Social Science Quarterly, Sept
1992 v73 n3 pp. 708-9
Peter BURKE. The French Historical
Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991. 152 pages. $9.95 paper.
This slim volume by a respected
historian concerns the possibly revolutionary impact on French and
Western
historical scholarship of the Annales
school in France. While
probably failing to document any real revolution in the writing or
understanding of history, it does tell us a great deal about the
historical
discipline in France and the proclivity of its
scholars to seek to appropriate the methods and accomplishments of the
social
sciences for themselves.
The notion that
between the world wars a group of French historians open to the
insights and
methods of the social sciences declared war on traditional narrative
and
largely political history and through the journal Annales made French historical
scholarship
preeminent depends in large part on denigrating the historical
accomplishments
of earlier French scholars. The interwar leaders of the movement,
Lucien Febvre
and Marc Bloch, and the post-World War II inheritor of their position,
Fernand Braudel,
have indeed been some of the most prominent historians of France in
our century. Bloch
successfully worked on problems of feudalism and religious psychology
in French
life over a long period of time (la
longue durée) and
within a comparative framework; he particularly used the insights of
psychology
and sociology. Febvre for his part was influential in probing the
complexities
in writing a social history of religious belief, utilizing linguistics
and
psychology, in trying to understand the appeals of Protestantism in the
sixteenth century and the fundamental world view of that age. Perhaps
his
greatest contribution was the creation of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique
des Hautes Etudes in 1947, which became the means of delivering
the French
historical establishment into the hands of the Annales school. It was, as Burke
writes,
the arrival of heretics to a position of leadership over a new
historical
orthodoxy.
Perhaps the greatest
leader of the Annales
school was Fernand
Braudel and his most impressive work the book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II. In Braudel we have a historian for whom
geography, climate, economics,
and material culture generally exert a deterministic force which
individuals
highly or lowly placed resist without hope, the analytical discussion
of which
relegates the history of persons and events to no more than an
appendix. Here
history fully accepts and integrates (could one even say surrenders
fully to?)
the methods of the social sciences. Braudel's influence has remained
strong in France and elsewhere, even where
individual scholars violate as much as they accept his standards of
historical
scholarship. Indeed, one can claim to be an annaliste with or against the
ideology of Marx, with or without an
interest in mentalites,
even with or
without a preference for structure and the longue duree over politics and
events. It is now almost enough
to declare adherence to the school to be given carte blanche to do
whatever one
wishes. The marks of orthodoxy are faint and getting fainter as the new
Annales "religion" gets older,
something predicted by Anatole Franc-e-that new religions claim
victims more ferociously than old religions.
What should social
scientists conclude from this "revolution" in history? While most of
the innovations recommended and pioneered by the Annales school had actually
already been
suggested by a number of other earlier scholars, the intense sense of
mission
and the feeling of solidarity against an allegedly inflexible and
reactionary
disciplinary establishment in the Sorbonne and elsewhere gave the
members of
the Annales school the zeal and evangelical
drive to propagandize effectively and tirelessly in favor of their
outlook and
activities--so much so that history as a result now refuses to be
confined to
any narrow topic, time frame, or method. It has taken the whole world
of human
and even inorganic life into its purview and will use any and all
methods of
research and exposition. History has gained immensely from the fervor
of its
somewhat pretentious Annales partisans,
and social scientists need no longer disdain the work of historians.
Nevertheless, historians remain a very peculiar sort of social
scientist and an
odd type of humanistic scholar as well. Which is what they should be.
That they
have become truly catholic in outlook and method may or may not make
them more
acceptable to social scientists. It may be that they have attempted to
organize
all the social sciences under the imperial aegis of historians, not
something
likely to be easily appreciated or tolerated.
Finally, the French again have the
final word: le
plus sa change.... There was probably less in this "historical
revolution" than
meets the eye.
Norman
RAVITCH, University of California, Riverside