Donald A Nielsen. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2005.
The phrase “Annales school” refers to the journal Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, founded in France in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and to the work of subsequent French historians such as Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Jacques LeGoff, Georges Duby, and others who either edited or were closely associated with this journal. The Annales school originated in the post-1900 European setting of cultural ferment in which historians and social scientists sought new approaches to the intellectual problems inherited from the past. Febvre and Bloch were both critical of the predominant emphasis on famous persons and events as well as the documentary methods currently advanced by historians such as Langlois and Seignebos. They were both sympathetic to a variety of new intellectual currents, including Henri Berr’s quest for a synthesis of historical knowledge, the work of the geographer Vidal de la Blache, the Durkheim school of sociology, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s studies of “primitive mentalities,” and the efforts of historians and economists such as Henri Pirenne and François Simiand to create a comparative history informed by scientific methods. Durkheim’s L’Année Sociologique, founded in 1898, and Berr’s Revue de Synthèse Historique, founded in 1900, both provided models of broadly interdisciplinary cooperation.
Much of the work leading to the formation and early history of Annales was accomplished at Strasbourg, where both Febvre and Bloch taught between 1920 and 1933. The environment there was well suited to new intellectual initiatives. Researchers from a variety of disciplines worked in close contact with one another. These included the historians Henri Bremond and Georges Lefebvre, who both worked on problems of historical psychology and mentalities, as well as the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote on collective memory, was a member of the Durkheim school of sociology, and was also on the original editorial board of Annales.
Although Braudel later protested the designation “school” to describe the work of the Annales group, the studies done by Annales historians share several distinctive perspectives that make the designation “school” generally convincing, if we are cautious to also take into account the individual and generational differences among its various members. The central orientations promoted by Febvre and Bloch, which initially defined the new approach, included a focus on problem-oriented history; the use of comparative methods in historical research; the development of a more synthetic total history; the creation of a new social history that investigates the lives of previously neglected populations, rather than only rulers and elites; the anchorage of historical research in geographical, environmental (and in the later Annales writers, even climatic) contexts; and, finally, study of the “mentalities” informing historical societies.
The second generation of Annales historians, under the added influence of Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, supplemented this overall agenda with a focus on material civilization, a strongly quantitative and statistical approach to economic and social history, and an attempt to construct serial histories tracing the precise fluctuations of not only prices, production, and availability of goods but also cultural productions such as publications, religious documents, and so forth. Accompanying these newer empirical foci was a shared delineation of three dimensions of historical time that had been only implicit in the work of Febvre and Bloch. This temporal division included (1) a short term, focused on notable persons and political events (histoire événementielle) largely scorned by the Annales group; (2) the study of shorter historical periods (e.g., one to two centuries), with a focus on the distinctive outcomes, or conjunctures, resulting from the mutual interconnections of economic and social and, to a lesser degree, cultural processes; and (3) the longue durée of history, focused on the impact of enduring geohistorical and civilizational structures. In general, later historians in this group have typically adopted the broad distinction between structure and conjuncture as one of their central organizing motifs.
Despite their common interest in redirecting historical scholarship, Febvre and Bloch each worked in his own distinctive direction. Febvre was a wide-ranging, restless thinker who wrote essays on a variety of topics, often to challenge other historians into new ways of approaching historical questions or establish the importance of new topics. He wrote a study of the Franche-Comté region, a geographical introduction to history published in Berr’s series, L’évolution d’humanité, and myriad essays exploring a wide range of historical topics, especially the Renaissance and Reformation. Febvre especially encouraged the study of the emotional climates and moral sensibilities of the past. He urged new historical studies of the history of love, hatred, fear, death, and related emotional states. Although he admired the work of the few previous investigators in these fields, such as Johan Huizinga, he was also critical of that author’s book on The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). He thought it provided an excessively schematic depiction of the radical alternation of emotional states in late medieval culture and argued that the ambivalence of emotional structures is found in every civilization.
