The French Annales school of historians, centered around the journal Annales, occupy a unique place in the historiography of the twentieth century. On the one hand, their writers share the confidence of other social science-oriented historians in the possibility of scientific approaches to history; on the other hand, they are aware of the limits of such approaches. In the course of more than eight decades they have profoundly changed conceptions of what constitutes and who makes history. They have offered a very different conception of historical time from that held by most historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Virtually all historians from Ranke to Marx and Weber, and after them the American social science-oriented historians, had seen history in terms of movement across a one-dimensional time from the past to the future. The Annales historians radically modified this conception by stressing the relativity and multilayering of time. Annales historians have insisted that they do not represent a "school," though they have often been identified as such, but rather a spirit marked by openness to new methods and approaches to historical research. To a very large extent they are right. The publications by members of the circle reflect very different interests and approaches. They have not formulated an explicit theory or philosophy of history; in fact, research has always taken precedence over theoretical reflection. Their historical writings nevertheless reflect theoretical presuppositions. Despite their protestation that they are not a school, the Annales since the end of World War II have had a firm institutional basis.

And despite fundamental changes over time, there have been continuities in the language they have used and the concepts they have employed since the early works of their founders, Lucien Febvre and Mare Bloch. The discussions about methods that, beginning in 1900, took place in Henri Berr's journal. Revue de synthcse historique, mentioned earlier, are part of the prehistory of the Annales. Lucien Febvre's book about the Franche-Comte, also mentioned above, signals the transition to a new kind of historical science. In it the entities that up to that point had played such an important role-the state, but also the economy, religion, law, literature, and the arts-lose their autonomy and are integrated into an allembracing culture. Culture is no longer understood as the privileged intellectual and aesthetic domain of an elite, but rather as the way in which a whole population experiences and lives life.

Lucien Febvre and especially Mare Bloch, who studied in Leipzig and Berlin between 1908 and 1909, closely followed the work being done in social and economic history in Germany. There are parallels between Febvre's book about the Franche-Comte and Lamprecht's earlier economic history of the Moselle valley in the middle ages, although probably no direct influence. While economic and social history in Germany focused on administrative and constitutional aspects. Lamprecht and Febvre were concerned with the close ties between social, economic, and political structures and the patterns of thought and behavior in a specific geographic, cultural region. Febvre's interests reflected a training different from that of most German historians. In Germany, of 141 occupants of university history chairs in the period from 1850 to 1900, 87 had studied philology as a secondary field and of these 72 had specialized in classical philology; 23 had studied theology or philosophy, only 10 economics, and 12 geography. In contrast, in France geography was an integral part of the agregation, the examination required for a university career. Moreover, geography as it had emerged in France as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century under the guidance of Paul Vidal de la Blache, who had been deeply influenced by Carl Ritter and the German tradition of geography, also was historical and cultural in its orientation. Vidal de la Blache's geographic humaine, which avoided the geographic determinism of his contemporary Friedrich Ratzel in Germany, deeply influenced the entire tradition of Annales historians from Febvre onward.

In addition to geography, there was Durkheim's sociological approach, interpreted for the Annales historians by his student, the economist Francois Simiand. Durkheim on the one hand wanted to transform sociology into a strict science, which for Simiand involved mathematical formulations. On the other hand, consciousness, perceived as collective consciousness, was for Durkheim the central subject of the science of society, of which norms, customs, and religion were important components. The acceptance of these scholarly approaches reflects the close links between geography, economics, and anthropology in French historiography, in contrast with the emphasis on the state, administration, and jurisprudence of the German tradition that included Max Weber. In this light the great importance Febvre and Bloch attributed to anonymous structures becomes understandable, as well as the attention they paid to the aspects of feelings and experience embedded in the collective mentalities that form the subject of historical anthropology. The intellectual bases of the Annales were laid by Febvre and Bloch long before they founded the journal. Febvre's Philippe II et la Franche-Comte (1911) and Mare Bloch's The Royal Touch (1924), on the magic arts of healing of the French and English kings in the Middle Ages, appeared before the founding of the journal in 1929, as did Febvre's Martin Luther: A Destiny. The Annales at no point stood for a closely defined doctrine. In part patterning its name on the Vierteljahrschriftfur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, the oldest and still very much respected journal in the field, the new journal originally called itself Annales d'histoire economique et sociale; although from the beginning it perceived itself very differently from the Vierteljahrschrift. After 1946 the title was changed to Annales. Economies. Societes. Civilisations, in order to emphasize its interdisciplinary character more strongly. History for the Annales historians occupied a central role among the sciences dealing with man, but in a different way than it had for classical historicism. While the latter had elevated the state as the key institution to which all other aspects of society and culture were subordinated, Annales historians abolished the boundaries between the traditional disciplines in order to integrate them into the "sciences of man" (sciences de l'homme).

