The Annales School of History

The Annales School of History

The writings and methods of history in the 20th century, in many ways, underwent a paradigmatic shift due in large part to a group of French scholars who are now universally identified as belonging to the “Annales school” of historians. This new shift in historical writing centered around the journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale, founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, both professors at the University of Strasbourg. In later decades, names like Braudel, Le Goff and Ladurie came to represent both a crystallization as well as, subsequently, a fragmentation of the Annales school of historical interpretation.

More contemporary scholars like Iggers and Hunt have insisted on reducing the Annales historians’ revolutionary ideas to a proper definable school, one that like any other, can be periodized and therefore be made historically fashionable – or not- depending on the moment in time we find ourselves in. I believe that interpreting the Annalistes in such a rigid fashion – which is itself symptomatic of the rigidity of the historical status quo – is to ultimately deny their greatest contributions to the field; namely, the ability to free ourselves from our own paradigmatic constructs and in doing so, remove any limit to historical imagination in serving a shared historical end.

The methodological imperatives of the Annalistes framework is best exemplified by analyzing the many classical texts produced by the historians themselves. In many respects, Lucien Febvre’s History and Psychology (1938) solidified the themes that came to preoccupy the future Annalistes. It helped delineate between the history of the past and that of the future by identifying what he considered to be the maladies of the status quo and by proposing for the historian a new set of tools.

Febvre believed that traditional historians unknowingly projected their own beliefs and psychological peculiarities onto the subjects of their historical research and hence, misinterpreted historical figures. Given His belief that “an individual is only what his period and social environment allow him to be,” Febvre argued for a re-application of a personal psychology – one that was part of a larger interdisciplinary approach to research – in order to enlighten the “mental processes” of the social groups in their own time. This was done by reassembling the physical, moral and intellectual existence of every generation that represent the object of our study, which could only then give credibility to the historical application of psychology.