A remarkable amount of the most innovative, the most memorable and the most significant historical writing of the twentieth century was produced in France. La nouvelle histoire, as it is sometimes called, is at least as famous, as French, and as controversial as la nouvelle cuisine.1 A good deal of this new history is the work of a particular group associated with the journal founded in 1929 under the title Annales d'histoire économique et sociale; following four changes of title, it is now known as Annales: histoire, sciences sociales. Outsiders generally call this group the ‘Annales School’, emphasizing what members have in common.
Insiders, on the other hand often, though not always, deny the existence of such a school, emphasizing individual approaches within the group.2 During a discussion at the International Congress of Historical Sciences held at Stuttgart in 1985, I remember hearing a leading member of the group, Marc Ferro, vigorously denying the existence of a school. While so doing, he regularly employed the term ‘nous’. If the word ‘school’ (like the Annales ‘paradigm’ or ‘spirit’) gives the misleading impression of an orthodoxy, a better term might be the one proposed by two more insiders, Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel: ‘nebula’ (nébuleuse).3 Alternatively, it may be useful to speak of an Annales ‘network’, a ‘movement’ or even an extended ‘family’.
The centre of the network, over the decades, obviously includes the two founders, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch; their designated successor, Fernand Braudel, together with Charles Morazé, less well known but active behind the scenes, notably in the creation of the VIe section;4 younger historians such as Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Marc Ferro and Maurice Aymard; and even younger historians such as Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel, André Burguière, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Lucette Valensi, Bernard Lepetit and Antoine Lilti. Near the centre we also find Alain Boureau, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Alphonse Dupront, Arlette Farge, François Furet, Pierre Goubert, Christiane Klapisch, Maurice Lombard and Mona Ozouf.
More difficult to place is Ernest Labrousse, who played a central role in the second generation while remaining a Marxist, of a kind that did not exempt him from attacks by members of the French Communist Party.5 In similar fashion, their commitment to Marxism may place Maurice Agulhon and Michel Vovelle outside the inner circle. Also on the edge, for different reasons, are Georges Lefebvre, who worked on the French Revolution; Alberto Tenenti and Ruggiero Romano, two Italians at the École; and Philippe Ariès, a self-defined amateur historian. One might add Jean Delumeau, Alain Corbin and Robert Muchembled, all three working in the style or spirit of Annales while remaining outside the network. On or beyond the fringe one might place the polymaths Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau and the conservative historian Roland Mousnier, who make brief appearances in this study thanks to the overlap between their historical interests and those of Annalistes.
The journal, which is now over eighty years old, was founded in order to promote a new kind of history, and it continues to encourage innovation. The leading ideas behind Annales might be summarized briefly as follows. In the first place, the substitution of a problem-oriented analytical history for a traditional narrative of events. In the second place, the history of the whole range of human activities in the place of a mainly political history. In the third place – in order to achieve the first two aims – a collaboration with other disciplines: with geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, social anthropology, and so on. As Febvre put it, with his characteristic use of the imperative, ‘Historians, be geographers. Be jurists too, and sociologists, and psychologists’.6 He was always on the alert ‘to break down compartments’ (abattre les cloisons) and to fight ‘the spirit of specialization’.7 In a similar way, Braudel wrote his Mediterranean in the way he did in order to ‘prove that history can do more than study walled gardens’.8
The aim of this book is to describe, to analyse and to evaluate the achievement of this network. It is often perceived from outside as a monolithic group with a uniform historical practice, quantitative in method, determinist in its assumptions, and hostile, or at best indifferent, to politics and to events. This stereotype ignores not only divergences between individual members of the group but also developments over time. Hence it might be more illuminating to speak of the ‘Annales movement’.
This movement may be divided into three phases. In the first phase, from the 1920s to 1945, it was small, radical and subversive, fighting a guerrilla action against traditional history, political history and the history of events. After the Second World War, the rebels took over the historical Establishment. This second phase of the movement, in which it was most truly a ‘school’ with distinctive concepts (notably ‘structure’ and ‘conjoncture’) and distinctive methods (notably the ‘serial history’ of changes over the long term), was dominated by Fernand Braudel.
A third phase in the history of the movement opened around the year 1968. It is marked by what has been called ‘fragmentation’ (émiettement).9 By this time, the influence of the movement – especially in France – was so great that it had lost much of its former distinctiveness. It was a unified ‘school’ only in the eyes of its foreign admirers and its domestic critics. The latter continued to reproach the group for underestimating the importance of politics and of the history of events, although Marc Ferro, for example, was writing about the First World War and the Russian Revolution. From the late 1970s onwards, some members of the group turned from socio-economic to sociocultural history, while others rediscovered political history and even narrative. Since the year 1989 or thereabouts, different members of the group have moved in new directions, returning to social history, for instance, or attempting to write a more reflexive history.
