Opponents of the Annales School

Joseph Tendler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137294982
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Based on analysis of archival and published sources, Opponents of the Annales School examines for the first time those who have dared to criticise and ignore one of the most successful currents of thought in modern historiography. It offers an original contribution to the understanding of an unavoidable chapter in modern intellectual history.

Part I

Annales at Home

1

Annalistes: Pre-history and Trajectories

For almost 100 years, the Annales School has attracted the attention of scholars around the globe. A narrative of its origins and development has simultaneously emerged: pre-history, or intellectual formation, between 1900 and 1929; an era of realization, from 1929 until 1946 and culmination in international reception thereafter. Historians and their colleagues across the humanities helped raise this tide, but while each has their interest, attention here will direct itself towards an overview of Annalistes’ methodological proposals in order to understand the range and depth of their techniques. Readers in search of an exhaustive account of all Annales historians’ methodologies, or a general history of the school, which other scholars have already attempted, will find this disappointing. But it provides a synopsis of how a methodological tradition came to exist, in the process paying attention to the way in which Annalistes projected their own version of their history.

From where did this enterprise emerge, and whither did it go? And which personalities prosecuted projects associated with it? By addressing these questions in tandem, the chapter seeks to avoid assuming coherence where none exists as, for example, in the case of Marc Bloch: his work made statements about method, but his account of the subject, Apologie pour l’histoire, appeared only after his death.¹ Scrutiny of methodologies advanced by Annales historians from texts both in which they formulated them and in which they applied them, so not merely as axiomatic affirmations and, as far as possible, placing oeuvre alongside historian and professional activity, underpins the effort. And the international diffusion of Annalistes’ methodologies, which became widespread between 1950 and 1970 but which had begun during the pre-history of Annales in 1900, is only hinted at below; the national chapters that follow make it clearer still.

Pre-history: sciences of society, nature and economics, 1900–28

Characteristic of their age, Annales forebears consisted in a majority of men, albeit from a range of disciplines. Berr, Émile Durkheim and Vidal de la Blache with their sympathizers rationalized, in contemporary vocabulary, the practice of history. Rationalization in a Weberian sense meant the creation of benchmarks against which to discern and measure the importance of an historical project, organization of professional associations and the removal of traces of instinct from the historian’s modus operandi.² Efforts of this order shaped the early precepts of an Annales methodological tradition and marked Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s formative years.

A threefold context – France’s defeat by Prussia in 1871, the ideologically rigorous assault on university historians conducted by scholars on the Right and the emotive accusations of Charles Péguy – stimulated concerns that French intellect had neither the depth nor power to comprehend the world. Alphonse Aulard, Numa Denys Fustel De Coulanges, Charles-Victor Langlois, Ernest Lavisse, Gabriel Monod and Charles Seignobos argued that if history could become a science, as they hoped, then its scientific status would ‘depend on a method to produce correct results’. Concerns with national misfortunes notwithstanding, the invocation of science also meant to distinguish the professionals from amateurs, many of whom were women, writing history for the wider public in the spirit of the Enlightenment – mixing literary elegance with a casual attitude to factual correctness.³ Historians concerned with formulating a singular ‘méthode rigoreuse’ often defended Protestantism and republican commitments from Catholic and royalist counter-attack, and thus affirmed official orthodoxies. By such deeds they, like Annalistes and so many other products of Third Republican historiography, ascended to the rank of a school in the work of recent scholars; they became the école méthodique. Yet the label distracts attention from the shifting and varied propositions that they advanced. If the political scientist Émile Pillias could be believed, then for historians ‘the Protestant moral is essentially to tell the truth, an individual responsibility. On the contrary, for Catholicism, mendacity is not a cardinal sin’, and luminaries of the Right, Charles Maurras and Henri Massis, certainly alleged in 1939 that ‘G. Monod was not a practising but a political protestant.’⁴ Uniformity, as implied by the label ‘school’ or alleged by Maurras and Massis, does not, however, capture the reality.⁵ Attempts by this group of historians to ‘scientize’ history nevertheless have some currency in view of their shared discursive lexicon, and they in that way hoped to lend historical research cogency, in the 30 years from 1880 until 1910, aimed to ensure that it could rival both the scientific status of natural science, in the age when Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine improved personal health, and the perceived pre-eminence of German historical practice after 1871.⁶ Method, they thought, also legitimized historical education, which historians and politicians hoped would foster a ‘cultural revolution’ by presenting to France’s future generations incontrovertible evidence of the historic importance of French republicanism.⁷

The Dreyfus Affair had brought public recognition for a form of historical method, but also damaged its claim to ideological neutrality. Monod, Seignobos and Lavisse overcame their initial reluctance and, between 1894 and 1906, examined evidence submitted in court using the principles of documentary analysis.⁸ Public notoriety followed, and for history too: one-third of all doctoral dissertations submitted to the Sorbonne came from history students, each hopeful of obtaining a secure, lifelong career in a lycée or university.⁹ And the emphasis on method spread throughout Parisian scientific institutions, reaching its summit when another Dreyfusard, the Marquis Arconati-Visconti, endowed a chair devoted to the subject at the Collège de France in 1905.¹⁰ For all that, and as the twentieth century progressed, méthodique historians’ involvement with Dreyfus made their practice look ‘totally outdated and harmful’ to Febvre, for example, because it appeared to serve particular causes.¹¹ Early Annalistes regarded it, in Alice Gérard’s words, as ‘the emblem of the rationalist camp’, used against those who ‘mourned the passing of the ancien régime’ in order to extol the virtues of liberal democracy.¹²

