The Annales School Critical Assessments 1: Histories and Overviews

328 Pages·1999·25.788 MB·English

by  Clark, Stuart (ed.)

First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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In editorial matter and selection © 1999 Stuart Clark, individual chapters
© 1999 respective authors
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Annales school/edited by Stuart Clark,
p. cm. - (Critical assessments)
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: v. 1. Histories and overviews - v. 2. The Annales
school and historical studies - v. 3. Fernand Braudel -
v. 4. Febvre, Bloch and other Annales historians.
1. Historiography. 2. History-Philosophy. 3. History-
Methodology. 4. Annales school. 5. History, Modern-20th century.
I. Clark, Stuart. II. Series.
D13A644 1999
907'.2-dc21 98-44048
CIP
ISBN 0-415-15551-7 (Boxed set of 4 volumes)
ISBN 0-415-15552-5 (Vol. I)
ISBN 0-415-15553-3 (Vol. II)
ISBN 0-415-15554—1 (Vol. Ill)
ISBN 0-415-20237-X (Vol. IV)
Contents
VOLUME I Histories and Overviews
General Introduction Stuart Clark X
Acknowledgements XV
Appendix: Chronological Table of Reprinted Articles XXlll
Introduction to Volume I XXXI
Part One: Histories
1. The Annales and French Historiography (1929-72)
Maurice Aymard 3
2. French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and
Fall of the Annales Paradigm Lynn Hunt 24
3. Histoire d'une histoire: la naissance des Annales
André Burguière 39
4. "Désapprendre de l'Allemagne": les Annales et l'histoire
allemande pendant l'entre-deux-guerres Peter Schüttler 54
5. The Annales: Continuities and Discontinuities
Jacques Revel 75
6. Braudel's Empire in Paris Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson 86
7. Fernand Braudel, Historian, "homme de la conjoncture"
Immanuel Wallerstein 96
8. Von der wissenschaftlichen Innovation zur kulturellen
Hegemonie? Die Geschichte der 'nouvelle histoire' im
Spiegel neuerer Gesamtdarstellungen Lutz Raphael 110
9. Censorship, Silence and Resistance: The Annales during the
German Occupation of France Natalie Zemon Davis 122
10. Marc Bloch et Lucien Febvre face à l'Allemagne nazie
Peter Schüttler 138
vi Contents
11. The Present as Challenge for the Historian: The
Contemporary World in the Annales E.S.C., 1929-1949
Lutz Raphael 160
12. Lucie Varga: A Central European Refugee in the Circle
of the French "Annales", 1934—1941 Peter Schöttler 181
13. Women and the World of the Annales
Natalie Zemon Davis ; 204
Part Two: Overviews
14. Introduction Colin Lucas ~ 227
15. The Annales Historians Stuart Clark 238
16. Total History: The Annales School Michael Harsgor 257
17. The Annales in Global Context Peter Burke 268
18. Theory of a Practice: Historical Enunciation and the
Annales School Philippe Carrard 281
VOLUME II The Annales School and Historical Studies
Introduction to Volume II vii
Part Three: The Annales School and Historical Studies
19. Le révisionnisme en histoire ou l'ecole des «Annales»
Jacques Blot 3
20. The Annales School and Feminist History: Opening
Dialogue with the American Stepchild
Susan Mosher Stuard 14
21. The Annales School and Social Theory Norman Birnbaum 23
22. The New Annales: A Redefinition of the Late 1960s
Andre Burguiere 35
23. The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory
of History Paul Ricœur 47
24. Reflections on the Relations of Historical Geography
and the Annales School of History Alan R. H. Baker 96
25. The Contribution of an ^«watote/Structural History
Approach to Archaeology John Bintliff 129
26. Is Politics still the Backbone of History? Jacques Le Goff 162
27. Achievements of the Annales School Robert Forster 178
28. Medieval Culture and Mentality according to the New
French Historiography Aaron J. Gurevich 196
