Annales School

The Annales School is a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It has dominated French social history and influenced historiography worldwide. Prominent leaders include cofounders Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), as well as Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), Georges Duby (1919-1996), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929- ) and Jacques Le Goff (1924- ). The main outlet was the journal founded in 1929, Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history"), 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.

The journal, founded in Strasbourg, moved to Paris and continues today as Annales: Histoire, Sciences Social. The scope of topics is vast--there is a search for total history. The emphasis is on social history, and very-long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" ("mentalités" in French). 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.

Bloch

Marc Bloch (1886-1944) was the cofounder of the Annales school, and a quintessential modernist. He studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, and in Germany, serving as a professor at the University of Strassbourg until he was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch was highly interdiciplinary, 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 (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931) and Feudal Society were incorporated by the second-generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel.

mentalities

Bloch, Marc. Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924) looked at the long-standing folk belief that the king could cure scrofula by 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 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 studies spanning several centuries (with specific events used as illustrations). Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities resonated with scholars who were reading Freud and Proust. In the 1960s, Robert Mandrou and Georges Duby harmonized the concept of mentalité history with Fernand Braudel's structures of historical time and linked mentalities with changing social conditions. A flood of mentalité studies based on these approaches appeared during the 1970s-80s. By the 1990s, however, mentalité history had become interdisciplinary to the point of fragmentation but still lacked a solid theoretical basis. While not explictly rejecting mentalité history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.

Bibliography

• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89, (1990), the major study in English excerpt and text search
• Carrard, Philippe. "Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel," Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2-19 in JSTOR
• Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, (1992)
• Dosse, Francois. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, (1994, first French edition, 1987) excerpt and text search
• Fink, Carole. Marc Bloch: A Life in History, (1989) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Susan W. Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (1996) excerpt and text search
• Hexter, J. H. "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 1972, vol. 44, pp. 480-539 in JSTOR
• Moon, David. "Fernand Braudel and the Annales School" online edition
• Roberts, Michael. "The Annales school and historical writing." in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds. Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline. (2004), pp 78-92 online edition
• Stirling, Katherine. "Rereading Marc Bloch: the Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist." History Compass 2007 5(2): 525-538. Issn: 1478-0542 Fulltext: History Compass
• Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, (1976)

Primary sources

• Braudel, Fernand. On History, (1980, first French edition 1969). excerpt and text search
• Burke, Peter, ed. A New Kind of History From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, (1973)
• Duby, G. History Continues, (1994)
• Earle, P., ed. Essays in European Economic History, 1500-1800, (1974)
• Ferro, Marx, ed. Social Historians in Contemporary France: Essays from "Annales", (1972)
• Revel, J. and L. Hunt, eds. Histories: French Constructions of the Past, (1995).

External links

• recent issues of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Social
• biography of Fernand Braudel