Annales School

Eamon O’Flaherty, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

The Annales group of historians, including the founders of the journal Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, were responsible for
a historiographical revolution, which challenged and then transformed historical writing in France and, from the 1970s
onwards, had an international impact. The germ of the Annales challenge to established historiography in France grew out of
a commitment by the founders to a widening of the field of historical research and an engagement with the human sciences.
Over three generations between the 1960s and the end of the century, Annales moved through a number of clearly definable
phases during which it continued to foster methodological innovation and multidisciplinary engagement, while remaining
committed to a rigorous historical approach to evidence.

I historical time and periodization. Again, the reevaluation

The historiographical revolution that took place in France
between the 1930s and the 1960s is indelibly associated with
the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, founded in
Strasbourg in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The
journal quickly moved its base to Paris and continued publi-
cation until 1939. During the war and the occupation of
France, it appeared as Annales d’histoire sociale and Mélanges
d’histoire sociale. It was effectively refounded in 1944 as Annales:
histoires, sociétés, civilizations and, since 1994 has been titled
Annales: histoire, sciences sociales. Throughout this period, the
journal has been the center of a movement in historical writing,
which sought to transform history by opening it up to the
concepts and developments in other branches of the human
sciences, including geography, sociology, and anthropology. At
the core of the wide variety of practices and approaches asso-
ciated with the Annales school was a view of history, which
sought the widest possible perspective on historical change.
This necessitated a broad understanding of the complex range
of factors, which contribute to historical change including
psychological, cultural, economic, and environmental factors.
The question of human agency is central to this concern, but in
the Annales tradition, human agency could only be understood
by studying the collective elements in human consciousness
and activity, against which any analysis of individual action
needed to be set. A corollary of this was a broadening of the
chronological and methodological approach to historical
research. To some extent, this involved the expansion of the
subject matter of historical enquiry and a new approach to the
subject matter of historical research. A historical practice
primarily concerned with the study of power and power elites
gave way to a new emphasis on hitherto neglected areas of
historical human experience, where the newer developments in
other areas of the human sciences in the early twentieth century
seemed to offer far more interesting and incisive perspectives.
Thus, a reformulation of the domain of historical research and
a new emphasis on research as collective as well as an indi-
vidual procedure, focused on clearly identified problems and
themes, was a central part of the methodology of the school.
But as well as opening the field up to engagement with a variety
of new approaches, the Annales also brought about an impor-
tant change in the way in which historians conceived of
of the role of human agency was central here, particularly given
the way in which the successive generations associated with
the journal expanded the chronological limits of historical
study to evaluate phenomena and processes from the
perspective of longer-term changes, which transcended indi-
vidual consciousness or agency. In seeking to understand
deep-seated processes behind historical change, the Annales
historians were interested in identifying underlying structures,
which shaped profound change in human societies in ways
that were invisible to individual human agents or to contem-
porary historical actors. This concern with deep structures was
partly shaped by the engagement with economic history and
the long-term cycles identifiable from the serial study of
economic data such as prices. The result of these latter devel-
opments brought quantitative methods to the center of the
Annales in the middle decades of the twentieth century, iden-
tifiable with the leadership of Ernest Labrousse and Fernand
Braudel. The emphasis on quantitative methods, serial history,
and the study of deep underlying structures of change and
immobility over long periods of time represented an evolution
from the concerns of Febvre and Bloch in the first generation,
and also coincided with the dominance of the school in the
French historical establishment. The dominance of economic
and statistical approaches, over the psychological and cultural
elements of the initial program, revealed an implicit tension
between different views of what was primary and secondary in
terms of historical causation and social history. The study of
mentality, conceived in the widest sense as a history of
collective representations and of the evolution of individual
consciousness in a social and historical context, had been
present from the beginning as a core part of the Annales
program, however overshadowed by quantitative history. From
the 1960s, however the inclusiveness of the totalizing
approach, characteristic of the school’s founders, and of its
ambitions in the postwar era, was clearly still producing
