1. HI323 Historiography Charles Walton
Les Annales

2. ‘A week is a long time in politics’
Harold Wilson-(1964)

3. Zhou Enlai on the impact of the French Revolution of 1789-’it's too soon to tell’ (c.1971)

4. It’s French It spanned most of 20th century It came in three waves
Annales School
It’s French
It spanned most of 20th century
It came in three waves

5. The Annales at their peak
1950s/1970s under Fernand Braudel & Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie
Influential in France and internationally, esp. in US from 1970s onward
Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949 French/ English) makes a splash
Influence has waned but still significant

6. Peter Burke (Cambridge historian) on the Annales:
‘The substitution of a problem-orientated analytical history for a traditional narrative of events’ (more true of waves 1 and 3 than 2)
‘The history of the whole range of human activities in the place of a mainly political history’
‘Collaboration with other disciplines’ such as geography, sociology, economics and anthropology

7. Marc Bloch ( ) and Lucien Febvre ( ) founded the journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale in 1929

8. First Wave Annales Approaches
Rejected narrow political history
Interdisciplinary – link study of the past with approaches and methods of the social sciences
Breaking down chronological barriers
How unique? Influence of other historians (Berr), sociologists (Durkheim) and geographers (Vidal de la Blache)

9. The early years
Importance of place – University of Strasbourg (came into French hands after WWI)
Desire to avoid overtly political mobilization of history
Love-hate relationship with sociology (sociological models: ‘leaky vessels’ for Bloch)
Influence of World War One and Marxist concerns – respect for peasants and workers (soldiers); respect for ordinary individuals
Competition with Germany – desire to provide alternative to Rankean and nationalist history

10. Marc Bloch’s histories
The Royal Touch (1924)- influence of Durkheim and anthropology; examined “irrational” beliefs to explore kingship and power in Britain and France
French Rural History (1931) – long duration; stresses work of peasants rather than elites; use of aerial photographs and move backwards in time
Feudal Society (1939) – a comparative historical sociology of Europe c , avoiding any political narrative or discussion of individual kings.

11. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (1924) long view - centuries
problem focused
religious psychology
history of mentalités (practices, unconscious mental structures)
comparative history (France, Britain)
Marc Bloch,
The Royal Touch (1924)
About the custom of royals curing scrofula by laying hands on infected subjects
Influenced by sociologist Emile Durkheim
( ), who focused not on individual or individual psychology but on
collective phenomena
Suicide (1897)
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

12. - Looked at aerial photos of French countryside
- Looked for historical reasons for different land patterns
Materialism: looked at forces and relations of production: certain technology (the heavy plow) worked best in Northern France due to political, environmental and socio-cultural factors.
Non-Marxist materialism: No base vs. superstructure; Both mattered.

13. 1942/3
1939/40
1940

14. Strange Defeat, 1940 How did France collapse so quickly?
‘Statement of evidence’: his commitment to empiricism
Immediate AND long-term causes (made his career looking at long-term; had to struggle to )
Crisis of conscience: Durkheimian ‘collective culture’ fails to capture the anguish of individual responsibility: part III of book -> ‘A Frenchman examines his conscience’

15. Strange Defeat
‘If we turn back on ourselves we shall be lost. Salvation can be ours only on condition that we set our brains to work with a will, in order that we may know more fully, and get our imaginations moving to a quicker tempo.’

16. Question Was Bloch moving away from his own school?
Was Strange Defeat an attempt to re-incorporate individual and collective agency into an analytical framework that had treated mentalités’ (collective mental structures) as resistant to change, resistant to sudden bursts of individual or collective will? If so, why bother joining the Resistance (as he did, and was killed for it)?

17. ‘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’.
History must look at structures; ‘now, at last, it struggles to penetrate beneath the mere surface of actions’.
Debt to sociology and commitment to interdisciplinarity – ‘Long have we worked for a wider more human history’. BUT ‘Sociological laws are frail vessels that disintegrate as they sail.’
Historian should understand, not judge (Rankean attitude) – but what about the politics of one’s own time? Should historians ignore them? How can one not judge in the face of Nazism?
Denial of individual agency in favour of the collective. Does this lead to ethical paralysis?
Last book, written while fighting in the Resistance against Nazism

18. Lucien Febvre Phd thesis: Franche-comté in the time of Philippe II
Published in 1912
Begins with land, then economy, social relations, ending with the rule of Philippe II (late 16th century)

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

20. Febvre – Problem of Unbelief
About a 16th century French poet, Rabelais
Funny story about giants -- critical of religion.
So was Rabelais an atheist? ‘Impossible!’ says Febvre
Categories of ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief’ didn’t exist
Book about mentalités: the senses, practice, experience
He was wrong, it turns out, but he asked influential questions and made historians more aware of potential anachronism in their analyses… we have to understand different states of mind (and not just of elites) to make sense of past worlds…
Legacies: cultural history (anthropological); psychological histories, history of emotions (recent).

21. 2nd Wave Annales (post-WWII) Fernand Braudel, 1902-1985
Dominates the field for
decades
Fernand Braudel,

22. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1923-1949)

23. Braudel’s Mediterranean…
…in the Age of Philip II (1949)
‘Age of’ is the key here, not King Philip II
Interdisciplinary
Vast in scope – Histoire totale!
Region, sea
Sea as real but also historical metaphor
How people engage with environment
Society, culture, economy
Last part of book: the reign of Philip II

24. Braudel and the Annales way
Large-scale – the sea is at the centre of the book rather than an individual
Beyond Europe – global, comparative
Interdisciplinary, influence of geography particularly strong
Attempt to write a ‘total history’

25. Braudel’s conception of time
Built on work of Febvre and Bloch
Time was not homogenous: different rhythms – geographical, economic, social, cultural, political
The political timeframe was the least important: statesmen ‘more acted upon than actors’ – froth on top of the crest of waves pulled and pushed by tides. The tides mattered most to Braudel.

