions to what is conventionally categorized as economic, social, political and cultural history. One of the achievements of the group has been to subvert traditional categories and offer new ones, from Bloch's ‘rural history’ in the 1930s and Braudel's civilisation matérielle of the 1960s to the socio-cultural history of recent years and the ‘connected history’ (histoire croisée) launched by Michael Werner as the successor to Bloch's comparative history. All the same, the importance of the contribution to economic history made by Labrousse and his followers is undeniable. It is also difficult to dispute that politics was undervalued, at least for a time (in the 1950s and 1960s), and at least by some members of the group. In compensation, Agulhon made important contributions to the study of politics from below, in the Republic in the Village, and to the study of political culture, in his books on Marianne.
More recently, the Annalistes have participated less than might have been expected in the rapid rise of environmental history, despite Le Roy Ladurie's pioneering study of climate.68 Again, despite the contributions of Chartier and others, the rise of cultural history in France has become associated with a different network from that of Annales: the network of historians such as Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli. Once again, the Annales group has not been much involved in the recent rise of the history of knowledge, spearheaded in France by Christian Jacob, apart from five articles on the subject published in the journal in 2010.
Another way of assessing the Annales movement is to examine its leading ideas. According to a common stereotype of the group, they concern themselves with the history of structures over the long term, employ quantitative methods, claim to be scientific and deny human freedom. Even as a description of the work of Braudel and Labrousse, this view is too simple, and it is still less adequate as a characterization of a movement that has gone through various phases and included a number of strong intellectual personalities. It may be more useful to discuss intellectual tensions within the movement. These tensions may well have been creative. Whether this is the case or not, they remain unresolved.
The conflict between freedom and determinism, or between social structure and human agency, has always divided Annales historians. What distinguished Bloch and Febvre from the Marxists of their day was precisely the fact that their enthusiasm for social and economic history was not combined with the belief that economic and social forces determined everything else. Febvre was an extreme voluntarist, Bloch a more moderate one.
In the second generation, on the other hand, there was a swing towards determinism, geographical in the case of Braudel and economic in that of Labrousse. Both men have been accused of taking the people out of history, and concentrating their attention on geographical structures or economic trends. In the third generation, among historians concerned with topics as diverse as matrimonial strategies or reading habits, there was a swing back towards voluntarism. Historians of mentalities no longer assumed (as Braudel did) that individuals are prisoners of their world-view, but concentrated their attention on ‘resistance’ to social pressures.69
The tension between Durkheimian sociology and the human geography of Vidal de la Blache goes back so far that it might be considered part of the structure of Annales. The Durkheimian tradition encouraged generalization and comparison, while the Vidalian approach concentrated on what was unique to a particular region. The founders tried to combine the two approaches, but their emphasis was different. Bloch was closer to Durkheim, while Febvre (despite his concern for problem-oriented history) was closer to Vidal. In the middle phase of the movement it was Vidal who prevailed, as the regional monographs published in the 1960s and 1970s testify. Braudel did not neglect either comparison or sociology, but he too was closer to Vidal than to Durkheim. One reason for the appeal of social anthropology to the third generation of Annales may have been that this discipline (which faces both ways, towards the general and the particular) may help historians to find their balance.
François Furet once told his compatriots that the French Revolution was over. Can we say the same for the French ‘Historical Revolution’? As early as 1974, the Catalan Marxist Josep Fontana was already writing about the ‘decadence’ of Annales.70 As the chronology following this chapter shows, the number of important works produced by members of the group between 1970 and 2000 offers strong evidence against Fontana's assertion. The Hautes Études still exists (in temporary exile from 54 Boulevard Raspail) and still contains gifted historians who identify with the Annales tradition.
All the same, it may not be too much to say that the movement, as a distinctive movement, has effectively come to an end. On one side, we have found members of the Annales group rediscovering politics and also the event. On the other, we now see so many outsiders inspired by the movement – or moving in a similar direction for their own reasons – that terms like ‘school’ and even ‘paradigm’ are losing their meaning. The movement has effectively dissolved, in part as a result of its very success. Members of the group have been moving in new directions, as the previous chapter attempted to demonstrate, but historians in other countries have also moved in these directions, at the same time as the Annalistes or even earlier.
Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Paris was the centre of innovation in historical writing. Since then, innovations have taken place more or less simultaneously in different parts of the globe. As remarked earlier, the history of the body, for instance, was not a monopoly of Annales but emerged in several different countries at more or less the same time. If there was a French inspiration it was not from professional historians but from Foucault. Speaking more generally, there is more than one centre of innovation today – or no centre at all. There is another reason for the decline of French hegemony. Braudel once remarked that his advantage over Witold Kula was that his ideas were broadcast through the ‘French loudspeaker’ and Kula's through the Polish one.71 Since then, the importance of the French loudspeaker has diminished, along with the knowledge of French outside the Francophone world. The Annales group, like other groups in French culture, face the challenge of competition, with the English-speaking and English-reading world.
So far as the first generation of Annales is concerned, Braudel's assessment is worth remembering. ‘Individually’, he wrote, ‘neither Bloch nor Febvre was the greatest French historian of the time, but together both of them were.’72 Considering the second generation, it is difficult to think of another historian of the mid-twentieth century in the class of Braudel himself.
Looking at the movement as a whole over nearly a century (remembering the work of Bloch and Febvre before 1929), one sees a whole shelf of remarkable books to which it is difficult to deny the title of masterpieces: The Royal Touch, Feudal Society, The Problem of Unbelief, The Mediterranean, The Peasants of Languedoc, The Three Orders, Civilization and Capitalism and so on. They are great individual achievements, but also collective achievements in the sense of being connected to one another and emerging from discussions within the group.
It is also worth remembering the research teams that were able, especially in the second generation, to carry out enterprises demanding too much time for any individual to bring any one of them to a successful conclusion. The long life of the movement has allowed historians to build on one another's work (as well as to react against some of it). To name only the most important developments in the history of Annales history is to make an impressive list: problem-oriented history, comparative history, historical psychology, geohistory, the history of the long term, serial history and historical anthropology.
In my own view, the outstanding achievement of the Annales group, over all four generations, has been the expansion of the subject-matter of history. The group has extended the territory of the historian to unexpected areas of human behaviour and to social groups neglected by traditional historians. These extensions of historical territory are associated with the discovery of new sources and the development of new methods to exploit them. They are also associated with collaboration with other disciplines that study humanity, from geography to linguistics, and from economics to psychology. Supported by the Hautes Études, this interdisciplinary collaboration has been sustained over more than eighty years, a phenomenon without parallel in the history of the social sciences.
It is for these reasons that the title of this book refers to the ‘French Historical Revolution’, and that the Introduction began with the words, ‘A remarkable amount of the most innovative, the most memorable and the most significant historical writing of the twentieth century was produced in France.’ Thanks to the work of the group, family or network, the discipline will never be the same again.