29. The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary
History H. L. Wesseling 226
Contents vii
30. L'heure des Annales: La terre—les hommes—le monde
Krzysztof Pomian 236
31. Reflections on the Historical Revolution in France: The
Annales School and British Social History Peter Burke 284
32. The Impact of the Annales School in Mediterranean
Countries Maurice Aymard 295
33. The Annales and Medieval Studies in the Low Countries
Walter Simons 309
34. Spanish Medieval History and the Annales: Between Franco
and Marx Adeline Rucquoi 331
35. Le Goff, the Annales and Medieval Studies in Hungary
Gâbor Klaniczay 348
36. Les Annales vues de Moscou Youri Bessmertny 362
Part Four: The History of Mentalities
37. The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural
History Patrick H. Hutton 381
38. The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales
André Burguière 404
39. 'The Gift of Theory': A Critique of the histoire des
mentalités Michael A. Gismondi 418
40. Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities
Peter Burke 442
41. Intellectual History and the History of Mentalités:
A Dual Re-evaluation R. Chartier 457
Part Five: 'Nous les Annales': The Annales Appraise Themselves
42. Personal Testimony Fernand Braudel 491
43. Beyond the Annales François Furet 509
44. Les Annales: Portrait de groupe avec revue
Bernard Lepetit 530
45. Préface Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Roussellier 545
VOLUME III Fernand Braudel
Introduction to Volume III vii
Part Six: Fernand Braudel
46. Un livre qui grandit: La Méditerranée et le monde
méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II Lucien Febvre 3
47. Braudel's Geohistory—A Reconsideration Bernard Bailyn 13
viii Contents
48. Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean
H. R. Trevor-Roper 19
49. Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien J. H. Hexter 30
50. Disorderly Conduct: Braudel's Mediterranean Satire
Hans Kellner 85
51. Fernand Braudel Peter Burke 111
52. Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of
Fernand Braudel Samuel Kinser 124
53. A Note on Braudel's Structure as Duration
Ulysses Santamaria and Anne M. Bailey 176
54. Capitalism Enshrined: Braudel's Triptych of Modern
Economic History Samuel Kinser 184
55. 'Material Civilisation' in the Work of Fernand Braudel
Peter Burke 195
56. Ars Historica: On Braudel Làszlà Makkai 201
57. Un nouvel espace-temps François Fourquet 215
58. Un grand dessein: civilisation matérielle, économie et
capitalisme (XVe-XVIIIe siècle) Michel Morineau 231
59. Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down
Immanuel Wallerstein 258
60. Fernand Braudel and National Identity Perry Anderson 268
61. Long-run Lamentations: Braudel on France
Steven Laurence Kaplan 294
VOLUME IV Febvre, Bloch and other Annales Historians
Introduction to Volume IV vii
Part Seven: Lucien Febvre
62. Introduction: The Development of Lucien Febvre
Peter Burke 3
63. Lucien Febvre, 1878-1956 Palmer A. Throop 11
64. Lucien Febvre et l'histoire Fernand Braudel 26
65. Lucien Febvre and the Study of Religious History
Bruce E. Mansfield 33
66. Encore une question: Lucien Febvre, the Reformation and
the School of Annales Dermot Fenlon 44
Part Eight: Marc Bloch
67. Marc Bloch's Comparative Method and the Rural History
of Mediaeval England J. Ambrose Raftis 63
Contents ix
68. Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History
William H. Sewell, Jr 80
69. Marc Bloch R. R. Davies 91
70. Emile Dürkheim and the Historical Thought of Marc Bloch
R. Colbert Rhodes 110
71. Marc Bloch and Comparative History Alette Olin Hill and
Boyd H. Hill, Jr 138
72. Marc Bloch Henry Loyn 162
73. The Social and Historical Landscape of Marc Bloch
Daniel Chirot 111
1A. Marc Bloch: Did He Repudiate Annales History?
