Annales school

The founders of the French Annales School of history, Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944), as well as its most prominent late-20th-century member, Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), were all heavily influenced by geography, both in their formative education and in their subsequent historical research. Febvre and Bloch were students of the French geographer Vidal de la Blache at the École Normale Supérieur, and Braudel fully absorbed the founders’ enthusiasm for la tradition vidalienne (Vidalian tradition).

Specifically, Annalistes took from Vidal the notion that geographical landscapes are the result of human and natural processes in mutual adaptation, both historically and in the present. The constraints and opportunities provided by the environing natural environment thus play a crucial role in terms of the manner in which humans materially and culturally reproduce themselves and their societies. The human past thus involves the historical-geographic creation of “social natures” (genres de vie) that influence the day-to-day activities of individuals in society. In short, variations in the way nature becomes humanized provide the very foundation for the variations in the historical and cultural trajectories of societies.

The key to this Vidalian vision is that nature and society play equal roles in this process. This is known as possibilisme, a term popularized by Lucien Febvre in his book La terre et l’évolution humaine, in which he strongly promoted this geographical approach to his fellow historians. Vidal's notion of genres de vie thus provided the very basis for what Braudel calls the “geohistorical” approach of the Annales School. Specifically, genres de vie are constructed and reproduced only very slowly in time. This necessitates a consideration of what Annalistes call the “longue durée” of historical time compared with the medium time frame of institutions and the day-to-day time frame of specific historical events. Social natures are long in the making and reproduce and change only slowly. Institutions—economic, social, and political—are less long in the making and less slow to change. Finally, historical events such as wars, political contests, and economic depressions occur and end relatively rapidly. To write history means to consider occurrences within each of these time frames in interrelation or otherwise as mutually influencing.

This layered view of historical time necessitates a holistic, interdisciplinary approach. To this end, Febvre and Bloch founded the journal Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales in 1929. The format of this journal was certainly influenced by a journal published earlier, La synthèse historique, which also advocated interdisciplinarity. But significantly, the holistic format of the Annales de Géographie, first published in 1891 by Vidal de la Blache and Marcel Dubois, was also a crucial influence. This is not often acknowledged because, after Vidal, French geographers mostly lost his holistic, historical vision, particularly as Febvre in his book rendered la tradition vidalienne in terms that largely relegated geography to the description of physical landscape to make disciplinary room for the Annales kind of history. In the end, however, this new history is really merely a more truly Vidalian study of the human past.