Transcript HI323 Historiography Charles Walton

HI323
Historiography
Charles Walton
Les Annales
‘A week is a long
time in politics’
Harold Wilson(1964)
Zhou Enlai on the
impact of the French
Revolution of 1789’it's too soon to tell’
(c.1971)
Annales School
1. It’s French
2. It spanned most of 20th century
3. It came in three waves
The Annales at their peak
• 1950s/1970s under Fernand Braudel &
Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie
• Influential in France and internationally,
esp. in US from 1970s onward
• Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and
the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II (1949 French/1972-3 English)
makes a splash
• Influence has waned but still significant
Peter Burke (Cambridge historian)
on the Annales:
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‘The substitution of a problem-orientated
analytical history for a traditional narrative of
events’ (more true of waves 1 and 3 than 2)
‘The history of the whole range of human
activities in the place of a mainly political
history’
‘Collaboration with other disciplines’ such as
geography, sociology, economics and
anthropology
Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) founded the journal
Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale in 1929
First Wave Annales
Approaches
• Rejected narrow political history
• Interdisciplinary – link study of the past
with approaches and methods of the social
sciences
• Breaking down chronological barriers
• How unique? Influence of other historians
(Berr), sociologists (Durkheim) and
geographers (Vidal de la Blache)
The early years
• Importance of place – University of Strasbourg
(came into French hands after WWI)
• Desire to avoid overtly political mobilization of
history
• Love-hate relationship with sociology
(sociological models: ‘leaky vessels’ for Bloch)
• Influence of World War One and Marxist
concerns – respect for peasants and workers
(soldiers); respect for ordinary individuals
• Competition with Germany – desire to provide
alternative to Rankean and nationalist history
Marc Bloch’s histories
• The Royal Touch (1924)- influence of Durkheim
and anthropology; examined “irrational” beliefs to
explore kingship and power in Britain and France
• French Rural History (1931) – long duration;
stresses work of peasants rather than elites; use of
aerial photographs and move backwards in time
• Feudal Society (1939) – a comparative historical
sociology of Europe c.900-1300, avoiding any
political narrative or discussion of individual
kings.
• long view - centuries
• problem focused
• religious psychology
• history of mentalités (practices,
unconscious mental structures)
• comparative history (France,
Britain)
Marc Bloch,
The Royal Touch (1924)
About the custom of royals curing
scrofula by laying hands on infected
subjects
Influenced by sociologist Emile Durkheim
( 1858-1917), who focused not on
individual or individual psychology but on
collective phenomena
• Suicide (1897)
• The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(1912)
- Looked at aerial photos of
French countryside
- Looked for historical reasons
for different land patterns
- Materialism: looked at
forces and relations of
production: certain
technology (the heavy
plow) worked best in
Northern France due to
political, environmental
and socio-cultural factors.
- Non-Marxist materialism:
No base vs. superstructure;
Both mattered.
1942/3
1939/40
1940
Strange Defeat, 1940
• How did France collapse so
quickly?
• ‘Statement of evidence’: his
commitment to empiricism
• Immediate AND long-term
causes (made his career
looking at long-term; had to
struggle to )
• Crisis of conscience:
Durkheimian ‘collective
culture’ fails to capture the
anguish of individual
responsibility: part III of book > ‘A Frenchman examines his
conscience’
Strange Defeat
• ‘If we turn back on ourselves we shall be lost.
Salvation can be ours only on condition that
we set our brains to work with a will, in order
that we may know more fully, and get our
imaginations moving to a quicker tempo.’
Question
• Was Bloch moving away from his own school?
• Was Strange Defeat an attempt to re-incorporate
individual and collective agency into an analytical
framework that had treated mentalités’
(collective mental structures) as resistant to
change, resistant to sudden bursts of individual or
collective will? If so, why bother joining the
Resistance (as he did, and was killed for it)?
• ‘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’.
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History must look at structures; ‘now, at
last, it struggles to penetrate beneath the
mere surface of actions’.
• Debt to sociology and commitment to
interdisciplinarity – ‘Long have we worked
for a wider more human history’. BUT
‘Sociological laws are frail vessels that
disintegrate as they sail.’
• Historian should understand, not judge
(Rankean attitude) – but what about the
politics of one’s own time? Should historians
ignore them? How can one not judge in the
Last book, written while fighting in
face of Nazism?
the Resistance against Nazism
• Denial of individual agency in favour of the
collective. Does this lead to ethical paralysis?
Lucien Febvre
• Phd thesis: Franche-comté in the time of
Philippe II
– Published in 1912
– Begins with land, then economy, social relations,
ending with the rule of Philippe II (late 16th
century)
François Rabelais (?-1553)
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel
1937
Febvre – Problem of Unbelief
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About a 16th century French poet, Rabelais
Funny story about giants -- critical of religion.
So was Rabelais an atheist? ‘Impossible!’ says Febvre
Categories of ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief’ didn’t exist
Book about mentalités: the senses, practice, experience
He was wrong, it turns out, but he asked influential
questions and made historians more aware of potential
anachronism in their analyses… we have to understand
different states of mind (and not just of elites) to make
sense of past worlds…
• Legacies: cultural history (anthropological); psychological
histories, history of emotions (recent).
