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Achievements of the Annales School

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert Forster
Robert Forster
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

In his presidential address last year Robert Gallman quoted a letter written by Lucien Febvre to Marc Bloch. Febvre and Bloch were the first editors of the journal Annales, and Febvre's exhortation on this occasion to break down the barriers among the social sciences was only one among many. Gallman's “Notes on the New Social History” would have pleased both French scholars, especially the allusion to verve and “trumpet call.” Today we are concerned with the role of economics in the galaxy of disciplines the Annales claim to unify in their “grand alliance.”

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 58 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1978

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References

1 Gallman, Robert E., “Some Notes on the New Social History,” this Journal, 37 (March 1977), 3–12Google Scholar.

2 See Febvre, Lucien, Combats pour l'histoire (Paris, 1953, 1965)Google Scholar and Bloch, Marc, Apologie pour l'histoire ou métier d'historien (Paris, 1949)Google Scholar. These are good examples of the “style” and élan of the first editors of the Annales.

3 The journal has had a number of titles since 1929: Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (1929–38), Annales d'histoire sociale (1939–41), Mélanges d'histoire sociale (1942–45), Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (1946–).

4 Two excellent reviews of the work of the “Annales School” are Aymard, Maurice, “The Annales and French Historiography (1929–72),” The Journal of European Economic History, 1 (1972), 491–511Google Scholar; and Hexter, J. H., “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien …,” The Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972), 480–539CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Lévy-Leboyer, Maurice, “La croissance économique en France au XIXe siècle,” Annales: E.S.C., 23 (1968), 788–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar; id., “La New Economic History,” Annales: E.S.C., 24 (1969), 1035–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Landes, David, “Statistics as a Source for the History of Economic Development in Western Europe: The Protostatistical Era,” in Lorwin, Val R. and Price, Jacob M., eds., The Dimensions of the Past: Materials, Problems, and Opportunities for Quantificative Work in History (New Haven, 1972), pp. 61–75Google Scholar. Landes says that French data are much more appropriate for microanalysis. Ibid., p. 74.

7 Bloch, Marc, Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française (Paris, 1951), 2 vols.Google Scholar; Braudel, Fernand, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949, 1966)Google Scholar, English trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1973), 2 vols.; Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Le territoire de l'historien (Paris, 1973), p. 168Google Scholar.

8 Even in the hard-nosed USA, “Economic Man” is losing some of his proclivity for profit maximization. See Silk, Leonard, “Economic Man Acquires a Soul,” New York Times: Business Section (July 17, 1977), p. 1Google Scholar.

9 Braudel, F., Écrits sur l'histoire (Paris, 1969), Pt. IIGoogle Scholar; Foreword to Stoianovich, Traian, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976)Google Scholar.

10 Cobb, Richard, A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (London, 1969), pp. 76–83Google Scholar.

11 Although the “school” is usually associated with the review, it also publishes monographs and collections of articles in the series Cahiers des Annales and the books of many of its members. “Membership,” however, must be understood as extending beyond direct affiliation with the École Pratique des Hautes Études, known for years as the “Sixth Section:” The École is a government-supported institute which organizes “research teams” on specific projects. Many, though not all, of the articles published in the Annales constitute progress reports on long-term research in the “historical sciences.” The institutional history of the Annales would be a long paper in itself. See Comité Français des Sciences Historiques, La Recherche historique en France de 1940 à 1965 (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar.

12 Stoianovich, Traian, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976)Google Scholar.

13 The problem of “historical explanation” can carry us far. For “explanation” relating to social theory, I have found these books especially helpful: Dumoulin, Jerome and Moisi, Dominque, eds., The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar; Leff, Gordon, History and Social Theory (U. of Alabama Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Tuma, Elias H., Economic History and the Social Sciences (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971)Google Scholar.

14 Simiand, François, “Méthode historique et science sociale,” Annales: E.S.C., 15 (1960), 83n.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Ibid., pp. 83–119.

