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‘The gift of theory’: A critique of the

histoire des mentalités
a
Michael A. Gismondi
a
York University , Downsview, Canada
Published online: 30 May 2008.

To cite this article: Michael A. Gismondi (1985) ‘The gift of theory’: A critique of the histoire
des mentalités , Social History, 10:2, 211-230, DOI: 10.1080/03071028508567621

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 DISCUSSION

Michael A. Gismondi

'The gift of theory': a critique of the

histoire des mentalités
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The histoire des mentalites represents, for some historians, the new approach to
illuminating the role of the common people in history. For some time the
innovations of this approach in conceiving time, space, ritual and popular culture
have enjoyed acceptance from those social historians keen to recover the everyday
life of the lower orders through histories of the family, the mob, riots, women,
sexuality and even death. Taking an interdisciplinary approach characteristic of
the Annales' 'total history', and concerned with understanding the meanings and
values held by historical actors, the project of these Annaliste historians of mentalite
has even been likened to that of the British marxist historiographers.1 And yet in
a recent symposium the British social historians Peter Burke and Eric Hobsbawm
remained sceptical of a possible concord. While sympathizing with the Annales
approach in general, and the histoire des mentalites in particular, they tended to skirt
any issue of using the concept outright, and instead offered suggestions as to what
they wished the histoire des mentalites to become. Burke, for example, acknowledged
a debt to the Annales but quickly observed that ' British cricitism of the French
approach would be of great value '.2 Hobsbawm raised similar doubts. Indeed, after
outlining the merits of the approach he effectively redesigned the concept when
he suggested:

what I think we ought to do is see mentalite not as a problem of historical

empathy or archaeology or if you like as social psychology, but as the cohesion
of systems of thought and behaviour which fit in with the way in which people
live in a particular society, in their particular class and in their particular
situation of class struggle, against those above or, if you like, below them. I
would like to restore to men of the past and especially the poor of the past,
the gift of theory.3
durata', Studi Storici, xxii (1981), 413-23;
1
Peter Burke,' Reflections on the historical A. Esler, 'The truest community: social
revolution in France: the Annales School and generations as collective mentalities', Journal
British social history', Review, I (1978), of Political and Military Sociology,XII(1984),
147-64; Patrick Hutton, 'The history of 99-112.
2
mentalities: the new map of cultural history', Burke, ibid., 151.
3
History and Theory, xx (1981), 413-23; Haim Eric Hobsbawm, 'Comment', Review, 1
Burstin, 'Storia della mentalita e lunga (1978), 162.
211
 212 Social History VOL. 10: NO. 2
Hobsbawm's re-invention of mentalite in a new marxist way seems to represent
more than a gift for the poor: rather a gift of theory for the 'poor' theorists of
the histoire des mentalites. Our examination of various works in this genre of
historiography confirms Hobsbawm's scepticism while demonstrating, however,
that the central problems of the histoire des mentalites do not arise because it is
theoretically bankrupt, but because it annexes concepts from the social sciences
in an uncritical manner.
In outlining these theoretical failings I raise a number of questions concerning
the utility of the mentalite approach for social historians. These questions arose
in response to tendencies within the histoire des mentalites to diminish the role of
rational self-activity and agency in history, to import functionalist modernization
theories of civilization, and to introduce ' unconscious blocks' and ' irrationalities'
to explain the passivity or helplessness of people in the face of historical change.
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More important, I argue that these tendencies themselves result from (i) the
indeterminate place of mentalite in the Annales' ' total history' with its plurality
of times, and (2) the consensual and paradigm-like understanding of mentalities
or mental climates of an age with their emphasis on what members of a society
have in common mentally. Despite my enthusiasm for the new subject areas
explored in this manner I find these theoretical weaknesses produce a history which
obscures the active role that culture, and conflicts over culture, play in a social
formation. Consequently, in reappraising some of the theoretical statements on
mentalite as an organizing principle, I caution against the present call for a
rapprochement between historians of culture and those of mentalite, and conclude
that the histoire des mentalites might purge itself of its ethnocentricity, its politically
retrograde notion of the drift towards enlightenment, and its highly descriptive
but analytically shallow ethnography by making good use of — as Hobsbawm puts
it - the ' Gift of Theory'.

I M P R E C I S I O N : V I C E OR V I R T U E ?
One immediate difficulty in offering a unified critique of mentalite stems from its
changing use among Annalistes. After developing a general definition based on the
theoretical writings of Jacques Le Goff, Robert Mandrou and Philippe Aries, we
will explore that changing use and development of the concept in three generations
of Annalistes: (1) Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre; (2) Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
and Robert Mandrou; and (3) the historians of La Nouvelle Histoire.i
Jacques Le Goff opens his theoretical intervention by suggesting the very
imprecision of the term mentalite may be its strongest attribute. Arguing that
mentalite has the innate capacity to designate the residues of historical analysis,
4
J. Le Goff, 'Mentalities: a new field for ale et histoire des mentalites. Le Moyen Age:
the historian', International Social Science Entretien avec Georges Duby (1970)' in
Council Social Science Information, XIII (1974), Aujourd'hui L'Histoire: Enquete de la nouvelle
64-86; Robert Mandrou, 'L'Histoire de critique (Paris 1974), 201-17; P. Ariès,
mentalité', Encyclopedia Universalis, XVIII 'L'Histoire de mentalité', in Le Goff et al., La
(1968), 436-8, Georges Duby 'Histoire soci- Nouvelle Histoire (Paris, 1978).
 May ig8$ The histoire des mentalites 213
Le Goff reminds orthodox historians that these residues constitute an important,
yet overlooked, area of research:
The level with which the history of mentalite is concerned is that of the
quotidian and the automatic, that which eludes the individual subjects of
history because it throws a light on the impersonal content of their thought,
that which Caesar and the last soldier of his legions, Saint Louis and the
peasant on the land, Christopher Columbus and the sailor in his caravels have
in common. The history of mentalities is to the history of ideas what the
history of material culture is to economic history.5
Following Carlo Ginzburg we will question this propensity to explore 'what
Caesar and his last soldier have in common' later in the paper, but Le Goff
continues:
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the discourse of men, regardless of tone that is used, be it that of conviction,

