Total History: The Annales School Author(s): Michael Harsgor Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Jan., 1978), pp. 1-13 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260089 . Accessed: 24/02/2011 17:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sageltd. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Contemporary History. http://www.jstor.org Michael Harsgor Total History: The Annoles School In a spirit of self-mockery Heinrich Heine wrote that other nations may be powerful on land and sea but Germans dominated the air. He was, of course, referring to that thin spiritual atmosphere in which the philosophers floated their dreams and theories. Today, in the second half of the twentieth century, while other powers measure their strength in terms of armoured divisions or technological prowess, the French reign supreme in historiography. That at least is the view of Professor Traian Stoianovich in his in- structive study of the contemporary French historical school - especially as represented by Annales.' According to Stoianovich, there are three nations who have led the world in the field of historical scholarship; in two, Greece and Germany, the flame of creativity has been extinguished but it continues to burn brightly in France. The Greeks, and nobody will disagree with Professor Stoianovich about their merits, are praised as the pioneers of historiography. By their exemplary presentation of facts they in- tended to train historians in the spirit of wisdom anud virtue and so fit them for public service. For the Greeks, then, history was a 'useful' discipline. As well as the classical authors, Stoianovich also includes Machiavelli, Guicciardioni, Bodin and Francis Bacon as belonging to this school i.e. history as useful. The second historiographical paradigm, according to Stoianovich, appeared only in the eighteenth century when the study of history was redefined and given a sense of development. But this second model only came to fruition with Leopold von Ranke's, 'wie es eigentlich war', who with his deep respect for the infinite variations of past experience was determined to write history strictly as a scientific report (or aspiring to be such); his only concession to fashion being his florid style. Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol 13 (1978), 1-13 2 Journal of Contemporary History Now it has happened again (for only the second time in 2,300 years). A third model of historiography has emerged on the banks of the Seine and has been developed to its present brilliant form by the historians gathered round the periodical Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations. For Stoianovich, not since Ranke has there been a more important school or better method of historical re- search. The origins of this Annales method can be found in the work of Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944). It had its roots in the French tradition but was also inspired, as its sub-title suggests, by the German Vierteljahrschriftfur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgesch ich te. Annales first appeared in 1929, a time when Marxist scholars were attempting to uncover the economic base of the political and cultural superstructure. If their results were uninspiring they never- theless encouraged interest in a more scientific approach. However, from the beginning the founders of Annales felt that both the Third Republic style of history and the economic determinism of the Marxists were too constricting for the kind of historiography they had in mind. They aspired to higher things - to a discipline which both dominated and embraced all other studies of the human con- dition. They celebrated every attempt to enlarge Clio's realm. Hence their admiration for Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897) who brought about a shift from conventional history to Kulturgeschichte, which for Karl Lamprecht could only be 'primarily a socio-psychological science', a formulation which un- doubtedly influenced later Annales evolution. And Wilhelm Dilthey (d. 1911) produced with his kind of Geistesgeschichte the outline of what would in a more advanced stage of Annales growth appear as histoire des mentalites. However, the detection of sources cannot impair the originality of the enterprise launched by Febvre and Bloch at the end of the 1920s, which also witnessed the publication of the first volume of Henri Berr's collection - L'Evolution de l'Humanite with its overall title Synthese Histori- que. The need for a fusion of economic, social and cultural history was increasingly felt and the magic word 'synthesis' was em- broidered on the new flag. Even if in those days nearly half a cen- tury ago the first Annales researchers were still far from the recent proudly imperialistic cri de guerre uttered by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, one of the present champions of the current: 'History is the synthesis of all social sciences (sciences de l'homme) turned towards the past' - where the original braquees is far stronger Harsgor: Total History: The Annales School 3 than my 'turned', because this past participle alludes both to a pointed telescope and to a beaming search-light . without men- tioning a levelled gun. Nevetheless Traian Stoianovich did not pen his historical sketch of the Annales school just to show how it arrived at its present all- embracing conceptions. He offers the reader something better: a profound thematic analysis accompanied by chronological land- marks. If at times the reader feels quite overwhelmed by the riches which are relentlessly heaped on him, it is his own fault: a work concentrating in 217 pages the intellectual adventures and victories of a brilliant Pleiad of researchers, necessarily must be tightly pack- ed; even if it was only some years after the second world war that the Annales method with its secular trinity of Serialism, Struc- turalism and Functionalism finally took shape. Serialism* is the outcome of every Annales historian's burning desire to achieve the greatest possible measure of scientific rigour. As historical research is rarely able to provide coherent statistics for unstatistically-minded ages, the researcher is obliged to proceed by extrapolations and inferences. Often it means skating on very thin ice; history is not yet a branch of mathematics! In any case, as both the Founding Fathers' generation and their spiritual descendants were specialists in pre-industrial societies notably poor in statistics, they were forced to depend on archival information, chronological lists of prices or demographic material. This is a field Annales researchers have made their own. Of course they had earlier ex- amples to follow and perfect, such as Francois Simiand's price studies and Henry Hauser's price history, published in 1936.2 Traian Stoianovich is therefore understandably fascinated by the 'admirably systematic analyses of Ernest Labrousse, Jean Meuvret and Frank Spooner',3 who opened the way for a renewed serial history. Prices, followed over centuries if possible, play a cardinal role in building up the 'long period' model in historical economic analysis; such a model must integrate, according to some Annales views, both the oscillatory variations of cyclical change and the mutational variations of structural change - an example of the in- fluence exercised in the fifties by 'pure' economics on the thought of French historians. Further cultivation of serialism bore fruit in the rich *Serialism (analyse serieile in the original) is the critical examination of very long trends in demographic or economic processes. 4 Journal of Contemporary History demographic studies published by Annales researchers. Historical demography, an autonomous discipline developing in an at- mosphere permeated by 'the growing attraction of non-consensual history' (T. Stoianovich) turned out to be an Annales speciality. Pierre Goubert's eagerness and talent in the study of parish records brought forth a work hailed as a masterpiece when it was pub- lished, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 a 1730; 4 the breakthrough in serial history proved that, once mastered, the method could successfully deal with subjects like religious history - a field of research to whose 'serialisation' Pierre Chaunu had attracted atten- tion - or like the study of sexual behavior in the past, a domain in which Jean-Louis Flandrin has won his spurs. Structuralism is not accepted by everyone sheltering under the Annales umbrella. It is also true that very much is asked: not only the analysis of an economic structure, that is, the organization of a given economic variable with its significance to the general economic system and its precise relationship to other variables such as cost, prices, income, money, interest rates, rents; but also the analysis of the impact of conjunctures, that is, factors of cyclical or oscillatory movement. The problem of Annales researchers was to build models of social structures (not only economic ones) 'taken from life', which means covering the skeleton of the basic economic analysis with the flesh of demographic, cultural, mental and even psychoanalytical data.