16 Hobsbawm, E. J., “From Social History to the History of Society,” in Gilbert, Felix and Graubard, Stephen R., eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), p. 12Google Scholar.

17 Simiand, “Methode historique,” p. 104.

18 Rostow, Walt, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales: E.S.C., 14 (1959), 716CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Young, James Z. reviewing P. B. and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas of Biology (New York, 1977)Google Scholar, in The New York Review of Books (June 14, 1977), p. 26.

20 Braudel, Écrits sur l'histoire, p. 132 and passim; Hexter, “Fernand Braudel,” p. 518. As Hexter puts it, geographic features become “non-people persons.”

21 (Paris, 1949, 1966), English trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1973), 2 vols.

22 Hexter, “Fernand Braudel,” p. 531f.

23 Ibid., pp. 515–18. Braudel regards most of economic history as part of a “day-to-dayness” or the routine habits of the mass of human beings, including their material concerns, all within the framework of a pre-industrial society. See Braudel, Fernand, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, English trans. Ranum, Patricia M. (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 6–7Google Scholar and passim. See also Braudel, , Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (XVe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1967), I.Google Scholar

24 Bailyn, Bernard, “Braudel's Geo-History—A Reconsideration,” this Journal, 11 (Summer 1951), 277–82Google Scholar. Melvin Knight's review was more kind; he alluded to the “connective tissue” between social and natural phenomena in Braudel's work, a phrase that would please him. Knight, Melvin M., “The Geo-History of Fernand Braudel (Review Article),” this Journal, 10 (Nov. 1950), 212–16.Google Scholar

25 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1965), 2 vols.Google Scholar; English trans. John Day (Urbana, 1974). One might also add Huguette, andChaunu, Pierre, Séville et l'Atlantique (1504–1650) (Paris, 1955–60)Google Scholar, 11 vols. and annexes, and Goubert, Pierre, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (Paris, 1960), 2 vols.Google Scholar

26 Furet, François, “Le quantitatif en histoire,” in Le Goff, Jacques and Nora, Pierre, eds., Faire de l'histoire (Paris, 1974), I, p. 55Google Scholar; Daumard, Adeline, “Données économiques et histoire sociale,” Revue économique, 1 (Jan. 1965), 79–80Google Scholar. See Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 122–24.

27 See the collections Ports, routes, traffics and Les Hommes et la terre and the recent work on the family by Philippe Ariès and Jean-Louis Flandrin, and on death by Michel Vovelle and François Lebrun.

28 de Vries, Jan, “The Classics in Transition,” Reviews in European History, 1 (March 1975), 473.Google Scholar

29 de la Blache, Paul Vidal, Principes de géographie humaine (Paris, 1921)Google Scholar; Febvre, Lucien, La terre et l'évolution humaine (Paris, 1922)Google Scholar; see Houston, J. M., A Social Geography of Europe (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

30 Bloch, Les caractères originaux.

31 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Histoire du climat depuis l'an mil (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar; trans. Bray, Barbara, Times of Feast, Times of Famine (Garden City, 1971)Google Scholar.

32 The bibliography is enormous. For a start: André Burguière, “La Demographie,” in Le Goff and Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire, II, pp. 74–104; Pierre Goubert, “Recent Theories and Research in French Population between 1500 and 1700,” in Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C., eds., Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 457–73Google Scholar; Goubert, P., “Historical Demography and the Reinterpretation of Early Modern French History: A Research Review,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, I (Autumn 1970), 37–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the French review Population, especially since 1958.

33 Fleury, Michel and Henry, Louis, Nouveau manuel de dépouillement et de l'exploitation de l'état civil ancien (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar.

34 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l'historien, pp. 23–37. The Times Literary Supplement devoted several issues (April 7, July 28, Sept. 8, 1966) to the “New History”; among the articles was Le Roy Ladurie's “From Waterloo to Colyton”—from “battle history” to the peasant family, written with his characteristic élan. TLS (Sept. 8, 1966), pp. 791–92.