Historical synthesis, the centrepiece of Berr’s response to the situation in the first decade of the twentieth century, mixed aspirations of truth-seeking and rigour with claims about the nature of reality itself. Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique provided the forum in which like-minded scholars contemplated ‘rescuing’ the human sciences from impoverishment through the reduction of research hours by the ‘routine and empiricism’ of teaching and ideology.¹³ The periodical welcomed representatives of professional orthodoxy: Berr, for example, heralded Alphonse Aulard’s magnum opus, the Histoire politique de la Révolution française, as the same ‘probing and fertile model of science’ as Seignobos had achieved in his Histoire politique de l’Europe contemporaine.¹⁴ Berr’s milieu in its turn did not attack historical method for its hyper-scientism in the manner of scholars associated with Action française; instead they disparaged excessive specialization.¹⁵ Synthesis provided the key: Berr’s doctoral dissertation and then his La Synthèse en histoire defined it as a form of ‘philosophical reflection’, a way ‘to understand life’ by drawing together knowledge in full awareness of its historical evolution. This had an ontological content and a strong measure of Hegelian Idealism:

If we go to the essence of our thought, we shall say that history, such as we understand it, is itself linked with general synthesis; it is, at its base, philosophical reflection; that it must, one day, become the very soul of education; that it is able to give to all beings – above all to young people in intellectual confusion – the joy inherent in taking time to understand life, to surpass it, so to speak, and to situate the individual within Humanity, the totality of the Real.¹⁶

The sciences of man must, he added, adopt the ‘axiological neutrality’ of their natural counterparts and use a variety of methods in order to construct the real.¹⁷ Berr practised the interdisciplinarity implied by this vision through his ‘voluntarist editorial strategy’: the appeal to and inclusion of articles by scholars working in any discipline.¹⁸ Contributor numbers witnessed success: historians wrote 43 per cent, philosophers 19 per cent and littéraires 17 per cent of the articles included between 1900 and 1910.¹⁹

Editorial generosity cannot disguise the way in which scholars sympathetic to Berr’s enterprise defined their programme against the spectre of ‘traditional history’: a collection of characteristics mixing rhetorical flourish with critique of university historians. François Simiand, unlike Berr, upbraided Seignobos for focusing on individual rather than general facts, which, Simiand argued, revealed the past by exposing the beliefs on which communities built shared ‘representations’ of their world. The idea derived from Émile Durkheim’s treatise on sociological method, the limits of which Simiand surpassed by adumbrating a universal, scientific process.²⁰ According to Simiand, social scientists created general explanations using an historical method: the discernment of facts through scrutiny of documentation.²¹ But sociologists then formulated and tested hypotheses constructed out of recovered information, whereas historians simply reconstructed a course of events, therefore providing only understandings of ephemera, often of past politics. Unlike historians, sociologists therefore used historical method with ‘scientific’ precision.²² Their empirical examinations of groups of people and other collectives, including assessments of similarity and difference between phenomena across time and place, in order to offer causal laws as explanations, extended that advantage still further.²³ The disembodiment of reality and the arbitrary role of researchers in determining the selection of hypotheses posed Simiand few problems by comparison with historians, who worried about compromises to their impartiality, because they constituted a realistic way for ‘objective’ social scientists to apply ‘well-reasoned method’.²⁴

Sociology likewise spoke to the synthetic ambitions of these years. As Simiand mocked histories of fact and event as ‘histoire historisante’, Paul Lacombe argued that historians should adopt a ‘sociological method’.²⁵ Berr too criticized historians’ shortcomings – pouring scorn on those outside France, Eduard Meyer and Arvid Grotenfelt – in the process distinguishing as historical two related tasks: ‘erudition’, the collection of facts, and ‘science’, the colligation of atomic details to create a ‘genetic process’. Executed in tandem, the procedures both replicated past realities and confirmed the reciprocity of history and sociology by confirming that whole and part went together.²⁶ Meyer’s preoccupation with the particularity of personality and with contingency, and his denial of history’s potential to imitate the natural sciences, therefore looked regressive.²⁷ But Berr’s critique stopped at the point of demonstrating how sociology and history should co-exist. He did not, like some Durkheimians, propose that sociology would eventually ‘replace’ history, which would one day have retrieved finite stores of data, because only sociologists had the tools fit for interpretation.²⁸

Yet Durkheim himself grounded sociological method in institutional history.²⁹ Institutions, he alleged, compounded ‘all beliefs and all modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity. Sociology can, therefore, be defined as the science of institutions.’³⁰ Fustel de Coulanges, who had taught Durkheim at the École Normale Supérieure, inspired the definition, and the preface to the Année sociologique confirmed sociologists’ interest in historical research, mentioning only history and sociology.³¹ Like Simiand, Durkheim taunted ‘traditional’ history, particularly Gaetano Salvemini’s work, as corrosive because it claimed that historians analysed isolated facts.³² Instead, Durkheim argued, any method should investigate what he and Marcel Mauss called the social fact, a particular...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Abbreviations in the Notes
• Introduction: ‘Annales Continues … ’
• Part I: Annales at Home
• Part II: Views from Western Europe
• Part III: Transatlantic Passages
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Index