Explain the new approaches introduced by Annalesse in the development of history.

INTRODUCTION

History as a term has two distinct yet interrelated meanings. It refers both to the past and to the

written accounts of what happened in the past. What is implicit in this statement is the subtle

distinction between history and the past. As just stated, whereas history is about the written

accounts of the virtually limitless past events, peoples and processes, the past refers to all human

events and associated processes, most of which are not recorded. That is to say, history as a field

of study is not only the subject but also object of its own discipline. The discipline of history can

be divided into two branches in terms of its philosophical underpinnings as (a) the speculative

focusing on the actual content of history and (b) the analytical concerned with its methodology or

the ways historical explanations are constructed.1

The paradoxical developments in France in the decade of the 1920s posed an encompassing and

new question that demanded new perspectives and new methodologies. Moreover, the intellectual

development of the period challenged the scope of history that focused itself largely on events,

and it also criticized the historical sources as it gave undue importance on archive. Therefore,

French scholars Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre attempted to address these challenges and

introduced a broader history.

More than fifty years old, this school already has a history. As Lucien Febvre said in 1946, “since

the world moves, the Annales moves also”. 2

1
Kaya Yılmaz, Marmara Üniversitesi, İstanbul, 2009, pg 223.
2
Francois Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 7-15.

1
In January, 1929, Bloch and Febvre launched a new journal called “Annales d’histoire economique

et sociale” (Annales of Economic and Social History), which is probably the most prestigious of

all historical journals. With an aim to initiate ‘all history’ and ‘true history’ in place of partial

history, the Annales tradition gave rise to a school of better historical writing.

The old Historiographical

Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch were the leaders of what might be called the French Historical

Revolution. In order to interpret the actions of revolutionaries, however, it is necessary to know

something of the old regime which they wish to overturn. To understand as well as to describe this

regime, we cannot confine ourselves to the situation in France around 1900, when Febvre and

Bloch were students.

Since the age of Herodotus and Thucydides, history has been written in the West in a variety of

genres – the monastic chronicle, the political memoir, the antiquarian treatise, and so on. For a

long time, however, the dominant form was the narrative of political and military events, presented

as the story of the great deeds of great men – the captains and the kings. This dominant form was

first seriously challenged during the Enlightenment.

At this time, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of writers and scholars in

Scotland, France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere began to concern themselves with what they

called the ‘history of Society’, a history that would not be confined to war and politics, but would

2
include laws and trade, moral and the ‘manners’ that were the Centre of attention in Voltaire’s

famous essay on manners.3

These scholars dismissed what the eighteen-century scholar John Millar of Glasgow, anticipating

Braudel, once called ‘that common surface of events which occupies the details of the vulgar

historian’, in order to concentrate on the history of structures such as the feudal system or the

British constitution. Some of them were concerned with the reconstruction of past attitudes and

values, notably with the history of the value-system known as ‘chilvary’, others with the history

of art, literature and music. By the end of the century, this international group of scholars had

produced an extremely important body of work.

In the nineteenth century, however, one of the consequences of the so-called ‘Copernican

Revolution’ in history associated with Leopold von Ranke was to marginalize, or remarginalize,

social and cultural history. Ranke’s own interests were not limited to political history. He wrote o

the Reformation and the Counter – Reformation, for instance, and he did not reject the history of

society, art, literature or science. All the same, the movement that Ranke led and the new historical

paradigm that he formulated undermined what we might call the ‘new history’ of the eighteenth

century. His emphasis on archive sources made the historians who worked on social and cultural

history look mere dilettanti.

Ranke’s followers were more narrow-minded than the master himself, and in an age when

historians were aspiring to become professionals, non – political history was virtually excluded

3
Francois Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 7-15.

3
from the new academic discipline. The new professional journalfounded in the later nineteeth

century, such as the Historiche Zeitschrift (founded 1856), the Revue Historique (1876) and the

English Historical Review (1886), concentrated on the history of political events. The ideals of the

new professional historians were articulated ina number of treaties on historical studies’ by the

French historian Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos.