The history of Annales may thus be interpreted in terms of the succession of four generations. It also illustrates the common cyclical process by which the rebels of today turn into the Establishment of tomorrow, and are in turn rebelled against. What is less common is the longevity of the movement. This is partly due to its institutional base in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (and later at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) but also to the openness of the leaders, who generally tolerated dissent even if they did not encourage it.
Continuity is particularly obvious in the case of the journal: Paul Leuilliot, who taught history at a lycée in Paris, was secretary to the editorial committee for well over half a century, 1930–88, as well as making frequent contributions to the journal in its early years. Some major concerns have persisted. Indeed, the journal and the individuals associated with it offer the most sustained example of fruitful interaction between history and the social sciences from the 1930s until today. It is for this reason that I chose to write this book.
This brief survey of the Annales movement attempts to cross several cultural boundaries. It attempts to explain the French to the English-speaking world, the 1920s to a later generation and the changing practice of historians to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and others. The survey is itself presented in the form of a history, and attempts to combine a chronological with a thematic organization.
The problem with such a combination, here as elsewhere in history, is what has been called ‘the contemporaneity of the non-contemporary’. Braudel, for example, although he was exceptionally open to new ideas, even late in his long life, did not fundamentally change his way of looking at history or indeed of writing history from the 1930s, when he was planning his Mediterranean, to the 1980s, when he was working on his book on France. For this reason it has proved necessary to take some liberties with chronological order.
This book is at once something less and something more than a study in intellectual history. It does not aspire to be the definitive scholarly study of the Annales movement that it is to be hoped someone will write in the twenty-first century. Such a study will have to make use of sources that were unavailable when this book was in the making. Its author will need a specialized knowledge not only of the history of historical writing, but also of the history of twentieth-century France.
What I have tried to write is a more personal essay. I have sometimes described myself as a ‘fellow-traveller’ of Annales – in other words, an outsider who has (like many other foreign historians) been inspired by the movement. I have followed its fortunes fairly closely in the last fifty years. All the same, Cambridge should be sufficiently distant from Paris to make it possible to criticize as well as to celebrate the Annales achievement.
Although Febvre and Braudel were both formidable academic politicians, little will be said in the pages that follow about this aspect of the movement – the rivalry between the Sorbonne and the Hautes Études (as it is convenient to call it for short), or the struggle for power over appointments and curricula.10 I have also, with some regret, resisted the temptation to write an ethnographic study of the Annalistes – their ancestors, intermarriages, factions, patron-client networks, styles of life, mentalities, and so on.
More controversially, relatively little will be said here about the journal itself, from the early days of Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, when many of the texts were written by Bloch and Febvre themselves (1800 out of 3876 between 1929 and 1948), to the present Annales: histoire, sciences sociales, the product of a much larger team, including professional administrators.11 Appearing every two months over 85 years, a new issue of Annales, in its grey, blue and finally shiny white covers, was an exciting event in the everyday life of younger historians in particular, beyond, as well as inside, France. The journal made its impression not only with individual articles of high quality but also by review essays, programmes for future collective research and thematic numbers on relatively new topics, such as the special issue on the history of technology (1935) to which Bloch contributed an important study of water-mills. As an indicator of new trends, articles in the journal were for obvious reasons in advance of books on the same topics, often by the same authors.12
All the same, in this study I decided to concentrate on the major books produced by members of the group, attempting to assess their importance in the history of historical writing. It may appear paradoxical to discuss a movement that has been held together by a journal in terms of books rather than articles. However, what has made the greatest impact (on professionals and the general public alike), especially outside France and over the long term, is a cluster of distinguished monographs.
The movement has too often been discussed as if it could be equated with three or four people. The achievements of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and others are indeed spectacular. However, as in the case of many intellectual movements, this one is a collective enterprise to which significant contributions have been made by a number of individuals. This point is most obvious in the case of the third generation, but it is also true for the age of Braudel (who relied on the intellectual help of Ernest Labrousse and the administrative help of Clemens Heller, among others) and even for that of the founders, who owed a good deal both to colleagues and to assistants such as Paul Leuilliot and Lucie Varga. Team-work had been a dream of Lucien Febvre's, as early as 1936.13 After the war, it became a reality. Collaborative projects on French history have included the history of the social structure, the history of agricultural productivity, the history of the eighteenth-century book, the history of education, the history of housing and a computer-based study of conscripts in the nineteenth century.
Following the chapters on the four generations, this study ends with a discussion of responses to Annales (enthusiastic or critical), an account of its reception in different parts of the world and in different disciplines, and an attempt to place it in the history of historical writing. Despite the relative brevity of this book, its aim is to allow the reader to view the movement as a whole.