Annales d’histoire economique et sociale (1928-) or The Annales School

Bloch’s ‘The royal touch’; Braudel’s ‘Mediterrean’.

Longue duree, conjuncture, histoire a rebours, collective mentalities, serial history, event.

Bloch, Febvre, Braudel, Labrousse, Ariel, Dupront, Barthes, Goffman, Bourdieau, Ladurie, Wallerstein.

XVIIIth century social historians: Michelet, Gibbon and Burckhardt

The Annales d’histoire economique et sociale was founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1928. The Annales School presents itself as a problem-oriented analytical history, which looks at human activity comprehensively. Peter Burke divides the movement in three phases or generations:

1920-1945: the movement is very radical and subversive and strongly opposes the tradition of political history. [Bloch and Febvre]

1945-1968: the movement becomes a school of thought, with its main concepts (structure-conjuncture) and method (serial history of changes over the long term). [Braudel and Labrousse]

1968-1989: the school becomes more fragmented and shifts its concern from the socio-economic to the socio-cultural. [Ariel, Bourdieau, Goffman etc]

Defined by some as a form of structural situationism, in its first phase this historians’ movement places itself against the positivist school which concentrated on the analysis of short periods, adopted a traditional narrative of events and analysed history almost exclusively from the political-military point of view. As F. Simiand summarised, the founding fathers of the Annales school mainly comprised of economic histoirians who rebelled against traditional historians’ idola, identified as: political idol: their obsession with wars and states; Individual idol: their obsession with great men; Chronological idol: their obsession with looking at development as linear.

The Annales School historians programmatically examined phenomena and their underlying causes in depth with a particular attention to immobile stretches of time.

Marc Bloch starts with a study on what he calls ‘collective illusions’ and in ‘The Royal Touch’ he looks at the belief that the King’s touch could cure people from diseases. He compares France and England on a long term scale and analyses how collective illusions such as this survived after the Middle Ages. His aim was to problematise the fact that people believed such improbable things for a prolonged period in time and to point to possible causes of such a phenomenon. A survey of this kind could be regarded as a psychological history, and Bloch partly applies Durkheim’s ideas on collective beliefs and mentalities. In 1931 Bloch publishes French Rural History. This work is important for the Annales School since it uses a regressive method (lire l’histoire a rebours); Bloch believes that it is better to proceed from the known to the unknown, hence he reads history backwards. His study on feudal society examines the culture of feudalism, its sense of time, forms of collective memory and the structures of feeling and thought. Bloch here and elsewhere attacks the idol of origins arguing that historical phenomena ought to be explained in terms of their own time, rather than of earlier periods.

Febvre’s work on religion is an example of a historical linguistics of the impossibility of atheism in the XVIth century. For the Annales School, co-operation with other disciplines is essential.

Braudel is a crucial figure of the movement, his most famous work, Mediterranee, is divided in three parts. As Bloch with social psychology and Febvre with linguistics, Braudel’s work heavily relies on a different discipline: geography. The first part is in fact a geohistory and had much popularity both as a historical geography and a history of the environment. In the second part, he looks at the general trends of the mediterranean people, writing a kind of history of structures, the economic, the geographical, the technological and so forth. In the third part Braudel is concerned with undermining the history of events. He poses individuals and events in their context and, as P. O. writes, ‘makes them intelligible at the price of revealing their fundamental unimportance’. In this he is trying to show how a history of events can only provide a superficial reading of society’s development.

Braudel’s main contribution lies in his insistence on writing total histories. Unlike Febvre and Bloch, Braudel says very little about the history of mentalities. His main priority was to show that time moves at different speeds, and he divides time into geographical, social and individual. He also examines long stretches of time, somehow resounding some of Bergson’s ideas, he introduces into historiography the notion of la longue duree.

In Civilisation materielle et capitalisme, Braudel divides his object of study into:

Material civilisation (where production takes place, immobile).

Economic life (the place of trade and distribution).

Capitalist mechanism (the realm of consumption, where change is more rapid).

Here again in the first part, ‘The structures of everyday life’, he takes a global and long-term approach, his concern is with what sustains life as a whole, as well as habit. There is no reference to symbolic structures nor to history of meaning.

The second, ‘Wheels of commerce’ is about the market economy and the ways it coexisted with the non-market economy in early modernity. In the third part, ‘perspective of the world’, he takes a systemic approach which is heavily influenced by the world-system theory of Wallerstein. Braudel introduced crucial concepts to the school and helped linking it to the currents in anthropology and linguistics in vogue at the time. Barthes and Levi-Strauss both took issue with his ideas. However, he was dismissive of two important tools of the Annales school: quantitative history and the history of mentalities. His method was primarily structuralist.

Labrousse was an economic historian who largely used the quantitative method and also introduced the idea of conjuncture. He also adopted demographic models and mainly wrote regional history. By conjuncture (which can be translated as trend) Labrousse refers to the connection between diverse yet simultaneous phenomena. Conjuncture came to be contrasted with the idea of structure, in the sense that the former identified the short-medium as opposed to the long-term. They were however complementary to one another in Labrousse.

The third generation of the Annales school breaks with Braudel’s methodological structuralism and reaffirms the Durkheimian idea of history of mentalities. Aries for instance also rejects quantitative approaches, focusing on natural phenomena and their refraction in culture. Dupront examines unconscious attitudes but rather than to Durkheim, he returns to Marxist notions of ideology. Primarily concerned with culture, he writes a kind of psychological history of the social imagination and contrasts it to collective representations. In this he contrasts imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

The thrid generation moves away from quantitative history to reassert the anthropological realm, especially through cultural anthropology (Goffman, V. Turner, Bourdieau), to repose the accent on politics proper, and to return to history as narrative. Bourdieau for instance replaces the notion of social rules with that of habit and strategy. Other studies in the 1960’s and 1970’s ceased to question the causal relationship between events and structures and opted for an understanding of them as mutually reflecting.

Le Roy Ladurie reproposed the notion of event as primary in historical analysis, divinding it into three types: traumatic, catalyst and creative.

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Resources			Ferdinand Braudel Centre. Binghamton University. Biographical Info on Braudel	V. good generic
Bibliography	M. Bloch: L. Febvre: F. Braudel: Ariel:	The royal touch. French rural history. (1931) Feudal society. (1939) The problem of unbelief in the XVIth century: the religion of Rabelais. (1939) Mediterranee Civilisation materielle et capitalisme. (1967-79) Centuries of childhood. The hour of our death.

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