emotion or grandiloquence, is generally nothing more than a jumble of ready
made ideas, commonplaces and threadbare concepts, the multifarious outlet
of the flotsam of cultures and mentalities of various origins and times.6
From works examining attitudes towards childhood, sexuality and crime to others
decoding rites of passage and rituals, the Annalistes" intent was not to reconstruct
individual minds but the collective representations that control men's judgements.
As Roger Chartier explains:
they pose the relationship close to the formulation of sociologists in the
Durkheimian tradition, placing the accent on the schemes or the contents of
thought which, even if they are unexpressed in the style of the individual, are,
in fact, the ' unthought' and internalized conditionings that cause a group or
society to share, without need to make them explicit, a system of representations
and a system of values.7
Le Goff offers three examples of these shared group values operating at the
'unthought' level. For example, in searching for causes of the Crusades, Le Goff
contends that traditional explanations such as demographic swings, the greed of
merchants and papal policy are perhaps not essential. He proposes in addition that
' one must take into account the indispensable attraction of a terrestrial Jerusalem
which mirrors that which is in heaven, the impetus of the images in the collective
mind formed around the idea of Jerusalem. What is a crusade if a certain religious
mentalite is missing?' 8 Le Goff sees mentalite playing a similar key role in George
Duby's analysis of feudalism and the political mentalite of' feudality', and in Max
Weber's 'protestant ethic' with its emphasis upon new attitudes towards work
which contributed to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.9 Mentalite is
5
Le Goff, 'Mentalities: a new field', 85. Encyclopedia Universalis, 436.
6 8
Ibid., 85. Le Goff, op. cit., 82. See G. Duby, 'The
7
R. Chartier,' Intellectual history or socio- diffusion of cultural patterns in feudal society',
cultural history?', in Dominic La Capra (ed.), Past and Present, xxxix (1968), 3-10.
Modern European Intellectual History (Ithaca, 9 Le Goff, op. cit., 82.
1982), 23. Mandrou makes a similar point in
 214 Social History VOL. I O : N O . 2
introduced as a new factor discovered operating alongside the more traditional
factors of economics, demography and politics. Still unclear, however, are the links
between these factors, and their influence upon each other. This is further
compounded as each represents different levels in the plurality of time used by
the Annalistes. The concept of conjuncture goes part way in addressing this
problem but in an unconvincing manner, especially if we believe Braudel that 'the
long run always wins in the end'.
Annalistes place mentalities in the longue duree and, because these structures
move so gradually, they distinguish them from other factors which change more
quickly (i.e. economic fluctuations, demographic swings and political events).
Because mentalities do not move at the same rhythm as the economic or political,
the historian must identify, at the level of the quotidian, the fragments of these
slow-moving mentalities as they interact in the present. As Le Goff writes:
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the history of mentalities forces the historian to take a closer look at some of
the essential phenomena in the field: heritages, the study of which teaches
continuity, losses, cleavages (from where, from whom, from when do this
mental habit, this expression, this gesture come?); tradition, that is to say the
ways in which societies are mentally reproduced, the dephasing which is the
product of the delay in the minds of men when it comes to adapting to change
and the unequal speed of evolution of different sectors of history; it is a
privileged field of analysis for the critique of linear conceptions in the craft
of history. Finally inertia, of the utmost importance as an historical force which
is more the attribute of minds than of matter, for matter is often more liable
to change than minds. Men make use of machines which they invent whilst
holding on to the mentalities which date from before machines. Motorists use
the vocabulary of the horseman; the factory workers of the nineteenth century
had the same mentality as the peasants that their fathers and grandfathers were.
Mentality is that which changes most slowly. The history of mentality is the
history of the gradual in history.10
Overall, most mentalities resemble islands of resistance unaffected (and not
affecting) the mechanisms of social change. Sometimes, however, their' dephasing'
suggests mentalities are more than ' prisons of the longue duree' and are actual
causal variables in the drift of history. Here, Le Goffs analysis begs the link
between changing, or 'unchanging' mental climates and the altering socio-
economic ones. As Hobsbawm argues, 'one must insist on the importance of class
10
Ibid., 86. Mandrou calls this the destruc- role of ideas in history, or whether or not there
turation and restructuration of the mental is a role for ideas, but the place of ideas in a
climate of an age. British marxist historians of specific society, the nature of that society, and
culture share this focus. However, they are the reasons why some ideas are destructuring
more concerned with the tensions between the and others restructuring in the light of that
various factors composing this 'conjuncture'. socio-historical context. See Gareth Stedman
For them, it is not the ideational aspect of Jones,' From historical sociology to theoretical
Weber and Duby they object to, but the lack history', British Journal of Sociology, III
of clarity as to the place of ideas in a social (1976), 285.
structure. The point of departure is not the
 May ig85 The histoire des mentalites 215
structure, of authority, of the varied interests of rulers and ruled and the relations
between them in studying the field of ideas.'11 It is only by doing so that we can
identify the reasons why some attitudes from the past persist, and are even used
by historical actors to resist social change.
Not that the Annalistes ignore these relations. They use complex socio-economic
theories and are very interested in linking mentalities to varied social groups. But
it is precisely when Le Goff et al. attempt to demonstrate how mentalities ' harbour
complex relationships with social structure' that they falter.12 This is particularly
evident in their explanation of (1) the co-existence of conflicting mentalities in the
same historical period or in the mind of one historical figure, and (2) their
interpretation of the transformation of mentalities and the role of changing ideas
as catalysts of social change. Le Goff, for example, identifies in the mind of Louis
XI two co-existing, yet apparently contradictory, mentalities. He finds that in
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politics Louis XI displays a 'machiavellian' mentalite, whereas in religious faith

he displays a traditionally superstitious mentalite. This evidence of the co-existence
of two opposing mentalities in the King's mind suggests to Le Goff that more than
one dominant mentalite can operate in society at any stage in its evolution.
Supporting his thesis, he identifies enlightened mentalities operating in palaces and
monasteries, which differ from and yet co-exist in the same society with the more
backward mentalities of the mill, tavern and forge.13 But, because the histoire des
mentalites purports to be a history of the transformations in ideas, Le GofT must
impute movement in this description of co-existing mentalities. He does so in a
problem-filled manner.
Assuming a theory of transforming mentalities premised on a slow drift from
primitive to more enlightened, he sees the task of the histoire des mentalites as the
identification of the stages of the 'wakening of consciousness in history'.14 Thus
he concludes that Louis XI's 'machiavellian' politics manifested this drift
towards enlightenment while his religious attitudes were an island of primitive
resistance, a transitional residue from the past. Elaborating further, he locates this
wakening of consciousness spatially, and finds it blossoming in castles and
monasteries but not in mills and taverns. This is tantamount, however, to a
theoretical dualism which locates opposing mentalities in the structure of society
without developing the links between changing social relations and changing
values. Clearly, Le GofPs analysis of Louis XI begs the question of not only the
symbolic power of a King in feudal society but likewise the ideological function
of his dual mentalite as he confronts intra-lord strife on the one hand, and lord—serf
strife on the other. Perhaps if he had linked the evidence of Louis XI 's dual
mentalite to the process of political survival in feudal society, the King's 'machi-
avellian' mentalite among lords, and the traditional religious mentalite lords
exhibited among peasants, would seem less a melange of enlightenment ideas with
medieval residues and more a viable political manoeuvre in order to maintain
power. This interpretation, however, demands recognition that society is not 'a
whole way of life' but a 'whole way of conflict' based on class antagonisms which
11 13
Hobsbawm, 'Comment', 161. Ibid., 92.
12 14
Le Goff, op. cit., 92. Ibid., 93.
 216 Social History VOL. I O : NO. 2
'entail essential objective antagonisms and conflicts of interest'.15 It is this basic
materialist principle of class strife and conflict, rooted in objective antagonisms,
that British marxist historians argue can be observed as a pattern over time in
changing social institutions and values. By decoding these patterns in values (or
mentalitesl) they link them to the level of objective conditions of contradiction,
class conflict and class formation.16
Although Le Goff does recognize a class component in the social tension of
society, he equivocates when linking mentalities to these tensions:
eminently collective, mentalite seems to be removed from the vicissitudes of
social struggles. It would, however, be a great mistake to isolate it from social
structures and dynamics. It is, on the contrary, a crucial element in social
tensions and struggles. Social history is dotted with myths that reveal the role
of mentalities in a history which is neither unanimous nor immobile 'blue
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nails', 'white collars', 'two hundred families'. Alongside mentalities

