HI323
Historiography
Claudia Stein
Les Annales
Oportet haeresse esse -- it is important to be a
heretic
Marc Bloch, 1886-1944
Lucien Febre, 1876-1956
• long view
• problem focused
• religious psychology (history of
mentalities)
• comparative history
Marc Bloch, The Royal
Touch, 1924
Influenced by sociologists Emile Durckheim,
1858-1917 Focussed not on individual or
Psychology of the individual but always on
Collective phenomena
• Suicide (1897)
• The Elementary Forms of
• Religious Life (1912)
‘invention’ of regressive
method
Influenced by Paul Vidal de la Blache, 1845-1918
Founder of French school of geopolitics
Tableau de la Geographie de la France((1903)
which links geography with human history
(influnenced by German geographer Friedrich
Ratzel who became central to Nazi historiography)
1942/3
1939/40
1940
Bloch’s dilemma:
• ‘In the vast drag of submarine swells, so
cosmic as to appear irreversible, of what avail
were the struggles of a few shipwrecked
sailors? To think otherwise would be to falsify
history’.
• Belief in ‘scientific’ history (in the natural
science sense NOT the German sense); retains
belief in some sort of positivism
• Historian should understand not judge – but
what about the politics of one’s own time,
should the historian ignore it)
• Marginalisation of political history in favour of
long views (how to explain Nazism?)
Bloch questions the relevance of
History and his methodology in the
face of Nazism
• Denial of individual agency in favour of the
mass (due to reliance on Durckheim)
François Rabelais (?-1553)
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel
1937
2nd generation of Annales
Dominates the entire field for
decades
Fernand Braudel, 1902-1985
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II (1923-1949)
•New notion of space: large-scale, ‘global’
•Interdisciplinary
•Radical new notion of time
The Three Durées
•Time of long duration (l’histoire de la longue durée)
Deep time
• Time of conjunctures
the time taken by broader movements of economies, social structures, political institutions
and civilisations
•Time of events (l’histoire événementielle)
‘their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night
with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails’
•.
3rd Generation of Annales (since mid-1960)
First time women: Christine Klabisch , Arlette Farge, or Michele Perrot
Ernest Labrousse, Pierre Goubert, Jacques le Goff, George Duby
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Return to a History of Mentalities
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 1929-
Influence of anthropology
Focus on narrative again (less
Quantitative)
Strong focus on history of mentalities
Return to mentalités: circa 1970
• Le Roy Ladurie
– Montaillou (1975)
• Medieval town destroyed by feuds and religious strife
• Demography, attitudes, beliefs, cosmology, politics
– The Peasants of Languedoc (1966)
• Economic life of peasants in southern France between late
medieval and early modern period, 14th-18th centuries
• Juicy factoid (literally): average peasant in Languedoc drank
between 1.5 and 2 litres of wine daily in 1480, AND had sex
with their sheep and a randy bed-hoping priest!
• Wine consumption rates would go down… the southern
Gaulois could handle their alcohol better than the Frankish
northerners!