The plural was used intentionally, in order to emphasize the plurality of sciences. The Annales, not following the models provided by Ranke's fragmentary or Droysen's systematic dogmatic pronouncements, formulated no theory of history or historiography, not even in Bloch's The Historian's Crafft - notes he jotted down at the front in 1940. The purpose of the Annales was, as Bloch and Febvre explained in the introduction to the first issue of the journal, to provide a forum for various directions and new approaches.

Also no clear common political denominator can be found in the Annales. Although its contributors were overwhelmingly republicans and French patriots, they were much less ideological than the bulk of German historians, who saw a primary function of their scholarship to be the justification of German national aims and of the political and social institutions of Imperial Germany. It is, however, important to understand the political engagement of the founders of the Annales, and to remember that Marc Bloch, who was of Jewish descent, was tortured and murdered by the Germans in 1944 as a resistance fighter. As for the role of the Annales in the French academic scene, Febvre and Bloch, until they were called to Paris in 1933 and 1936 respectively," were at the University of Strasbourg, and it was from here that they pursued their conflict with Seignobos and the traditional political historians at the Sorbonne. Later, things were very different. If they had occupied a somewhat marginal position in the 1930s, Febvre and the Annales in fact became the establishment after the war, when a new interest in cultural and social history arose and a critical reconsideration took place of the attitudes that Bloch, in The Strange Defeat, charged had helped to pave the way for the catastrophe of 1940.

In 1946 the Annales received a firm institutional basis in the newly formed Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. As noted, the Ecole had been founded in 1868 as a research center according to the German model. Lacking the normal courses of study, it was dedicated exclusively to research and to the training of researchers. In the Fourth Section, devoted to historical studies, seminars following Ranke's pattern were introduced. The Sixth Section, reorganized in 1972 as the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), was committed to integrating history and the social science disciplines within a comprehensive "science of man" (science de l'homme), which would include not only the traditional social sciences so important in the early years of the Annales, namely economics, sociology, and anthropology, but also linguistics, semiotics, the sciences of literature and the arts, and psychoanalysis.

Through the funding the Ecole received from the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) and from American foundations, it was able to exert a major influence on research in France.

This institutionalization had conflicting results. It favored interdisciplinary research and thus, often, a new openness, and it made teamwork possible, coordinating various projects that increasingly used the new technological means of data processing. Thus in the sixties and seventies, on the one hand the great syntheses of Fernand Braudel, Pierre Goubert, Jacques Le Goff, Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Robert Mandrou appeared in the Annales; on the other hand were highly specialized contributions, frequently written in a jargon incomprehensible to outsiders.

In spite of the great variety of methodological and conceptual approaches in the now over eighty years since Febvre's book about the Franche-Comte appeared in 1911, the works of Annales historians have had much in common. To illustrate this we shall briefly look at several of the important works that appeared between 1911 and the 1980s: Febvre, Philippe II et la Franche Comte (1911); Bloch, Feudal Society (1939-40);" Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942); Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peasants of Languedoc (1966)16 and Montaillou (1975); and finally Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th to 19th Century (1979-87) and The Identity of France (1986). It is striking that in none of these works is there a central institution serving as a guiding thread in a historical narrative in which the actions of persons play a decisive role. This does not mean that the role of politics is ignored. In Bloch's examination of feudal society it plays an essential role, but in a different way than in German studies. While the latter focus on the formal aspects of feudalism, on political, ecclesiastical, and juridical institutions, Bloch approaches feudalism anthropologically as a complex of interpersonal relations.