a constructive engagement between the study of physical and
environmental structures and the analysis of cultural forms and
collective mentalities. A variety of regional studies, most
famously Le Roy Ladurie’s on Languedoc, bore witness to
a further shift in the development of the school. To some
extent, this reflected the long-standing commitment to the
project of a ‘total history,’ in which even the most austere

708 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.61146-7

structural and quantitative methodologies were approached in
the belief that these were ultimately a basis for the under-
standing of the whole of human experience, including mental
and cultural experiences and structures, rather than a form of
determinism. Thus, history could be conceived as manifesting
itself at a variety of levels, ‘from the cellar to the attic,’ i.e., from
fundamental environmental, and economic constraints to the
quintessentially human forms of mental and social organiza-
tion and, ultimately collective and individual human experi-
ence. Of course this extension involved a substantial degree of
refinement of the conceptual apparatus for analyzing and
describing cultural and mental change. In this respect, the
Annales’s continuing engagement with theoretical develop-
ments across the human sciences in the postwar decades also
played a part in the refinement and expansion of the range of
study. Thus historical anthropology, the history of mentalities,
and cultural history became the most impressive aspects of the
contribution of the third generation of historians associated
with the school. In all these areas, one can also point to
congruent developments in historical approaches to the
human sciences in postwar France, which paralleled the work
of historians of the Annales. Toward the end of the century,
even some of the most characteristic elements of the Annales
approach were called into question by the practice of the third
generation. Microhistory and case studies offered a contrast to
the previous emphasis on the collective and the anonymous,
while the resurgence of narrative history from the 1980s
seemed to fly in the face of the reaction against histoire histor-
isante, which had united the new history and the other human
sciences, especially sociology, in the 1920s.
II
Febvre and Bloch were reacting against the historical positivism
associated with Gabriel Monod, Charles Seignebos, and the
Revue Historique, founded in 1876, but the French historio-
graphical tradition was much wider and, since the Enlighten-
ment, had produced philosophical histories, which sought to
probe the underlying cultural and social factors of historical
change. Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs sought to place study of
human behavior at the center of philosophical history. In the
nineteenth century, a number of influential writers, including
François Guizot, Alexis de Toqueville, and Jules Michelet
produced wide-ranging analyses of the relationship between
cultural and political change, which, in the case of the first two,
owed much to Edmund Burke’s development of a theory of
society as the product of an essential historical process of
organic institutional and social development. Michelet’s
breadth of interests ranged from cultural history to the history
of the common people, and included the assertion that history
must also be about the people and not just about power or
institutions. Nevertheless, the influence of the scientistic mode
of historical research associated with Leopold Von Ranke and
the German school was evident in France after the defeat of
1870. History in the Third Republic was dominated by two
main characteristics, one scientific, the other national. The first
involved an admiration for the rigor of the German historical
school, which Monod praised highly for its ‘publication of
documents, critique of sources, its patient elucidation of all
Annales School 709
aspects of history’ (Revue Historique, I (1878), 315–316) and lay
behind much of the academic organization of historical
research led by Ernest Lavisse in the last decades of the nine-
teenth century. In the first issue of the Revue Historique, Monod
proclaimed that the journal would be ‘a collection of positive
science and free discussion; moreover, it will not depart from
the realm of fact and will be closed to political and philo-
sophical theories’ (Revue Historique, I (1878), 315–316).
Although Monod showed himself open to a wider conception
of historical knowledge held by other positivist historians,
a more rigorously defined definition of historical science,
which seemed to eschew most forms of intellectualism or
generalization was evident in the Introduction aux études histor-
iques published by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles
Seignobos in 1898. The great monument of this generation of
historians was the multivolume history of France conceived by
Lavisse in 1890 and published in 17 volumes between 1901
and 1911. The project was highly influential partly because of
the academic credentials of the authors, but also because it
provided a history that underpinned the political unity of the
Third Republic. “Lavisse . created the myth of a nation-state,
which came into being between the time of the Gauls and the
Merovingians, was consolidated by the administrative changes
and military conquests of the Capetian monarchy and culmi-
nated in an ideal constitution: the democratic, moderate, and
centralizing Republic” (Bourdé and Martin, 1989: 209).
Bloch and Febvre emerged out of a reaction against this
approach to history, which was increasingly criticized in the
early decades of the twentieth century as limiting and partial.
They were not alone in this critical approach to the reigning
historical orthodoxy. Emile Durkheim criticized the focus on
particular events as opposed to larger processes in the journal
L’Année sociologique in 1896. But, wider perspectives were also
being canvassed by historians around this time. In 1896, Henri
Berr founded the Revue de synthèse in Paris bringing together
a broad spectrum of scholars and intellectuals including
psychologists, sociologists, economists, and historians,
including Lucien Febvre. In his 1893 thesis L’Avenir de la phi-
losophie: esquisse d’une synthèse des connaissances fondée sur l’his-
toire (The future of philosophy: outline of a synthesis of
knowledge founded on history), and afterward, Berr saw
historical synthesis as capable of providing a unifying and
organizing element in all the sciences. Berr’s regular seminars at
the Centre de synthèse in Paris offered a model for the collective
projects launched by Febvre and Bloch in Annales in the 1930s,
although Berr’s project was more theoretical in scope than the
Annales. Febvre’s first work was begun at the École Normale
Supérieure in Paris where he encountered the geographer Paul
Vidal de la Blache, founder of Annales de géographie. Febvre’s first
work was his thesis on Philippe II et la Franche Comté (1911)
a regional monograph, which placed strong emphasis on the
geographical, religious, and social history of the region. In La
Terre et l’évolution humaine (1922), Febvre developed his ideas
on historical geography and the interaction of humanity and
the physical environment, ‘seeking to understand the role in
human history of a number of specifically geographical
factors – distance, space, position.’ Here Febvre signaled
a concern with the spatial dimension of history, which was
central to many of the future concerns of the school. During the
1920s, Febvre moved to the University of Strasbourg where he
710 Annales School
was part of a brilliant group of scholars from many disciplines
who reshaped the university in the aftermath of the First World
War. Strasbourg was the scene of many fruitful exchanges
between historians, sociologists, and anthropologists during
the 1920s. Here also Febvre began his friendship with Marc
Bloch. Bloch had also attended the École Normale Superieure
and, like Febvre, had first completed a regional monograph, on
the Île de France, published in 1913. Febvre and Bloch
produced a number of major works in the 1920s and 1930s and
both were appointed to chairs in Paris, Febvre at the Collège de
France in 1933 and Bloch at the Sorbonne in 1936. In 1929, the
two collaborated in founding Annales d’histoire économique et
sociale. Febvre seems to have played the leading organizational
role in the journal during the 1930s and took over completely
when Bloch, who was Jewish, was excluded from academic life
during the occupation. But both made ground-breaking
contributions, both in the journal and in their books, during
the interwar period. Two books in particular stand out as
classics which, in separate ways, demonstrated the new
approach to the history of mentalities, which was at the heart of
their contribution. In Les Rois thaumaturges (1924) Bloch
studied the phenomenon of royal healing in France over a long
time frame, borrowing the concept of collective representations
from sociology to analyze the belief system surrounding thau-
maturgic kingship in the medieval and early modern periods.
The result was an innovative study of the historical sociology of
religious belief, which could perhaps be regarded as the first
example of the history of mentalities, which was to be so
prominent from the 1960s. Lucien Febvre’s Problem of Unbelief
in the Sixteenth Century, while primarily a study of Rabelais, was
really addressing a more fundamental problem. Febvre dis-
agreed profoundly with the standard current interpretation,
which presented Rabelais as a free thinker and rationalist.
Febvre’s reinterpretation centered on stripping away anachro-
nistic views of Rabelais’s beliefs and reinstating the context of
sixteenth-century belief and dissent. In arguing that Rabelais’s
mental universe could only be reconstructed within the terms
and limits of possibility of the language and mental equipment
of a sixteenth-century mind, Febvre gave an object lesson in the
enlarged possibilities of an approach based on the reconstruc-
tion of the mental world of the past, including, in the case of
Rabelais, the impossibility of atheism within the mental
structures of the sixteenth-century mind.
The history of the journal in its early years reflected the
concerns of the directors and especially Febvre, who contributed
over 900 articles, reviews, and notices between 1929 and 1948.
The battle against histoire historisante continued to be waged by
Febvre in book reviews, which was also an important medium
for pursuing the pluridisciplinarity of the journal. Annales also
reflected Bloch’s belief in the importance of delineating histor-
ical problems as the principal object of study, hence tran-
scending the limitations of a fixed periodization. The sense of
a relativity of historical time, with different rates of change and
different time spans applying to different phenomena was clear,
even if the subject matter was more familiarly historical
compared to the semaines de synthèse. The first collective enquiry
looked at the comparative history of land records across Europe.
Business archives and price lists were studied in 1930. In 1935,
there was a special issue on ‘technologies, history, and life’ and
in 1936 an article ‘les noblesses, reconnaissance générale’
announced the launch of a collective enquiry on the nobility.
During the war, when the journal changed its name, two new
enquêtes were launched on alimentary habits and on associa-
tions in ancien régime society. The list alone conveys something
of the excitement and the sense of possibility involved in
extending the frontiers of research in so many new directions.
Indeed Bloch’s idea that the historian’s craft involved the
mastery of a vast range of disciplines made collective enquiry
a practical necessity, as well as a reflection of his belief in the
essential unity of the human sciences: ‘there is only one human
science in time, which strives incessantly to unite the study of
the dead to that of the living.’ The collective enquiries also re-
flected the journal’s engagement with the contemporary world,
and the explicit desire to use the new approach to history to cast
light on some of the problems of the contemporary world in the
aftermath of the Crash of 1929.
Although Febvre’s work often concentrated on the study of
individuals, albeit with a attention to deep contextualism,
which anticipated later developments in intellectual history
beyond France, he seems to have been more favorable to the
increasing concentration on economic history, which grew in
prominence in the 1930s and 1940s. Febvre saw the price
surveys undertaken by François Simiand as a model for serial
quantitative history, which would transcend the subjectivity of
the documentary evidence and grasp patterns and recurring
phenomena, which would reveal the deep structures of history.
Bloch joined the resistance and was executed in 1944. He was
succeeded at the chair of economic history at the Sorbonne by
Ernest Labrousse, and this marked a turn away from the focus
on the history of mentalities toward socioeconomic serial
history. Febvre became more powerful after the war when in
1947 he set up the VIth section of the École Pratique des Hautes
Études and director of the Centre des Recherches Historiques.
The Annales school now had an institutional presence at the
heart of French academic life, and its dominance was assured
for the next four decades. Although never one of the directors,
Ernest Labrousse was extremely influential in the direction
taken by the work of the Annales historians from the 1940s to
the 1960s. Labrousse’s Outline of the movement of prices and
revenues in France (1933) and his Crisis of the French economy
(1944) provided a structure and a methodology, which was
adopted by a whole generation of French historians. Pierre
Chaunu called them ‘the breviary of my generation’ and saw
them as more influential than even the work of Braudel. Lab-
rousse introduced the idea of long-term trends and short-term
crises and produced an interpretation of the long-eighteenth
century and the French Revolution in terms of a century-long
trend of rising prices, followed by a decade-long intercycle of
contraction and a bad harvest of 1788 triggering the revolu-
tionary events. Such a deterministic schema, clearly linked to
Labrousse’s Marxism, was very persuasive in the ideological
climate of the 1950s, when many of the leading historians were
associated with the left and, combined with the support of
Braudel and the obvious affinities of Braudel’s work with
Labrousse’s structural model, account for the leading place of
quantitative history in the 1950s and 1960s.