Febvre was the author or coauthor of several books that figure prominently in current historical and sociological scholarship. His study (with Henri Martin) of The Coming of the Book (1958), published after Febvre’s death, has received increasing attention more recently. Its focus on changing material culture associated with the explosion of the printed word engaged Febvre’s interest in mentalities and added historical substance to the theoretical issues being raised by Marshall McLuhan concerning the orchestration of the senses in various cultures and the rise of modern print culture. However, Febvre’s greatest and most enduring work is The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942). This was also a study of mentalities and for a time, the only substantial one done by the Annales group. It also focused on the ideas of elite or literary culture and had strong links to traditional intellectual history. In that respect, it stood out from the later Annales investigations of mentalities, which emphasized the study of popular culture and collective psychology. In his work on unbelief, Febvre drew on the Durkheimian conception of basic categories and words as “mental equipment” and argued against the so-called modernity of Rabelais as a forerunner of an atheistic worldview. In Febvre’s view, unbelief was impossible in an era saturated in religious sentiment, terminology, and controversy, where the term atheist itself was used to register disagreement with an opponent’s religious ideas. Febvre also summarized, before McLuhan, the basic theme of that author’s later writings when he argued that the sixteenth century saw a shift from the predominance of the ear to that of the eye. Only with the shift in the latter half of the sixteenth century to newer philosophical and scientific ideas, under the influence of figures such as Descartes, does the sixteenth-century mentality undergo a substantial transformation, reflected in the large increase in the number of key terms newly available to later sixteenth-century thinkers.
While Febvre concentrated on early modern-European history, Bloch was primarily a medievalist. Although he was influenced by Marx and emphasized the historical role of the common people rather than political elites, in several respects, he was closer to the sociological approach of the Durkheim school. He developed precise concepts for use in historical research (e.g., the concept of feudal society), emphasized the importance of collective sentiments and beliefs, and aimed at the creation of a “total history.” He wrote an early regional study of the Île-de-France but also advanced the study of comparative history at both the methodological and substantive levels. He carried out comparisons of particular institutions, social groups, and historical processes (e.g., kingship, administrative classes) within the orbit of European civilization (e.g., France, England, Germany) but also ventured into a wider field of comparisons between civilizations (e.g., European and Japanese feudalism). He was interested in technical change but focused on the social and cultural forces that molded technology. For example, he argued that slavery declined in Europe partly because of the influence of Christian ideas, which in turn created a dearth of servile labor and initiated a quest for new laborsaving technologies.
Bloch’s first major book, his most Durkheimian work, was Royal Touch (1924). It employed the concept of collective representations to examine the collective psychology behind this belief and drew, as well, on Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of primitive mentality and J. G. Frazer’s studies of sacred kingship. It traced the healing power attributed to kings from the medieval through the early modern period and focused on a comparison of France and England.
Bloch’s longest and most important book is the two-volume Feudal Society (1939-1940). Although Febvre himself took exception to what he thought was its excessively sociological and abstract presentation of medieval history, it represents Bloch’s most successful attempt, and perhaps that of the entire Annales school, to write a “total history.” Through the use of the concept of a “feudal society,” it combines into a synthetic whole the understanding of the environment, economic life, political power, personal ties, social groups and classes, collective beliefs, sentiments and practices, and the work of intellectuals in the European middle ages. It is also a comparative study of societies set within the framework of European “civilization” in its medieval historical form. Although it pays more attention to social groups and to the masses than to the individuals and families in the political elite, it does discuss political organization.
Bloch also wrote more on economic and social history than Febvre. After his departure from Strasbourg in 1936, he assumed Henri Hauser’s Chair of Economic History at Paris. In this respect, he was closer than Febvre to the concerns of many later members of the Annales school. His book on French Rural History (1931) is in some respects his most personal book, because of its focus on rural peasant economy and society with which Bloch identified so strongly. It examined the longue durée of history from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and used the “regressive” method of moving from the known to the unknown, developed by earlier historians such as Frederic William Maitland, to reconstruct the “original characteristics” of French agriculture.
During the five years between Marc Bloch’s death in 1944, at the hands of the Nazis, and the publication in 1949 of Fernand Braudel’s book on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World at the Time of Phillip II, a second generation of Annales historians emerged into prominence. Also, several institutional changes took place that affected the group. In 1946, the journal’s title was changed to Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilizations, indicating a shift in emphasis from the earlier title. More important was the formation in 1947 of the new Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Febvre became president of the Section as well as director of the Centre de Récherches Historiques, a subsection of the larger Sixth Section. After Febvre’s death in 1956, Braudel became editor of the journal. The new Sixth Section provided the Annales group with an influential organizational center from which to disseminate their vision of historical research.
