The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014 by Peter Burke (review)

This is a revised, updated version of a work that, since first publication in 1990, has generally been acknowledged as the most lucid, readable, and best-informed analysis of the Annales school of history, which dominated the French historical scene for much of the twentieth century. The Annales journal was established in 1929 as a polemical riposte to what Peter Burke characterizes as ‘an old historiographical regime’ (p. 7), focusing on ruling elites and political narrative. The journal in contrast sought a rapprochement with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and extended the social and geographical range of the historian’s subject matter. What started as a periodical transmuted after the Second World War into a powerful influence on French academic life. Although the practitioners of Annales-style history scorned the idea that they formed a ‘school’, this is certainly what they seemed to constitute to historians outside France, who by the 1980s were saluting the Annales as the most vibrant and influential non-Marxist historical movement in the twentieth century. Burke’s three-stage analysis of the trajectory of the school has become classic: the founding generation of the Renaissance historian Lucien Febvre and medievalist Marc Bloch; the ‘age of Braudel’ from the 1950s to the late 1960s, when early modernist Fernand Braudel not only ran the journal but also dominated France’s research institutions and agendas; and then a third, post-1968 generation, spurred to pursue new directions and approaches. In 1990, Burke acknowledged that the journal was at a crossroads, and the passage of time has confirmed this analysis, which makes this revised account all the more valuable. The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed much soul-searching within the school. The cultural and linguistic turn threatened to outflank the Annalistes intellectually: emerging scholars conjured with the names of Foucault, Bourdieu, and Certeau more than with the sacred trinity of Febvre, Bloch, and Braudel. The growing mode of global history also set out a new challenge to France, where the proportion of historians in post researching their native country is higher than in other comparators. Burke acknowledges that, in this fourth generation, the Annales has entered a kind of ‘post-heroic’ age. More institutionally and intellectually disparate than before, and set in a more crowded research environment, it is now viewed as less exemplary. It is also revealing how few of the Annales historians Burke mentions are under fifty years old. Burke has always been in the vanguard of historians in the English-speaking world to draw inspiration from the Annales, and he knows personally and admires many of the historians in his account. The rather downbeat tone of the last chapters thus lends this fine study a somewhat wistful, elegiac air. The school may well be less of a school; but such has been its force for good that one is tempted to conclude: the ‘school’ is dead, vivent les Annales!