common to everyone there exist class mentalities. Their interplay remains to
be studied.17
Here Le Goff provides us with the germ of two working hypotheses found among
historians of mentalities. Either mentalities are common to all (i.e. they are beyond
class struggle) or they are peculiar to specific classes and integral elements in social
tension. The problem with the first case is that when he portrays mentalities as
held across social cleavages, he then has no compulsion to relate these to the
objective tensions that nevertheless obtain in society. Ideology and the process of
history are rejected in favour of the more anonymous and autonomous 'drift
towards enlightenment'. In the second case, although Le Goff recognizes class
differences he does not employ them to explain how a society's vicissitudes are
linked to mentalities.18 At best, when he uses class he does so descriptively,
resembling Weber's use of class, status and power (i.e. nowhere is class defined
in terms of mode of production or struggles rooted in property relations).19
Consequently the approach remains more concerned with description and patterns.
Perhaps in their haste to purge the histoire des mentalites of a crude marxism ' which
saw mentalities as a mirror image of socio-economic structures' the Annalistes
failed to see that all marxism was not vulgar.20
15 17
Compare E.P. Thompson, 'The long Le Goff, op. cit., 92. Carlo Ginzburg
revolution', New Left Review (May/June criticizes this supra-class analysis in his The
1961), 24-33 and (July 1961), 34-9; or Ellen Cheese and the Worms (Torino, 1976),
Meiksins Wood's argument in her 'The introduction.
18
politics of theory and the concept of class: Gregor McLennan makes this obser-
E.P. Thompson and his critics', Studies in vation of Braudel's use of class, Marxism and
Canadian Political Economy, ix (1982), 45-77. the Methodologies of History (1982), ch. 7.
16 19
Compare Thompson's 'Eighteenth- S t e d m a n Jones criticizes those historians
century English society: class struggle without w h o use Weberian concepts of class, status and
class?', Social History, III (May 1978), power as if they were counterpoints to the
149-51; and Brian Palmer, 'Classifying cul- marxist approach in his 'Historical sociology
ture', Labour/Travail, 8/9 (spring 1982), to theoretical history', 301-2.
20
153-85. M c L e n n a n , op. cit., 144.
 May ig85 The histoire des mentalites 217

THE LEGACY OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS

In discussing the fate of the history of mentalites in the Annales Andre Burguiere21
places Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in the midst of an ongoing debate among
French historians over the scientific character of the discipline. That debate
initially opposed sociologists (grouped around Durkheim and L'Annee Soci-
ologique) against French historians. Although the sociologists saw history as
uniformly anecdotal and unscientific, the historians were divided on the scientific
merits of sociology. The positivists, rejecting the.scientific pretensions of socio-
logists, insisted history was the scientific study linking particular events. On the
other hand, those historians dubious of Sorbonne positivism eyed common ground
between history and the theoretical conceptions of social science.22 The work of
Bloch and Febvre represents a delayed attempt to deal with this crisis in French
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historiography. When founding the Annales they would coin the term 'total
history' to imply an adherence to 'the conditions and methods of science set by
sociologists, while ignoring the fact that those conditions had been enunciated to
disqualify history'. 23 In joining historical data with social scientific concepts, they
broadened history into a social science, in which the histoire des mentalites occupied
a special position.24
Mentalite played a crucial role in the attempts of both Bloch and Febvre to
contest positivistic historiography.25 Burguiere distinguishes between their ap-
proaches, however, arguing that these distinctions determine the fate of mentalite
in the Annales. To summarize, Burguiere sees Febvre 'working through the
consciousness of men... through conscious formulations that express the thought
of an individual rather than by searching back to the implicit meaning of collective
behaviour'.26 For Bloch, however, he finds 'an attempt to explain moral and
affective attitudes by their social roots and their enshrinement in the economic and
demographic conditions of the time' P This distinction Burguiere attributes to the
intellectual influence of Durkheim.28 He notes a decided emphasis on comparative
work, and also an attempt to work through the conscious formulations of
individuals to the collective level. As Burguiere explains:
it is as if Bloch, departing from political and religious representations, had
increasingly concentrated his attention on the mental phenomena that are
furthest from conscious thought and intellectual production but that are also
those most connected to social and material life, while Lucien Febvre kept
21
Andre Burguière, 'The fate of the history croyance au XVIième (Paris, 1968), 1-18,
of mentalities in the Annales', Comparative 491-501; and his 'Sensibility and history', in
Studies in Society and History, in (July 1982), P. Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History (1973),
424-37. 12-26; M. Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges
22
H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path : (Paris, 1961) and Feudal Society (1961).
26
French Social Thought in the Years of the Burguière, op. cit., 431; on Febvre's
Depression 1930-1960 (New York, 1966), individualistic approach see B. Mansfield,
19-65. 'Lucien Febvre and the study of religious
23 history', Journal of Religious History, I (1960).
Burguière, op, cit., 425.
24 27
Ibid., 426. Burguière, op. cit., 432.
25 28
Lucien Febvre, he Problème de l'in- Hughes, op. cit., ch. 2.
 2i8 Social History VOL. I O : NO. 2
trying to broaden his exploration to all levels of the mental universe, and to
integrate, in a single totality, intellectual and psychological phenomena.29
Burguiere concludes that the fate of the Annales was to follow Bloch, and he sees
in the new ethnographic history of the 1960s a resurgence of his method at the
micro or village level.
While no criticism of Durkheim, or the problematic influence of his work on
Bloch is raised by Burguiere, Colbert Rhodes has recently shown how Bloch took
from Durkheim the notion of collective conscience as a structure based on common
culture, and how Bloch 'repeatedly observed that collective conscience encloses
individuals in society and thereby determines an individual's behaviour '.30 We will
contest the implications of this 'common culture' influence later. Meanwhile,
recognizing the influence of the anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl31 provides us
with a different insight into the theorizing of mentalite.
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Febvre and Bloch took the name mentalite from Levy-Bruhl, who published his
La Mentalite Primitive in 1922, one year before Bloch's Les Rois Thaumaturges.32
Levy-Bruhl believed that primitive mentality resembled childhood thought, and
he concluded that the animism practised by primitives was alogical (i.e. similar
to childhood thought patterns) and clearly different from the logical ways of
thinking of modern man. Theorizing from the ontogenetic to the phylogenetic,
Levy-Bruhl reasoned that societies evolved from primitive, pre-logical, uncivilized
states to modern, logical, civilized ones. This reasoning had a profound effect on
Bloch and Febvre.33
Burke has found this evolutionary assumption throughout the work of the
founding fathers, but assumes it is now outdated. It resurfaces by implication,
however, in the second generation of Annalistes, barely hidden in their 'drift
towards enlightenment'. This problem of the law of progress is further exacerbated
by the peremptory consequences of the Durkheimian influences on Bloch, which
see newer historians conceiving of mentalites as envelopments upon human agency,
thus, by an act of theoretical closure, denying the individual's effect on structures.