More central than Labrousse, and far more wide-ranging
and accessible as a historian, Fernand Braudel was Febvre’s
successor as leader of the Annales. Born in 1902, Braudel spent
most of the period 1923–32 in Algeria, apart from 2 years in

Brazil. On Febvre’s advice, he turned a conventional thesis on
Mediterranean politics in the reign of Philip II into a study of
the Mediterranean at the time of Philip II. The whole project
took several decades to complete, the first draft written in
a prisoner-of-war camp in Lubeck and the first edition pub-
lished in 1949. The result was a monumental piece of schol-
arship, but also an innovative ‘geohistory’ with a radically new
conception of historical time. Braudel wrote of ‘les temps de
l’histoire,’ emphasizing the plurality of historical time. In this,
he was following the Annales tradition of matching historical
processes and phenomena to their specific durations, but also
going much farther in presenting a total history of the Medi-
terranean as a series of overlapping or layered temporalities. In
addition, Braudel wished to construct a geohistory, which
would be attentive to space as well as time, recognizing the
conditions of human society as intimately related to the
landscape and emerging from the landscape in a series of
overlapping developments corresponding to three major rates
of temporal change. He was critical of the event-oriented
history, which Febvre and Bloch had rebelled against, but
also of a geography that suffered from analogous limitations
when it neglected the environmental and temporal dimensions
of human experience. He defined a geohistory as a task, which
would ‘construct a truly representative human geography; to
make the geographers pay more attention to time (which
should be fairly easy) and (what will be rather less easy) to
make the historians more concerned about space’ (Braudel,
1989a: ii, 295). The three times of history correspond to the
three sections of The Mediterranean. The final section of the
book deals with the time frame of conventional history, the
short term, the temps court, where Braudel describes the political
structures, wars, territories, and politics of the period. Braudel is
less interested in these ‘surface agitations,’ ‘oscillations,’ ‘surface
disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on
their strong backs.’ These and many other comments reinforce
Braude’s hierarchical view of the relative unimportance of the
short term, which is also, he points out, the time frame of the
individual, but not of humanity itself. Braudel’s distinction of
times is also a distinction of rates of change. The short term is
the time frame of rapid change, whereas the middle term is
slower and rhythmical, ‘a structural history, even a social
history of groups and movements’ what he also calls collective
destinies. To this category belong networks of communication,
systems of exchange, demographic trends, economic cycles of
the kind described by Labrousse, and also the territorial
empires of Spain and the Ottomans. Braudel’s first level, cor-
responding to the opening section of the book, is the category
of immobile, virtually timeless time. The processes of change at
this level take place at a rate incommensurate with individual
consciousness and yet they are, for Braudel, the most profound
and inescapable forces in history. Understanding them involves
an appreciation of human society as a phenomenon existing in
and conditioned by the physical landscape and the environ-
ment – geology, soil, vegetation, climate, landscape,
topography.
Braudel’s concept of history as largely shaped by processes
that are larger than humanity is fundamentally deterministic. It
may be that his pessimistic view on the limitations of human
agency and freedom (‘a tiny island, a prison’) may have been
influenced by the fact that he was himself a prisoner when he
Annales School 711
first wrote the book. Unlike the possibilism of Vidal de la
Blache, Braudel does not see the landscape as something that
can be endowed with meaning, rather he seeks to see the
human actors as shaped by forces emanating from the envi-
ronment in ways that they cannot determine. Of course it is
arguable that this consciousness is itself a means of human-
izing the impersonal. Related to this determinism is the fact
that culture is relatively neglected in The Mediterranean. Yet,
despite criticisms, Braudel’s massive work had an enormous
impact on historical understanding. His assertion of the
importance of the longue durée as the time frame, which
enabled us to understand the relative importance (and unim-
portance) of human agency in the shorter time frames was
nevertheless capable of supporting sophisticated analyses of
historical processes in all three. His determinism was by no
means reductive, but was rather an affirmation of the
complexity of historical process, characterized by the interac-
tion of forces operating at different levels of temporality and
causation. It was not the great length of the work but its breadth
which accounts for its enduring influence – the revelation of
how the aspiration to a total history could provide a more
rounded picture of the interaction between human society and
the physical environment by expanding the field of historical
enquiry in spatial and temporal dimensions. As well as taking
over increasingly from Febvre in the direction of the school,
through the VIth Section, the journal and the Collège de France,
including inspiring and supervising a new generation of
historians, Braudel produced two further major books,
Civilization and Capitalism, a three-part work completed in 1980
and The Identity of France, an unfinished history of his own
country published after his death. The first part of Civilization
and Capitalism, The Structures of Everyday Life, again saw Braudel
make a major contribution to extending the scope of history by
focusing on the historical structures and forms of material
culture, viewed in the perspectives of the longue durée and across
continents. The study of material culture is now almost
commonplace, indicating just how innovative and influential
the book was. The Wheels of Commerce and The Perspective of the
World studied the development of mechanisms of production
and exchange, and then proceeded to describe the succession of
dominant economic powers in the early modern period from
Venice to the rise of Britain in the late-seventeenth century.
Here again, Braudel’s work was characterized by a combination
of meditative insights, daring initiatives of interpretation and
analysis based on the extended perspectives of the longue durée,
and the incorporation of perspectives from across the human
sciences, which cast fresh light on the evidence of the sources.
Of course, the range of these sources had been dramatically
increased by the fundamental reappraisal of the nature and
significance of historical evidence associated with Annales.
Epistemologically, the relationship between historical sources
and historical knowledge was the same for Annales as for the
scientistic historians of the previous century. What was
fundamentally different was the range of sources discussed, the
methodology of their use, the recognition of the need to apply
the conceptual sophistication of other disciplines in the human
sciences, and, thanks to Braudel and others, the demonstration
that this would profoundly change our temporal and spatial
understanding of the past. Braudel’s example inspired Pierre
Chaunu’s monumental work on Seville and the Atlantic in the
712 Annales School
early modern period, which revealed the power of the battery
of methodologies assembled by the Annales.
To concentrate on the leading figures does not do justice to
the breadth of the Annales achievement, or to its commanding
role in French historical writing in the second half of the
twentieth century. If the first and second generations can be
conveniently assessed via Febvre, Bloch, and Braudel, the
leading figure of the third generation, not least in terms of the
international impact and popularity of his work, is Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie. The ‘Labrousse moment’ and the dominance of
Braudel were reflected in a preponderance of regional mono-
graphs based on serial quantitative methodology. Outstanding
examples were Pierre Goubert’s work on Beauvaisis in the early
modern period, which was faithful to the Braudelian/
Labroussian example, but also regional studies by Paul Bois
and Maurice Agulhon, which restored the interest in cultural
forms and mentalities, which Bloch and Febvre had displayed
in the interwar period. Le Roy Ladurie’s thesis, The Peasants of
Languedoc, was also a regional monograph, which displayed the
strengths of quantitative history in the longue durée, especially
in the analysis of the interaction of Malthusian demographic
structures and the rural economy, but where the standard
model described a kind of homeostatic system maintained by