35 More accurately, family history “came into its own” when the quantitative data of the demographers were joined to the qualitative findings of the anthropologist. See Forster, Robert and Ranum, Orest, eds., Family and Society: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore, 1976)Google Scholar.

36 Anthony Wrigley made this comment in a seminar at Johns Hopkins University in 1975.

37 Labrousse, Ernest, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenues en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1932), 2 vols.Google Scholar; La Crise de l'économie française à la fin de l'Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris, 1944).

38 Landes, David, “The Statistical Study of French Crises,” this Journal, 10 (Nov. 1950), 195–211Google Scholar. Even so, the recognition has been very tentative. See Richet, Denis, “Croissance et blocages en France du XVe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: E.S.C., 23 (1968), 783CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Pierre Chaunu, “Conjoncture, structures, systèmes de civilisations,” in Bouvier, Jean, Chaunu, Pierre, et al. , Conjoncture économique, structures sociales: Hommage à Ernest Labrousse (Paris, 1974), pp. 21–35Google Scholar and passim.

40 Marczewski, Jean, “Buts et méthodes de l'histoire quantitative,” Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, No. 3 (1964), pp. 127–64.Google Scholar

41 Chaunu, Pierre, “Histoire quantitative ou histoire sérielle,” Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, No. 3 (1964), pp. 165–176Google Scholar; Vilar, Pierre, “Pour une meilleure compréhension entre économistes et historiens: Histoire quantitative ou économétrie retrospective?” Revue historique, 233 (1965), 293–312Google Scholar; Furet, “Le quantitatif en histoire,” p. 44; Richet, “Croissance et blocages,” pp. 783–84. Richet pointed to the dangers of “hypercriticism” of the “model.” More sympathetic to the new economic history have been Maurice Lévy-Leboyer and François Crouzet, but neither can be considered part of the Annales school.

42 Pierre Chaunu, “L'économie—dépassement et prospective,” in Faire de l'histoire, II, p. 62.

43 That “growth” has not always been the prime goal of French entrepreneurs themselves is discussed in Carter, Edward, Forster, Robert, and Moody, Joseph, eds., Entreprise and Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore, 1976)Google Scholar, essays by Charles Kindleberger, David Landes, Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, and Albert Boime.

44 Chaunu, Pierre, “Croissance ou développement (?): A Propos d'une véritable histoire économique de l'Amérique latine aux XIXe et XXe siècles,” Revue historique, 244 (1970), 359–60Google Scholar. Italics mine.

45 Chaunu, “L'économie,” pp. 66–67; “Un nouveau champ pour l'histoire sérielle, le quantitatif au troisième niveau,” Mélanges en l'honneur de Fernand Braudel (Toulouse, 1973), pp. 105–25.

46 More accurately, a “renewed emphasis” on anthropology, since it was Febvre, Lucien in 1941 who wrote “Comment reconstituer la vie affective d'autrefois? La sensibilité et l'histpire,” Combats pour l'histoire (Paris, 1965), pp. 221–38Google Scholar; and Le problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1942). For the “renewed emphasis,” see the papers by François Furet, Le Goff, Jacques, and Duby, Georges in Dumoulin, Jerôme and Moisi, Dominque, eds., The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist (Paris, 1973), pp. 197–227Google Scholar. For a concise description of the state of anthropology today see Fernandez, James W., “Anthropology, A Discipline about Man Himself,” New York Times: News of the Week in Review (July 17, 1977)Google Scholar.

47 This pattern of evolution seems apparent in the eight articles published in Forster, Robert and Ranum, Orest, eds., Rural Society in France: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar, Intro, and passim.

48 Daumard, Adeline and Furet, François, “Les archives notariales et la mécanographie,” Annales: E.S.C., 14 (1959), 676CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Furet, “Le quantitatif,” pp. 42–61.

49 See Appendix. Obviously, not all of these types of sources lend themselves to “measurement”in the same way. The data from parish registers can be computerized; those from newspaper affiches cannot, to my knowledge at least.

