Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe

Essays from Annales

Peter Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136581748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In 1929 two French historians, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, founded Annales, a historical journal which rapidly became one of the most influential in the world. They believed that economic history, social history and the history of ideas were as important as political history, and that historians should not be narrow specialists but should learn from their colleagues in the social sciences.

Two of the most distinguished French members of the Annales school are represented in this volume - Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - the core of which is the debate on the Price Revolution of the sixteenth century dealt with by Cipolla, Chabert, Hoszowski and Verlinden.

Within the volume, all the contributions are oriented towards Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and all are concerned with long-term changes, and with the relation between economic growth and social change. It includes articles on the European movement of expansion discussed by Malowist and the activities of the Hungarian nobles as entrepreneurs discussed by Pach, and two articles on wider issues: Le Roy Ladurie on the history of climate, and Braudel, summing up the Annales programme, on the relation between history and the social sciences. This classic text was first published in 1972.

One

Introduction

Peter Burke

In the last forty years, some of the most important and stimulating history in the world has been written in France. I say ‘forty’ years, rather than thirty or fifty, because it was forty years ago, in Strasbourg in 1929, that Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded a new historical journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. It is this journal, known since 1946 as Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, which first published all the articles that follow. The journal has become associated with a particular style of history and a particular group of historians, whose living members include Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

Febvre and Bloch founded Annales, as it is simpler to call it from now on, because they were dissatisfied with the way in which history was being written in France. Febvre believed that history—the discipline—had been going through a crisis since the late nineteenth century, and that the young were turning away from it to the social sciences because these subjects satisfied their ‘need for reality’, as he put it, while history did not. For too many historians, he thought, ‘history meant learning, if not all the details, at least as many details as possible about the mission of M. de Charnacé to the courts of the North’.

Febvre was always most severe on the diplomatic historians who wrote about foreign policy without reference to the economic and social background. He would have appreciated G. M. Young’s remark that such history was ‘little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk’. But he opposed any history that was less than total. In famous polemical book-reviews, later reprinted in a volume with the appropriate title of Combats pour l’histoire, he attacked Étienne Gilson and Daniel Mornet, for example, for writing history of philosophy and literary history without integrating philosophy and literature into history in general. As for economic and social history, Febvre once announced in mid-lecture that there is no such thing; there is only history—total history, the history of all human activities and their reciprocal relationships. The moral for the practising historian was that an interdisciplinary approach was needed, ‘a history impatient of frontiers and compartmentalization’. ‘Historians’, Febvre demanded, ‘become geographers. Become lawyers too. And sociologists, and psychologists.’ He took his own advice to the extent of writing several books on geography. His first important work, Philippe II et la Franche-Comté (1912), was concerned with political, religious and social history. He treated the crisis of 1567 in Franche-Comté as the product of three conflicts: nobility versus bourgeoisie, Catholic versus Protestant, and a centralizing monarchy versus local liberties.¹

Marc Bloch, Febvre’s younger colleague at Strasbourg and co-founder of Annales, needs less introduction to the English public. Several of his books have been translated. Indeed, he has come to be regarded as a kind of honorary Englishman, no doubt because of his cautious, empirical approach to history, less flamboyant, rhetorical and speculative in manner than Febvre’s. But like Febvre, Bloch was concerned with the reform of history. His manifesto was a lecture he gave in 1928, the year before Annales began, a lecture entitled ‘Towards a comparative history of European societies’.² A characteristic piece of work, much closer to understatement than to exaggeration, this lecture argues the case for ‘an improved and more general use’ of the comparative method, the study of the similarities and differences between societies, whether they are close or distant in space and time, more particularly because this method may set historians on ‘the road that may lead to the discovery of real causes’. Another example of Bloch’s pioneering approach is his book, Les Rois thaumaturges (1923), which deals with the belief current in England and France from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century that kings had the power to heal scrofula, the ‘king’s evil’, by touching the sufferer. This was a work on the social history of ideas, and it drew inspiration from the work of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl on beliefs in primitive societies. Social anthropology might well have been added to the list of disciplines which Febvre told historians to take up.³

