Everything about The Annales School totally explained
The
Annales School (in French) is a school of historical writing named after the
French scholarly journal
Annales d'histoire économique et sociale where it was first expounded. The journal kept this name from 1929-39. It was successively renamed
Annales d'histoire sociale (1939-42, 1945),
Mélanges d’histoire sociale (1942-4),
Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations (1946-1994), and
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (1994-).
Annales school history is best known for incorporating
social scientific methods into history.
Origins
The
Annales was founded and edited by
Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre in
1929, while they were teaching at the
University of Strasbourg, France and later in
Paris, France. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive
Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the
Année 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- and early 20th-century historians. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (
la longue durée) over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called
mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study.
Precepts
An eminent member of this school,
Georges Duby, wrote in the foreword 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.
The Annalistes, especially
Lucien Febvre, advocated a
histoire totale, or
histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem.
Post war
Bloch was shot by the
Gestapo during the German occupation of France in
World War II for his active membership of the
French Resistance, 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.
Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time:
l'histoire quasi immobile (motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (
la longue durée), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures.
While authors such as
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Marc Ferro 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Annales School'.
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