Annales School

The Annales School (Annales is pronounced /a(n)'nal(ə)/ in French) is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (later called Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations, then renamed in 1994 as Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales) where it was first expounded. Annales school history is best known for incorporating social scientific methods into history.

The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg. These authors quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Annee Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th century historians. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la longue durée) over events. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study.An eminent member of this school, Georges Duby, wrote in the forward of his book Le dimanche de Bouvines that the history he taught "relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation."

Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France in World War II, and Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during this time that he mentored Fernand Braudel, who would become one of the best known exponents of this school. Braudel's work came to define a 'second' era of Annales historiography and was very influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of Philip II of Spain.

While authors such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jacques Le Goff continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history and economic history.

See also: Historiography

References

• Fernand Braudel and the Annales School by Dr David Moon

Further reading

• Peter Burke. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989. Stanford University Press. 1991.
• François Dosse. The New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales. University of Illinois Press. 1994.
• Lynn Hunt and Jacques Revel (eds). Histories: French Constructions of the Past. The New Press. 1994. (A collection of essays with many pieces from the Annales--the long introduction is excellent, and contains many good references).
• Philippe Poirrier, Aborder l'histoire, Paris, Seuil, 2000.

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