It was after 1929, however, that both Febvre and Bloch produced their greatest works; one wonders what influence each had on the other. Febvre moved over to the history of ideas with his book, Le Problème de I’incroyance au XVIe siècle (1942). This book begins by discussing the question whether Rabelais was, as Abel Lefranc once called him, an atheist, and moves on to the more general problem of the intellectual and psychological possibility of atheism at that time. In a famous section on ‘the limits of unbelief in the sixteenth century’, Febvre discussed what he called (in a rather Wittgensteinian phrase) the ‘mental tools’ (l’outillage mental) of the period, emphasizing its ‘primitive’ nature in order to argue that the sixteenth century was not yet ready for unbelief. Religion was too much bound up with everyday life to be rejected; abstract thought was hampered by the lack (in both the Latin and the French of the time) of such concepts as ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, ‘abstract’, ‘concrete’ or ‘causality’; men’s sense of time, space and quantity was extremely imprecise. Febvre, like Bloch, had clearly learned from Lévy-Bruhl’s book, The Primitive Mind. But he pushes further into historical psychology, discussing, for example, the relative importance of the five senses in the sixteenth century, and arguing (twenty years before McLuhan) that the rise of printing meant the rise of the eye.⁴

Meanwhile Marc Bloch was writing his French Rural History (1931), and his Feudal Society (1939–40), an essay in total history which moves from systems of land tenure to modes of feeling and thought.

The achievement of the founders of Annales has been nicely summed up by Fernand Braudel. ‘Individually,’ he has written, ‘neither Bloch nor Febvre was the greatest historian of the time, but together both of them were.’ One might add that their joint impact 011 the practice of history in France was even greater than their own achievements. As Braudel has put it, they established a kind of Common Market of the social sciences, ‘with history as the preponderant power’. Bloch was killed by the Germans in 1944, but Febvre lived on to 1956, not only editing Annales but writing much of it himself, warmly encouraging the young, and scolding the others for not writing ‘our’ kind of history. He was nothing if not dogmatic; but perhaps one cannot make a successful revolution, intellectual any more than social, without dogmatism.⁵

Nor does one make a successful revolution without allies. Febvre and Bloch were fighting on the same side as some French social scientists with a strong interest in history, notably the geographer Vidal de la Blache and the economist Simiand.

Paul Vidal de la Blache was a generation older than Febvre, who attended his lectures at the École Normale. He was a pioneer of a new sort of geography, la géographie humaine, ‘social geography’ one might call it. He founded a new journal, the Annales de géographie, to spread his new conception; so even the title of Annales is a sort of homage to Vidal. This new geography implied ‘a new conception of the relation between the land and man’, as he put it. Man’s relationship to the environment he saw as ‘at once active and passive’, shaping it and being shaped by it. Vidal’s key concept was that of genre de vie, ‘way of life’, a middle term between the individual and his environment. It was this way of life (itself influenced by the environment) which decided which one of the geographical possibilities open to a society was taken up. A river might be seen by one society as a barrier, but by another as a route—it depended on their technology and their attitudes. Vidal’s revolution was a ‘historization’ of geography, and this implied, as Febvre was perhaps the first to see, a possible and fruitful ‘geographization’ of history. Genre de vie may remind the reader of Max Weber’s Lebenstil, ‘style of life’. It seems that the Annales school learned from social geography what historians elsewhere, notably in the USA, have learned from sociology—to take events less seriously and structural factors more seriously than they had done.⁶

François Simiand was much the same age as Febvre, and like him a harsh critic of the traditionalist historians of the day, against whom he wrote a famous article on historical method and the social sciences, attacking three ‘idols of the tribe of historians’. These were the ‘idol of polities’, the ‘idol of the individual’, and the ‘idol of origins’: that is, the predominance of political history over economic and social, the focusing of research on individuals rather than institutions, and the study of things when they were beginning rather than when they were important.⁷

Simiand’s great positive contribution to the study of history was his work on prices. What interested him in particular were long-term trends or fluctuations. In modern history, he distinguished four periods of rising prices and production, of economic expansion, which he called ‘A-phases’: 1500–1650, 1789–1815, 1850–80 and 1900–20. Between these periods came ‘B-phases’, when prices were stable or falling, and the economy contracted. This work is interesting for several reasons. In the first place, Simiand was an economist who tried to give a historical explanation for the Great Slump. In the second place, he was concerned with long-term trends, rather than with the time of events. In the third place, he emphasized that price history is not a closed system, but influences, and is in turn influenced by, social and political history. As Febvre would say, there is no such thing as price history.⁸