Dissenting voices could of course be heard in the nineteenth century. Jules Michelet and Jacob

Burckhardt, who produced their histories of the Renaissance more or less at the same moment, in

1855 and 1960 respectively, had much wider views of history than the Rankeans did. Burchardart

viewed history as the field of interaction of three forces – the state, religion and culture – while

Michelet called for what we would now describe as ‘history from below’ ; in his own words, ‘the

history of those who have sufferd, worked, declined and died without being able to describe their

suffering’.4

The economic historians were perhaps the best organized of the dissenters from political history.

A journal of social and economic history, the Social and Economic History Quarterly was founded

in 1893. In Britain, classic studies of economic history, such as William Gunningham’s Growth of

English Trade and J.E Thorold Roger;s Six Centuries of work and wages, go back to 1882 and

1884 respectively. In France, Henri Hauser, Henri See and Paul Mantoux were all beginning to

write on economic history at the end of the nineteenth century. By the later nineteenth century, the

dominance, or as Schmoller put it, the ‘imprialism’, of political history was frequently challenged.5

4
Ibid.
5
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929 - 2014, UK: Polity Press, 2015, pp. 13.

4
The Annales

A new approach to the study of history emerged in France in the late 1920s around the scolary

journal Annales d’histoire e economique et Sociale. The Annales School, as it came to be

identified, grew to be the pre-eminent twentieth-century movement in historical scholarship. Its

bold agenda of a ‘total history’ embracing all the social science captivated historians worldwide.6

Since the 1950s French historiography has been dominated by the “Annales” school, a research

trend brought into being by the journal of that name. Its main aim was to give history a clearly

scientific status through a re-definition of the object of the historian’s interest and the use of

objective analytical methods borrowed from the social sciences.

The “Annales” school focused on economic and social questions and presented them in

quantitative formulations. It denied the role of events in historical processes and rejected the

traditional political history. It introduced the concept of total history which combined ecology with

economy in order to explain long-term phenomena which shape mankind’s history. Structures and

trends were recognized as the main subject of historical research. The longue durée category

worked out by Fernand Braudel has become the visiting card of the school. The historians who

followed the guidelines of the “Annales” school stressed the importance of interdisciplinary

studies, sought inspiration in sociology, economics and geography and repudiated all links with

philosophy and literature.7

Scholars participated in the efforts to view and study history from an innovative perspective in

order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the human past. The Annales movement

6
Nicolas Lewkowicz, The Annales School; Journal of an Intellectual History, Intellectual History Review, Vol. 21, Jun
2011, pp. 250-251.
7
Tomasz Wiślicz, The “Annales” School and the Challenge of the Late 20th Century’; Criticism and Tentative
Reforms , Vol. 92, Jan 2005, pp. 1.

5
can be defined in modern terms as “the attempt by French scholars to adopt economic, linguistic,

sociological, geographical, anthropological, psychological, and natural science notions to study

history and to infuse a historical orientation into the social and human sciences” (Bentley, 1999,

p. 107). The Annales profoundly changed the conceptions of what constitutes and what makes

history.8

The Founders

The leaders of the Annales movement, Febvre and Bloch, attended the University of Strasbourg,

where they were immersed in the works of other university disciplines, such as

anthropology, economics, geography, psychology and sociology. The inter-departmental

cooperation during their university years led them to the idea of studying history using a holistic

approach. Bloch was interested in social psychology, and focused his work on the feudal system

in medieval France, while Febvre examined the geographical background and social, cultural and

political features of early-modern French history. This holistic approach separates the Annales

movement from the empiric approach to history.9

Rejecting the narrow emphasis on politics, war, diplomacy, or event-oriented history, the French

Annales school aimed to “grasp more totally and fully the whole dimensions of human reality”

(Gilderhus, 1987, p.115-116). They sought to encompass the whole, the totality of life in the

region, focusing upon the uniformities in the political, social, economic, intellectual, and

geographic realms. The quest for a total history with wider scope and complex content required a

8
Ibid.
9
Francois Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 7-15.

6
new methodology or a wide range of repertoire of interests, methods, and interpretations (Breisach,

1994; Roberts, 2004). For this reason, Bloch and Febvre called for a flexible yet an analytically

rigorous history that required the historian to identify a problem for analysis and then draw on

whatever intellectual perspectives were appropriate, regardless of disciplinary boundaries (Tosh,

2008). They suggested that historians work with their comrades and brothers in the social sciences

to capture the total history in the proper spirit. With the slogan “Down with all barriers and labels,”

they claimed, “Man cannot be carved into slices. He is a whole. One must not divide all of history

–here the events, there the beliefs” (Breisach, 1994, p.371)10

10
Tom Nesmith, Total History and Archives, Le Roy Ladurie's The Territory of the Historian, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979, pp. 127-133.

7
CONTRIBUTION OF THE ANNALES SCHOOL

Bloch and Febvre could not disapprove of the conceptual categories of traditional histories without

also rejecting the forms conveying them. They considered the conventions of historical writing

inadequate vehicles for their approaches to research. Bloch ridiculed "mere narrative, for long

encumbered with legend, and for still longer preoccupied with only the most obvious event. Bloch

and Febvre opposed histories of selected individuals and ever-changing happenings constructed

on the narrow documentary base of written accounts; they favoured what they believed was a true

science of the past, one that concentrated on collectivities and slowly-changing conditions, was

capable of learning from other sciences, especially the social sciences of geography and sociology

and was supported by a vastly expanded documentary base.11 A desire "to penetrate beneath the

mere surface of actions" led Bloch and Febvre to resist preconceived definitions of source material.

Their mistrust of the subjective element in written sources convinced them that physical evidence

such as architectural remains, tools, landscape and even astronomical patterns provided a degree

of direct access to the past that written records did not allow.12

1. The Annales scholars generated a new paradigm to compete with two previous ones.

One of these earlier approaches had treated history as a source of exemplary cases to be taken from

the sphere of past politics and used as an instrument within contemporary politics. Another had

broadened the scope of the discipline to include 'a more strictly linear model of general progress

11
Toby Burrows, The Annales School: An Intellectual History, Parergon, Australian and New Zealand Association of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.), Vol. 27, No. 1, 2010, pp. 195-197.
12
Tom Nesmith, Total History and Archives, Le Roy Ladurie's the Territory of the Historian, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979, pp. 127-133.

8
and development’. Narrative political history, strengthened by more meticulous and 'scientific'

treatment of documents, had become very highly regarded · at the Sorbonne by the early

twentieth century.

However, the Annales movement sought to establish a third paradigm: 'an inquiry into how

one of the systems of a society functions in terms of its multiple temporal, spatial, human,

social, economic, cultural and event mental dimensions', an inquiry which encompassed a

concern with 'the various communications functions, including the concealed or symbolic

functions of communication'. This paradigm was to produce and express 'some conflict between

the advocates of a whole-society historical analysis (histoire globale) and the proponents of

functionalism' (pp. 236- 7).

In opposition to the traditionalists at the Sorbonne, a strong argument was made for history as

the leading light within 'a community of human sciences', one whose members paid little heed to

the walls separating individual disciplines from one another.

In the years following their joint foundation (in 1929) of the journal whose full title eventually

became Annales: economies, societes, civilisations, Febvre and his colleague Marc Bloch

tended to specialize. Febvre pursued his examination of mentalities. Bloch paid more attention

to the interplay of geography, law, kinship and demography. However, as was shown in The

Royal Touch (1973), an exploration of beliefs concerning the supposedly healing powers of

medieval kings in France and England, Bloch was also deeply concerned with the equally

significant relations between culture, psychology and power. Furthermore, Elie Kedourie's

comment on Febvre's use of comparative method applies to both men: But for Febvre comparison

was more than a heuristic device which some historians might find useful, and some others ...

clearly a bore. Belief in comparison went for him hand in hand with the belief that there was some

9
kind of bedrock structure, some ultimate, more real, reality to which, with improved drills and

metal detectors, the new historian can penetrate. (1975: 239)

Marc Bloch (born at Lyons in 1886) is more familiar to a British audience than Febvre, especially

through his Feudal Society (1965). This work reflects Bloch's view that the most useful

divisions of historical time were made with reference to civilizations and generations. Feudal

Society studied a major civilization, paying attention to its aggressive neighbours (especially the

Moslems, Hungarians and Scandinavians) and cultural context (expressed in

religion, law, orientations to nature, forms of technology and so on). Through the use of a very

wide range of evidence - including artistic styles, mercantile records, archaeological remains,

place-names, topology and official documents - Bloch developed an argument which gave

priority to no single factor (such as technology). Daniel Chirot describes this approach succinctly:

If the defining characteristic of feudal ties of dependency was a response to the insecurity of

the invasions, then they marked the start of the civilization. If weak family and tribal ties, weak

states, and a weak economy combined with the need to outfit expensive mounted warriors, then

the areas with these conditions were feudal Europe and others were not. In other words,

thorough knowledge of the subject revealed a set of conjunctions, conditions which

occurred more or less simultaneously, to create a type of society that would persist for a long

time. (1984:26)13

13
Dennis Smith, History, Geography and Sociology: Lessons from the Annales School, Volume: 5, February 1,
1988, pp. 137-148.

10
 2. Guidelines for "mentalities" as a field of historical study / comparative history

As a field of study, the history of mentalities bears the pronounced imprint of Annales

historiography. Annales historians share a close sense of collegiality in pursuing an ambitious

agenda of research which seeks to show the interrelationship of all spheres of human activity,

optimally on a global scale. The history of mentalities is usually characterized as a recent and

derivative concern of the Annales school. Annales historians who have analyzed their own

historiographical tradition claim that this was a necessary preparation for the study of culture, since

it is the most difficult domain in which to do quantitative research.10 But it should not be forgotten

that "mentalities" was an early interest of the school's founders, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch.

Febvre's point of departure for his discussion of unbelief is an analysis of the "mental equipment"

available to sixteenth-century man - those environmental, institutional, and linguistic forms which

set conceptual limits upon his mental universe. He argues that man has a need for coherence

(vision) in, as well as forms (structure) for, his ideas. In their coherence, prevailing conceptions of

the world provide fixed points of orientation against which original ideas must be measured. One

reconceives in light of what one already knows.14

Marc Bloch's contribution to "mentalities" also dealt with the problem of belief, although from the

perspective of human credulity. One of Bloch's purposes was to show the power of a collective

illusion. But another was to reveal the historical character of collective psychology by pointing out

the differences between the medieval and the modern mind. The medieval world was one of

"marvel," in which most phenomena were explained in terms of supernatural causes. The "sacred"

(that which is explicable only in supernatural terms) had wide boundaries. His less structured mind

14
Dennis Smith, History, Geography and Sociology: Lessons from the Annales School, Volume: 5, February 1, 1988,
pp. 137-148.

11
was free to speculate about the world in terms which had few critical limitations. 3 If Bloch and

Febvre never fully formulated a theory of mentalities, their work did provide an agenda for further

research. Febvre outlined the tasks under two headings. First, he called for an "inventory of the

mental equipment" of Western man at various stages of his historical development. Here he is

concerned with the building blocks from which ideas are formed. The problem, Febvre argues, is

not only what people thought in the past, but how it was possible for them to think at all.

The task, therefore, is to establish the mental horizons of an age - not only as these open upon the

future, but also as they delimit the possibilities of thought in a given historical era. It is not that

innovative ideas cannot have efficacy. But new ideas are borne in forms which must challenge old

and often binding intellectual structures, which can thwart their acceptance or bend them into

conformity with their own systems. To study the history of mentalities is to enter the arena of

human experience most resistant to change.14 Second on Febvre's agenda was a history of human

sentiment. Here he took issue with the intellectual historian's exclusive preoccupation with rational

discourse as the privileged evidence of the history of thought. He charges that the intellectual

historian, in limiting his analysis to the sphere of human reason, presupposes that human nature is

unchanging. But the structure of the human psyche, no less than that of society, is transformed in

time. Febvre's premise is that emotions, too, shape the contours of thought, and that understanding

the changes in the structure of human emotions through the ages is an essential factor in explaining

the conditions under which rational discourse takes place.15

Febvre suggested that there is an "historical curve" in collective psychology, extending from

primitive society, in which emotional life (organized through myth and ritual) stands at the center

15
Ibid.

12
of culture, toward modern society, in which intellectual activity crowds emotional life toward the

periphery.15 In plotting that curve, the historian of mentalities has since found his essential

endeavor. Although slow to take up Febvre's call for work upon "mentalities," Annales historians

have in recent years returned to his agenda in order to pursue re- search in this field.16 Borrowing

eclectically from ethnologists, linguists, and demographers, they have contributed sophisticated

quantitative studies of attitudes toward family life, sexuality, and death.17 The prestige of their

work is derived from their ingenuity in retrieving data about popular culture hitherto inaccessible;

yet their boldness in the realm of practice is matched by their caution in the realm of theory.16

The Annales movement was distinctive for the increased attention paid to the mindsets of entire

groups, known as mentalités. Lucien Febvre was the first historian to call for a study into the

history of emotions in 1941. He believed that 'the emotional life [is] always ready to overflow the

intellectual life'5. The entire Annales movement was revolutionary, entailing methods of studying

history that had never been considered before.17

3. Quantitative History

The term quantitative history arose primarily as a result of the works of E. Labrousse and

F. Braudel who widely introduced the use of statistical methods into historical thinking.18 From

1950 or thereabouts to the 1970s or even later, was surely the rise of quantitative history. This

‘quntitative revolution’, as it has been called, was first visible in economic field, especially the

16
Patrick H. Hutton, The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History; Journal of History and Theory,
Vol. 20, No. 3, October 1981, pp. 237-259.
17
Barbara H Rosenwein, Worrying About Emotions in History; The American Historical Review, No. 3, June 2002,
pp. 821-845.
18
Patrice Bourdelais, French Quantitative History: Problems and Promises, Social Science History; Journal of
Quantitative History in International Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1984, pp. 179-192.

13
history of prices. After the history of prices, the history of the population was the second great

conquest of the quantitative approach. The rise of demographic history took place in the 1950s,

and it owes as much to contemporary awareness of world population explosion as the price history

of the 1930s owes to the Great Crash. The development of this field, in France at least, was the

joint work of demographers and historians.19

Le Roy Ladurie used the quantitative disciplines of demography to develop a kind of total history

examining material culture and everyday life of the masses. He combined multiple demographic

and economic series so as to be able to analyze the traditional agrarian economy. In the long term,

from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the structure includes several types of combined

series as well as several economic cycles. The structure becomes apparent in an analysis of these

successive cycles, their similarities and differences. The linkage of series numerous enough to

permit such research is arduous and has most often been undertaken within the framework of

French regional studies.20

Today, techniques of statistical analysis are more accessible and more solidly based, but continue

to evolve so rapidly that they should be seen as provisional at any point. Moreover, as an

investigator's curiosity shifts, new documents-or new readings of old documents-are "invented" as

sources, thereby expanding their limits. Serial history for periods preceding the sixteenth century

is no longer impossible. A. Guerreau (1981) gives proof of this development for the thirteenth,

fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

19
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution, The Annales School 1929 - 2014
20
Robert Forster, Achievements of the Annales School; Journal of Economic History, Vol. 38, No. 1, The Tasks of
Economic History, March 1978, pp. 58-76.

14
The strength of serial history today lies in the fact that few areas appear inaccessible to it. Yet it

cannot claim to be the only possible approach, as a glance at any recent bibliography will show.

