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Annales School: A Historiographical Shift
Fernand Braudel first came into my life as a History Book Club selection when the first two-volume paperback edition of his work "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II" became available in English in the mid-1970s. I sat in my upstairs room (I was a teenager living with my parents) taking the text slowly and intensely, looking at every footnote, looking up EVERY reference made to places or things if I didn't know about them (and if you've ever read the books, there are plenty). Prior to acquiring the works, I had little experience - little knowledge - of the period or events beyond something seen in a movie like El Cid, or a reading assignment about Las Balericas and the Moros - though those were long before the 16th Century. In my high school year, I read an article in Mankind Magazine about the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. It fascinated me, more so because it was nothing I'd ever encountered before. In none of my school courses did we cover the Mediterranean world of that era. Being in the US, we always shifted to the age of European discovery and the New World after 1492. One of my brothers started talking about a course he had in college that was specifically about European history WITHOUT shifting to the New World after 1492. So when I saw the Braudel book was a Book Club selection, it was a no-brainer. Reading Mika Waltari's historical novel "The Wanderer" (in English translation, though Waltari's writing makes me yearn to learn Finnish) added color to the period as I crept with pleasurable determination - and a sort of obsession - through the Braudel book. I knew that the second volume had what I felt - prior to starting the two-volume work - to be most interesting, consisting of the more standard political and military history I was used to. The first volume set the stage, providing background with an exhaustive study and accounting of every factor that influenced political/military history - like the environment, trade, etc etc etc. I first learned of the draining of the marshes in Italy, and the significance of that to socio-economic history and everything else related. What commodities were produced and where, what raw materials and where, the ferreting out of new routes to buyers and the edge it gave the merchant - on and on and on. And I was hooked. Unbelievable, isn't it? But maybe not so unbelievable.... As a teen, I was examining. Examining with the capital E. My own nature. Reality. What the mechanics were of how everything in time and space worked (theories, but not the math – I was awful at math, while eating up the theories). Braudel and the Annales School had “found the formula”, I was excitedly learning (and I was young), to isolate the principal factors influencing the world – life... the universe... and everything – that is, as it pertained to history. And I loooooved history. So I crept along for years, reading little by little, usually spinning off into some side-route (following the bunny trail, as it were) as I did supplementary reading and research that led to other related themes, etc etc, then coming back again and the cycle continued. With 1979 and my first experience with fantasy role playing – D&D – and world-building – I was swept away with the enormity of it all. And I had a heck of a lot of knowledge about what makes a medieval/renaissance world tick. The rest... is history.... So when I found this article on the Web - Fernand Braudel and the Annales School – I wished to post it as I’ve posted so many articles on Scribed reflecting what intrigues me. Hope you find something in it that will intrigue you as well....
100% found this document useful (7 votes)
7K views7 pages
Annales School: A Historiographical Shift
Fernand Braudel first came into my life as a History Book Club selection when the first two-volume paperback edition of his work "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of …
Fernand Braudel and the Annales SchoolDavid Moon
Introduction
The Annales school of historians emerged in France in the late 1920s around a journal entitled Annalesd'histoire economique et sociale (which translates as the Yearbook of Economic and Social History). Theannales school - which was about far more than just economic and social history - reached the peak of itsimportance and influence in the middle decades of the C20th, and still exists today. The journal is nowcalled: Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations.Although most of the historians associated with the annales school were French and worked atFrench universities, they by no means limited themselves to studying the history of France. The annalesschool was not a solid group of historians all working on similar topics and using a similar methodology.Rather, it was a loose group of historians with similar aims. It is the range and diversity of their work within broadly similar aims that makes the Annales historians so significant. Most importantly, historiansof the annales school were committed to broadening the range of the discipline of history. In the process,in some cases they pioneered, and other cases developed and publicised, a number of approaches tohistory that were `new' at the time, including:
•
comparative history, the history of mentalities (or attitudes)
,
•
quantitative history
amongst others.
•
They
challenged conventional ideas on periodization
, and wrote about
problems over `the long term' ('la longue duree'
)
.
•
They also insisted on
breaking down barriers between disciplines
, and consciously
drew on themethodologies of other disciplines
, in particular:
geography, social sciences such as sociology,anthropology, economics, and psychology, and also linguistics
.
o
They emphasized
the importance of factors in understanding the past beyond political and diplomatic history and narratives of events.
o
Annales historians presented alternatives to the primacy of the `economic substructure' as a causal factor in history. They gave greater emphasis to geography rather than theeconomy.
•
In summary, the annales school challenged the contemporary dominance of political and diplomatic history and narratives of events in favour of social, economic and cultural history,and looking for broader structures in history.
Discussion of annales historians fits well into the historiography class for a number of reasons:1. The annales school emerged in reaction to the dominance in France (and indeed elsewhere) in the earlyC20th of political and diplomatic history and narratives of events by historians following in the traditionof the C19th German historian Leopold von Ranke.
