Annales School

The Annales School is a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It has dominated French social history and influenced historiography worldwide. Prominent leaders include cofounders Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), as well as Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jacques Le Goff. The main outlet was the journal founded in 1929, Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history"), which broke radically with traditional historiography by insisting on the importance of taking all levels of society into consideration and emphasized the collective nature of mentalities. The journal, founded in Strasbourg, moved to Paris and continues today as Annales: Histoire, Sciences Social. The scope of topics is vast--there is a search for total history. The emphasis is on social history, and very-long-term trends, often using quantification and paying special attention to geography and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" ("mentalités" in French). Little attention is paid to political, diplomatic or military history, or to biographies of famous men.

Bloch

Marc Bloch (1886-1944) was the cofounder of the Annales school, and a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair. He studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure and became a professor at the university of Strassbourg, and was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. Bloch joined the French Resistance in late 1942, driven by ardent patriotism, identification with his Jewish roots and a conception of France as champion of liberty. He was captured, tortured and shot by the Gestapo in 1944, and became a national martyr.

Bloch was highly interdiciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). His own ideas, especially those expressed in his masterworks, French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931) and Feudal Society were incorporated by the second-generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities at the same time period as the psychological novel came of age is an oft-overlooked fact of his scholarship and one that is critical to an understanding of his contribution to 20th-century methodological developments. Stirling (2007) examines this essentially stylistic trait alongside Bloch's peculiarly quixotic idealism, which tempered and sometimes compromised his work through his hope for a truly cooperative model of historical inquiry. While humanizing and questioning him, Stirling gives credit to Bloch for helping to break through the monotonous methodological alternance between positivism and narrative history, creating a new, synthetic version of the historical practice that has since become so ingrained in the discipline that it is typically overlooked.

Bibliography

• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89, (1990), the major study in English excerpt and text search
• Carrard, Philippe. "Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel," Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2-19 in JSTOR
• Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, (1992)
• Dosse, Francois. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, (1994, first French edition, 1987) excerpt and text search
• Fink, Carole. Marc Bloch: A Life in History, (1989) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Susan W. Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (1996) excerpt and text search
• Hexter, J. H. "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 1972, vol. 44, pp. 480-539 in JSTOR
• Roberts, Michael. "The Annales school and historical writing." in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds. Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline. (2004), pp 78-92 online edition
• Stirling, Katherine. "Rereading Marc Bloch: the Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist." History Compass 2007 5(2): 525-538. Issn: 1478-0542 Fulltext: History Compass
• Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, (1976)

Primary sources

• Braudel, Fernand. On History, (1980, first French edition 1969). excerpt and text search
• Burke, Peter, ed. A New Kind of History From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, (1973)
• Duby, G. History Continues, (1994)
• Earle, P., ed. Essays in European Economic History, 1500-1800, (1974)
• Ferro, Marx, ed. Social Historians in Contemporary France: Essays from "Annales", (1972)
• Revel, J. and L. Hunt, eds. Histories: French Constructions of the Past, (1995).

External links

• recent issues of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Social
• biography of Fernand Braudel