After the Second World War, the second generation of the Annales school began to publish their researches. Braudel was one of the young men whom Febvre encouraged, and his book on the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, dedicated to Febvre, was published in 1949. The first part of the book is concerned with historical geography, ‘geo-history’ as he calls it, and is very much in the Vidal de la Blache and Febvre tradition. It deals with mountains and plains, with climate and communications. Braudel sees Philip II’s empire above all as a ‘colossal enterprise of sea and land transport’, which was ‘exhausted by its own size’ in an age when it took a ship of fifty tons up to ten days to sail from Marseilles to Algiers. Braudel has also learned from Bloch and Simiand. The second part of his book describes price and population movements and their effects. He suggests that the Price Rise of the sixteenth century, Simiand’s phase A, was favourable to very large states, like the empires of Philip II and Suleiman the Magnificent. He discusses the causes and consequences of the ‘ruin of the bourgeoisie’ in the Mediterranean world. Here he puts into practice his recommendation to historians (see pp. 17f. below) to take more interest in the long-term.⁹

One of the few books which can fittingly be compared with Braudel’s masterpiece is Chaunu’s Séville et l’ Atlantique (1955–9). Its hero is a larger sea and the scale of the book is correspondingly more vast. The interpretative part alone, volume VIII, is over three thousand pages long. In spite of this, it is much more of a monograph and much less of a general synthesis than Braudel’s book. First and foremost it is a contribution to quantitative economic history. It deals with the fluctuations in the volume of trade between Seville and the New World for a century and a half, or, more precisely, from 1504 to 1650. It turns out that there was a long phase of expansion, 1504–1622 (apart from a short-term recession in the 1550s), followed by a period of contraction; Simiand’s phase A and phase B appear once more. Chaunu also argues that the economy of the whole world was becoming unified, thanks to the discovery of America, and that economic trends from Amsterdam to Peking follow the same rhythm as the trade between Seville and the New World. Chaunu is interested in structures as well as trends; in the structure of communications, for example. He makes the point that the low density of population made the New World still more vast, and that the distances were increased still further by poor communications (especially before the Spaniards came), diversity of languages as well as lack of good roads. Pizarro was able to repeat the success of Cortés ten years later because the Incas had not heard what had happened to the Aztecs.¹⁰

Another important work of the postwar Annales school is by a former pupil of Bloch’s, Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis (1960). What Goubert originally planned to do was to write a piece of ‘total history’, like Bloch’s Feudal Society, but for the Beauvais region between 1600 and 1730; ‘consenting to geographical sacrifices’, as Labrousse once put it, ‘in order to maintain chronological ambitions’.¹¹ Unfortunately, the task was still too great, and Goubert decided to leave out institutions, religion (the local variety of Jansenism, for example) and social attitudes. What remains is still a remarkable work of economic and social history, a study of structure and trends (structure, conjoncture). There is a flourishing school of historical demography in France, with Louis Henry as its leader and Population as its journal. It was Henry who developed the method of ‘family reconstitution’, now practised by English historians like E. A. Wrigley. Goubert applied the method to the village of Auneuil. One of his achievements has been to incorporate historical demography into a more general social history. He has a long and important section on the demographic ancien régime in the Beauvaisis, which conformed to a Malthusian model; the population gradually rising, meeting a subsistence crisis every thirty years or so, suddenly declining, then gradually building up again. … Another important section deals with social structure, emphasizing that the peasants of the Beauvaisis were not a homogeneous mass, but had a whole hierarchy among themselves. At the top were the prosperous ploughmen and the rent-collectors; then came the country craftsmen, the gardeners, vine-growers and bean-growers (haricotiers); at the bottom the agricultural labourers.¹²

The second half of Goubert’s book is devoted to patterns of change. This is essentially a study of price history in the manner of Simiand and Labrousse, distinguishing short-term and long-term trends. In the long-term, he describes the fall of prices between 1647 and 1730, thus confirming Simiand’s B-phase once more. Particularly interesting is Goubert’s juxtaposition of price movements and population mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction Peter Burke
• 2 History and the Social Sciences Fernand Braudel
• 3 The so-called ‘Price Revolution’: Reflections on ‘the Italian Situation’ Carlo M. Cipolla
• 4 More about the Sixteenth-century Price Revolution Alexandre R. E. Chabert
• 5 Price and Wage Movements in Belgium in the Sixteenth Century C. Verlinden, 1. Craeybeckx, E. Scholliers
• 6 Central Europe and the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Price Revolution Stanislas Hoszowski
• 7 Movements of Expansion in Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Marian Malowist
• 8 Sixteenth-century Hungary: Commercial Activity and Market Production by the Nobles 2. P. Pach
• 9 History and Climate Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie