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