Several other influences within Annales were at work in defining the school’s major historical concerns. In particular, the second generation of Annales turned toward a strongly quantitative, statistical, and even “materialistic” approach to history and focused heavily on economic history. In this respect, François Simiand, an economist closely associated with the Durkheim school, provided an important inspiration. Simiand had been an early critic of established historiography and, in 1932, had published an influential work on the general movement of prices, where he distinguished between the phases of economic expansion (called “A Phases”) and contraction (the “B Phases”) in longer economic cycles. This distinction became central to later Annales historians in their efforts to chart the relationships between price fluctuations and social, cultural, and political changes. Ernest Labrousse was a second influential pioneer of this approach. His work of 1933 on the history of prices and revenues in eighteenth-century France set the tone for many later studies. Labrousse introduced the use of more statistical methods as well as a greater appreciation of Marxism’s contributions (something that Marc Bloch had developed earlier, if to a lesser extent).
After its publication, Braudel’s massive study of the Mediterranean world became one of the major reference points for later Annales authors. The book’s geographical focus on a sea as the unifying historical force marked an extension to a new scale of the more limited regional studies done by earlier members of Annales and continued by later authors. Its temporal emphasis was decidedly on the longue durée of slowly changing, indeed almost stable “structures” emerging around the Mediterranean. However, it also had a second substantial focus on the sixteenth-century “conjunctures” of economic, social and, to a lesser degree, cultural processes. Events, persons, and political processes occupied a distant third place in Braudel’s study. Perhaps equally important was Braudel’s attention to the spatial dimensions of history.
The book became the subject of widespread praise but also extensive critical commentary. While some of the book’s detailed historical arguments have been challenged, the major criticisms have focused on larger issues of perspective and method. For example, Braudel was thought to be excessively deterministic and place too much emphasis on the long-term “destiny” forged for societies by the Mediterranean environment. The book seemed to be a “history without people.” Braudel’s neglect of actors and events seemed to eliminate the element of voluntarism from history. Despite its chapter on “civilizations,” his study also lacked any fuller engagement with the problem of “mentalities” (one of Febvre’s major interests). In general, the Annales group has given much greater attention to the economies and societies subtitle of their journal and much less to the study of their third putative focus, civilizations. However, Braudel was later to give a series of lectures on civilizations, published after his death, which partially remedied this neglect and contains a particularly important introductory chapter on the concept of civilization in history and the social sciences. This chapter draws particularly on the earlier ideas of Marcel Mauss about civilizations.
Braudel followed his Mediterranean work with another, equally ambitious three-volume study of early modern economy and society. While the book focused on Europe, it generally adopted a global perspective and drew in a wider range of comparisons among civilizations. The first volume struck a characteristically Braudellian note with its emphasis on material civilization. The second volume focused on the expansion of early modern commerce, while the third traced the emergence of a world perspective and global socioeconomic system. In this final volume, Braudel resisted the effort to create a more coherent image of the modern capitalist world system, such as the one developed later by Immanuel Wallerstein (under Braudel’s influence). Braudel remained a historian with interdisciplinary and global interests but refused to become a social theorist.
Braudel’s treatise on the Mediterranean encouraged heroic efforts among his compatriots at Annales. Between 1956 and 1960, Pierre and Huguette Chaunu assembled a huge study of trade between Spain and the New World and surpassed even Braudel in scope by taking the Atlantic as its geohistorical focus. Chaunu’s work also introduced more explicitly the notions of “structure” and “conjuncture” into Annales discourse. While a spatial and geohistorical emphasis had already led Febvre and Bloch to do regional studies, this research trend continued to be a central part of the group’s work, not only in the efforts at a global history in the massive volumes of Braudel and Chaunu but also in more focused studies, for example, by Pierre Goubert on Beauvais, Immanuel Le Roy Ladurie on Languedoc, and Michel Vovelle on Provence.
