The French Historical Revolution

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Published

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989

Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction

Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction

Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty

Philip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship

Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience and Reality

Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics

Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction

Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics

James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind and Politics

Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction

Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

William Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction

John Preston, Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography and Love

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason

James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State

Forthcoming

Alison Ainley, Irigaray; Maria Baghramian, Hilary Putnam; Sara

Beardsworth, Kristeva; Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco; James Carey, Innis and McLuhan; Thomas D’Andrea, Alasdair MacIntyre; Eric

Dunning, Norbert Elias; Jocelyn Dunphy, Paul Ricoeur; Nigel Gibson, Frantz Fanon; Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin; Karen Green, Dummett; Sarah Kay, Žižek; Paul Kelly, Ronald Dworkin; Valerie

Kennedy, Edward Said; Carl Levy, Antonio Gramsci; Harold Noonan, Frege; Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn; Nick Smith, Charles Taylor; Nicholas Walker, Heidegger

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Old Historiographical Regime and its Critics

2 The Founders: Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch

i The Early Years

ii Strasbourg

iii The Foundation of Annales

iv The Institutionalization of Annales

3 The Age of Braudel

i The Mediterranean

ii The Later Braudel

iii The Rise of Quantitative History

4 The Third Generation

i From the Cellar to the Attic

ii The ‘Third Level’ of Serial History

iii Reactions: Anthropology, Politics, Narrative

5 The Annales in Global Perspective

i The Reception of Annales

ii Striking a Balance

Glossary: The Language of Annales

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

It goes without saying that this study owes a good deal to conversations with members of the Annales group, notably with Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff, Michel Vovelle, Krzysztof Pomian, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel, in Paris and also in more exotic locations, from the Taj Mahal to Emmanuel College.

I should like to thank my wife, Maria Lucia, my publisher, John Thompson, and Roger Chartier, for their comments on an earlier draft of this study. I am also indebted to Juan Maiguashca, who fired my enthusiasm for Annales, some thirty years ago, and to dialogues with Alan Baker, Norman Birnbaum, John Bossy, Stuart Clark, Robert Darnton, Clifford Davies, Natalie Davis, Javier Gil Pujol, Carlo Ginzburg, Ranajit Guha, Eric Hobsbawm, Gábor Klaniczay, Geoffrey Parker, Gwyn Prins, Carlos Martínez Shaw, lvo Schöffer, Henk Wesseling, and others who have, like myself, tried to combine their involvement with Annales with a measure of detachment from it.

Introduction

A remarkable amount of the most innovative, the most memorable and the most significant historical writing of the twentieth century has been produced in France. La nouvelle histoire, as it is sometimes called, is at least as famous, as French, and as controversial as la nouvelle cuisine.¹ A good deal of this new history is the work of a particular group associated with the journal founded in 1929, and most conveniently known as Annales.² Outsiders generally call this group the ‘Annales school’, emphasizing what they have in common, while insiders often deny the existence of such a school, emphasizing individual approaches within the group.³

At the centre of the group are Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Nearer the edge are Ernest Labrousse, Pierre Vilar, Maurice Agulhon and Michel Vovelle, four distinguished historians whose commitment to a Marxist approach to history – particularly strong in Vilar’s case – places them outside the inner circle. On or beyond the fringe are Roland Mousnier and Michel Foucault, who make brief appearances in this study because of the overlap between their historical interests and those associated with Annales.

The journal, which is now more than sixty years old, was founded in order to promote a new kind of history, and it continues to encourage innovation. The leading ideas behind Annales might be summarized briefly as follows. In the first place, the substitution of a problem-oriented analytical history for a traditional narrative of events. In the second place, the history of the whole range of human activities in the place of a mainly political history. In the third place – in order to achieve the first two aims – a collaboration with other disciplines: with geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, social anthropology, and so on. As Febvre put it, with his characteristic use of the imperative, ‘Historians, be geographers. Be jurists too, and sociologists, and psychologists’.⁴ He was always on the alert ‘to break down compartments’ (abattre les cloisons) and to fight narrow specialization, ‘l’esprit de spécialité’.⁵ In a similar way, Braudel wrote his Mediterranean in the way he did in order to ‘prove that history can do more than study walled gardens’.⁶