Br y ce Lyon 200
75. Marc Bloch, historien et résistant Bronislaw Geremek 213
76. Marc Bloch and Social Anthropology Jack Goody 230
77. 'Façons de sentir et de penser': Un tableau de la civilisation
ou une histoire-problème? Jean-Claude Schmitt 236
78. Marc Bloch et la critique de la raison historique
Otto Gerhard Oexle 249
Part Nine: Other Annales Historians
79. Toward a Serial History: Seville and the Atlantic, 1504-1650
Fernand Braudel 265
80. La poésie du chiffre: Le Roy Ladurie and the Annales
School of Historiography Hope H. Glidden 278
81. Pierre Goubert's Beauvais et le beauvaisis: An Historian
'parmi les hommes' Robert Harding 295
82. Das Andere, die Unterschiede, das Ganze: Jacques Le Goffs
Bild des europäischen Mittelalters Otto Gerhard Oexle 318
General Introduction
Stuart Clark
Like most other aspects of late second millennium western culture, the
practice of history has been transformed in the last hundred years. It began
the century as a typical product of modernism—and, indeed, one of its
intellectual mainstays. Its declared methods were broadly empiricist and its
attention was centred on the rational, sovereign, fully political male. It was
written in terms of linear narratives of the domestic and international
affairs of empires, nation states, and churches and dedicated to the trans-
historical values of enlightenment and progress. Currently, by contrast,
history owns no single methodology, knows no boundaries, and tells no
particular kind (because it tells every kind) of story. Historians now speak
with calculated ambiguity of 'fictions' both in the archives and in their own
writings; they seek the historical and the contingent in every conceivable
aspect of human experience and in the lives of all; and they approach the
past as far as possible without metanarratives and in a spirit of relativism.
In some respects, perhaps, history may even be turning into a product of
postmodernism. Its truths are said by some to be created in language, not
found in the past, and to be wholly dependent on the uses to which they are
put and the interests they serve. Difference, rather than change or develop-
ment, is claimed to be history's real subject matter and the individuals on
which it has traditionally lavished so much care have become merely sites
of contested meanings.
What has brought this about? Above all else, of course, the experiences
of the twentieth century themselves have produced novel forms of histor-
ical consciousness. Like all civilizations we write the kind of history that
suits our times; and our times bear little relation to those of one hundred
years ago. But there have been intellectual sea changes as well. The whole
direction of twentieth-century philosophy has given language a greater
constitutive role in historiography, as in everything else. Major movements
of contemporary thought and practice, like Marxism, Freudianism and
xi General Introduction
Feminism, and the cultural repercussions of post-colonialism and post-
industrialism have shifted western historians' perspectives in radical ways.
Especially from the 1960s onwards, the most dynamic and innovative areas
of academic history have been non-traditional—in social and economic
history, in intellectual and cultural history and in the history of art, science
and medicine. A vogue for interdisciplinarity has opened the subject to
transforming influences from the social sciences, from psychoanalysis and
from critical theory. In the same years, the enormous expansion of higher
education and academic publishing has meant demands for new styles of
investigating and presenting history. Today, in consequence, the writing
and teaching of the subject have become an extraordinarily rich and varied
enterprise—and an international one. It is now without hierarchy or
priority or limit, a history that refuses nothing.
Individual historians have been influential in these changes—one thinks
immediately of Johan Huizinga, Edward Thompson or Michel Foucault—
and so too have clusters of like-minded scholars—the British Marxists, the
American 'Cliometricians', the Italian micro-historians, and so on. But
nobody has rivalled the collective impact of the group to whom this
anthology is devoted—the historians associated with the French academic
journal Annales and its twentieth-century campaign to alter fundamentally
our understanding of the past. These were the first to attack the basic
assumptions of the professional history inherited from the nineteenth
century. It was guilty, they said, of narrowness of subject matter, sterility
in its presentation, submissiveness to the factual and isolation from other
disciplines. They were also able to sustain this challenge over a remarkable
span of time, beginning in the 1930s and continuing at least until the 1970s.