26. Three Dimensions of Time
‘The deep’/structures (Part I of book): geographical structures and climate in which humans live. Change is slow, only visible over the longue durée (the long run)
‘Conjonctures’ (Part II): medium term trends (5, 10, 50 years) that combine in historically important ways: legal systems, economic cycles. A middle term between longue-durée structures and events
‘L’histoire événementielle’ (Part III): history of events (seen as superficial by Annalistes at the time)

27. Braudel on structures and longue durée
‘To historians like ourselves, while structure does of course mean an assembly of parts, a framework, it signifies more particularly a reality which survives through long periods of time and is only slowly eroded… all structures act both as foundations and obstacles.’
‘History and the Social Sciences: The Long Term’, Social Science Information 9:1 (1970), 151

28. Braudel on the Environment:
Part One is ‘devoted to a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles. I could not neglect this almost timeless history, the story of man’s contact with the inanimate.’

29. Ernst Labrousse: a fellow traveller of the Annales
Braudel praised Labrousse’s statistical studies
Taught at Sorbonne from 1940s onward
The French Economic Crisis at the End of the Old Regime (1943)
Looked at long, medium and short term economic trends to explain socioeconomic origins of the French Revolution – a conjoncture historian
‘Tout s’explique par la courbe!’ – ‘The curve explains everything!’ the French Revolution could be explained by economic curves plotting the prices of land rents, bread and taxes. Everyone had economic reasons to be angry in 1789!

30. How to historically situate the longue durée approach to history
How to historically situate the longue durée approach to history? (My speculation here)
Braudel was a prisoner of war in Germany in World War II – desire to see history as a great sea of time, to relativize the tragic present – to transcend it.
Offered a historical contrast to the present (1950s-1960s), which underwent abrupt modernisation. The anxiety of vertiginous change was soothed by the seemingly eternal seas of ‘sociétés immobiles’ – unchanging societies

31. How to historically situate the longue durée approach to history
How to historically situate the longue durée approach to history? (My speculation here)
And yet, the perspective which put the environment and technologies at the core (de-centring the human ethical agent) also heightened the historical significance of technological modernisation, which was all the rage in the 1950s-1970s (e.g. Third World ‘modernisation’ programmes)
Opposite of Frankfurt School, which rejected the cold, scientific materialism and technological modernisation of the Enlightenment. Next to Braudel’s ‘immobile societies’ of deep history, one could only marvel at recent modernisation.

32. Criticism of Braudel
Mediterranean influenced environmental historians, but they have shown that nature is far more fluid and historical than Braudel suggested.
Braudel too descriptive and his work lacks a central problem - ‘a kaleidoscopic jumble’ (Simon Kinser); disconnected rooms of a mansion
Not enough attention to institutions and ideas
Lots of answers but to what questions? (Less ‘problem’ focused than wave 1 and 3 of Annales)

33. The period post-Braudel Third Wave Annales
Le Roy Ladurie – continued and developed the Annaliste approach

34. History of mentalities
Roots in Bloch and Febrve’s work on cultural representations
Engages with anthropology
Focus on collective (not individual) beliefs/assumptions
Mentalities the (often unconscious) mental structures that influence (determine?) action

35. Mentalités Le Roy Ladurie The Peasants of Languedoc (1966)
‘Economic life of peasants in southern France between late medieval and early modern period, 14th-18th centuries
‘Histoire immobile’ (unchanging history), but more emphasis on culture and economy than environment.
Juicy factoid (literally): average peasant in Languedoc drank between 1.5 and 2.5 litres of wine daily in 1480.
Wine consumption rates would go down… the southern Gaulois could handle their alcohol better than the Frankish northerners!
Montaillou (1975)
Medieval town destroyed by feuds and religious strife
Narrower time period: thirty years (not millenia!)
Still ‘histoire totale’ with demography, attitudes, beliefs, cosmology, politics
But focused on particular individuals (new). Aim to uncover the texture of the town in specific historical moments… move towards micro-history, even as it was ‘total history’

36. 1970s and 1980s New approach or revival of Bloch/Febvre?
Women historians arrive on the Annales scene: Arlette Farge, Michele Perrot
Shift away from quantification (wave 2) towards ‘mentalités’ again
Micro-history, history of minorities, women, children – not all white-male elite history
Influence of cultural anthropology: symbols and culture, history of meanings

37. Influence of Annales beyond France
Became globally influential in 1960s-1970s. Why?
French funding for research was generous. (Les Trente glorieuses – economic boom in these years)
US funding (Ford, Rockefeller), especially of the 6th section of the École pratique des hautes études, which became the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, directed by Braudel
International academic exchanges increase (think Erasmus programs but global and professors)
Translations into other languages
Hierarchy, patronage in French university system

38. Chief legacies
History and social science – self-conscious interdisciplinarity, often as ‘cultural history’: sociology, anthropology, critical theory [Foucault]
‘Longue durée’/ ‘total history’ still current notions (making a comeback with ‘deep history’ and ‘big data history’ in recent years)
Global, postmodern, gender history
From narrative political history to political culture (ideas, practices, mentalités)

39. Annales in perspective
1st wave – desire to avoid politics while acknowledging ordinary workers (a somewhat Marxist sentiment but also desire to remain neutral in troubled times)
2nd wave – dominated by former communist/socialists who rejected Marxism. Non-dialectical in approach. Shift from modes of production (Marx) to modes of exchange (Braudel)… stress on market integration (a good thing for Braudel), not capitalist exploitation of workers and peasants (as Marxists would emphasise)

40. Origins of Longue durée