The aim of this book is to describe, to analyse, and to evaluate the achievement of the Annales school. This school is often perceived from outside as a monolithic group with a uniform historical practice, quantitative in method, determinist in its assumptions, and hostile, or at best indifferent, to politics and to events. This stereotype of the Annales school ignores divergences between individual members of the group and also developments over time. It might be better to speak not of a ‘school’, but of the Annales movement.⁷

This movement may be divided into three phases. In the first phase, from the 1920s to 1945, it was small, radical and subversive, fighting a guerrilla action against traditional history, political history, and the history of events. After the Second World War, the rebels took over the historical Establishment. This second phase of the movement, in which it was most truly a ‘school’ with distinctive concepts (notably ‘structure’ and ‘conjoncture’) and distinctive methods (notably the ‘serial history’ of changes over the long term), was dominated by Fernand Braudel.

A third phase in the history of the movement opened around the year 1968. It is marked by fragmentation (émiettement). By this time, the influence of the movement – especially in France – was so great that it had lost much of its former distinctiveness. It was a unified ‘school’ only in the eyes of its foreign admirers and its domestic critics, who continued to reproach it for underestimating the importance of politics and of the history of events. In the last twenty years, some members of the group have turned from socio-economic to socio-cultural history, while others are rediscovering political history and even narrative.

The history of Annales may thus be interpreted in terms of the succession of three generations. It also illustrates the common cyclical process by which the rebels of today turn into the Establishment of tomorrow, and are in turn rebelled against. All the same, some major concerns have persisted. Indeed, the journal and the individuals associated with it offer the most sustained example of fruitful interaction between history and the social sciences to be found in our century. It is for this reason that I have chosen to write about them.

This brief survey of the Annales movement attempts to cross several cultural boundaries. It attempts to explain the French to the English-speaking world, the 1920s to a later generation, and the practice of historians to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and others. My account is itself presented in the form of a history, and attempts to combine a chronological with a thematic organization.

The problem with such a combination, here as elsewhere in history, is what has been called ‘the contemporaneity of the non-contemporary’. Braudel, for example, although he was exceptionally open to new ideas, even late in his long life, did not fundamentally change his way of looking at history or indeed of writing history from the 1930s, when he was planning his Mediterranean, to the 1980s, when he was working on his book on France. For this reason it has proved necessary to take some liberties with chronological order.

This book is at once something less and something more than a study in intellectual history. It does not aspire to be the definitive scholarly study of the Annales movement that I hope someone will write in the twenty-first century. Such a study will have to make use of sources I have not seen (such as the manuscript drafts of Marc Bloch or the unpublished letters of Febvre and Braudel).⁸ Its author will need a specialized knowledge not only of the history of historical writing, but also of the history of twentieth-century France.

What I have tried to write is rather different. It is a more personal essay. I have sometimes described myself as a ‘fellow-traveller’ of Annales – in other words, an outsider who has (like many other foreign historians) been inspired by the movement. I have followed its fortunes fairly closely in the last thirty years. All the same, Cambridge is sufficiently distant from Paris to make it possible to write a critical history of the Annales achievement.

Although Febvre and Braudel were both formidable academic politicians, little will be said in the pages that follow about this aspect of the movement – the rivalry between the Sorbonne and the Hautes Etudes, for example, or the struggle for power over appointments and curricula.⁹ I have also, with some regret, resisted the temptation to write an ethnographic study of the inhabitants of 54 Boulevard Raspail – their ancestors, intermarriages, factions, patron-client networks, styles of life, mentalities, and so on.

Instead, I shall concentrate on the major books produced by members of the group, and attempt to assess their importance in the history of historical writing. It sounds paradoxical to discuss a movement that has been held together by a journal in terms of books rather than articles.¹⁰ However, it is a cluster of monographs that has made the greatest impact (on professionals and the general public alike) over the long term.

The movement has too often been discussed as if it could be equated with three or four people. The achievements of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and others are indeed spectacular. However, as in the case of many intellectual movements, this one is a collective enterprise to which significant contributions have been made by a number of individuals. This point is most obvious in the case of the third generation, but it is also true for the age of Braudel and for that of the founders. Team-work had been a dream of Lucien Febvre’s, as early as 1936.¹¹ After the war, it became a reality. Collaborative projects on French history have included the history of the social structure, the history of agricultural productivity, the history of the eighteenth-century book, the history of education, the history of housing, and a computer-based study of conscripts in the nineteenth century.