50 François Furet and Adeline Daumard, Structures et relations sociales à Paris au milieu du XVIIIesiècle (Paris, 1961); Furet, , “Pour une définition des classes inférieures à l'époque moderne”, Annales: E.S.C., 18 (1963), 459–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daumard, , “Une référence pour l'étude des sociétésurbaines en France aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: Projet de code socio-professional,” Revued'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 10 (1963), 185–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar, including the occupational codes for the 19th and 20th centuries (pp. 208–10) that have now become standard references for alloccupational analyses undertaken by the “school.” Furet's assertions about “quantification” asessential to “scientific” social history elicited the criticisms of Tirat, Jean-Yves, “Problèmes de méthode en histoire sociale,” Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 10 (1963), 211–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; a rejoinder by Furet and Daumard appeared in the same review in 1964 (pp. 293–98).

51 Vovelle, Michel, Piété baroque et déchristianisation: Attitudes provençales devant la mart au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar; Delumeau, Jean, “Au sujet de la déchristianisation,” Revued'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 22 (1975), 52–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Charles Tilly, “Quantification in History as Seen from France,” in Lorwin and Price, eds., The Dimensions of the Past, p. 114 and passim, pp. 94–125.

53 Ibid., pp. 114–16.

54 Jan de Vries, “The Classics in Transition,” pp. 473, 568–73, passim. While full of admirationfor the breadth of vision and the density of the source materials employed in the Annales articles under review, de Vries is less happy about “a sloppy use of elementary economic concepts” and what he calls a “conceptual gap” between the facts and the “grand themes” such as “crises,” “structures,” phases “A,” “B,” and so on.

55 Salmon, J. H. M. in a review of Braudel, Écrits sur l'histoire, in History and Theory, 10 (1971), 346–55Google Scholar, makes the point well: “The trouble is that Braudel has not given us a close analysis of the methodology of this dialectic. He has preferred, instead, to communicate both his enthusiasm about the kind of integral historical reality it will make intelligible and his faith in its role as a meeting place for the social sciences” (p. 354). In short, one must not confuse a panegyric with a “method.”

56 When François Furet talks about importing a “model” from contemporary demography, he simply means (as I read him) employing the procedures of a demographer; that is, charting changes in the composition of the family (age at marriage, number of children, rates of illegitimacy, birth and death, and so on) in order to discover or uncover a pattern of behavior over time. Furet says this is a “heuristic” process, a “building up of a body of data” from which ”discoveries” can be made, such as the unexpected fact that French peasant women married atthe late age of 28 in the seventeenth century. “Of course,” continues Furet, “the problem of causality remains unsolved.” The word “model” as used here—and too often throughout our profession, I fear—has nothing to do with “explanation,” at least as analytical philosophers define the word. This is not to say that the discovery and deployment of new data is not part of the historian's task. Furet, “Discussion,” in Dumoulin and Moisi, eds., The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist, p. 47.

57 William H. Sewell makes a useful distinction between “comparative history,” “comparative method,” and “comparative perspective.” The last, for example, suggests an awareness of other societies when studying one, but not an explicit use of other societies to test a hypothesis about one. Sewell observes that the comparative “awareness” of the Annales historians seems much keener regarding pre-industrial societies. “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory, 6 (1967), 208–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel were “masters” at comparative insights, though usually within a European context from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. See Bloch, Marc, “Toward a Comparative History of European Societies,” trans. Riemersma, J. C., in Lane, Frederic C. and Riemersma, Jelle C., eds., Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, Ill., 1953), pp. 494–521Google Scholar.

58 See the three volumes of Le Goff and Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire. I think it is significant that the word “method” is not employed in the subtitles of these recent volumes on “a new type of history” in France. The subtitles are: “New Problems,” “New Approaches,” and “New Objects.”

