The Annales School

By Erik Yorty

Some of the most innovative and influential historiographic changes in the twentieth-century came from a group of French historians known as the Annales School. The methods they introduced challenged traditional historical focus from prominent and powerful individuals and shed light on often overlooked or dismissed populations and cultures. To achieve this, they developed methodologies that examined evidence of broader beliefs, ideas, and attitudes of common everyday people. They also expanded the boundaries of the field of History by interacting and collaborating with other fields such as the Social Sciences. This new focus on cultural and economic relationships and not just a sterile political narrative was a move that they hoped would bring us closer to what they termed as Total History. Throughout the years the Annales School would continue to evolve and innovate, and distinctive eras of Annales scholars emerged.

The founding of the Annales School can be traced back to French historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch who began the Annales journal in 1929 as a response to the French doctrine of historical narrative that had a monopoly on what the official historical narratives were.(Green and Troup 1999) They believed that this was a flawed and biased system that catered to showing political elites in favorable lights and glossing over or ignoring altogether the histories of less prominent or privileged individuals. They also had the notion that explicitly focusing on political narratives left much to be desired by the way economics and culture interacted with those dynamics. They wanted to create an overview of how all of the political, social, and economic elements shaped one another and impacted the relationships within those systems. Febvre’s work included how the material available to a geographic region affected its social, cultural, and political development. The premise of Bloch’s studies centered around the material structures found within a society. Of interest to Bloch were the formation of hierarchies and how these relationships between elites and commoners evolved over time; he examined how the notion of the legitimization of power occurred within society and even became ritualized to reinforce it. The combining of these two theories and creating a system in which multiple theories and ideas serve to compliment and expand on one another would be the basis of the Annales School and its mission to create a Total History. As H.L. Wesseling put it, “the achievement of the Annales revolution has been that they exposed this anachronism and introduced the history of man instead of that of the state.” (Wesseling 1978)

In the 1940s a student of Febvre’s named Fernand Braudel would lead the wave of a new era of Annales Scholars with the publication of his book The Mediterranean. In this work Braudel branched out from the Rankean model of objective empirical research and developed an entirely new concept of ‘historical time.’(Green and Troup 1999) Braudel theorized that there were three distinct layers of historical time that explained ‘man in his relationship to the environment’ that Braudel refers to as durees. Each duree is associated with their respective histories and they all move at a different pace than one another. He analogized the ocean to help explain this process. The slowest moving of these three durees has to do with geographical time, which is understood to be ‘almost imperceptible’ as it changes over the course of hundreds of years. This type of change deals with things such as climate and geology. The middle layer of these historical durees is metaphoric of ‘swelling currents with slow but perceptible rhythms.’ These change more rapidly than the previous layer and occur in cycles of roughly ten to fifty years. The types of structures this middle duree is representative of include economic cycles, trade, population growth and decline, and prices of goods and services. The third duree is referred to as ‘the ephemera of history’ and is likened to the crests of foam of an ocean carried by the tides of history’s currents.(Green and Troup 1999) This third duree mainly is concerned with traditional political history and diplomatic narratives that dominated the field up until the creation of the Annales School. Braudel highlighted this type of fast moving change in his book The Mediterranean by exemplifying the battle of Lepanto in 1571 which ended Turkish dominance in the Mediterranean. Braudel likened this event to “delusive smoke that does not last” and that it should not preoccupy historians more than the bigger picture of the long duree. (Popkin 2016) From this model Braudel is making a firm statement that by focusing only on the very surface of this ocean of history we are missing the vast expanse of knowledge and reality of the true scope of history. Although Braudel had used these three durees to help illustrate his idea of historical time, he would later assert that these were not the only durees, but rather there were many others. He emphasized the concept of combining as many of these durees as possible in an effort to get closer to the goal of Total History.

Followers of Braudel and his second wave of Annales School would come into their own during the 1960s and expand upon his ideas. These scholars would focus of the school in a new direction and take advantage of technological advances to further research in the field of quantitative history. These historians recognized the computer as a valuable tool to further the studies of statistics on levels never before as efficient. They also took the innovative approach of using public records, such as financial and population registries, as historical sources that can be used to identify patterns. One such notable Annales historian to implement these methods was Ernest Labrousse, who established a historical model centered on three nodes—economic, social and cultural—inventing the quantitative history sometimes now called “cliometrics.” Through these nodes he added statistical evidence to more traditional historical models using the same themes such as narrative accounts and individual witnesses. Notable among his works is his book Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (“Sketch of the movement of prices and revenues in France during the 18th century”, 1932). From this statistical data analysis, the Annales historians hoped to be able to identify what they referred to as historical problems.(Green and Troup 1999) This was a fundamental shift away from the emphasis of total history of the previous Annales school eras. Through these newly available methods and technologies Annales historians hoped to be able to collaborate their research in a problem-solving approach to history. Using computerized data Annales historians were able to identify causal factors to historical changes and events and collaborate large groups of scholars to tackle the problem. This was a huge shift in the mission of the Annales School and history as a whole, creating an entirely new concept of what the mission of a historian is.

In the 1970s the Annales School would see another major paradigm shift and the dawning of a third distinctive era. In an effort to rehumanize the people it studies, less emphasis was placed on the mere quantitative value of the research and more was placed on the importance of the roles of individuals. Some had begun to draw parallels of the heavy use of quantitative research and likened it to the narrowmindedness of the positivist history the Annales had worked hard to move away from. This new shift was characterized as the study of mentalites.(Green and Troup 1999) The basis of this concept was to examine the views and attitudes of everyday people on a range of topics such as sex, love, religion, work, money, gender, and education to name a few. From the information gained Annales historians hoped to be able to gain better context and insight to the inner workings and dynamics of the societies in which these lay people lived. Georges Duby studied primary sources such as art and architecture to highlight how the changes in them in the medieval period were directly correlated to the effects of urbanization and cultural expansion that occurred during that period. He argued that as people’s attitudes to these changing dynamics shifted, so too did the expressions of art and architecture of the times.(Green and Troup 1999) While the methods and ideas of the Annales School had evolved greatly from its beginnings during the 1970s, it still retained elements of the previous eras and there remained Annales scholars who revitalized and expanded on the ideas of Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel.

Although the influence and innovation of the Annales School is undebatable, they have not been without their critics over the years. One of the most common of these criticisms is the lack of a meta-narrative for historical change. (Green and Troup 1999) The basis for this criticism is that while the Annales have been well adapted to explaining and studying pre-industrial societies, they are less suited to the more rapid and fast paced changes we see in modern society. There also remains tensions within the school itself as to the direction and focus, mentalities or quantification. The current state of the Annales School is not as clearly defined as previous iterations, but during the 1990s onward it appears that there is an ongoing shift that could result in yet another paradigm shift and a fourth distinct era. One thing that is clear however, is that the legacy of the Annales School and the contributions they have made to the study of history over the course of the twentieth century and into the current day have been groundbreaking and revolutionary. They have laid the groundwork for new generations to continue their work towards a Total History and to use the tools and methods they mapped out to identify causes of historical problems and take an active role in helping solve them. Beyond all of these direct contributions, the Annales School legacy may be even more apparent in it’s indirect influence of Historiographical thought in the twentieth century and beyond. Their influences can be seen in the advent of Post-Colonialists, Feminist Histories, and Post-Modernist theories that are prevalent in many of today’s discussions.

Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. 1999. The Houses of History : A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory. New York : New York University Press, 1999.

Ousselin, Edward. 2016. “La France En Chiffres: De 1870 à Nos Jours.” French Studies 70 (2): 298.1-298. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knw039.

Wesseling, H. L. 1978. “The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary History.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 1 (3/4): 185–94.

Harsgor, Michael. 1978. “Total History: The Annales School.” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1): 1–13.

The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014. By PETER BURKE. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. xvi + 198 pp.

Popkin, Jeremy D. 2016. From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography. New York ; Oxford University Press.