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Achievements
of the AnnalesSchool
IN
his presidential address last year Robert Gallman quoted a letter written by Lucien Febvre to Marc Bloch.1 Febvre and Bloch
were the first editors of the journal Annales, and Febvre's exhortation
on this occasion to break down the barriers among the social sciences
was only one among many. Gallman's "Notes on the New Social
History" would have pleased both French scholars, especially the
allusion to verve and "trumpet call."2 Today we are concerned with
the role of economics in the galaxy of disciplines the Annales claim to
unify in their "grand alliance."
The subject of our session is the "Achievements of Economic
History," with the Annales School placed beside cliometrics and
Marxist history. The Annales group would not find this arrangement
comfortable. It represents a reversal of roles; Annales history in the
service of economic history? The Annales group-today even more
than in the past-is not primarily oriented toward economics. While
the word Economies appears on the masthead of the journal, it is
closely associated with Societes and Civilisations; the various changes
in the title of the Annales since 1929 reflect this concern for a close
alliance between economic and social history-which is not, I might
add, an alliance between equals.3 Ostensibly, to highlight any one of
Clio's suitors-sociology, anthropology, linguistics, geography, demography, or economics-is to compartmentalize and betray the
main object of the "School":total history, the integration, even on the
level of the micro-village study, of many levels of analysis incorporating the skills and tools of an array of ancillary disciplines.4 I say
Journal of Economic History, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (March 1978). Copyright ? The Economic History Association. All rights reserved.
The author wishes to thank Elborg Forster, Orest Ranum, and Charles Wood for their helpful
comments on the first draft of this article.
1 Robert E. Gallman, "Some Notes on the New Social History," this JOURNAL,
37 (March
1977), 3-12.
2 See Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l'histoire (Paris, 1953, 1965) and Marc Bloch, Apologie
pour l'histoire ou metier d'historien (Paris, 1949). These are good examples of the "style" and
elan of the first editors of the Annales.
3 The journal has had a number of titles since 1929: Annales d'histoire 6conomique et sociale
(1929-38), Annales d'histoire sociale (1939-41), M6langes d'histoire sociale (1942-45), Annales:
Economies, Socigt6s, Civilisations (1946- ).
4 Two excellent reviews of the work of the "Annales School" are Maurice Aymard, "The
Annales and French Historiography (1929-72)," The Journal of European Economic History, 1
(1972), 491-511; and J. H. Hexter, "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien ...,"
The
Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972), 480-539.
58
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The AnnalesSchool
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Forster
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Forster
16 E. J. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," in Felix Gilbert and
Stephen R. Graubard, eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), p. 12.
17 Simiand, "Methode historique," p. 104.
18 Walt Rostow, "Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue duree," Annales: E.S.C., 14 (1959),
716.
19 James Z. Young reviewing P. B. and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas of
Biology (New York, 1977), in The New York Review of Books (June 14, 1977), p. 26.
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The AnnalesSchool
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Foremost among these are human geography and historical demography. Geography has had a long tradition in France, combining a
keen sense of locale and milieu with a thorough ecological examination of a region or community.29 Marc Bloch was a master of this
approach, which was especially successful in rural history.30 In the
1960s Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie made a systematic study of climate,
based in part on an imaginative use of the dates of the wine harvest
from the late sixteenth century.31 But it was in demography that the
Annales could claim a major breakthrough. Blessed with parish registers that provided reasonably complete data on baptisms, marriages,
and burials from the mid-sixteenth century onward in a rural society
where geographic mobility was at a minimum, French demographers
led by Louis Henry and Pierre Goubert were able to move beyond
aggregate statistics to the reconstitution of the rural family.32 Here
the centralization of research served them well, for the demographic
"team" in Paris established a standard operating procedure for the
gathering of data region-by-region, village-by-village, by a prearranged sampling technique. Provincial universities assigned students
to remote villages where they laboriously filled out the blue, red, and
greenfiches sent from the capital. Once these were assembled and
interpreted, Annales historians trained by the Henry-Fleury manual
were able, first, to trace aggregate trends in population growth in
relation to epidemics and food supply, and then to study the implications of age structures, life expectancy, marriage age, pre-marital
conceptions, and birth control practices.33 It was with a mixture of
pride and humor that Le Roy Ladurie, chief spokesman for the
Annales at international conferences in the 1960s, reflected on the
sexual restraint of a rural community that married its men and women
in their late twenties and showed- almost no signs of illegitimate
29 Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de g6ographie
humaine (Paris, 1921); Lucien Febvre, La
terre et l'Nvolutionhumaine (Paris, 1922); see J. M. Houston, A Social Geography of Europe
(London, 1953).
30 Bloch, Les caractres
originaux.
31
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l'an mil (Paris, 1967);trans. Barbara
Bray, Times of Feast, Times of Famine (Garden City, 1971).
32 The bibliography is enormous. For a start: Andre Burguiere, "La Demographie," in Le
Goff and Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire, II, pp. 74-104; Pierre Goubert, "Recent Theories and
Research in French Population between 1500 and 1700," in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley,
eds., Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 457-73; P. Goubert, "Historical Demography
and the Reinterpretation of Early Modem French History: A Research Review," Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 1 (Autumn 1970), 37-48. See also the French review Population,
especially since 1958.
3
Michel Fleury and Louis Henry, Nouveau manuel de d&pouillementet de l'exploitation de
l'tat civil ancien (Paris, 1965).
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197-227. For a concise description of the state of anthropology today see James W. Fernandez,
"Anthropology, A Discipline about Man Himself," New York Times: News of the Week in
Review (July 17, 1977).