This study ends with a discussion of responses to Annales, whether enthusiastic or critical, an account of its reception in different parts of the world and in different disciplines, and an attempt to place it in the history of historical writing. My aim (despite the relative brevity of this book) is to allow the reader to see the movement as a whole.

The Old Historiographical Regime and its Critics

Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch were the leaders of what might be called the French Historical Revolution. In order to interpret the actions of revolutionaries, however, it is necessary to know something of the old regime which they wish to overturn. To understand as well as to describe this regime, we cannot confine ourselves to the situation in France around 1900, when Febvre and Bloch were students. We need to examine the history of historical writing over the long term.

Since the age of Herodotus and Thucydides, history has been written in the West in a variety of genres – the monastic chronicle, the political memoir, the antiquarian treatise, and so on. However, the dominant form has long been the narrative of political and military events, presented as the story of the great deeds of great men – the captains and the kings. This dominant form was first seriously challenged during the Enlightenment.¹

At this time, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of writers and scholars in Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere began to concern themselves with what they called the ‘history of society’, a history that would not be confined to war and politics, but would include laws and trade, morals, and the ‘manners’ that were the centre of attention in Voltaire’s famous Essai sur les moeurs.

These scholars dismissed what John Millar of Glasgow once called ‘that common surface of events which occupies the details of the vulgar historian’ in order to concentrate on the history of structures such as the feudal system or the British constitution. Some of them were concerned with the reconstruction of past attitudes and values, notably with the history of the value-system known as ‘chivalry’, others with the history of art, literature, and music. By the end of the century, this international group of scholars had produced an extremely important body of work. Some historians, notably Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Koman Empire, integrated this new socio-cultural history into a narrative of political events.

However, one of the consequences of the so-called ‘Copernican Revolution’ in history associated with Leopold von Ranke was to marginalize, or remarginalize, social and cultural history. Ranke’s own interests were not limited to political history. He wrote on the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and he did not reject the history of society, art, literature, or science. All the same, the movement Ranke led and the new historical paradigm he formulated undermined the ‘new history’ of the eighteenth century. His emphasis on archive sources made the historians who worked on social and cultural history look mere dilettanti.

Ranke’s followers were more narrow-minded than the master himself, and in an age when historians were aspiring to become professionals, non-political history was excluded from the new academic discipline.² The new professional journals founded in the later nineteenth century, such as the Historische Zeitschrift (founded 1856), the Revue Historique (1876) and the English Historical Review (1886), concentrated on the history of political events (the preface to the first volume of the English Historical Review declared its intent to concentrate on ‘States and politics’). The ideals of the new professional historians were articulated in a number of treatises on historical method, such as the Introduction aux etudes historiques (1897) by the French historians Langlois and Seignebos.

Dissenting voices could of course be heard in the nineteenth century. Michelet and Burckhardt, who produced their histories of the Renaissance more or less at the same moment, in 1855 and 1860 respectively, had much wider views of history than the Rankeans. Burckhardt viewed history as the field of interaction of three forces – the state, religion and culture – while Michelet called for what we would now describe as ‘history from below’; in his own words, ‘the history of those who have suffered, worked, declined and died without being able to describe their sufferings’.³

Again, the masterpiece of the French ancient historian Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (1864), concentrated on the history of religion, the family and morality rather than on politics or events. Marx too offered an alternative historical paradigm to that of Ranke. According to Marx’s view of history, the fundamental causes of change were to be found in the tensions within social and economic structures.

The economic historians were perhaps the best organized of the dissenters from political history. Gustav Schmoller, for example, professor at Strasbourg (or rather Strassburg, because at that time it was still part of Germany) from 1872, was the leader of an important historical school. A journal of social and economic history, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial und Wirtschafts-geschichte, was founded in 1893. In Britain, classic studies of economic history, such as William Cunningham’s Growth of English Trade and J. E. Thorold Rogers’s Six Centuries of Work and Wages, go back to 1882 and 1884 respectively.⁴ In France, Henri Hauser, Henri Sée and Paul Mantoux were all beginning to write on economic history at the end of the nineteenth century.⁵

By the later nineteenth century, the dominance, or as Schmoller put it, the ‘imperialism’, of political history was frequently challenged. J. R. Green, for example, opened his Short History of the English People (1874) with the bold claim to have ‘devoted more space to Chaucer than to Cressy, to Caxton than to the petty strife of Yorkist and Lancastrian, to the Poor Law of Elizabeth than to her victory at Cadiz, to the Methodist Revival than to the escape of the Young Pretender’.⁶

The founders of the new discipline of sociology expressed similar views. Auguste Comte, for example, made fun of what he called the ‘petty details childishly studied by the irrational curiosity of blind compilers of useless anecdotes’, and advocated what he called, in a famous phrase, ‘history without names’.⁷ Herbert Spencer complained that, ‘The biographies of monarchs (and our children learn little else) throw scarcely any light upon the science of society.’⁸ In similar fashion, Emile Durkheim dismissed specific events (événements particuliers) as no more than ‘superficial manifestations’, the apparent rather than the real history of a given nation.⁹

In the years around 1900, criticisms of political history were particularly sharp, and suggestions for its replacement were particularly fertile.¹⁰ In Germany, these were the years of the so-called ‘Lamprecht controversy’. Karl Lamprecht, a professor at Leipzig, contrasted political history, which was merely the history of individuals, with cultural or economic history, which was the history of the people. He later defined history as ‘primarily a socio-psychological science’.¹¹

In the United States, Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous study of ‘the significance of the frontier in American history’ (1893) made a clear break with the history of political events, while early in the new century a movement was launched by James Harvey Robinson under the slogan of the ‘New History’. According to Robinson, ‘History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.’ As for method, ‘The New History will avail itself of all those discoveries that are being made about mankind by anthropologists, economists, psychologists and sociologists.’¹²

In France too around the year 1900, the nature of history was the subject of a lively debate. The narrow-mindedness of the historical Establishment should not be exaggerated. The founder of the Revue Historique, Gabriel Monod, combined his enthusiasm for German ‘scientific’ history with an admiration for Michelet (whom he knew personally and whose biography he wrote), and was himself admired by his pupils Hauser and Febvre.

Again, Ernest Lavisse, one of the most important historians active in France at this time, was the general editor of a history of France which appeared in ten volumes between 1900 and 1912. His own interests were primarily in political history, from Frederick the Great to Louis XIV. However, the conception of history revealed by these ten volumes was a broad one. The introductory section was written by a geographer, and the volume on the Renaissance penned by a cultural historian, while Lavisse’s own account of the age of Louis XIV devoted a substantial amount of space to the arts, and in particular to the politics of culture.¹³ In other words, it is inexact to think of the established professional historians of the period as exclusively concerned with the narrative of political events.

All the same, historians were still perceived by the social scientists in precisely this way. Durkheim’s dismissal of events has already been quoted. His follower, the economist François Simiand, went still further in this direction in a famous article attacking what he called the ‘idols of the tribe of historians’. According to Simiand, there were three idols which must be toppled. There was the ‘political idol’ – ‘the perpetual preoccupation with political history, political facts, wars etc., which gives these events an exaggerated importance’. There was the ‘individual idol’ – in other words, the overemphasis on so-called great men, so that even studies of institutions were presented in the form ‘Pontchartrain and the Parlement of Paris’, and so on. Finally, there was the ‘chronological idol’, that is, ‘the habit of losing oneself in studies of origins’.¹⁴

All three themes would be dear to Annales, and we shall return to them. The attack on the idols of the historians’ tribe made particular reference to one of the tribal chieftains, Lavisse’s protégé Charles Seignebos, professor at the Sorbonne and coauthor of a well-known introduction to the study of history.¹⁵ It was perhaps for this reason that Seignebos became the symbol of everything the reformers opposed. In fact, he was not an exclusively political historian, but also wrote on civilization. He was interested in the relation between history and the social sciences, though he did not have the same view of this relation as Simiand or Febvre, who both published sharp criticisms of his work. Simiand’s critique appeared in a new journal, the Revue de Synthèse Historique, founded in 1900 by a great intellectual entrepreneur, Henri Berr, in order to encourage historians to collaborate with other disciplines, particularly psychology and sociology, in the hope of producing what Berr called a ‘historical’ or ‘collective’ psychology.¹⁶ In other words, what the Americans call ‘psycho-history’ goes back considerably further than the 1950s and Erik Erikson’s famous study of Young Man Luther.¹⁷

Berr’s ideal of a historical psychology to be achieved by interdisciplinary co-operation had a great appeal for two younger men who wrote for his journal. Their names were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch.