The Annaliste Movement

International Review of Social History, 1990

Fernand Braudel liked to say that historians ought to take a 'global' approach to their work, in other words to see the historical problems on which they were working as part of a larger whole. "La globalite, ce n'est pas la prevention d'ecrire une histoire totale du monde [.. .] C'est simplement le desir, quand on a aborde un probleme, d'en depasser systematiquement les limites." 1 Braudel himself gave one of the most remarkable examples of this global approach by refusing to limit himself even to the Mediterranean and by placing the history of that sea between the Atlantic and the Sahara. 2 Today, sixty years after the foundation of Annales, it is time to see the historical movement-if not "school"-centred on the journal as itself a part of history. In that case we might do well to follow Braudel's example and try to place this movement in a global context. In recent years, it has become customary-in some circles at least-to describe the Annales approach as "the new history". 3 In this article I should like to ask the question 'How new is the new history?' and to try to define the contribution of the journal and the movement (which has lasted three generations now) by means of comparison and contrast. The area chosen for comparison will be Europe and America. The first generation of Annales was marked by the desire for a broader and more interdisciplinary history, breaking the dominance of political history and allowing economic history, social history, and the history of mentalities a place in the sun. The second generation of Annales, that of Braudel, Labrousse, and their followers, was the generation in which French historians made their quantitative turn, towards the study of price and population trends over the long term (I'histoire sirielle), as well as to a serious, analytical history of social structures. The obvious place to begin this sketch is with the third generation of Annales, and to examine its practice over the last twenty or thirty years.

Thesis Eleven, 1981

2005

Acta Poloniae Historica, 2007

The European Legacy, 1996

Ihe Annales school of history is dead. Or so François Furet told us in an article entitled "Beyond the Annales" in 1983. In 1987, François Dosse lamented the present state of the historical school. Historians, according to Dosse, had lost touch with the original ideas of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre which had once inspired the Annales to revolutionize the history of economies, societies, and civilizations (the journal's three-pronged subtitle) since its foundation in 1929. The medievalist Georges Duby, in an interview later that year, spoke in more restrained terms of an essoufflement-the movement had run out of steam. 3 "We ere," said Duby, "at the end of a long conquest organized around the Annales. ... We have reached a certain level, and we must confront other problems." There is a consensus that a turning point was reached in the 1980s. In spite of this perception of decline and exhaustion, the journal still flourishes, its international reputation apparently undiminished. French governments have regarded historians like Leroy Ladurie, Braudel, and Duby as ornaments of national culture and funded their enterprises accordingly. In spite of the feeling that the social sciences are in crisis, the historical discipline has a very strong presence in the public arena. Annales historians in particular have achieved unprecedented control over the communications media. The hegemonic poskion of Annales historians is spectacularly clear, and it is deeply resented in other quarter;; of French academia. This paradoxical combination of commercial success and alleged crisis prompts an assessment of the legacy of the Annales. What is the contribution of the now-fashionable history of mentalities to that legacy? Is the era of the Annales over? Or is it inevitable that, having triumphantly assaulted the French academic establishment, Annales historians would disperse in different directions? The Annales may have lost their homogeneity and purpose as a coherent school of thought, but the prolific creativity of those influenced by its ideas remains impressive. Many past hallmarks of the Annales school, however, have been jettisoned. In the current phase of disintegration, historians have abandoned the longue durée in favor of case histories and Italian-style "microhistory." The vogue is over for quantification and for 'serial history' (the examination of long series of homogeneous data, such as the market price of bread or the dates of the wine harvest, which Leroy Ladurie used as a key to long-term climatic variations). Other elements of the legacy have endured. The interdisciplinary banner is still unfurled, even if the notion of history's sister disciplines has changed enormously. Today, interdisciplinary means that the historian must become an anthropologist, an ethnogra-

left history, 1993

Originally published in the inaugural volume of left history, this piece explores the influence of the philosophy of Henri Bergson on the founders of the Annales and argues that in that very Cold War year of 1949 Lucien Febvre rejected these principles in favour of the qualitatively different approach of Fernand Braudel.

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