short-term crises, Le Roy Ladurie’s Languedoc traced a great
cycle of recovery, stability, and decline from the mid-fifteenth
to the end of the seventeenth century. More significantly, Le
Roy Ladurie’s analysis, while broadly comparable to the
structural model of Goubert’s Beauvaisis, did not describe an
immobile history dominated by the impersonal interaction of
structure and conjuncture, but interwove this with an account
of the development of peasant society, which incorporated
evidence of popular consciousness, including illuminating case
studies of heresy and social unrest of the kind he later expanded
into the best-selling Montaillou, a historical anthropology of
a Cathar village, and Carnival at Romans, a case study of the
breakdown of social relations in an urban setting, which
became a microcosm of early modern urban mentalities and
behavior. The range of Le Roy Ladurie’s work was in some ways
Braudelian, as in his study of the history of climate since the
year 1000, comparable to the global perspectives of Braudel’s
Capitalism, but also represented a rediscovery of the specific and
the short term, which had been in danger of becoming
obscured by an excessively programmatic focus on the quan-
titative and the impersonal. The case studies reflected an
awareness of further waves of affinity in the human sciences in
cultural anthropology and cultural theory associated with
writers like Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Mauss, and the slow impact
of Norbert Elias. What Michel Vovelle half-jokingly called the
bulimia of historians ensured that the danger in all schools of
creating a sterile orthodoxy was subverted by the constant
evidence of creativity in addressing problems and sources, and
a continued willingness to listen to others, including other
historians. Was the fertile interaction between Annales and
non-Annales historians from the 1960s a reflection of the
success of the school in redefining the objects and nature of
historical enquiry? Certainly, the thoroughly original contri-
butions of Philippe Ariès and Michel Foucault on death,
childhood, madness, prisons, and the epistemic structures of
historical systems of thought all posed a challenge to Annales
and yet a validation of the notion that history would proceed
by identifying and illuminating important areas of research and
enquiry, which were the subject of important reflections across
the human sciences. For the Annales school, the response was
to grapple with the questions of how historians could
contribute to this kind of historical anthropology, what kind of
sources could be identified, and how should they be studied.
Michel Vovelle’s study of attitudes to death, the afterlife, and
religion, Baroque Piety and Dechristianisation (1973) owed much
to the work of the Catholic religious sociologist Gabriel Le Bras,
but Vovelle’s background was as a Marxist and follower of
Labrousse’s approach to serial history. Vovelle’s study of
changing religious attitudes in eighteenth century Provence was
based on a study of 30 000 wills – a forbidding kind of
documentation whose potential he dramatically revealed and
in doing so also showed that an austere quantitative approach
could be fruitfully applied to the history of mentalities, which
once again occupied a central place in the Annales, and could
build on its sophisticated tradition of intellectual innovation,
which did not sacrifice historical rigor. Collective enquiries
were organized into attitudes to death and popular literacy
from the 1970s onward and these in turn provoked a further
refinement of the problematics of analyzing cultural
phenomena through historical sources. Adopting perspectives
from cultural theory, Roger Chartier’s work on cultural history
suggests a further refinement of the development of the study
of mentalities by emphasizing the primacy of cultural and
symbolic constructions. Peter Burke, who was one of the
earliest British historians to appreciate the significance of the
Annales, and who has been a constant innovator himself, and
André Burguière, an Annales insider who has written an intel-
lectual history of the movement, see the revival of narrative, the
reemergence of mentality (as historical anthropology), and the
revival of interest in politics as key themes in the development
of Annales since the late 1980s. Burke, writing in 1990, saw the
divergence of themes and approaches as evidence of continuing
vitality but queried whether it was still possible to speak of an
Annales school because of its achievement in transforming
history internationally as much as because of the divergences of
the fourth generation: ‘the movement is dissolving, in part as
a result of its success’ (107). Both Burke and Burguière, writing
in 2006, agreed on the centrality of the return to mentalities for
the relationship between history and the human sciences, and
outlined the challenges faced by historians in responding to
some of the demands of cultural theory and anthropology, still
facing the problem confronted by the founders of Annales
between the individual agent and the collective consciousness.
See also: Bloch, Mark Léopold Benjamin (1886–1944); Burke,
Peter (1937–); Historical Geography; Historical Thought and
Historiography: Current Trends; Historical Thought and
Historiography: Modern History (Since the 18th Century) – the
West; Social Geography.
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