Febvre, Lucien (1878–1956)

Lucien Febvre, a historian by training, is a central figure in the history of geography as an advocate of the approach of the geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache, particularly after the latter's death in 1918. Born in Nancy in the Lorraine, Febvre received his doctorate in history at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris in 1911. He began teaching at the University of Dijon in 1912, but his career was soon interrupted by World War I. He resumed what would become an illustrious scholarly career at the University of Strasbourg in 1919, where he collaborated with fellow historian Marc Bloch. With Bloch, Febvre founded the soon to be prominent journal Annales d'histoire et sociale in 1929, beginning what is now known as the Annales School of history. Febvre was eventually elected to the prestigious College de France in Paris in 1933.

Vidal de la Blache was one of Febvre's professors during his time at the Ecole Normale, and, taken with Vidal's geographical approach, Febvre continued attending his lectures even after Vidal moved to the Sorbonne. From his earliest training as a historian, then, Febvre was greatly influenced by what was then the predominant regional approach taken by the early French school of geography. This continuing influence is clear in the Annales School's approach to history, particularly its emphasis on what became known as the longue durée of historical evolution, so dominant in the work of perhaps its best-known member, Fernand Braudel.

Along with a corpus of historical works Febvre authored that are imbued with a strong appreciation of the human-environment relationship, his most important book concerning the study of geography is La terre et I'évolution humaine, published in 1922 and translated into English in 1925. This book is an extended defense of what Febvre considered to be Vidal's geographical approach against growing criticism of it as merely descriptive. Such attacks came largely from those in the rather new discipline of sociology, influenced by Émile Durkheim, who considered their take on “social morphology” to be a more causal, scientific approach to the problem Vidalians merely described on the basis of their geographical studies of regional genres de vie.

Ironically, Febvre's view came to be considered as the definitive statement of geography as a scientific discipline, and not just in France. The geography Febvre defends focuses exclusively on the human-natural environment relationship as it evolves over long periods of time in unique, regional settings. To Febvre, the regional monograph was the ultimate goal and singular achievement of geography. He completely missed Vidal's emphasis on the causal processes—trade, transportation, and so on—that intersect to form such regions. Since Febvre's work became so prominent a disciplinary reference, the works of the Annales School of history became more a legacy of Vidal's own approach than what was actually followed in departments of geography in France and elsewhere.