MENTALITE AS A D I M E N S I O N O F T H E B R A U D E L I A N
PARADIGM
Fernand Braudel's work has little to contribute to the histoire des mentalites. Rather
it is his goal of' total history' which spurred others to pursue the history of mental
structures. In his Mediterranean, Braudel's civilizations lay emphasis on cultural
and ideational factors, but he did not develop a history of mentalite. His emphasis
is more of a personification of objective factors like climate and geography than
29 31
Burguière, op. cit., 433. On Levy-Bruhl see Evans Pritchard,
30
R. Colbert Rhodes, ' Emile Durkheim Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965),
and the historical thought of Marc Bloch', ch. 4.
32
Theory and Society, V (1978), 45-74. See also L. Levy-Bruhl, La Mentalite Primitive
the interesting discussion of James Frazer's (1922).
influence on Bloch in Stuart Clarke, 'French 33
Burke, 'Reflections on the historical
historians and early modern culture', Past and revolution in France', 155.
Present, c (August 1983), 73-5.
 May ig8s The histoire des mentalites 219
a mental attitude shaped by the experience and apprehension of that geography
and climate.34 It is the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and of Robert Mandrou,
his successor at the Sixieme section, which introduced a new emphasis on mentalite.
As Mandrou explains, 'the histoire des mentalites is one dimension of total history
it is the ambition of the Annales to write'. 35
Mentalite as an obstacle is the most striking characteristic of both Le Roy
Ladurie's The Peasants of Languedoc™ and Robert Mandrou's Introduction to
Modern France: An Essay in Historical Psychology.31 Mandrou's work follows in
the more individualistic vein of Febvre, and therefore I have chosen to emphasize
Le Roy Ladurie in the text and refer to Mandrou in the notes. Overall there is
a decided emphasis on this generation of Annalistes to introduce forces outside
human control as determinants of social relations. I will contest this logic.
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THE PEASANTS OF LANGUEDOC

In The Peasants of Languedoc, Le Roy Ladurie synthesizes a Malthusian argument,
with an analysis of agrarian cycles and mental attitudes towards agricultural
improvement to challenge traditional marxist interpretations of the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. Le Roy Ladurie identifies two crucial aspects necessary
for the rise of capitalism: engrossment of land, and the use of technological
innovations to increase productivity. Underlying these factors he notes the
necessity of a corresponding ' mental attitude' towards innovation and production
for the market. Le Roy Ladurie's intent is to introduce these various factors in
order to explain the failure of capitalism to penetrate France (in contrast to the
unilinear theories of the transition held by the vulgar marxists).
Published in 1966, the major contribution of his Peasants was the introduction
of quantitative evidence, especially coherent series of demographic fluctuations,
to Braudel's notion of 'total history'. Using demographic evidence, Le Roy
Ladurie showed how cycles of demographic growth or decline acted as objective
determinants upon factors such as the geographic extent of land settlement, the
choice of crop system, the degree and mode of exploitation, the psychological needs
of small peasant producers, and even the rise of an attraction and aptitude towards
risk taking.38 Reconstructing phases or conjunctures in French history where
population, subsistence and income converged as 'scissors', Le Roy Ladurie
demonstrated how these factors led to the fragmentation of land possession in
Languedoc into small peasant freeholdings. It was these small peasant landholders,
oriented as they were to subsistence farming, that resisted technological innovation,
resulting in a crisis in productivity. According to Le Roy Ladurie this accounted
for the failure of capitalism to penetrate France until 1870—3.
34
See R. Forster, 'Achievements of the France 1500-1640: An Essay in Historical
Annales School', Journal of Economic History, Psychology (1975); criticized by S. Lyman,
xxxviii (1978), 58-76. 'The history of mentalities: recent writings on
35
Mandrou, Encyclopedia Universalis. revolution, criminality, and death in France',
36
E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of in R. Brown and S. Lyman (eds), Structure,
Languedoc (Urbana, 1974). Consciousness and History (Cambridge, 1978).
37 38
R Mandrou, Introduction to Modern Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants, 131.
 220 Social History VOL. I O : N O . 2
The neo-Malthusian aspects of his work have been both admired and debated;
most commentators have, however, chosen to ignore the place of mentalite as a
cultural obstacle in his 'scissors'. As he wrote in his introduction,
economic and quantitative history by itself - no matter how rigorous or
exhaustive... furnished only a rough, if indispensable, framework to build
upon. I realized as a matter of common sense that the Malthusian stumbling
blocks in the way of expansion were not all of a material nature. I sensed the
presence of a formidable obstacle in mental attitudes and divined invisible
frontiers of the human spirit, the most difficult to traverse. Little by little I
learned to identify these spiritual stumbling blocks in the chronicle of hopeless
popular revolts and in the bloody history of peasant religions.
With the best tools at my disposal and within the framework of a single
human society, I embarked upon the adventure of total history.39
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If Le Roy Ladurie's use of mentalite and culture is absent from most discussions
of his use of demography, when mentalite as an obstacle is introduced to his model
it raises a number of interesting questions. As he writes:
technological immobility was the fruit of a whole series of cultural stumbling
blocks. Some have spoken of a natural ceiling on productive resources. But
nature in this case is actually culture, it is customs, way of life, the mentality
of people, it is a whole formed by technical knowledge and a system of values,
by the means employed and the means pursued. The forces that first deflected
the expansion, then checked it, then ultimately broke it were not only narrow
in an economic sense but also cultural in a broad sense, and even, in a certain
measure, spiritual. In this last category, above all, their actual impact is
impossible to measure but their power of constraint obvious.40
Here he provides us with an example of mentalite (or culture) as inertia, as a
structural envelopment limiting men's actions. Yet it remains unclear how some
men break these patterns, and why, or how these patterns relate to demography.
Are mentalities and demography mutually determining and linked obstacles to
progress? On the one hand, he argues that depopulation led to the reconstruction
of family lineages along patriarchal lines (in order to fulfil the new psychological
needs of families caused by the ravages of epidemics, and as a response to the
depopulation crisis caused in property inheritance).41 Likewise, he argues that
depopulation determines supply and demand of labour and thus determines wage
rates and the mode of exploitation.42 Finally, he even claims that sexual repression
and inhibitions among both Jansenists and Huguenots ' conform to the basic facts
of overpopulation'.43 On the other hand, he counters that material and cultural
aspects are mutually inseparable, as he writes:
population - following its early triumphs - retreated, because society, popu-
lation and the economy lacked the progressive technology of true growth. But
39
Ibid., introduction, 8. 98-9.
40 41
Ibid., 298. Peter Burke recognizes the Ibid., 30.
42
importance of mentalities for Le Roy Ladurie's Ibid., 38-42.
43
'scissors' in his Sociology and History (1980), Ibid., 3 0 2 .
 May J9S5 The histoire des mentalites 221
they also lacked — at least as yet and at least to a sufficient degree among ruling
classes and the people — the conscience, the culture, the morals, the politics,
the education, the reformist spirit and the unfettered longing for success which
would have stimulated technological initiative and the spirit of enterprise and
permitted economic take-off.44
Here the blend of cultural factors and material factors is obvious, but the
structured links between factors remain confused, or absent. When Le Roy
Ladurie reconstructs a conjuncture he blends discrete factors like population
cycles, technology and mentalite in a factor-analytic attempt at explanation.
Because he does so, Forster characterizes his work as a compartmentalization of
history, as his history remains a static, descriptive, piling-on of factors.45
Le Roy Ladurie, in order to dynamize his static model, imports the drift towards
enlightenment, and to a certain extent even demographic cycles (and plagues or
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epidemics) sweep in from outside the model as forces of nature beyond the control
of men. Mandrou, for example, interprets plague as a natural disaster which
affected men equally across social relations. But he himself offers us a materialist
counterpoint to his logic. Arguing that the effect of plague increased with famine
(because nourishment and variety of diet afforded one greater or lesser resistance
to disease), Mondrou begs the question of how the amount and variety of food in
feudal society was distributed and appropriated. Virulence of disease, like the
ability to resist disease, is not due merely to geography, climate and diet but
mediated by social relations, passing through the prism of class relations and not
directly related to nature.46
Equally, the thesis that mentalities are linked to changing social structures is a
question the Annalistes address poorly. At best, mentalite remains one discrete
aspect of total history. For example, because the Annalistes strive to capture a' total
history' they conceive of social reality as a plurality of independent entities ranging
from demographic factors, geographic resources and technological levels, to the
social structure and even mentalities. A problem arises with this approach,
however, because it precludes any internal connection between these elements and
fails to indicate the significance of the relationship of one factor to the other. As
a consequence, mental structures, like climatic and geographic structures, remain
highly descriptive. To paraphrase Kinser's critique of Braudel's geostructural-
ism, the notion of structure is used referentially rather than analytically. This
44
Ibid., 3 0 2 . most recently in his' A concept: the unification
45
This piling-on of factors in a 'conjunc- of the globe by disease (Fourteenth to Seven-
ture' is criticized by Stanley Aronowitz teenth Centuries)', in The Mind and Method of
in 'A metatheoretical critique of Immanuel the Historian, trans, by Sian and Ben Reynolds
Wallerstein's The Modern World System', (1981), 28-83; Eric Wolf has recently coun-
Theory and Society, x (1081), 503-20. This tered this way of conceiving of disease in his
criticism of 'conjuncture' influenced my Europe and the People without History (Ber-
thinking about the Annales approach. Waller- keley, 1982). He writes of the 'great dying' in
stein is a great admirer of Braudel, and the Central and South America that ' The advent
journal Review, which Wallerstein founded, is bf pathogens does not in itself furnish adequate
dedicated to global history in Braudel's name. explanation of what happened. One must ask
In fact the study centre is named after him. also about the social and political conditions
46
Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, that permitted pathogens to proliferate at such
36; Le Roy Ladurie has personified disease a rate', 133-5
 222 Social History VOL. I O : N O . 2
problem is further confounded when these factors are placed within the Annales'
historiography of plural time.
The concept 'conjuncture' and the dialectic of time spans seem to offer
intersections of these various factors comprising 'total history'. Yet despite this
sophistication, the conjuncture tends to resemble — to paraphrase Stanley
Aronowitz — a mere layering of patterned variables, a crisscross of discrete cyclical
factors, congealed at one historical moment. As such, 'total history' offers us an
understanding of the weight of structure composed of relatively separate factors
which fuse naturally without any sense of marxist entailment.47 Santamaria and
Bailey have recently put the problem this way,
Braudel's notion of plural time is a reminder that to speak of change, any
present must be weighed within a retrospectively and prospectively formulated
totality. Braudel's desire, however, to 'imprison the event and restrict it to
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the short term' in order to explain it in terms of longer durations, cannot be