2. Annales historians engaged with Marxist historians. Although there were some similarities betweenMarxist and annales historians in their approaches, in their interest in structures and, in particular, their rejections of narratives of political history, they also disagreed on a number of issues. In particular,annales historians presented alternatives to the primacy of the `economic substructure' as a causal factor in history. They gave greater emphasis to geography rather than the economy.3. The annales school of historians also influenced the work of some of the scholars who will bediscussed in later in this class, e.g. Michel Foucault. To some extent,
annales historians' work onmentalities and cultural history anticipated the `linguistic turn' - the close attention to the significance of language.
The Annales School
There were, broadly, three generations of historians of the annales school. The most important membersof the 1st generation - the founders - were the medievalist Marc Bloch and the early modernist LucienFebvre. The commanding figure in the next generation of annales historians, who came to prominence inthe 1940s-50s, was Fernand Braudel. And one of the most prominent of the 3rd generation, who is stillworking, is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.Just a few examples to give you a sense of the sort of work they have done.Marc Bloch Works included The Royal Touch (1924). Its subject was the belief current in medieval andearly modern France and England that the king could cure a skin disease known as scrofula simply bytouching sufferers. In the book, Bloch analysed popular attitudes to kingship, religion and miracles over along period of time (CC13th-18th), and by comparing the belief in France and England. His approachdrew on social sciences: sociology, anthropology, psychology.Bloch went on to write major
works on rural society and feudal society in medieval France and Europein which he paid attention to structures rather than events.
During WWII he was active in the French resistance, and was executed by the Germans in 1944Lucien Febvre If Bloch was heavily influenced by social sciences such as sociology, then his co-founder of the annales school was influenced more by geography. Febvre's early work gave great emphasis to therole of geography in history.
His first book was a study of a region of France in the C16th. The first chapter described the geography of the region. He did not argue, however, that the natural environment determined the history of the region, but that there were a variety of human responses to the environment in which they lived. People, their ways of life, and their attitudes and beliefs - not geography - werecentral to Febvre's interpretation of history. Febvre's approach to the role of geography in history can betermed `environmental possibilism', in contrast to `environmental determinism'. (The role of geography inhistory was a recurring theme in annales school, in particular in the work of Fernand Braudel.)
Fernand Braudel. Probably the most famous work by an Annales historian was Braudel's history of theMediterranean World in the C16th. He wrote the first version of this book - his doctoral thesis - as a POWin Germany during WWII, and later revised it for publication. The 1st edn came out in 1949, and the 2nd,further revised, in 1966. This was history on a massive scale. Like Febvre, he began with the geographyof the Mediterranean world. Although he denied this in the text, for Braudel, unlike Febvre, geography played a more decisive or even determining role in human history. I'll talk about "The Mediterranean" inmore detail later in the lecture.Braudel went on to become an exponent of history on an even broader scale and on a wider scope: `total history' and `global history'. He wrote multi-volume works on world history.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. The most well known historian of the 3rd generation of the annales school.His best known work is
a study of a French village called Montaillou in the C14th. The village was acentre of Cathar heretics. Because of this, the local bishop ordered an investigation, and had many of thevillagers interrogated and punished. The transcripts of the interrogations served as the source for Le Roy Ladurie's book. He drew on the records of the interrogations to present a reconstruction of the village, its society and culture. His subjects included the housing in the village, the villagers' perceptions of space,time, nature, God and religion, family life, childhood, sexuality and death.
Le Roy Ladurie has also written on peasants and rural history in the early modern period, and thehistory of the climate over the last thousand years. The range and ambition of his work, and the aim of pushing history into new areas, area all typical of the annales school.(These are just a few examples of work by some of the more prominent historians associated with theannales school. There is much, much more besides.)
Fernand Braudel's Approach to History in"The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II"
I've chosen to focus on the work of Fernand Braudel in this lecture, in part because one of the documentsfor a later tutorial is the Preface to "The Mediterranean", but more because if one historian has to besingled out from the annales school as making the most significant contributions to historical theory, Ithink it has to be Braudel. And, I want to focus on these as exhibited in his most well known book: "TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" (i.e. the C16th), 1st edn 1949, revisededn 1966.I want focus on three areas: Braudel's attempt at `total history' and the relationship between the three partsof "The Mediterranean"; Braudel on time in history; Braudel on the role of geography in history. But, for sake of convenience will try to consider them together while discussing the book.One of the aims of the founders of the annales school back in the 1920s was to
challenge thecontemporary dominance of political and diplomatic history and narratives of events in favour of social,economic and cultural history, and looking for broader structures in history.
In "The Mediterranean",Braudel took this further than Bloch or Febvre, and sought to integrate the different types of history.(The point of this discussion of "The Mediterranean" is not to seek to understand Spanish foreign policy in the C16. This is done far better than I can by colleagues in the Dept who are specialists on earlymodern history, and who draw on a far wider body of more recent scholarship than one book written half a century ago. The point here is to consider Braudel's approach to history.)
The book is divided into three parts, reflecting Braudel's division of `historical time' into three layers (onelayer for each part of the book):
•
`Geographical time' (Part 1). For Braudel, the relationship between humans and the environment was very slow, change was almost imperceptible, and was a history of repetition and recurring cycles based on the cycle of the seasons.
•
`Social time' (Part 2). 'Social time' was a little faster than 'geographical time'. It was still slow,