Annales school

Did You Know?

• The journal was renamed several times, including Annales d'histoire sociale (1939–1942, 1945) and Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations (1946–1994).
• In 1962, Braudel and Gaston Berger used Ford Foundation money and government funds to create the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death.
• Marc Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France in World War II for his active membership of the French Resistance.

Origins

The Annales was founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre while they taught at the University of Strasbourg and later in Paris. Bloch, a medieval historian, and Febvre, an early modernist, rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy, and war championed by historians Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes. They combined geography, history, and sociological approaches from the Année Sociologique to pioneer the study of long-term historical structures, or la longue durée, over events.

Geography, material culture, and mentalités—the psychology of an epoch—became characteristic areas. Bloch studied at the École Normale Supérieure and in Germany, and his interdisciplinary interests were influenced by geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache and sociologist Émile Durkheim. His works French Rural History and Feudal Society were later incorporated by the second generation led by Fernand Braudel.

Braudel

After 1945, Fernand Braudel led the second generation of the Annales school. He obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and founded the 6th Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which became the independent École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1975. Braudel's followers used the longue durée approach to stress slow, often imperceptible effects of space, climate, and technology. Having lived through two world wars, the Annales historians emphasized inertia and continuity over ruptures, focusing on geography, climate, and demography as long-term factors.

They rejected Marxist ideas of using history to foment revolution. Braudel's most influential book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Époque de Philippe II (1949), used ideas from other social sciences and downplayed specific events and individuals, stressing geography but not mentalité. In 1951, historian Bernard Bailyn published a critique of the book, framing it as dichotomizing politics and society.

Impact outside France

The Annales school systematically sought influence abroad, with varying success. It was especially well received in Italy and Poland. Polish economic historians Franciszek Bujak and Jan Rutkowski were attracted to its innovations; Rutkowski corresponded with Bloch and published in the Annales. British historians, apart from a few Marxists, were generally hostile, siding with Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History over Edward Hallett Carr's What Is History?

Hugh Trevor-Roper was one of the few sympathetic British historians. The Wageningen school centered on Bernard Slicher van Bath was viewed internationally as a Dutch counterpart, though Slicher van Bath rejected the idea of a quantitative school. In the United States, Lynn White Jr. dedicated his book Medieval Technology and Social Change to Marc Bloch. In South America, Federico Brito Figueroa founded a new Venezuelan historiography based on the Annales from the 1950s. Spanish historiography was influenced starting in 1950 with Jaume Vicens Vives.

Current

Roger Chartier now leads the Annales school. He holds positions as Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Professeur at the Collège de France, and Annenberg Visiting Professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He regularly gives lectures and teaches in the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. His research in early modern European history covers the history of education, the book, and reading.

Recently, he has explored the link between written culture and literature, especially theatrical plays in France, England, and Spain, blending literary criticism, bibliography, and sociocultural history. His undergraduate course looks at how texts were created, spread, and read in early modern Europe and America. It examines practices like how readers marked books, materials such as writing surfaces and implements, and places where texts were produced and consumed, including monasteries, schools, printing houses, and libraries.