The third generation of Annales historians that began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s has produced many noteworthy individuals and studies, but perhaps the most famous is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. His various studies, beginning with his thesis on the peasants of Languedoc, continue Braudel’s concern with geohistory but also expand it in a variety of directions not addressed very thoroughly by Braudel. These include a focus on mentalities (e.g., the inquisition and heresy in Montaillou), climatic influences, serial history (e.g., wine harvests), and in general, an effort to achieve the ideal of a “total history” originally called for by Febvre and Bloch. Le Roy Ladurie’s book Montaillou also attempted to achieve the Annales goal of a total history through the intensive study of every aspect of a particular community. This approach resembled the earlier studies of whole communities done by both anthropologists and sociologists. Through the work of Le Roy Ladurie and his talent for reaching wider audiences, the history of Annales also became more widely known to the public; indeed, Ladurie became something of a celebrity, much as Foucault and others had done.
One of the major shifts in scholarly focus among the third generation of Annales historians has been a greater attention to the problem of “mentalities.” This change was in part a reaction against the seemingly exclusive focus of second-generation Annales writers on an economically oriented geohistory. However, it was also prompted by the work of historians outside the Annales orbit, such as Phillip Aries and Michel Foucault, whose works on topics such as the family, death, and mental illness posed a challenge to the established Annales paradigm. Febvre’s aforementioned work on the problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century was the outstanding study in this genre, and for a long time, very infrequently emulated. However, the renewed interest in mentalities took a different form. Febvre had focused on major literary figures and elite culture, while the new interest was in historical psychology, popular culture, and what might be called “mass mentalities.”
Robert Mandrou, one of Febvre’s early associates, had already moved in this direction in his 1961 study of early modern-French popular culture. However, the following Annales figures greatly expanded this effort: Jean Delumeau drew on psychological theories to write his history of sin and fear in early modern Europe. Others, such as Georges Duby and Michel Vovelle, introduced Marxian ideas about ideology into Annales discourse. Jacques LeGoff, the outstanding medievalist in the group after Bloch, wrote a large treatise on the development of the medieval image of purgatory. This focus on religious ideas was later extended by Delumeau to the study of the history of Christian ideas about paradise. Finally, the renewed study of mentalities was inspired, in part, by the work of “symbolic anthropology,” with its focus on ritual, symbol, and collective definitions of reality. In this way, the work of Annales figures such as Georges Duby, Le Roy Ladurie, and others has been cross-fertilized by the writings of Marcel Mauss, Victor Turner, and Erving Goffman.
The historical focus of Annales has been primarily on medieval and early modern Europe. Contemporary society has been given much less attention. Many of their key concepts and methods—the longue durée, structure, conjuncture, A and B economic phases, and so on—were better suited to the study of the slow change or socioeconomic fluctuations of premodern agrarian societies. The work of Charles Morazé on The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie (1957) was, for a long time, the main exception to this generalization, although more recently, Annales figures such as Marc Ferro have written on topics such as the Russian Revolution from a standpoint congruent with the general Annales paradigm.
At the time of its inception, the Annales approach represented a departure from current practices in history and a new starting point. However, in succeeding as much as they have in defining a new style of historical research for the twentieth century, Annales and its approach have themselves become the historical establishment in France, and to a lesser degree and in varying ways, elsewhere in the world, where they have helped promote a new social history. The movement has left behind landmark works by Febvre, Bloch, Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie, and others, which will provide major reference points for historians and continue to be debated during this century.
At the same time, as the Annales school has grown, it has diversified its substantive focus. In many respects, its varied objects of investigation have come to resemble the specialties found in the adjacent field of sociology. Issues of the journal have addressed fields such as popular culture, the family, deviance, religion, and a wide variety of other topics, most of which continue to cross established disciplinary lines. In the process, it may have lost sight of at least one of its original objectives, the creation of a total history. This goal has not only been challenged by regional and topical specialization, but attempts have also been made to realize this objective in a different form. The large, synthetic works such as those of Bloch and Braudel have been supplemented by a more comprehensive coverage of analytically distinct subtopics as well as more thorough, if focused, studies on particular communities and regions. In the process, the meaning of a total history has shifted away from the sort of thing represented by Bloch’s study of feudal society, or even Braudel’s massive studies, and has perhaps come closer to what Le Roy Ladurie accomplished in his study of Montaillou. Whether this indicates a breakdown of one of the Annales original objectives or merely the prelude to more synthetic efforts remains to be seen.