Annales School

The Annales School (pronounced [aˈnal(ə)] in French) is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale where it was first expounded. The journal kept this name from 1929-39. It was later called Annales d'histoire sociale (1939-42, 1945), then Mélanges d’histoire sociale (1942-4), then Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations from 1946-1994) then renamed Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales).^[1] Annales school history is best known for incorporating social scientific methods into history.

The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg, France and later in Paris, France. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Année Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th- and early 20th-century historians. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la longue durée) over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. An eminent member of this school, Georges Duby, wrote in the foreword of his book Le dimanche de Bouvines that the history he taught "relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation." The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of an historic problem.

Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France in World War II for his active membership of the French Resistance, and Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during this time that he mentored Fernand Braudel, who would become one of the best-known exponents of this school. Braudel's work came to define a 'second' era of Annales historiography and was very influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of Philip II of Spain. Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time: l'histoire quasi immobile (motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (la longue durée), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures.

While authors such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jacques Le Goff continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history and economic history.

See also

• Historiography
• École des hautes études en sciences sociales
• World-system theory

References

Further reading

• John H. Arnold. History. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2000.
• Fernand Braudel. On History. Chicago University Press, 1980.
• Peter Burke. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989. Stanford University Press. 1991.
• François Dosse. The New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales. University of Illinois Press. 1994.
• Lynn Hunt and Jacques Revel (eds). Histories: French Constructions of the Past. The New Press. 1994. (A collection of essays with many pieces from the Annales--the long introduction is excellent, and contains many good references).
• (French) Philippe Poirrier, Aborder l'histoire, Paris, Seuil, 2000.ast:Escuela de los Annales

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