Above all, they were collectively the most influential historians of that
entire era. Following World War II they came to dominate historical
research and publication in France and by the 1970s and 1980s la nouvelle
histoire was admired and imitated throughout the world of academic
history. And if this is no longer as true in the 1990s, it is simply because
the kind of history they advocated is now an option open to all. Many of
their individual works have become classics of history writing and their
thinking has contributed crucially to the enormous expansion and diversity
that now charaterizes historical practice. The 'Annales school', as it has
come to be known, represents twentieth-century historiography at its most
innovative, dynamic and all-encompassing. Thus it is an indispensable
reference point for all contemporary historians and, indeed, for anyone
who thinks seriously about the past.
There are so many accounts of the Annales school in this anthology that
only the briefest is needed here. The journal was founded in 1929 by two
history professors at the university of Strasbourg, the medievalist Marc
Bloch and the early modernist Lucien Febvre. It was initially called Annales
d'histoire économique et sociale, but during World War II it was published
xii General Introduction
by Febvre alone under the partially pseudonymous title Mélanges d'histoire
sociale. In 1946 it metamorphosed again, reappearing as Annales: Econo-
mies, sociétés, civilisations, and in 1947 it was joined at the centre of the
Annales project by a new Sixième Section of the École des Hautes Etudes in
Paris, whose first head was also Febvre. The Sixième Section, and later its
Centre de Recherches Historiques, were crucial to the whole enterprise
because they brought the economic and social sciences together in an
interdisciplinary and collaborative, government sponsored research frame-
work but with history as the main focus. Following Febvre's death in 1956,
another early modernist, Fernand Braudel, took up both the editorship of
the journal (until 1969) and the headship of the Sixième Section (until
1972), the latter becoming an independent institution, the École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales, in 1975. Since the 1970s the journal has been
edited in a more collaborative manner—for example, in the period imme-
diately after Braudel by Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and
Marc Ferro jointly—and in 1994 it became Annales: Histoire, sciences
sociales in an attempt at yet further realignment. To speak of an Annales
'school' is not, of course, to speak only of the journal proper or of con-
tributions to it or of the historians so far mentioned. It embraces many
other French scholars and the historical essays, monographs, multi-
volumed works and collaborative projects that were the products of their
research. Alongside Bloch, Febvre and Braudel, and ultimately almost as
influential as the latter, was the economic historian Ernest Labrousse. From
the 1960s onwards there emerged a whole phalanx of'new historians', such
as Maurice Agulhon, André Burguière, Pierre Chaunu, Christiane
Klapisch, Bernard Lepetit, Pierre Nora, Mona Ozouf and Jacques Revel.
To speak of an Annales 'school', at all, is also not without problems.
Some of those involved have done so without too much discomfort—
Ladurie and Chaunu, for example. But it was not an image that appealed
to Febvre or Braudel or Furet. And in a recent volume edited with Lynn
Hunt, Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New Press; New York,
1995), Jacques Revel has insisted that the term is really inappropriate,
preferring to speak of 'a voice, or a series of voices, in a range of discus-
sions now under way among historians everywhere' (p. 2). Others suggest
that 'movement' or 'mode of thought' are better descriptions; in 1983 Furet
spoke of an 'academic crystallization' that was more than ajournai but less
than a doctrine. Revel's argument is partly that the term 'school' obscures
the variety that has existed in Annales history at every moment of its
development, and also suggests a kind of historical dirigisme instead of
the open eclecticism that was intended. He also points out that it has been
adopted as part of a 'golden legend' of the Annales, which portrays it as a
continuous unfolding of common goals embodying the intentions of the
journal's original founders; it is, in other words, an assumption guaranteed
by the celebratory commentary that the journal has occasionally con-