In using the term "complex" I intentionally avoid the word "system," rarely used by the Annales historians and seen by them as objectifying and reifying human behavior far too much. For the same reason one must be careful with the concept "structure," which is used by the Annales historians. To be sure their stress is on structures. Individuals, who occupy a key position in nineteenth-century historiography, are mentioned rarely, if at all in these works. In Bloch's Feudal Society, for example, the kings appear rarely and only marginally. In Braudel's book on the Mediterranean, they are relegated to the separate section on the political history of the region with little organic connection to the two preceding sections dealing with the almost timeless geographical setting of the Mediterranean region and its slowly changing economic and social structure. Individuals reappear in Le Roy Ladurie's early-fourteenth-century village of heretics, Montaillou, the focus of a foray into historical anthropology in which a set of narratives portrays men and women embedded in an age-old folk culture.
As I have noted, the Annales historians introduced a new concept of historical time. Their studies, including Febvre's Philippe II et la Franche Comte and The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, Bloch's Feudal Society, Braudel's Mediterranean book, and Ladurie's Montaillou, are more concerned with viewing a culture or an age apart from the stream of history than with relating a process of change through the ages. The historians we have discussed have largely abandoned the idea of a linear, directional history, characteristic of much of historical thought since the period Reinhart Koselleck has described as the transition between about 1750 and 1850 from the premodern to the modern time. Michel Foucault considers the idea of one history to be an invention of modern times, which have already ended. Most Annales historians would concur. In the place of one historical time, they see a plurality of coexisting times, not only among different civilizations but also within each civilization. This idea is most clearly developed in the structure of Braudel's Mediterranean book, which distinguishes three different times, each with its own speed: the almost stationary time of the Mediterranean as a geographic space (longue duree), the slow time of changes in social and economic structures (conjunctures), and the fast time of political events (evenements).On this basis Jacques Le Goff wrote his classic essay "Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages."

With the abandonment of the concept of linear time, the confidence in progress and with it the faith in the superiority of Western culture also break down. There no longer exists a concept of unified historical development on which a grand narra-tive of the history of man can be based. Moreover, historical narrative must find new forms of expression under these new conditions. As in the novel, so in history, the story with a central plot in which individuals take their place as free agents disappears. And the nation, which provided the sense of identity for broad segments of the population in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, is largely absent from these works. With few exceptions, the historiography of the Annales is either re-gional or supranational. The regions often assume a certain unity, not only in Febvre's book on the Franche-Comte but also in a host of studies in the 1960s that rely heavily on demographic data. Braudel's Mediterranean book deals with the whole Mediterranean world, Christian and Moslem. His Structures of Everyday Life (1967) deals with material aspects of life-the emergence of capitalist institutions as well as the various tangible aspects of life from health to food and fashions-in the period from 1500 to 1800, focusing on Europe but within a broadly comparative framework encompassing the entire world. Braudel's last great work, The Identity of France (1987), returns to national history but defines France not from the center in Paris but in terms of a pluralism of regions whose particular identity has remained stable throughout the centuries. Again the stress is not on change but on the longue duree, the persistence of a peasant culture and mentality into the twentieth century.

These remarks should not give the impression that the An-nales outlook remained constant over eighty years, although there is a continuity between the early works of Febvre and Bloch and those of the later Annales. They reflect the most important transformations in the historical thinking of the twentieth century, but they have given these their own character.

Since they have exerted important influences on historical writing worldwide they have in turn contributed to changes in historical perspective. One can distinguish perhaps four different phases of Annales historiography, reflecting the four generations of historians since Febvre's early work, but it must be kept in mind that historians in each generation have undergone changes in outlook that reflect the changes in the intellectual environment in which they have worked. Thus Febvre's early work shows similarities with French and German attempts to write an integrated social and economic history of a geographic, historical region that does not ignore political aspects. Geography is an important segment of Annales historiography, but it is always a "human geography" aware of the interaction of culture and physical space. Bloch's French Rural History (1931), for example, in which he seeks to reconstruct patterns of land use in the Middle Ages and the cultural consequences that resulted from them and are evident in aerial photography, introduces a focus on material factors. Remarkable in many of the Annales works is the great attention given to religious phenomena, again generally seen anthropologically as part of a collective mentality. The interest in religious thinkers at the turn to the modern age is particularly pronounced in Febvre's preoccupation with Luther's belief and Rabelais's supposed unbelief. The French tradition of cultural anthroplogy from Marcel Mauss and Levy-Bruhl to Levi-Strauss plays an increasing role in Febvre's thought, along with the new linguistic and semiotic approaches. The question of unbelief in the sixteenth century is for Febvre not primarily one of the ideas Rabelais or other individuals articulated but rather one of the "mental tools" with which they operated, of which their language is the chief one. Febvre's study thus takes on archeological aspects. Language here is less the conscious creation of the men and women who speak it than an interrelated system of meanings into which each generation is born and which shapes its thought processes.

