HI 323 Historiography Charles Walton Les Annales A

HI 323 Historiography Charles Walton Les Annales

‘A week is a long time in politics’ Harold Wilson(1964)

Zhou Enlai on the impact of the French Revolution of 1789‘it's too soon to tell’ (c. 1971)

Annales School The basics 1. It’s French 2. It spanned most of 20 th century 3. It came in three waves

The Annales at their peak • 1950 s/1970 s under Fernand Braudel & Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie • Influential in France and internationally, esp. in US from 1970 s onward • Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949 French/1972 -3 English) makes a splash • Influence has waned but still significant

Peter Burke on the Annales: • • • ‘The substitution of a problem-orientated analytical history for a traditional narrative of events’ ‘The history of the whole range of human activities in the place of a mainly political history’ ‘Collaboration with other disciplines’ such as geography, sociology, economics and anthropology

Marc Bloch (1886 -1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878 -1956) founded the journal Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale in 1929

The First Wave • Rejected narrow political history • Interdisciplinary – link study of the past with approaches and methods of the social sciences • Breaking down chronological barriers • How unique? Influence of other historians (Berr), sociologists (Durkheim) and geographers (Vidal de la Blache)

The early years • Importance of place – University of Strasbourg (part of France after WWI) • Desire to avoid overtly political (thus controversial) history • Love-hate relationship with sociology (sociological models: ‘leaky vessels’ for Bloch) • Influence of World War One and Marxist concerns – respect for peasants and workers (soldiers); respect for ordinary individuals • Competition with Germany – desire to provide alternative to Rankean and nationalist history

Marc Bloch’s histories • The Royal Touch (1924)- influence of Durkheim and anthropology; examined “irrational” beliefs to explore kingship and power in Britain and France • French Rural History (1931) – long term patterns; stresses work of peasants rather than elites; use of aerial photographs; moves backwards in time (genealogy) • Feudal Society (1939) – a comparative historical sociology of Europe c. 900 -1300, avoiding any political narrative or discussion of individual kings.

• long view - centuries • problem focused • religious psychology • history of mentalités (practices, unconscious mental structures) • comparative history (France, Britain) Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (1924) About the custom of royals curing scrofula by laying hands on infected subjects Influenced by sociologist Emile Durkheim ( 1858 -1917), who focused not on individual or individual psychology but on collective phenomena • Suicide (1897) • The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

- Looked at aerial photos of French countryside - Looked for historical reasons for different land patterns - Materialism: looked at forces and relations of production: certain technology (the heavy plow) worked best in Northern France due to political, environmental and socio-cultural factors. - Non-Marxist materialism: No base vs. superstructure; Both mattered.

1942/3 1939/40 1940

Strange Defeat, 1940 • How did France collapse so quickly? • ‘Statement of evidence’: his commitment to empiricism • Immediate AND long-term causes (made his career looking at long-term; had to struggle to grasp short-term) • Crisis of conscience: Durkheimian ‘collective culture’ fails to capture the anguish of individual responsibility: part III of book > ‘A Frenchman examines his conscience’

Strange Defeat • ‘If we turn back on ourselves we shall be lost. Salvation can be ours only on condition that we set our brains to work with a will, in order that we may know more fully, and get our imaginations moving to a quicker tempo. ’

Question • Was Bloch moving away from his own school? • Was Strange Defeat an attempt to re-incorporate individual and collective agency into an analytical framework that had treated mentalités (collective mental structures) as resistant to change, resistant to sudden bursts of individual or collective will? If not, why bother joining the Resistance (as he did, and was killed for it)?

• ‘In the vast drag of submarine swells, so cosmic as to appear irreversible, of what avail were the struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors? To think otherwise would be to falsify history’. • History must look at structures; ‘now, at last, it struggles to penetrate beneath the mere surface of actions’. • Debt to sociology and commitment to interdisciplinarity – ‘Long have we worked for a wider more human history’. BUT ‘Sociological laws are frail vessels that disintegrate as they sail. ’ • Historian should understand, not judge (Rankean attitude) – but what about the politics of one’s own time? Should historians ignore them? How can one not judge in the face of Nazism? Last book, written while fighting in the Resistance against Nazism • Denial of individual agency in favour of the collective. Does this lead to ethical paralysis?

