Canadian Journal of History
April 1992 v27 n1 p154(3)
The French Historical Revolution. The
Annales
School,
1929-89
(paper)., by Peter Burke. Stanford,
California, Stanford University
Press, 1990. vii, 152 pp. $27.50 U.S. (cloth); $9.95 U.S.
No twentieth-century
historiographical tradition has received more attention, or more
publicity,
than that associated with the French periodical, Annales, founded
in
1929. There are reasons other than the obvious importance of the
Annales
contribution
to the discipline which explain why this new account by Peter Burke is
but the
latest in a long line of books, articles, and colloquia devoted to
celebrating Annales
historians' contribution to widening horizons and renewing methods.
One is
that from the combative Lucien Febvre onwards historians associated
with the
review have frequently but not always - Marc Bloch is a notable
exception -
aggressively proclaimed themselves to be explorers of new frontiers.
Thus the La
nouvelle histoire, a dictionary on new methods which Jacques Le
Goff and
others published in 1978. unabashedly proclaimed that there existed a
new
history and that it was a French invention. More recently, the death of
Fernand
Braudel in 1985, the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the
review and
perhaps a growing realization, in France and elsewhere, that Paris was
losing
what pre-eminence in historical research it had previously enjoyed,
gave rise
to another spate of publications, though this time some were more
nostalgic in
tone, like the collection of autobiographies, appropriately titled
Essais
d'ego-histoire,
that Pierre Nora edited in 1987. Foreign admirers of the dominant
current
in French historiography have also zealously propagated the word in
books and
articles that praise the achievements of the Annales "school."
It must therefore be
asked whether
it is useful to have yet another book dealing with the Annales and
written by a foreign sympathizer, this time by someone who has long
described
himself as a fellow-traveller and is inevitably familiar with the
advantages
enjoyed by scholars at 54 boulevard Raspail in Paris. It has to be
said,
indeed, that his discussion of what
he terms the French historical revolution - "la nouvelle histoire, he
writes, is at least as famous, as French, and as controversial as la
nouvelle
cuisine" - adds little to what we already know. This does not
mean,
though, that his analysis is not useful. Both graduate and
undergraduate
students will appreciate his account for its succinctness and its
readability -
though they may at times feel bombarded by the rapid succession of
names and
books that fill his pages - as well as for his aim to present a history
of the
movement as a whole. They will also be grateful for his clear
chronological
approach, organized around three generations of scholars, the first
being that
of Bloch and Febvre, the second dominated by Fernand Braudel, the third
those
who followed in his large footsteps from the 1970s onward. His study
enjoys
still other qualities Burke refuses to accept stereotypical images of
the main
thrusts of the early Annales critique of the dominant mode of
historical
research and readily recognizes that others outside France, and
especially in Germany and the United States, were already making
similar
criticisms and proposing new directions
that historians might explore. He even makes some effort to recognize
the
limits to what la nouvelle
histoire achieved,
and to determine not just the strengths but also the weaknesses of the
major
works by Annales historians
that he examines.
Even if we bear in mind
that the purpose of this study is to offer only a general account of
Annales historiography for
historians
not familiar with the movement and scholars in other disciplines, this
is
nevertheless a flawed book. It suffers three principal weaknesses. One
is that
Burke fails to sufficiently stress the limits to what Annales
historians achieved
before the
1970s: the ideas that did not prove fruitful, the domains like
economic, urban,
or women's history, the periods like the later modern, and all too
often the
world beyond the Hexagon, where their contributions were much more
slender. A
second is that his discussion of the third generation and its
achievements in
the last twenty years is the least convincing part of his study. He has
to admit
that in the period from the 1970s French historians are no longer the
lone
pioneers they once might have been and that many of them have been
influenced
by American historians and social scientists. He even comes close to
admitting
(pp. 106-107) that the Annales
movement
is over. It is indeed clear that recent decades have been marked by an
increasing eclecticism in the methodological orientations of Annales
historians and a
toning down in
their opposition to political history and to the narrative and
biographical
genres. It may well be, then that by the seventies the Annales moment
had passed
and that
Burke's dense analysis of recent works by French historians only holds
together
thanks only to a sleight of hand: his narrow emphasis on historical
anthropology
and his inclusion within the Annales
orbit
of a number of highprofile scholars, many of whom developed either
independently or at the margin of the Maison
des sciences de l'homme and by ignoring others. He thus
includes
historians marginal to the Annales,
such
as Philippe Aries, Maurice Agulhon and Michel Vovelle, but passes over
others,
like Jean-Pierre Boussou Yves Lequin, or Louis Bergeron. The
criteria Burke
adopts for inclusion/exclusion are not at all evident to this
reviewer.
The most serious
drawback to Burke's study, however, is the methodology he adopts to
analyse the Annales movement.
He studies
historians whose originality lay not only in their openness toward
other social
sciences and willingness to explore new territories but in their
opposition to
dominant research modes - to studying elites and the nation state,
individuals
and the short term. Yet he approaches them by studying individuals and
their
principal publications. He refrains from analyzing the institutional
and
intellectual milieu, and, just as strangely given the nature of French
academic
and intellectual life, refuses to discuss politics and power. He even
fails to
put French historiography in the wider context of the historiographical
revolution that has affected the discipline everywhere since the 1950s.
Here,
then, is an opportunity missed to write une
nouvelle historiographie of la nouvelle
historie. In a well-known
metaphor, Le Roy Ladurie once divided historians into the truffle
hunters, who
scratch at the surface of events in search of gastronomic delights
and the
parachutists, who jump from great heights and are able to discern wide
patterns in landscapes as
they float
down to earth. Burke has sniffed around familiar French - and
especially Mediterranean - oak trees when it
might have
been hoped that the time had come to adopt a more Olympian vantage
point. Until
a more detached and penetrating study is made, students might do well
to
compare Burke's account with the sometimes too critical but always
stimulating
discussions of Annales
history
made by
French outsiders: Herve Coutau-Begarie, Le phenomene nouvelle
histoire (Paris, 1983) and
Marie-Claude Bartholy
and Jean-Pierre Despin, Le passe humain:
histoire (Paris, 1986).
Universite
Laval Barrie M.
Ratcliffe