Annales School

The phrase “Annales school” refers to the journal Annales d'Histoire Économique et Sociale, founded in France in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and to the work of subsequent French historians such as Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Jacques LeGoff, Georges Duby, and others who either edited or were closely associated with this journal. The Annales school originated in the post-1900 European setting of cultural ferment in which historians and social scientists sought new approaches to the intellectual problems inherited from the past. Febvre and Bloch were both critical of the predominant emphasis on famous persons and events as well as the documentary methods currently advanced by historians such as Langlois and Seignebos. They were both sympathetic to a variety of new intellectual currents, including Henri Berr's quest for a synthesis of historical knowledge, the work of the geographer Vidal de la Blache, the Durkheim school of sociology, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's studies of “primitive mentalities,” and the efforts of historians and economists such as Henri Pirenne and François Simiand to create a comparative history informed by scientific methods. Durkheim's L'Année Sociologique, founded in 1898, and Berr's Revue de Synthèse Historique, founded in 1900, both provided models of broadly interdisciplinary cooperation.

Much of the work leading to the formation and early history of Annales was accomplished at Strasbourg, where both Febvre and Bloch taught between 1920 and 1933. The environment there was well suited to new intellectual initiatives. Researchers from a variety of disciplines worked in close contact with one another. These included the historians Henri Bremond and Georges Lefebvre, who both worked on problems of historical psychology and mentalities, as well as the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote on collective memory, was a member of the Durkheim school of sociology, and was also on the original editorial board of Annales.

Although Braudel later protested the designation “school” to describe the work of the Annales group, the studies done by Annales historians share several distinctive perspectives that make the designation “school” generally convincing, if we are cautious to also take into account the individual and generational differences among its various members. The central orientations promoted by Febvre and Bloch, which initially defined the new approach, included a focus on problem-oriented history; the use of comparative methods in historical research; the development of a more synthetic total history; the creation of a new social history that investigates the lives of previously neglected populations, rather than only rulers and elites; the anchorage of historical research in geographical, environmental (and in the later Annales writers, even climatic) contexts; and, finally, study of the “mentalities” informing historical societies.

The second generation of Annales historians, under the added influence of Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, supplemented this overall agenda with a focus on material civilization, a strongly quantitative and statistical approach to economic and social history, and an attempt to construct serial histories tracing the precise fluctuations of not only prices, production, and availability of goods but also cultural productions such as publications, religious documents, and so forth. Accompanying these newer empirical foci was a shared delineation of three dimensions of historical time that had been only implicit in the work of Febvre and Bloch. This temporal division included (1) a short term, focused on notable persons and political events (histoire événementielle) largely scorned by the Annales group; (2) the study of shorter historical periods (e.g., one to two centuries), with a focus on the distinctive outcomes, or conjunctures, resulting from the mutual interconnections of economic and social and, to a lesser degree, cultural processes; and (3) the longue durée of history, focused on the impact of enduring geohistorical and civilizational structures. In general, later historians in this group have typically adopted the broad distinction between structure and conjuncture as one of their central organizing motifs.

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