In this sense language, too, is part of the material world. Yet the materialism of Febvre and Bloch is far removed from that of Marx. Marx's philosophy of history still shares the speculative aspects of much of nineteenth-century philosophy of history. When Bloch is concerned with technology, whether the water-mill or the plough, he sees the tools with which people work in a certain society as keys to their ways of thinking and living. Much more important than economics for the analysis of a society or a culture is semiotics, because, as Bloch showed in The Royal Touch (1924) and in Feudal Society and Febvre in his Rabelais book, every culture is a system of meanings that expresses itself in language and symbolism. Febvre himself reflected the changes that took place in the intellectual climate during his life. His Rabelais book, with its strong semiotic orientation, could not have been written three decades earlier at the time when his Franche-Comte work appeared in 1911, a work that still reflected the much more transparent world of social and economic history of the turn of the century.
In comparison with Bloch and Febvre, Braudel's work seems much less subtle. The idea that the external world, understood as climate, biology, and technology, sets sharp limits to what men and women can do is much more pervasive throughout his work than in that of Febvre and Bloch. The basic significance of the longue auree is that there is little change over the ages in the aspects of life that matter. Of course, Braudel does not deny the impact of tastes, ideas, and attitudes. Hence his interest in housing, clothing, and food as elements not just of material subsistence but of material culture as expressed in architecture, interior decoration, fashion, and cuisine. Braudel paves the way for the quantitative history of the i90os and 1970s without himself becoming a quantifier. In his economic history of France, which he wrote together with the economic historian Ernest Labrousse, he is interested in the great recurrent cycles that determine economic activity over decades and centuries. Economics thus becomes a hard science, closer to that of the classical political economists than to the German school, but without the former's belief in the persistence and the desirability of growth. In the 1960s the general fascination in the social sciences with quantification also takes over the Annales. Annales historians increasingly want to be scientists. They often call their institutes "laboratories" and speak of history as a science, a social science to be sure, but nevertheless one that, as they repeat, must work quantitatively if it is to be scientific.

A broad segment of French social history in the 1960s depended heavily on quantification, as for instance the demographic studies already mentioned, which on the basis of mass demographic data sought to present a "total history" (histoire totale) of a region. Starting with statistical data reconstructed from parish records on regenerative behavior, these studies approached the broader questions of sexual attitudes. Perhaps the most ambitious quantitative study of the 1960s was Le Roy Ladurie's Peasants of Languedoc (1966). For long stretches this was a "history without people," a statistical analysis of the interrelation of long cycles of population growth and food prices informed by Malthusian assumptions. It appeared in the same year as his history of climate since the year 1000, reconstructed in part on the hard material evidence of tree rings.

But the Peasants of Languedoc paradoxically also marked a departure from a "history without people," a formulation of Le Roy Ladurie, toward a new history of consciousness. The history of consciousness always occupied an important place in Annales writings. Feudal Society, too, in basic ways had been a history of consciousness, in which a social system was analyzed in the ways in which it expressed itself in attitudes and outlooks. Philippe Aries, in his Centuries of Childhood (1960) and The Hour of Our Death (1981), explored the history of mentalities in early modern Europe, relying on literary and artistic sources. Thus a history of mentalities was launched among historians of the third Annales generation, preeminently Robert Mandrou, Jacques Le Goff, and Georges Duby, who explored popular attitudes in a social and economic context. Mandrou dealt with witchcraft and the early capitalistic mindset of the Fuggers, Le Goff and Duby with broad segments of medieval religious, commercial, and military life. Similarly, art and literature became important sources for the reconstruction of past mentalities, as they had been for Bloch. The fascination with the computer transformed the study of mentalities. Indeed, the "history of mentalities" as it was pursued by Pierre Chaunu and Michel Vovelle proceeded from the assumption that the reconstruction of mentalities was possible only on the basis of the analysis of mass data such as wills, which yielded information on views of death and religion.

In this turn to quantification, Annales historians did not point out new directions but took their place in what had become a broad movement in historical social science research. Quantification was not the child of the Annales, but it had a good basis in Annales traditions stressing the material basis of culture. These same traditions, however, in their anthropological approach also pointed in the direction of a history of consciousness, which was open to the existential, experiential aspects of life. The Peasants of Languedoc was a high point in quantitative history employing theoretical models. At the same time it contains a dramatic narrative reconstruction of the massacre of Catholics by Protestants in the Carneval of Romans in 1580, explained in part by demographic and economic pressures between a Protestant burgher class and the impoverished peasant and journeymen's classes, but fought out in highly aggressive symbolic actions with sexual overtones that could only be understood psychoanalytically. Demography and economics were now replaced or at least buttressed by semiotics and depth psychology. The pressure for a history of the existential experiences of concrete human beings, and the resulting critical attitude toward a social science history that concentrated on structures and processes, found expression in the discovery by Annales historians of the history of everyday life. Le Roy Ladurie's Peasants of Languedoc was followed only nine years later by his Montaillou (1975), which, on the basis of the testimony of the peasants of a village in Southern France who in the early fourteenth century were investigated by the Inquisition on the suspicion of heresy, tries to reconstruct the most intimate and personal details and thoughts of common people.