shared if one is weighing change and continuity, for every present is explicable
not only in terms of a past and future which envelop it, but in terms of itself...
what is absent in Braudel's historiography by virtue of the formal and material
' envelopment' of the event and conjuncture is the inquiry into the effects of
action (over the medium or short term) on the creation of structures, since
there is an equation of the creation of structures with the longue duree.*8
As Thompson has elsewhere criticized, it is important sometimes to develop
analytic, isolated histories of various factors, activities or institutions, but these
analytically discrete histories are nevertheless the grist of human experience and
must therefore be ' convened within the same historical time if we are to develop
any real grasp of historical process'.49
The tendency here, however, becomes one of treating material and mental
structures as the determinants of social relations in the present, and out of human
control. Among historians of mentalite we find they conceive of mental structures
as factors operating outside the specific determinants of the fabric of society,
following their own principle of the drift towards enlightenment. One main
tendency is to treat mental structures as static, primitive islands of resistance, and
forces of inertia from the dead past, which move at different rhythms from, and
47
Aronowitz, op. cit., 519. institutions, and that we may by an act of
48
U. Santamaria and Anne Bailey, 'A note analytical isolation write distinct histories of
on Braudel's structure as duration', History these. But at least part of what is
and Theory, xxiii, I (1984), 78-83. expressed... will be the same unitary ex-
49
Despite the highly polemical mode of perience or determining pressure, eventuating
Thompson's The Poverty of Theory, he does in the same historical time, and moving at the
score some palpable hits upon the notion of same rhythm: a peasant revolt or the Gordon
levels, as used by Althusser, which – to my riots may accentuate a pressure, a longue duree
mind – are relevant to my argument: the of good harvests and demographic equilibrium
notion of levels motoring around in history at may allow it to relax. So that all these distinct
different speeds and at different schedules is an histories must be convened within the same
academic fiction....It is true the effectivity real historical time; the time within which
of class experience and conflict will be process eventuates. The Poverty of Theory: An
differently expressed in different activities and Orrery of Errors, 97.
 May ig85 The histoire des mentalites 223
are often obstacles to, changing socio-economic structures. Although more recently
some Annalistes see in these preserved attitudes ' living, dynamic recollections of
the past expressing collective values',50 they just as often continue to conceive of
mentalities as resistant to, and operating outside socio-economic determinants.
Thus when reconvening the longue duree with histoire evenementielle, mentalities
are either linked to the highly problematic consensus model of functionalism or
thought to operate based on their principle of progress which Le Goff has called
'the drift towards enlightenment'. Each remains, however, unable to explain the
impact on social change except in very simple terms. For example, historians of
mentalities have developed oppositions like primitive/modern or pre-industrial/
industrial in order to classify changes in mentalite. But in almost all cases these
ideal types no longer represent simple heuristic classificatory tools. For the
Annalistes (and perhaps even for Hobsbawm in his Primitive Rebels), because the
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polarity traditional/modern assumes 'the inevitable movement of traditional

