The Annales School. An Intellectual History (review)

Quite a bit has been written about the Annales School, including two important books, Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution (1990) and Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (1976), and several important shorter analyses by Stuart Clark, “The Annales Historians” in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (1985) and by Georg G. Iggers in Historiography in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed., 2005. All of them see the Annales School as the most influential historiographical movement internationally in the twentieth century, comparable in its significance to the Rankean model of the nineteenth century and replacing it. There are several points of agreement in this literature. They all view the founders of the Annales movement. Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, as pioneers in the reaction against the traditional scholarship with its narrative approach and focus on events and great individuals, primarily centering around the state, as represented by Charles Seignobos and Charles Langlois, and located at the Sorbonne. Instead they introduce an analytical, problem-oriented interdisciplinary approach broadening the scope of history to include all aspects of society and culture. Although this constituted a new direction in French historiography, it was not unique to France but was part of an international movement with counterparts in Germany in the work of Karl Lamprecht and that of the New Historians in America. Except for Iggers the studies of the Annales movement cited above generally ignore this. Stoianovich speaks of an Annales paradigm, best represented by a relatively determinist Fernand Braudel, which best conforms to the aim of the Annales historians to convert history into a strict social science. However, the rest of the literature, including André Burguière, see this as overlooking the diversity of Annales historiography and the changes which it underwent from the early works of Febvre and Bloch on.

Burguière introduces new notes into the interpretation of the Annales movement. As an insider, he is able to give a picture of the discussions and conflicts that make apparent the diversity of the movement and put to rest the notion of a paradigm. He thus depicts the personal as well as theoretical agreements and sharp disagreements, even conflicts, between Febvre and Bloch. Both were deeply influenced by Emile Durkheim and his Année sociologique and by Henri Berr and his Revue de synthèse, but in different ways and in different degrees. A main thesis of Burguière is that it is the notion of mentalities that holds the movement together from its founders until recent years. But Durkheim and Berr differ in their conceptions of mentalities. Durkheim’s stress is on social and economic structures governed by an unconscious collective mentality. In Bloch’s Feudal Society, individuals are hardly mentioned, but the world view and the cultural context of the time play a central role. Berr wants a “historical synthesis” that broadens the historical outlook to include all aspects of society and culture, but in which the views and intentions of individuals still play a significant role. This is reflected in Febvre’s early work on human geography, and later in his biography of Martin Luther and his examination of François Rabelais and the problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century. Burguière then proceeds to what he calls the “Labrousse Moment” after Ernest Labrousse’s statistical studies of prices as causal factors in the outbreak of the French Revolution. Here Burguière’s insistence on mentality as the unifying element of the Annales movement neither does really apply nor does it in Braudel’s turn to long enduring structures and shorter economic conjunctures, although Braudel avoids quantification. While in Stoianovich’s study, Braudel occupies a central role in the movement, in Burguière’s book he is marginalized. What follows in the next generation in the 1960s and 1970s is an intensified turn to quantification that is supposed to guarantee the scientific character of the inquiry...