1. Concepts and Methods
The Annales school

5. Modern historiography: three general phases
Traditional history influenced by Rankean objectivity, focus on politics, on ‘great men’ and narrative of events. (E. A. Freeman: ‘history is past politics, and politics is present history’.)
Broadening of discipline to include social and economic history—influence of social theory, e.g. Marxism.
The ‘new’ history—interdisciplinary, broadening of historical horizons to include cultural, visual, literary and intellectual history; openness to theories and practices of other disciplines, e.g. anthropology, sociology, literature, geography.

7. Lucien Febvre ( )
Wrote thesis on Philip II and the Franche-Comté; it focused on the geographical, psychological and cultural context of events.
Took up a position at the University of Strasbourg in 1919, where he met Marc Bloch.
With Bloch founded Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929.
After the War, with Braudel founded the Sixième Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.
Principal publications: Martin Luther, A Destiny; The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing (with H.-J. Martin); The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais; A Geographical Introduction to History; A New Kind of History (selected essays); The Rhine: Problems of History and Economics

8. Marc Bloch ( )
After studies served as an infantryman in World War I.
After the war he went to the University of Strasbourg, where he met Febvre, founding Annales in 1929.
Thesis was on the ‘Royal touch’ (the belief that a monarch could cure scrofula by touch); this and subsequent work was characterized by an interdisciplinary approach.
Principal works: The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England; Feudal Society; French Rural History; The Historian’s Craft; Memoirs of War, ; Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940.
Joined the French Resistance in World War II; was captured by the Gestapo in 1944, interrogated and tortured, and shot.

9. Some influences on Febvre and Bloch
Jules Michelet ( )—historian who adopted a broad conception of the subject matter of history.
Paul Vidal de la Blache ( )—geographer who emphasized the influence of environment and geography on human society.
Émile Durkheim ( )—‘founder’ of sociology; proponent of the application of scientific methods to the study of human society.

10. Febvre and Bloch’s approach
Rejected traditional history and its concentration on histoire événementielle (factual history).
Concerned with understanding the deeper structures of the past that lie beneath the surface events.
Total history (histoire totale)—the concern to understand a problem in all its dimensions, using the theories and tools of a range of disciplines, notably geography, anthropology, sociology and psychology.
Problem-oriented approach: historians should approach the past with a problem—often relating to contemporary concerns—that requires answering.

11. Feudalism: the problem
The term ‘feudalism’, applied to a phase of European history… has sometimes been interpreted in ways so different as to be almost contradictory, yet the mere existence of the word attests the special quality which men have instinctively recognized in the period which it denotes. Hence a book about feudal society can be looked on as an attempt to answer a question posed by its very title: what are the distinctive features of this portion of the past which have given it a claim to be treated in isolation? In other words, what we are attempting here is to analyse and explain a social structure and its unifying principles. A similar method—if in the light of experience it should prove fruitful—might be employed in other fields of study, under a different set of limiting conditions.
(Feudal Society, pp. xxvi-xxvii)

12. Feudalism
A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority—leading inevitably to disorder; and, in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during the second feudal age, was to acquire renewed strength—such then seem to be the fundamental features of European feudalism.
(Feudal Society, p. 446)
Roland pledging fealty to Charlemagne

13. Contents of Feudal Society
Part I—The Environment: The Last Invasions
Part II—The Environment: Conditions of Life and Mental Climate
Part III—The Ties Between Man and Man: Kinship
Part IV—The Ties Between Man and Man: Vassalage and Fief
Part V—Ties of Dependence among the Lower Orders of Society
Part VI—Social Classes
Part VII—Political Organization
Part VIII—Feudalism as a Type of Society and its Influence

14. Annales: title changes
—Annales d'histoire économique et sociale
—Annales d'histoire sociale
—Mélanges d’histoire sociale
1945—Annales d'histoire sociale
—Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations
1994-present—Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales

15. Annales: generations
Febvre and Bloch—the foundation of the approach; the establishment of the interdisciplinary spirit of Annales
Fernand Braudel ( )—increasing emphasis on global history, and on social and economic history
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929- )—more emphasis on microhistories, and on the history of mentalities (mentalités)
Roger Chartier (1945- )—current director of École des hautes études en sciences sociales (formerly VI Section: Sciences Économiques et Sociales)

16. Fernand Braudel ( )
Pupil of Febvre; with Febvre founded the Sixième Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1947.
Major works: La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II, 1949 (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II); Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe, (translated as: Civilization and Capitalism 15th to 18th Century, 3 volumes: I. The Structures of Everyday Life; II. The Wheels of Commerce; III. The Perspective of the World); The Identity of France,

17. The Spanish Empire under Philip II
Philip II ( ); king of Spain ( ), as well as ruling in Naples, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Spanish Empire; portrait by Antonio Moro
Europe and the Mediterranean in 1580

18. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Part One—The Role of the Environment
Part Two—Collective Destinies and General Trends
Part Three—Events, Politics and People

19. Braudel and historical time
Three types of historical time by which change can be measured:
La longue durée—the time of biological, geo-physical, environmental and climatic circumstance
Conjonctures—the time of broad movements of social, economic and demographic change
Events—the time of individuals and historical events (the focus of traditional history)

20. Braudel on traditional history
Lastly, the third part gives a hearing to traditional history—history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men, what Paul Lacombe and François Simiand called ‘l’histoire événementielle’, that is, the history of events; surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs. A history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition ultra-sensitive; the least tremor sets all its antennae quivering. But as such it is the most exciting of all, the richest in human interest, and also the most dangerous. We must learn to distrust this history with its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and as short-sighted as ours. It has the dimensions of their anger, dreams, or illusions…

21. … and on the need to divide up time
A dangerous world, but one whose spells and enchantments we shall have exorcised by making sure first to chart those underlying currents, often noiseless, whose direction can only be discerned by watching them over long periods of time. Resounding events are often only momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of them.
The final effect then is to dissect history into various planes, or, to put it another way, to divide historical time into geographical time, social time, and individual time. Or, alternatively, to divide man into a multitude of selves. This is perhaps what I shall be least forgiven, even if I say in my defence that traditional divisions also cut across living history which is fundamentally one, even if I argue, against Ranke or Karl Brandi, that the historical narrative is not a method, or even the objective method par excellence, but quite simply a philosophy of history like any other; even if I say, and demonstrate hereafter, that these levels I have distinguished are only means of exposition, that I have felt it quite in order in the course of the book to move from one level to another.
(Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 21)

22. Annales and total history: some considerations
Tends towards the non-theoretical; contrasts with Marxist approach in this respect.
Braudel initiated an emphasis on quantification, e.g. the study of price indices, as a means of uncovering the deeper structures of the past; but to what extent can history be understood through numbers?
Was Braudel right to reduce the role of the individual human agent in history and to move away from the traditional ‘story-telling’ narrative? Did Braudel’s approach make nature (mountains, seas, etc.) historical agents?
Is total history on the scale envisaged by Braudel and other Annales historians practicable or desirable?

23. Deterministic or humanistic?
when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. In historical analysis as I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long run always wins in the end. Annihilating innumerable events… it indubitably limits both the freedom of the individual and even the role of chance. I am by temperament a ‘structuralist’… But the historian’s ‘structuralism’… does not tend towards the mathematical abstraction of relations expressed as functions, but instead towards the very sources of life in its most concrete, everyday, indestructible and anonymously human expression.
(Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 1244)

24. J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812

25. King Canute failing to turn back the tide
Nicholas Poussin, The Crossing of the Red Sea, 1634