HI323HistoriographyClaudia Stein

Les Annales

Marc Bloch, 1886-1944 Lucien Febre, 1876-1956

Oportet haeresse esse -- it is important to be a heretic

Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch, 1924

• long view

• problem focused

• religious psychology (history of mentalities)

• comparative history

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, 1845-1918Founder of French school of geopoliticsTableau 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)

1939/40

1940

1942/3

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?)

• Denial of individual agency in favour of the mass (due to reliance on Durckheim)

Bloch questions the relevance of History and his methodology in the face of Nazism

François Rabelais (?-1553)

The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel

1937

2nd generation of Annales

Fernand Braudel, 1902-1985

Dominates the entire field for decades

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

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 1929-

Influence of anthropologyFocus on narrative again (less Quantitative)Strong focus on history of mentalities

Return to a 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!