59 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Montaillou, village occitan, 1294–1394 (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar. I refer to the detailed field work and ethnographic realism of Oscar Lewis in Children of Sanchez (New York, 1961) rather than to his controversial notion of a “culture of poverty.” By contrast, Victor Turner is an “interpretive ethnographer” who attempts to understand what certain “ritual performances” mean to those who practice them, using them as “decisive keys” to how people think and feel about their environment and their own interrelations. These “feelings” are not apparent or obvious, but must be inferred through indirect evidence and semantic links, a “discourse” that for the traditional empiricist is very unsettling not only because of its complexity, but because it detects symbolism so ubiquitously. The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969), pp. 6, 42–43, and passim.

60 Roubin, Lucienne, “Male Space and Female Space within the Provençal Community,” in Forster, and Ranum, , eds., Rural Society, pp. 152–80Google Scholar; Agulhon, Maurice, La République au village (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar; Osouf, Mona, “La fête sous la Révolution française,” in Le Goff and Nora, Faire de l'histoire, III, pp. 256–77Google Scholar.

61 François Crouzet comments that “total history” is stimulating in many ways, “but it involves a serious risk of dispersion of efforts, of amateurism, and it has led in many cases to economic history being sacrificed, being treated as preliminary spade-work to higher pursuits, such as the study of social structures and mentalités—which are a French obsession. …” Crouzet, François, “The Economic History of Modem Europe,” this Journal, 31 (March 1971), 143 and passim, 135–52.Google Scholar

62 For many examples of this see Le Goff and Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire.

63 Bernard, R. J., “Peasant Diet in Eighteenth-Century Gévauden,” in Forster, Elborg and Forster, Robert, eds., European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times (New York, 1975), pp. 19–46Google Scholar; Jacques Depauw, “Illicit Sexual Activity and Society in Eighteenth-Century Nantes,” in Forster and Ranum, eds., Family and Society, pp. 145–91; Castan, Yves, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc, 1715–1780 (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar; Peter, Jean-Pierre, “Disease and the Sick at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in Forster, and Ranum, , eds., Biology of Man in History (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 81–124Google Scholar; Morel, Alain, “Power and Ideology in the Village Community of Picardy: Past and Present,” in Forster, and Ranum, , eds., Rural Society, pp. 107–25Google Scholar; Dominque Julia is completing a catalogue of the French sources of episcopal visitations.

64 This touches a debate of long standing among economic historians. Most relevant here are Redlich, Fritz, “New and Traditional Approaches to Economic History and Their Interdependence,”this Journal, 25 (Dec. 1965), 480–95Google Scholar; “Potentialities and Pitfalls in Economic History,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 6 (1968), 93–115Google Scholar; Leontief, Wassily, “Theoretical Assumptions and Nonobserved Facts,” American Economic Review, 61 (1971), 1–7Google Scholar.

65 Redlich, “Potentialities and Pitfalls,” pp. 93–94.

66 Furet, “Le quantitatif,” Faire de l'histoire, I, p. 44.

67 Raymond Aron writes that the historian often creates the illusion that he is “explaining”when he is in feet juxtaposing and aligning. R. Aron, “Postface,” in Dumoulin and Moisi, The Historian Between Ethnologist and Futurologist, p. 235. H. W. G. Runciman claims that the “general theory” of Talcott Parsons “rests on so blatant a confusion of explanation with taxonomyas to make it puzzling that it should be taken as seriously as it has.” He goes on to say, however, that there is “nothing wrong with taxonomy.” Runciman, , Sociology in its Place and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 16–17Google Scholar.

68 Furet, “History and Primitive Man,” in The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist, pp. 199–203; Le Goff, “The Historian and the Common Man,” ibid., pp. 204–15. Le Goff, however, believes there are some dangers in the “ethnographic point of view.” “Growth,” he writes, “may need to be removed from the cloak of Rostovian myth; but it is still a reality to be explained” (ibid., p. 215). See also Le Goff and Nora, Faire de l'histoire, I, p. xi; Ladurie, E. Le Roy, “L'Histoire immobile,” Annales: E.S.C., 29 (1974), 673–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar