Week 2: The Annales School and “Total History”

In some sense, that a radically new school of social history would emerge in France in the aftermath of the Great War is unsurprising. It is, after all, the country of la nouvelle cuisine, la nouvelle vague, and le nouveau roman. Throughout the ever-expanding discipline of history, however, to identify the intellectual genesis of la nouvelle histoire is to ask a more fundamental question about the origin and nature of new intellectual paradigms. Why should a particular way of thinking emerge in a particular place, and at a particular time? How do we even begin to understand a broader intellectual framework for histories of mentalities? To what extent were Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s ideas influenced by their common experience during the First World War? Most importantly, how can one even begin to write an intellectual history of the Annales throughout the interwar period?

While this movement has been conventionally seen as one school with three main generations of unified thinking, it ought to be characterized more as being united only in what it opposed—that is, as a deliberate but varied reaction against the traditional paradigm of Rankean history. The crisis of historical consciousness brought on by the Great War only hastened this development: for Bloch and Febvre, the overarching goal of the Annales was to harness the best academic minds of the time to “formons-nous, en étudiant le present, à une intelligence plus aiguë du passé”1 to prevent the horrors of yet another global war. In this sense, there could have been no better context for me to encounter both Bloch and Febvre. In the cold, stony halls of the Bodleian, it was the first time in my undergraduate days where I felt insulated from the incessant buzz of start-up and technical culture, a sort of atmospheric tinnitus that exists in droves at Stanford but is unheard of in Oxford (or England, for that matter). Here, I found at least in part a philosophical justification for my study of history that transcended the banalities of Santayana’s thesis, where questions of method and philosophies of time and space could be captured as “science in movement.”2

Here, both Bloch and Febvre harkened back to medieval mentalities in order to construct a geographical and philosophical explanation for the origins of a distinctly European political ideology. On face value, Bloch’s Royal Touch, Febvre’s Martin Luther, and Braudel’s ambitious history of the Mediterranean asked questions regarding a particular set of beliefs and practices—ranging from the occult to the political—from the medieval to the early modern periods. However, their overarching narrative was one that emphasized underlying structures that thrived upon the experience and thought of ordinary people, not of states or kings. Under this new paradigm, historians were required to intrude upon culture and society as a means of obtaining historical truth: for thinkers of the Annales school, structural historical narratives would never be absolute or objective, but would reveal a particular point of view with a visible historical narrator.

1 Febvre, Lucien. “L’histoire économique et la vie: leçons d’une exposition.” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. 4e année, N. 13, 1932: p. 2.2 Bloch, Historian’s Craft, p. 11.