Starting with the history of prices and, more generally, economic history, serial history has

expanded rapidly into the history of climates, the social aspects of epidemiology, then into

demography, which offers a bridge to the "third level"-the emotional and psychic (religion,

sexuality and culture)21

Pierre Chaunu has reconstructed the entire movements of Spanish shipping in the Atlantic between

1500-1650 and in the Pacific as well, by using the archives in Seville. Pierre Vilar’s major work

“La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne” uses quantitative method at several different levels

including wage series. The combined effect of this total investigation is extremely strinking. (Le

Roy Ladurie, 1979: 24) These studies which are not so much copies from a model as individual

ariations on a group theme were the most impressive achivement of Annales movement in 1960s.

All of these combined Braudelian structure, Labroussian conjoncture and new historical

demography. The new quantitative history thought in causal terms. Numbers were to be used in

the comparison of differing variable. To make comparison, long quantitative series reconstructed

from the sources. (Iggers, 1984: 60) The attraction of this kind of enquiry is that it uncovers

patterns which relate to the whole of the society, rather than just segment of it illuminated by

literary sources. The isolation and comparison of selected variables, which is considered basic to

the society, would permit the construction of a total picture of a period in a specific geographical-

historical region. Le Roy Ladurie claims that the image of a society of country people remaining

stable over the very long term in spite of some violent temporary upheavals seems to me to be one

21
Patrice Bourdelais, French Quantitative History: Problems and Promises, Social Science History; Journal of
Quantitative History in International Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1984, pp. 179-192.

15
of the fundamental results to emerge from the works of quantitative history. (Le Roy Ladurie,

1979: 25) So, in “The Peasants of Languedoc”, he took the mental life of the age into

consideration.22

4.

22
Miyase Koyuncu Kaya, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s approach; The Peasants of Languedoc, Vol. 9, No. 2 1969, pp.
141-154.

16
Bibliography

1. Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929 - 2014, UK:

Polity Press, 2015.

2. Kaya Yılmaz, Marmara Üniversitesi, İstanbul, 2009.

3. Francois Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, University of

Illinois Press, 1994.

1. (Paperback)by Francois Dosse

2. Nicolas Lewkowicz, The Annales School; Journal of an Intellectual History, Intellectual

History Review, Vol. 21, Jun 2011.

3. Tomasz Wiślicz, The “Annales” School and the Challenge of the Late 20th Century’;

Criticism and Tentative Reforms , Vol. 92, Jan 2005.

4. Tom Nesmith, Total History and Archives, Le Roy Ladurie's The Territory of the Historian,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

5. Toby Burrows, The Annales School: An Intellectual History, Parergon, Australian and

New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.), Vol. 27, No. 1,

2010.

6. Dennis Smith, History, Geography and Sociology: Lessons from the Annales School,

Volume: 5, February 1, 1988.

7. Patrick H. Hutton, The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History; Journal

of History and Theory, Vol. 20, No. 3, October 1981.

8. Barbara H Rosenwein, Worrying About Emotions in History; The American Historical

Review, No. 3, June 2002.

17
 9. Patrice Bourdelais, French Quantitative History: Problems and Promises, Social Science

History; Journal of Quantitative History in International Perspective, Cambridge

University Press, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1984.

10. Robert Forster, Achievements of the Annales School; Journal of Economic History, Vol.

38, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History, March 1978.

11. Miyase Koyuncu Kaya, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s approach; The Peasants of

Languedoc, Vol. 9, No. 2 1969.

Sources

1. Burke, Peter. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. fith edition. Pennsylvania: The

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992

2. Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, Indiana University Press, 2013

3. D Tomich, The order of Historical Time

4. Michael E Smith, Braudel’s temporal rhytms and chronology theory in archaelogoy

5. Hacking I, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002

6. The Oxford History of historical writing, Chapter 1

7. HR Trevor Roper, Fernand Braudel, the Annales and the Mediterranean

(8) Peter Burke, Braudel’s Long Term, London Review of Books

18
19