The third generation of Annales historians is now approaching or already in retirement, having participated in the general enthusiasm for hard quantitative social science and then, as in the case of Le Roy Ladurie, turned to historical anthropology. A fourth generation, including Jacques Revel, Andre Burguicre, and Bernard Lepetit, has noted the dissolution of a specific Annales orientation into a historiography that is going in a variety of directions. Indicative of the changes taking place in the Annales is the change in the title of the journal in 1994, the replacement of the old subtitle, Economies. Societes. Civilisation, by Histoire, Sciences Societies. While the former subtitle had stressed the comprehensive interests of the Annales, it had reflected a bias against political history. This bias also included a preference for simpler, premodern societies, in which ethnological methods were better applicable than in complex industrial or postindustrial ones.

It has in fact often been held against the Annales that they were unable to deal with modem times. Undoubtedly the focus of Annales historiography has been on the Middle Ages and the Ancien Regime, but the Annales have never entirely neglected the modern period. In the 1930s they devoted much space to the problems of modem industrial society in the large cities both in the developed and in the then still colonial world. Articles dealt with fascism, bolshevism, and the New Deal, but surprisingly not with Nazism. Bloch's The Strange Defeat was a critical coming to terms with the Third Republic. Several very important studies on nineteenth-century French society appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, including Adeline Daumard's La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815-1848, Jean Bouvier's Credit Lyonnais de 1863 a 1882, Charles Moraze's The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie, and Louis Chevalier, Classes labourieuses et classes dangereuses a Paris pendant la premicre moitie du XIXe siecle, the last outside the circle of the Annales. The primacy of economic and sociological categories in these works was replaced by the strongly anthropological concerns of Maurice Agulhon and Mona Ozouf, who examined the republican traditions of nineteenth-century France through its symbols. Over a period of several decades, Marc Ferro devoted himself to the twentieth century in his studies of World War I and of Bolshevik Russia. Francois Furet since the mid-1970s has turned to a history of the French Revolution that rejects Marxist categories of class and stresses politics, ideas, and culture.

What remains distinctive of Annales writings on the modern and contemporary world is their focus on culture and symbols to make modern political traditions comprehensible, as in the volumes of Les Lieux des memoires (I984-86), a collaborative work on the symbols, monuments, and shrines of modern French national consciousness. Although the Annales have remained a movement deeply rooted in French traditions of scholarship, perhaps no scholarly movement in the twentieth century has had such an impact internationally as a model for new paths of historical investigation of culture and society.

Their influence extended even to the socialist countries, where historians realized increasingly that the Annales offered much better access to material culture and to the everyday life of common people than did dogmatic Marxism. Thus in 1971 there appeared in the Soviet Union Aaron Gurevich's synthesis, Categories of Medieval Culture, which avoided Marxist language and schemes of history and built on the tradition of Marc Bloch. Nor was Gurevich alone; in the 1980s a small but significant circle of Annales historians began to form in the Soviet Union. In Poland, where basic works of Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel were translated as early as the 1970s, the impact of the Annales was even greater. The Annales in turn published contributions by the most important Polish economic and cultural historians. Undoubtedly contributing to their influence was the fact that Annales historians on the one hand were committed to what they understood as a scientific approach to the historical past, and on the other worked with conceptions of history and society that were much more comprehensive and open than those of other social science-oriented historiography in the West or of official Marxism in the East. The complexity and pluralism in their approaches, however, also gave rise to serious contradictions in their practice. Thus, as we saw, especially in the three decades after the end of World War II, many historians in the Annales circle were fascinated by social science approaches that promised firm, objective knowledge. Braudel's emphasis on long enduring structures and on the material foundations of culture were not free of this scientism. Yet, as we also saw, there was a firmly established tradition, extending from Bloch and Febvre to Le Goff, Duby, and to the present, that relied heavily on such sources as art, folklore, and customs and therefore encouraged more subtle, qualitative ways of thinking. The works of these historians helped to bridge the gap between history and literature. Their strongly anthropological note prevented the main currents of Annales historiography from succumbing to the scientism that characterized much social science thought. The Annales throughout their history have been remarkably free of confidence in the superior qualities of a Western civilization built on scientific and technological skills, and free of the concepts of modernization so central to much social science theory. On the contrary, they have focused intensely on a premodern world.

Perhaps this helps to explain the sudden interest internationally in the Annales after 1970, at a time when the basic assumptions of social science history began to be questioned.

©Історичний факультет Київського національного університету імені Тараса Шевченка
Кафедра історії Росії
30.04.2001