Lucien Febvre • Phd thesis: Franche-comté in the time of Philippe II – Published in 1912 – Begins with land, then institutions, economy, social relations, ending with the rule of Philippe II (late 12 th century) – Political narrative at end of story

François Rabelais (? -1553) The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel 1937

Febvre – Problem of Unbelief About a 16 th century French poet, Rabelais Funny story about giants -- critical of religion. So was Rabelais an atheist? ‘Impossible!’ says Febvre Categories of ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief’ didn’t exist Book about mentalités: the senses, practice, experience He was wrong, it turns out, but he asked influential questions and made historians more aware of potential anachronism in their analyses… we have to understand different states of mind (and not just of elites) to make sense of past worlds… • Legacies: cultural history (anthropological); psychological histories, history of emotions (recent). • • •

The Second Wave (post-WWII) Dominates the field for decades Fernand Braudel, 1902 -1985

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1923 -1949)

Braudel’s Mediterranean… • …in the Age of Philip II (1949) – ‘Age of’ is the key here, not King Philip II • Interdisciplinary • Vast in scope – Histoire totale! – Region, sea – Sea as real but also historical metaphor – How people engage with environment – Society, culture, economy – Last part of book: the reign of Philip II

Braudel and the Annales way • Large-scale – the sea is at the centre of the book rather than an individual • Beyond Europe – global, comparative • Interdisciplinary, influence of geography particularly strong • Attempt to write a ‘total history’

Braudel’s conception of time • Built on work of Febvre and Bloch • Time was not homogeneous: different rhythms – geographical, economic, social, cultural, political • The political timeframe was the least important: statesmen ‘more acted upon than actors’ – froth on top of the crest of waves pulled and pushed by tides. The tides mattered most to Braudel.

Three Dimensions of Time 1. 2. 3. ‘The deep’/structures (Part I of book): geographical structures and climate in which humans live. Change is slow, only visible over the longue durée (the long run) ‘Conjonctures’ (Part II): medium term trends (5, 10, 50 years) that combine in historically important ways: legal systems, economic cycles. A middle term between longue-durée structures and events ‘L’histoire événementielle’ (Part III): history of events (seen as superficial by Annalistes at the time)

Braudel on structures and longue durée ‘To historians like ourselves, while structure does of course mean an assembly of parts, a framework, it signifies more particularly a reality which survives through long periods of time and is only slowly eroded… all structures act both as foundations and obstacles. ’ ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Long Term’, Social Science Information 9: 1 (1970), 151

Braudel on the Environment: Part One is ‘devoted to a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles. I could not neglect this almost timeless history, the story of man’s contact with the inanimate. ’

Ernst Labrousse: a fellow traveller of the Annales • Labrousse’s statistical studies-praised by Braudel • Taught at Sorbonne from 1940 s onward • The French Economic Crisis at the End of the Old Regime (1943) – Looked at long, medium and short term economic trends to explain socioeconomic origins of the French Revolution – a conjoncture historian – ‘Tout s’explique par la courbe!’ – ‘The curve explains everything!’ the French Revolution could be explained by economic curves plotting the prices of land rents, bread and taxes. Everyone had economic reasons to be angry in 1789!

How to historically situate the longue durée approach to history? • Braudel was a prisoner of war in Germany in World War II – desire to relativize a tragic present – to transcend it by viewing history as a great ocean of time. • Offered a historical contrast to the present (1950 s 1960 s), which underwent abrupt modernisation. Anxieties about vertiginous change were soothed by the seemingly eternal seas of ‘sociétés immobiles’ – i. e. , ‘unchanging societies’

How to historically situate the longue durée approach to history? (My speculation here) • And yet, the perspective which put the environment and technologies at the core (de-centring the human ethical agent) also heightened the historical significance of technological modernisation, which was all the rage in the 1950 s-1970 s (e. g. Third World ‘modernisation’ programmes) • Opposite of Frankfurt School, which rejected the cold, scientific materialism and technological modernisation of the Enlightenment. Next to Braudel’s unchanging societies, one could only marvel at modernisation.

