The Annales school () is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs.See for recent issues The school has been influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social and economic rather than political or diplomatic themes.
The school deals primarily with late medieval and early modern Europe, before the French Revolution, with little interest in later topics. It has dominated French social history and heavily influenced historiography in Europe and Latin America. Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866–1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988).
Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the École pratique des hautes études, all based in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023) and includes Jacques Revel,Since 1978, Revel has taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where he is (full professor); he served as president of the École from 1995 to 2004. and Philippe Ariès (1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978. The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities, or . The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier (born 1945), clearly distanced itself from the approach, replaced by the cultural and linguistic turn, which emphasizes the social history of cultural practices.
The main scholarly outlet has been the journal ("Annals of Economic and Social History"), founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, which broke radically with traditional historiography by insisting on the importance of taking all levels of society into consideration and emphasized the collective nature of mentalities. Its contributors viewed events as less fundamental than the mental frameworks that shaped decisions and practices. The informal successor as head of the school was Le Roy Ladurie. Multiple responses were attempted by the school. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe. By the time of the crisis the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world. Influence spread out from Paris, but few new ideas came in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history.One of numerous spin-off journals was (1986– ), devoted to quantitative history. The Annales ignored the developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political, and demographic research. An attempt to require an Annales-written textbook for French schools was rejected by the government.Hunt (1986) By 1980 postmodern sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives. As Jacques Revel notes, the success of the Annales school, especially its use of social structures as explanatory forces, contained the seeds of its own downfall, for there is "no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real".Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social", in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (1995) 480. The Annales school kept its infrastructure, but lost its .On the decline of Annales, see Hunt (1986); for a summary of the movement, see Burke, French Historical Revolution, 106–107.
The journal
The journal began in Strasbourg as ; it moved to Paris and kept the same name from 1929 to 1939. It was successively renamed (1939–1942, 1945), (1942–1944), (1946–1994), and (1994– ).
In 1962, Braudel and Gaston Berger used Ford Foundation money and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. In 1970, the 6th Section and the Annales relocated to the FMSH building. FMSH set up elaborate international networks to spread the Annales gospel across Europe and the world. In 2013, it began publication of an English language edition, with all the articles translated.
The scope of topics covered by the journal is vast and experimental—there is a search for total history and new approaches. The emphasis is on social history, and very long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geographySee Lucien Febvre, (1922), translated as A Geographical Introduction to History (London, 1932). and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" (). Little attention is paid to political, diplomatic, or military history, or to biographies of famous men. Instead the Annales focused attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis.
Origins The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg and later in Paris. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians whom Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes.Colin Jones, "Olwen Hufton's 'Poor', Richard Cobb's 'People', and the Notions of the longue durée in French Revolutionary Historiography", Past & Present, 2006 Supplement (Volume 1), pp. 178–203 in Project Muse
Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures () over events and political transformations.Colin Jones, "Olwen Hufton's 'Poor', Richard Cobb's 'People', and the Notions of the longue durée in French Revolutionary Historiography", Past & Present, 2006 Supplement (Volume 1), pp. 178–203 in Project Muse Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called , or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. The goal of the Annales was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history.J.H. Hexter, "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien", Historians, pp. 61
Co-founder Marc Bloch (1886–1944) was a quintessential modernist who studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in Germany, serving as a professor at the University of Strasbourg until he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch's interests were highly interdisciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). His own ideas, especially those expressed in his masterworks, French Rural History (, 1931) and Feudal Society, were incorporated by the second-generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel.
Precepts Georges Duby, a leader of the school, wrote that the history he taught: relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strove on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation.Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines (1973), forward The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a , or , a complete study of a historic problem.
Postwar Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France in World War II for his active membership of the French Resistance. Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during this time that he mentored Braudel, who became one of the best-known exponents of this school.
Braudel's work came to define a second era of Annales historiography and was influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of Philip II of Spain. Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time: (the quasi motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures.
While authors such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Marc Ferro and Jacques Le Goff continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history, political history and economic history.
Bloch's (1924)Translated as The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (1990) looked at the long-standing folk belief that the king could cure scrofula by his thaumaturgic touch. The kings of France and England indeed regularly practiced the ritual. Bloch was not concerned with the effectiveness of the royal touch—he acted instead like an anthropologist in asking why people believed it and how it shaped relations between king and commoner.
The book was highly influential in introducing comparative studies (in this case France and England), as well as long durations ("longue durée") studies spanning several centuries, even up to a thousand years, downplaying short-term events. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities, or , resonated with scholars who were reading Freud and Proust.
In the 1960s, Robert Mandrou and Georges Duby harmonized the concept of history with Fernand Braudel's structures of historical time and linked mentalities with changing social conditions. A flood of studies based on these approaches appeared during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, history had become interdisciplinary to the point of fragmentation, but still lacked a solid theoretical basis. While not explicitly rejecting history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.
Braudel Fernand Braudel became the leader of the second generation after 1945. He obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and founded the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which was devoted to the study of history and the social sciences. It became an independent degree-granting institution in 1975 under the name École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Braudel's followers admired his use of the approach to stress slow, and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.Olivia Harris, "Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity". History Workshop Journal (2004) (57): 161–174. Fulltext: OUP. Only Ariès was a true conservative—indeed a royalist.