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Forster
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detect, of course, such elements as social classificationand crosssectional analysis-a comparativeperspective if not comparative
method57-and perhaps,aboveall, a relianceon the kindof evidence
a sociologist and anthropologist would employ.58 The sociology of the
Annales seems to be functionalist, if indeed that term is still viable; its
anthropology closer to cultural materialism and descriptive ethnography than to symbolic anthropology or interpretive ethnography. If
Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou is a sign of the times-and Le Roy's
prodigious range of interests is a kind of weathervane for the
school-Oscar Lewis is still preferred to Victor Turner,59 though the
Roubins, Agulhons, and Ozoufs with their rituals, ceremonies, and
fetes, and their notions of sociability and religiosity are in the wings,
moving center-stage.60
The grand alliance of the social sciences, so much vaunted and so
selectively adapted by the Annales-with all its dangers of dispersal of
effort, dilettantism, and downright anarchy-has nonetheless enormously extended the subject matter of history and suggested new
issues, new relationships.61 More, given the French orientation tothe historian's task. Furet, "Discussion," in Dumoulin and Moisi, eds., The Historian Between
the Ethnologist and the Futurologist, p. 47.
57
William H. Sewell makes a useful distinction between "comparative history," "comparative method," and "comparative perspective." The last, for example, suggests an awareness of
other societies when studying one, but not an explicit use of other societies to test a hypothesis
about one. Sewell observes that the comparative "awareness"of the Annales historians seems
much keener regarding pre-industrial societies. "Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative
History," History and Theory, 6 (1967), 208-18. Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel were "masters"at
comparative insights, though usually within a European context from the twelfth to the
eighteenth century. See Marc Bloch, "Towarda Comparative History of European Societies,"
trans. J. C. Riemersma, in Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and
Secular Change (Homewood, Ill., 1953), pp. 494-521.
58 See the three volumes of Le Goff and Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire. I think it is significant
that the word "method" is not employed in the subtitles of these recent volumes on "a new type
of history" in France. The subtitles are: "New Problems," "New Approaches," and "New
Objects."
59 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan, 1294-1394 (Paris, 1975). I refer to
the detailed fieldwork and ethnographic realism of Oscar Lewis in Children of Sanchez (New
York, 1961) rather than to his controversial notion of a "culture of poverty." By contrast, Victor
Turner is an "interpretive ethnographer" who attempts to understand what certain "ritual
performances" mean to those who practice them, using them as "decisive keys" to how people
think and feel about their environment and their own interrelations. These "feelings" are not
apparent or obvious, but must be inferred through indirect evidence and semantic links, a
"discourse"that for the traditional empiricist is very unsettling not only because of its complexity, but because it detects symbolism so ubiquitously. The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969), pp. 6,
42-43, and passim.
60 Lucienne Roubin, "Male Space and Female Space within the Provengal Community," in
Forster and Ranum, eds., Rural Society, pp. 152-80; Maurice Agulhon, La Republique au
village (Paris, 1970); Mona Osouf, "La fete sous la Revolution franaise," in Le Goff and Nora,
Faire de l'histoire, III, pp. 256-77.
61 Frangois Crouzet comments that "total history" is stimulating in many ways, "but it
involves a serious risk of dispersion of efforts, of amateurism, and it has led in many cases to
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lives in the sense of presentingthe world beset by profoundimpersonal constraintsin which Whig politics and Marshallianeconomics,
classconflictand simplisticviews of superstructureare but dustin the
balance.68Not only is "economicman" a myth; neither faith nor
reasoncan move mountains.Not Braudel'smountains-not even with
bulldozers,wretched machinesanyway.
ROBERT FORSTEB,
APPENDIX
1. ParishRegisters(baptisms,marriages,
burials).
2. TaxRolls(includesoccupational,
residential,incomedata).
Old Regime:taille,capitation,vingtieme,centiwmte
denier,compoix,
cadastre.
Post-1789:
contribution
fonciefre,mobiliere,patentes
Indirecttaxes:octrois,aides;Churchtithes.
3. NotarialDocuments(wills, marriagecontracts,partages,inventories
afterdeath,wardship
accounts;
landleases,houseleases;apprenticeship
agreements).
contracts,partnership
4. LawCasesand LegalBriefs;Listsof Accused.
5. GrainPrices(mercuriales,
monthly).
6. MilitaryConscriptLists(physicalcondition,age, residence).
7. ElectoralLists(listsof "notables,"
eligiblevoters,dossiers).
8. Cahiers(1789).
9. Revolutionary
Confiscations
(propertyof emigres,Church,etc.).
10. MunicipalMinutes(villages,towns,sections).
11. SpecialEnquetes(onforges,wood,cattle,harvest,clearings,vineyards,
communalland,ateliers,industry,communication,
etc.).
12. MedicalReports(villagequestionnaires,
of pregnancy,
declarations
lists
of prostituteswithoccupation
of parents;epidemics).
13. Institutional
Accounts
(hospitals,
hospices,monasteries,
cathedral
chapters, guilds,universities,charities).
14. PrivateAccounts(seigneuries,partnerships,
banks,stock-companies,
livresde raison).
15. Admiralty
Records(portcustoms,shipinspections).
16. Bankruptcy
BalanceSheets.
" Furet, "History and Primitive Man," in The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the
Futurologist, pp. 199-203; Le Goff, "The Historian and the Common Man," ibid., pp. 204-15.
Le Goff, however, believes there are some dangers in the "ethnographic point of view."
"Growth,"he writes, "may need to be removed from the cloak of Rostovian myth; but it is still a
reality to be explained" (ibid., p. 215). See also Le Goff and Nora, Faire de l'histoire, I, p. xi; E.
Le Roy Ladurie, "L'Histoire immobile," Annales: E. S.C., 29 (1974), 673-92.
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