Criticism of Braudel • Mediterranean influenced environmental historians, but they have shown that nature is far more fluid and historical than Braudel suggested. • Braudel too descriptive and his work lacks a central problem - ‘a kaleidoscopic jumble’(Simon Kinser); disconnected rooms of a mansion • Not enough attention to institutions and ideas • Lots of answers but to what questions? (much less ‘problem focused’ than wave 1 and 3 of the Annales)

The Third Wave • Le Roy Ladurie – continued and developed the Annaliste approach

History of mentalities • Roots in Bloch and Febrve’s work on cultural representations • Engages with anthropology • Focus on collective (not individual) beliefs/assumptions • Mentalities -- the (often unconscious) mental structures that influence (determine? ) action

3 rd Wave: Return to mentalités Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie • The Peasants of Languedoc (1966) • ‘Economic life of peasants in southern France between late medieval and early modern period, 14 th-18 th centuries • ‘Histoire immobile’ (unchanging history), but more emphasis on culture and economy than environment. • Juicy factoid (literally): average peasant in Languedoc drank between 1. 5 and 2. 5 litres of wine daily in 1480. • Wine consumption rates would go down… the southern Gaulois could handle their alcohol better than the Frankish northerners! • Montaillou (1975) • • Medieval town destroyed by feuds and religious strife Narrower time period: thirty years (not millenia!) Still ‘histoire totale’ with demography, attitudes, beliefs, cosmology, politics But focused on particular individuals (new). Aim to uncover the texture of the town in specific historical moments… move towards micro-history, even as it was ‘total history’

Philippe Ariès third wave Annales • ‘Sunday historian’ • Day job: bureaucrat for fruit importing • Recognized earlier by Anglo. American historians, not French… • Series editor of French publisher: Plon • Not recognized as professional historian in France until 1978 at age of 64. • Hired by EHESS (Annales research institution)

Ariès – Children (1960), death (1970 s)

Pioneers the history of childhood and death • Childhood – Socially constructed – Before modern times, child was not considered a person and integral part of family until a certain age… result of high mortality rate – Proved wrong BUT pioneering in its approach • Death – Socially constructed – How societies ‘tame’ death ritually – longue durée – Recent changes: modern societies remove death from visible daily life

Western Attitudes Towards Death Book opens: ‘‘The new behavioral sciences and linguistics have introduced the notions of diachrony and synchrony, which will perhaps be helpful to us historians. Since many factors relating to the mentality, or turn of mind, are long term, the attitude toward death may appear almost static over very long periods of time. It appears to be a-chronic. And yet, at certain moments, changes occur, usually slow and unnoticed changes, but sometimes, as today, more rapid and perceptible ones. The difficulty for the historian lies in being sensitive to changes, but yet not being obsessed by them to the point of forgetting the great forces of inertia which reduce the real impact of innovations. ’ Philippe Ariès, 1974

Plus ça change, Plus c’est la même chose! The more things change, The more they stay the same…

Ariès on death • http: //www. azquotes. com/picturequotes/quote-death-must-simply-become-the -discreet-but-dignified-exit-of-a-peacefulperson-from-a-philippe-aries-124 -40 -25. jpg

1970 s and 1980 s New approach or revival of Bloch/Febvre? • Women historians arrive on the Annales scene: Arlette Farge, Michele Perrot • Shift away from quantification (wave 2) towards ‘mentalités’ again (wave 1) • Micro-history, history of minorities, women, children – not all white-male elite history • Influence of cultural anthropology: symbols and semiotics (i. e. , history of meanings)

Influence of Annales beyond France Became globally influential in 1960 s-1970 s. Why? – French funding for research was generous. (Les Trente glorieuses – economic boom in these years) – US funding (Ford, Rockefeller), especially of the 6 th section of the École pratique des hautes études, which became the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, directed by Braudel – International academic exchanges increase (think Erasmus programs but global and professors) – Translations into other languages

Chief legacies • History and social sciences – self-conscious interdisciplinarity, feeds into ‘cultural history’ (drawing on sociology, anthropology, critical theory) • ‘Longue durée’/ ‘total history’. These concepts are making a comeback with ‘deep history’ and ‘big data’ • From narrative political history to culture (practices, mentalités – but not intellectual history…)

Annales in perspective • 1 st wave – desire to avoid politics while acknowledging ordinary workers (a somewhat Marxist sentiment but also desire to remain neutral in troubled times) • 2 nd wave – dominated by former communist/socialists who rejected Marxism. Non-dialectical in approach. Shift from modes of production (Marx) to modes of exchange (Braudel)… stress on market integration (a good thing for Braudel), not capitalist exploitation of workers and peasants (as Marxists would emphasise)

Origins of Longue durée (joke on Fernand Braudel)