1. HI323 Historiography Claudia Stein
Les Annales

2. Oportet haeresse esse -- it is important to be a heretic
Marc Bloch,
Lucien Febre,

3. religious psychology (history of mentalities)
long view
problem focused
religious psychology (history of mentalities)
comparative history
Influenced by sociologists Emile Durckheim,
Focussed not on individual or
Psychology of the individual but always on
Collective phenomena
Suicide (1897)
The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (1912)
Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch, 1924

4. ‘invention’ of regressive method
Influenced by Paul Vidal de la Blache,
Founder of French school of geopolitics
Tableau de la Geographie de la France((1903) which links geography with human history (influnenced by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel who became central to Nazi historiography)

5. 1942/3
1939/40
1940

6. Bloch’s dilemma:
‘In the vast drag of submarine swells, so cosmic as to appear irreversible, of what avail were the struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors? To think otherwise would be to falsify history’.
Belief in ‘scientific’ history (in the natural science sense NOT the German sense); retains belief in some sort of positivism
Historian should understand not judge – but what about the politics of one’s own time, should the historian ignore it)
Marginalisation of political history in favour of long views (how to explain Nazism?)
Denial of individual agency in favour of the mass (due to reliance on Durckheim)
Bloch questions the relevance of
History and his methodology in the face of Nazism

7. François Rabelais (?-1553)
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel
1937

8. 2nd generation of Annales
Dominates the entire field for
decades
Fernand Braudel,

9. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II ( )
New notion of space: large-scale, ‘global’
Interdisciplinary
Radical new notion of time

10. The Three Durées Time of long duration (l’histoire de la longue durée)
Deep time
Time of conjunctures
the time taken by broader movements of economies, social structures, political institutions and civilisations
Time of events (l’histoire événementielle)
‘their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night
with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails’ .

11. 3rd Generation of Annales (since mid-1960)
First time women: Christine Klabisch , Arlette Farge, or Michele Perrot
Ernest Labrousse, Pierre Goubert, Jacques le Goff, George Duby
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

12. Return to a History of Mentalities
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 1929-
Influence of anthropology
Focus on narrative again (less
Quantitative)
Strong focus on history of mentalities

13. Return to mentalités: circa 1970
Le Roy Ladurie
Montaillou (1975)
Medieval town destroyed by feuds and religious strife
Demography, attitudes, beliefs, cosmology, politics
The Peasants of Languedoc (1966)
Economic life of peasants in southern France between late medieval and early modern period, 14th-18th centuries
Juicy factoid (literally): average peasant in Languedoc drank between 1.5 and 2 litres of wine daily in 1480, AND had sex with their sheep and a randy bed-hoping priest!
Wine consumption rates would go down… the southern Gaulois could handle their alcohol better than the Frankish northerners!