societies towards becoming modern', 51 the heuristic polarity itself is imbued with
a self-propelled autonomy and used to explain why societies change. This type of
historical schema sets two immediate contrasts with the British marxist approach.
First, whereas capitalism and feudalism are historically specific concepts, the
polarity modern/traditional is more descriptive and obscures the system of social
relations. At best the ideal types appear as complementary antinomies in a
relatively stable social system, denying the dynamic whereby one mentalite shapes,
contests and forms its opposite. Second, this theory of change has serious
peremptory consequences for the notion of social agency. Traditional mentalities
act as 'coercive prisons' that impede and control agents' lives. In effect, the
bearers of traditional mentalities are pegged as backward-looking and even
irrational (shackled by a Levy-Bruhlian primitiveness no doubt) and their struggles
are rendered irrelevant. Traditional mentalities are introduced as structural
constraints — much like the Annales' use of climate and demography — upon man's
understanding his true circumstances.
Thus, to account for changing mentalities, Le Roy Ladurie conceives of ideas
as catalysts or obstacles, and the manner in which ideas sweep in and envelop men,
beyond their control, reveals itself poignantly in his analysis of the massacre during
the Carnival of Romans.
50
Michel Vovelle, Idéologies et Mentalités industrial Europe', Past and Present, LXX
(Paris, 1982), 9. (1976), 30-75; and once again in Brenner,
51
See L. E. Shiner, 'Tradition and moder- 'The agrarian roots of capitalism', Past and
nity: an ideal type gone astray', Comparative Present, xcvii (1982), 16-113. The point of
Studies in Society and History, xvii (1975), 249. Brenner's criticism is that the relationship of
Clark makes a similar point in 'French man to nature is never direct (in so far as men
historians and early modern culture'. The and women are human) but always mediated
notion of demography and economy as factors by the relations of man to man in society. As
outside human control has received serious he shows, similar demographic and economic
criticism by Robert Brenner, 'Agrarian class cycles result in different outcomes because of
structure and economic development in pre- the structure of class relations and class power.
 224 Social History VOL. I O : NO. 2
THE CARNIVAL OF ROMANS 52
Le Roy Ladurie's reading of this local event is symptomatic of the implicit
assumptions he harbours regarding mentalite as an obstacle to the larger transition
to capitalism. He identifies a long-term drift towards enlightenment, and this
allows him to stop history at any one point and identify events and attitudes as
either backward-looking and barbarian or forward-looking and enlightened. Thus,
when he reconstructs the society of Languedoc, he employs an implicitly hier-
archical notion of culture. Using literacy and Weberian concepts of religious
rationality as signposts of enlightenment, he ranks rural man (whom he charac-
terizes as superstitious, illiterate and predominantly catholic) beneath urban man
(whom he characterizes as rational, literate and Calvinist).53 But by starting with
this simple dichotomy between barbaric man and enlightened man, Le Roy
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Ladurie not only strips away peasant culture but reduces peasant protest at the
Carnival to a retreat into irrationalism. In his hands, tradition and modernity no
longer represent simple classificatory ideal types, but descriptions-cum-
judgements; and the drift of history remains an unexamined assumption instead
of the focus of inquiry.
This rationalist dyad leads Le Roy Ladurie to build ramparts between civilized
man and barbaric man, town and country, and peasant and bourgeois; and sexual
and irrational images54 come together for him as explanations for his judgement
that popular revolts 'lacked the light of reason'.55 As in his analysis of disease,
Le Roy Ladurie develops a communication model of society. The new urban light
of Calvinism is apparently spread to rural areas by preachers and traders. Using
this diffusionist model, Le Roy Ladurie identifies blockages and avenues of
transmission of the new mentalite in a manner characteristic of the Annales' social
geography. This approach remains problematic, however, because Le Roy Ladurie
fails to give evidence that the townspeople do not believe in the apocalypse or
witchcraft. Further, he assumes a parallel between material penury and cultural
penury that borders on the ethnocentric. By equating literacy and ambition with
progress, he then assumes that urban artisans and the bourgeoisie are on the road
to enlightenment. But this assumption indicates a scientism that assumes peasant
values, culture and theories of knowledge lack purpose. Le Roy Ladurie may
recognize an 'oral culture' where custom, ritual and festival are shorthand
condensations of the complex meanings rural men share and act upon. Yet he seems
to resist recognizing that the 'oppressed have a life of their own, are guided by
principles, and capable of choices'.56
Peter Burke suggests that by purging Le Roy Ladurie's work of its Freudian
52
E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Carnival of the antinomy that opposed bourgeois and
Romans (New York, 1979). peasant, town and country – why not – barba-
53
The awe with which Le Roy Ladurie rism and civilization (The Peasants, 156-7).
54
holds 'modern' man is apparent in his Ibid., 208.
55
contrast of the bourgeois Sauvier Texier and Ibid., 210.
56
the 'commoner' Pierre Sallagier (the two See Juan Maiguascha, 'The standpoint
protagonists at the massacre): the two rep- of the Indian: an epistemological and method-
resented two societies, two life styles, two ological breakthrough', North/South, xiv
façades, and they personified, at the same time, (1982), 104-10. See also the comments of
 May ig8f) The histoire des mentalites 225
and Levy-Bruhlian assumptions we could rescue the concept of mentalite. But
Burke may be reacting to only one horn of the dilemma. Recovering a sense of
rationalism and intelligibility in witchcraft and revolt cannot be achieved without
revamping Le Roy Ladurie's theory of society and the place of mentalite in that
schema. We have seen, however, that in his work society suggests two worlds,
separated yet complementary, linked by the drift of history. Consequently, the
concepts ' traditional' and ' modern' are pressed into double duty and become not
only descriptive ideal types but a theory of change. Criticism of his model must
address it in the widest sense, by examining his idea of the social and the place
of the 'unilinear drift'57 in that model.
Clearly, by using the drift towards enlightenment to introduce movement to an
essentially harmonious system, the primitive modern dichotomy plays a crucial
role in his interpreting changes in mentalities and social structures. But these
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conditions of change cannot be conceived of as reified entities working out their

own independent wills. Le Roy Ladurie's work suffers from a mistaken conception
of how history has been made, and can be made. As C. Wright Mills wrote of
functionalist and systems models of historical explanation: ' what are often taken
as historical explanations would be better taken as part of the statement of that
which is to be explained.... Rather than explain something as a persistence from
the past we ought to ask "why has it persisted?".' 58 These are questions Le Roy
Ladurie never asks because his model assumes a harmony of interests in society
and presumes that 'persistence from the past', especially in the form of peasant
movements, is irrational, instinctive, unconscious and demented. By speaking of
a 'drift towards enlightenment' he transforms a conceptual abstraction into a
causal variable, and begs the question of whose ideas are considered enlightened
and what interests the 'enlightened sectors' of society represent.

LA NOUVELLE HISTOIRE
Recent reconceptualizations of mentalite have failed to remedy these theoretical
inattentions.59 Philippe Aries, in his major works on childhood and death, and even
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms,
xxxiii. Le Roy Ladurie has recently attempted
to remedy this downplaying of the active role
of culture-bearing agents, offering his own
reading of Paul Bois's work on the Chouan
Uprising: 'The "event" and the "long
term" in social history: the case of the Chouan
Uprising', in The Territory of the Historian
tr.B and S. Reynolds (Hassocks, 1979), 111-32.
Here he is interested in showing a 'revolution'
in which the structure itself is changed by an
event. This seems a curious task, but is a
necessary one given that he already has
analytically separated these levels of long term
and event. Compare the more marxist attempt
to reconcile the tensions between the two levels
as they eventuate in the experience of peasants
in D. Hunt's discussion of popular culture
during the same 'event': 'Peasant politics in
the French Revolution', Social History, ix, 3
(October, 1984).
57
See Le Roy Ladurie, 'A reply to
Professor Brenner', Past and Present, LXXIX
(1977), 56. As he writes: ' I do not deny this
homeostatic model also contains a unilinear
drift in the direction of agrarian capitalism.'
Brenner re-criticizes this logic in 'The roots of
agrarian capitalism', 20-41.
58
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagin-
ation (Oxford, 1959), 154.
59
Patrick Hutton, while interested in Ariès,
settles on Michel Foucault as his leading
example of the histoire de mentalité. This
selection is intriguing given that Foucault's
 226 Social History VOL. I O : NO. 2
more graphically in his self-consciously theoretical contribution to the encyclopedic
La Nouvelle Histoire,60 continues to use modernization theories, and to interpret
mentalities as shackles on understanding. Historical anthropology, or the new
ethnographic history,61 presents us with the wholly new problem of ahistoricity.
And finally, the theoretical interventions of Michel Vovelle62 present some
confirmation of our critique of mentalite, but turn to a reliance on French structural
marxism which appears unfruitful.
Most critics of Aries' approach suggest there is evidence for 'childhood' and
'death as individual experience' throughout the Middle Ages.63 Some question
at the theoretical level (1) the homogeneity of his mentalities, and (2) the way these
paradigm-like world-views change. The problem of homogeneity arises because
Aries represents attitudes towards death and childhood as being 'limited by a
background of common ideas that is taken for granted', a background 'common
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to literate clerics and to the people \ 6 4 His critics contend that by using high culture
as evidence he fails to distinguish a stratum of popular culture based on an oral
tradition. Both Gurevitch and Vovelle point to this failure in Aries to perceive
heterogeneity, and Gurevitch suggests Ginzburg's Mennochio as a counterpoint.
In The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg analyses the testimony of Mennochio's
inquisition, and teases out a lower stratum of culture, religion and social practice
that exists in some tension with the dominant culture. He develops the notion of
a cyclical movement in which higher culture interacts with that of the lower orders,
bringing to his analysis considerable nuance when addressing how attitudes are
arrived at and change. Aries' presentation of mentalites as 'unconscious expressions
of sensibilities of an age' 65 creates limiting structures characterized by inertia,
resistance and primitiveness. Further, because these limiting structures never-
theless contain a teleological drift, these very expectations of life experience
(namely childhood and death) are not linked to the changing material conditions of
reproducing life but appear to float forward upon a theory of modernization.
Patrick Hutton was quite uncritical when identifying this teleological theory of

work is not represented in La Nouvelle 60

Histoire. It is worth noting that Carlo
Ginzburg characterizes Foucault's work as a
history of exclusion, 'one that places the
subordinate classes beyond, or better yet, prior
to culture'. Recently Willis and Corrigan
traced this exclusionary aspect in Foucault to
his one-way use of discourse in power
relationships. In contrast, many social his-
torians argue cultural 'discourses' can be
reversed, and even used against an oppressor,
but this way of seeing the past involves a theory
that makes it possible to conceive of resistance.
C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xix;
and P. Willis and P. Corrigan, ' O r d e r s of
experience: the differences of working-class
cultural forms', Social Text, vii (spring/
s u m m e r 1983), 85-103.
P. Ariès, Childhood and Society (1962)
and The Hour of Our Death (New York, 1981),
and ' L'histoire de mentalité', in Le Goff (ed.),
La Nouvelle Histoire, 402.
61
Andre Burguière. 'The new Annales: a
redefinition of the late 1960s', Review, 3/4
(1978), 195-205; C. Tilly, 'Anthropology,
history, and the Annales', Review, 3/4 (1978),
207-13; J. Revel, 'The Annales: continuities
and discontinuities', Review, 3/4 (1978), 9-18.
62
Michel Vovelle, Idéologies et Mentalités,
parts 2 and 4.
63
Anton Gurevitch, 'Medieval culture and
mentality according to the new French
historiography', Archives of European Soci-
ology, xxiv (1983), 167-95.
64
P. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, xvii.
65
Ibid., xvii.
 May ig85 The histoire des mentalites 227
civilizations. But, as we have argued, this way of seeing mentalites is deracinated
from the very social processes it purports to explain. Indeed, even Vovelle says of
Aries that his mentalites 'float on air' due to the 'function of some internal
dynamic of the "collective conscience", not otherwise defined'.66 Despite
these reservations from a colleague, it is significant that Aries, and not Vovelle,
contributed the chapter on the histoire des mentalites to La Nouvelle Histoire?1
The new reliance on enlightened ethnographic sensitivities, with their 'thick
descriptions' of everyday life and rituals, festivals and symbols, avoids much of
the ethnocentrism and peremptoriness of the primitive/modern dichotomy.68
According to one writer, historians have appropriated from ethnography a method
that attempts' to illuminate in a uniform light regardless of time or place the modes
of being and behaving of human societies'.69 But, while this method is clearly
less judgemental of the common people of the 'past', this emphasis on a timeless
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element or constante fundamentale as a unifying factor in understanding history

essentially denies that sense of process so key to social historians. Indeed,
unresisted by most historians, it denies history herself.70
According to Robert Forster, it is this timeless element in 'the world of peasant
psychology that the historian must recapture in all its complexity',71 and it is in
ritual that the historian must identify the timeless constants that serve ' as a
momentary relief from hierarchical boundaries, and that function to reduce tension
in the local community that might otherwise be unbearable'.72 The intellectual
history of these conceptions of peasant mentalite and ritual has been traced to the
Kantian roots of Durkheim and Marcel Mauss's Primitive Classification, where
they argued that it was 'society that provided the categories in which men
"thought" their world'. 73 Levi-Strauss's 'structuralism' with its emphasis on
the ' universal grammar of culture' and the ' limits of the thinkable' also feeds
into the Annales practice of ethnographic history. Both of these ethnographic styles
have, however, been severely questioned by other anthropologists.74 Interestingly,
66
Vovelle, Idéologies et Mentalités, 2 3 4 . nate construct: a comment on E. Le Roy
67
See Vovelle's critique of Ariès in La Ladurie's Montaillou', Journal of Social
Nouvelle Histoire, 324-6. History, xv, 1 (1981), 152-5. See also the
68
See Clark's criticism in' French historians general remarks in Tony Judt, 'The rules of
and early modern culture', 64-73. the game', Historical Journal, 1 (1980), 183.
69 71
R. Forster and O. Ranum (eds), Rural Forster and Ranum, op. cit., introduction,
Society in France: Selections from the Annales xiii.
72
(Baltimore, 1977), 8. See the discussion of 'time in common'
70
Le Roy Ladurie appears attracted to the and 'space in common', and the treatment of
'structuralism' of the French ethnographer festival in Tina Jolas and François Zonabend,
Lévi-Strauss. His structures as unconscious 'Tillers of fields and woodspeople', in Forster
'grammar' find a home in Le Roy Ladurie's and Ranum, ibid., 126-51.
73
best example of 'immobile history', Mon- Stuart Hall, 'The hinterland of science:
taillou: The Promised Land of Error (1979). ideology and the sociology of knowledge', in
This question of history that stands still has Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies
provoked some criticism within the ranks of La (ed.), On Ideology (Birmingham, 1978), 23,
Nouvelle historians. See the references in and note 29.
Gurevich, op. cit., note 11. Regarding the 74
Sherry Ortner, 'Anthropological theory
structuralism in Montaillou, A. Stuard has since the 1960s', Comparative Studies in
raised some telling criticisms in ' An unfortu- Society and History, xxvi, 1 (1984). See also
 228 Social History VOL. 10: NO. 2
the historian E. P. Thompson unequivocally rejects this type of application of
anthropology to history (which renders customary values and rituals ahistorical),
because it is more concerned with being than becoming. For Thompson, and others
like him, there is no structural constant like ritual reciprocity or gift giving, that
exist 'isolated from particular social contexts'. As he writes:
structure is to be found in the historical particularity of the ensemble of social
relations and not in the particular ritual or form isolated from these. In history
new features arise and the structural organization of features to the whole
changes as structure changes.75
Analysis of ritual in a natural and timeless manner obscures the way in which
history or changing circumstances impinge upon and create new problems for the
value-systems of historical actors. Clearly, fundamental constants fail to illuminate
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how the function of ritual may change because the new ethnographic historians
detach process from structure, and dislocate the ritual belief-systems they study
from the conflicts they are supposed to translate and defuse. The self-contained
world of the Annaliste is a detached world, a world created and sustained by no
external structural factor which could be considered critical to its operation, and
this narrow approach fails to locate the rural community within its own political
economy. While it is plausible to map the discrete psycho-history of particular rural
societies, theirs remains an artificial world if the arena of life ends at the village
gate. Indeed, most accounts fail to draw links between the meanings within the
village, the politics of the maintenance of that symbolic order, and the broader
economic and social patterns of French society.76 Instead, their accounts assume
a consensus that the function and meaning of ritual has nothing to do with these
broader trends, but remains an outlet based on timeless wisdom.
Many social historians see festive organizations as more than mere 'safety
valves' or 'pre-political primitive forms of recreation'. For them, ritual provides
a 'clear, disciplined message to the authorities', 'legitimates popular justice', and
'co-ordinates semi-spontaneous action'." As Natalie Zemon Davis writes, festivals
and rituals 'can act both to reinforce order and to suggest alternatives to the
existing order'. For Davis, the circumstances in which ritual operates become the
crucial variable, and the rite is no longer a constant but historically specific. In
this historical approach, the ritual form may appear the same but the kinds of
shocks it functions to absorb and the meanings it holds for actors participating can
change dramatically. As Davis and Thompson show, and as Christopher Hill

Perry Anderson's criticism of structuralism in
his In The Tracks of Historical Materialism
(Chicago, 1984), part 2, where he argues in
structuralist classifications 'adjacency.:,
eclipses sequentiality' (49).
75
E.P. Thompson, 'Folklore, anthro-
pology, and social history', Indian Historical
Review, III (January 1978), 13-14.
76
Compare R. Brenner's argument that the
French State protected the property rights of
peasants against landlords, 'The Roots of
agrarian capitalism', 77-89.
77
Natalie Zemon Davis, 'The reasons of
misrule: youth groups and charivaris in
sixteenth-century France', Past and Present, L
(1971), 74: and E. Hobsbawm, Primitive
Rebels (New York, 1965), 6 and 57-65.
 May 1985 The histoire des mentalites 229
argued in his work,78 these rituals can be suggesting alternatives to a changing
world. By insisting that rituals are timeless, however, Annalistes slip into quaint
pictorial essays resembling static ethnographies, pictorials that miss the nuance in
gestures as they symbolically capture the changes in society.

CONCLUSION
Michel Vovelle would probably agree with my concern over inertia and teleology
in the history of mentalities, and yet he would probably include my intervention
into culture and mentalite as another dialogue with the deaf.79 And yet his
conclusions in Ideologies et Mentalites 'that the ball is in the marxist historians'
court' to develop approaches ' that defy mechanical reduction' and ' confront the
interweaving of different times of history' is an indigestible one.80 He seems to
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be saying two things to marxists. First, that 'mentalite is larger than ideology,
embraces what is not formulated, what remains apparently "insignificant" as well
as what remains deeply buried at the level of unconscious motivations'. 81 Second,
mentalities are not dead ideologies or hollow structures from the past but
'enduring recollections, treasured possessions of living identity, inviolable and
deeply imbedded structures which give authentic expression to collective
character'.82 But just what are the motivations that compel actors to recollect the
past, and just how unformed and collective are they ?
To take his second point first; to my mind those enduring recollections from
the past which Vovelle and Haim Burstin see as offering 'dynamic resistance' and
not being inert, hollow prisons of the longue duree, are never brought into tension
with the present. Indeed, the problem of interweaving times may be in the
Annalistes' court because, applying Santamaria and Bailey's criteria to Vovelle,
the theorization of how mentalities are produced is lost in the ravages of time. I
would argue that it is precisely in the historical present where we can discover in
the continuities from the past the reasons why they are not displaced, and the
reasons why their meanings may be transformed while their forms remain the
same. Indeed, we would discover their 'dynamism'. 83
This dynamism is denied in the Annalistes' approach because historical agents
are the victims of structures like climate, demography and mentality, and their
agency, or ability to react to structures, does not allow them to control their
78 82
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Ibid., 14.
Upside Down (1975) or his analysis of the 83
See Haim Burstin, 'Storia della men-
Norman yoke in Puritanism and Revolution talita', 422. Contrast Ellen Wood on the
(New York, 1958). analysis of continuities from the past, in
79
Vovelle, Idéologies et Mentalités, 11. 'E. P. Thompson and his critics', 56. Compare
80
Ibid., 15. The comments about marxism also the instructive use of 'destructuration'
appear only in the English-language version and 'acculturation' in Nathan Wachtel's The
of this paper in R. Samuels and G. S. Jones, Vision of the Vanquished (1977) and the
Culture, Ideology and Politics (London: His- interesting understanding of "tradition' in
tory Workshop Series, 1983) 9. Ironically, the E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The
book is dedicated to Hobsbawm. Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
81
Ibid., 1 3 .
 23° Social History VOL. 10: N O . 2
destiny. This is what Alastair Davidson called the contradiction in terms within
the Annales — that deep structures can be known but not controlled. In this sense
even the knowledge of structures does not empower men to resist.84
Secondly, to grasp mentalities as unformulated, and larger than ideology, does
not mean that unconscious evidence should be placed outside class, as 'a
quasi-autonomous cultural artifact beyond politics, economics, and class
structure'. 85 This is clearly the problem which arises with mentalite because it is
conceived as a collective, paradigm-like structure which limits the thinkable until
some 'moment' when there is a revolution which transforms the structure itself.
On the other hand, E. P. Thompson, in a work inspired by Le Goff, explains the
revolution in the structures of time (from the Feudal notion to the Capitalist
notion) by showing the tensions within these paradigms. For him, it is these
tensions within the 'limits of the thinkable' that the historian must decode.86 His
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use of the Gramscian concepts of consensual order and ordered conflict allow him
to situate unconscious evidence within a political economy, with its level of class
struggle and class formation. This approach allows him to identify in this ordered
and stable transformation of the notion of time not a subjectless teleology but a
contested terrain. Moreover, this approach does not preclude Aries' suggestion
that attitudes towards death, time and childhood may exist inarticulate, unconscious
and at the level of the longue duree, but argues that these mentalities are
nevertheless reconvened in historical time, handled by historical actors, questioned
and sometimes even resisted. Finplly, because the crowds who cling to a traditional
mentalite are not the victims of an impersonal historical force but the real victims
of class struggle, their resistance may be one of no avail. However, they themselves
are nevertheless imbued with a rationalism of their own and capable of choices.
Consequently, for some social historians their resistance becomes that in need of
explanation and not, as is the case if one uses the structures of the histoire des
mentalites, the source of historical explanation.
York University
Downsview, Canada
84
Alastair Davidson. 'Historical method pool of connotations, values and symbols
and the social sciences: a critique of the available in culture. This process, however,
Annales historiography', Thesis Eleven, 2 does not take place on neutral ground nor with
(1981), 74. equal ability or chances. It is composed of the
85 constant exchange of and struggle for meaning
See Hans Medick,' Plebeian culture in the
transition to capitalism', in Samuels and Jones, within contexts of reciprocity, dependence and
op. cit., 84; or H. Medick and D. Warren (eds), resistance (Introduction, 3).
86
Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of E. P. Thompson, 'Time, work-disci-
Family and Kinship (Cambridge, 1984): If pline, and industrial capitalism', Past and
'meaning' takes on new interest, it is meaning Present, xxxviii (1967), 56-97; and concerning
publicly assigned – meaning in the interplay of the active role of culture as written by French
social relations.... If the subject comes back to historians see the recent review article by
the centre of the stage, he does so within this David Hunt, 'Working people of France and
context of the production of meaning – the their historians', Radical History Review,
complex process of selecting from the shared 28/30 (1984), 45-65.