2nd Wave Annales
(post-WWII)
Dominates the field for
decades
Fernand Braudel,
1902-1985
The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II (1923-1949)
Braudel’s Mediterranean…
• …in the Age of Philip II (1949)
– ‘Age of’ is the key here, not King Philip II
• Interdisciplinary
• Vast in scope – Histoire totale!
– Region, sea
– Sea as real but also historical metaphor
– How people engage with environment
– Society, culture, economy
– Last part of book: the reign of Philip II
Braudel and the Annales way
• Large-scale – the sea is at the centre of
the book rather than an individual
• Beyond Europe – global, comparative
• Interdisciplinary, influence of
geography particularly strong
• Attempt to write a ‘total history’
Braudel’s conception of time
• Built on work of Febvre and Bloch
• Time was not homogenous: different
rhythms – geographical, economic, social,
cultural, political
• The political timeframe was the least
important: statesmen ‘more acted upon
than actors’ – froth on top of the crest of
waves pulled and pushed by tides. The tides
mattered most to Braudel.
Three Dimensions of Time
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2.
3.
‘The deep’/structures (Part I of book): geographical
structures and climate in which humans live. Change
is slow, only visible over the longue durée (the long
run)
‘Conjonctures’ (Part II): medium term trends (5, 10,
50 years) that combine in historically important
ways: legal systems, economic cycles. A middle term
between longue-durée structures and events
‘L’histoire événementielle’ (Part III): history of events
(seen as superficial by Annalistes at the time)
Braudel on structures
and longue durée
‘To historians like ourselves, while structure
does of course mean an assembly of parts, a
framework, it signifies more particularly a
reality which survives through long periods of
time and is only slowly eroded… all structures
act both as foundations and obstacles.’
‘History and the Social Sciences: The Long Term’,
Social Science Information 9:1 (1970), 151
Braudel on the Environment:
Part One is ‘devoted to a history whose
passage is almost imperceptible, that of man
in his relationship to the environment, a
history in which all change is slow, a history
of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.
I could not neglect this almost timeless
history, the story of man’s contact with the
inanimate.’
Ernst Labrousse: a fellow traveller of
the Annales
• Braudel praised Labrousse’s statistical studies
• Taught at Sorbonne from 1940s onward
• The French Economic Crisis at the End of the Old
Regime (1943)
– Looked at long, medium and short term economic
trends to explain socioeconomic origins of the French
Revolution – a conjoncture historian
– ‘Tout s’explique par la courbe!’ – ‘The curve explains
everything!’ the French Revolution could be explained
by economic curves plotting the prices of land rents,
bread and taxes. Everyone had economic reasons to
be angry in 1789!
How to historically situate
the longue durée approach to history?
(My speculation here)
• Braudel was a prisoner of war in Germany in
World War II – desire to see history as a great sea
of time, to relativize the tragic present – to
transcend it.
• Offered a historical contrast to the present
(1950s-1960s), which underwent abrupt
modernisation. The anxiety of vertiginous change
was soothed by the seemingly eternal seas of
‘sociétés immobiles’ – unchanging societies
How to historically situate
the longue durée approach to history?
(My speculation here)
• And yet, the perspective which put the environment
and technologies at the core (de-centring the human
ethical agent) also heightened the historical
significance of technological modernisation, which was
all the rage in the 1950s-1970s (e.g. Third World
‘modernisation’ programmes)
• Opposite of Frankfurt School, which rejected the cold,
scientific materialism and technological modernisation
of the Enlightenment. Next to Braudel’s ‘immobile
societies’ of deep history, one could only marvel at
recent modernisation.
Criticism of Braudel
• Mediterranean influenced environmental historians,
but they have shown that nature is far more fluid
and historical than Braudel suggested.
• Braudel too descriptive and his work lacks a central
problem - ‘a kaleidoscopic jumble’ (Simon Kinser);
disconnected rooms of a mansion
• Not enough attention to institutions and ideas
• Lots of answers but to what questions? (Less
‘problem’ focused than wave 1 and 3 of Annales)
The period post-Braudel
Third Wave Annales
• Le Roy Ladurie –
continued and
developed the
Annaliste approach
History of mentalities
• Roots in Bloch and Febrve’s work on
cultural representations
• Engages with anthropology
• Focus on collective (not individual)
beliefs/assumptions
• Mentalities the (often unconscious) mental
structures that influence (determine?)
action
Mentalités
• Le Roy Ladurie
– The Peasants of Languedoc (1966)
• ‘Economic life of peasants in southern France between late medieval and early
modern period, 14th-18th centuries
• ‘Histoire immobile’ (unchanging history), but more emphasis on culture and
economy than environment.
• Juicy factoid (literally): average peasant in Languedoc drank between 1.5 and
2.5 litres of wine daily in 1480.
• Wine consumption rates would go down… the southern Gaulois could handle
their alcohol better than the Frankish northerners!
– Montaillou (1975)
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Medieval town destroyed by feuds and religious strife
Narrower time period: thirty years (not millenia!)
Still ‘histoire totale’ with demography, attitudes, beliefs, cosmology, politics
But focused on particular individuals (new). Aim to uncover the texture of the
town in specific historical moments… move towards micro-history, even as it
was ‘total history’
1970s and 1980s
New approach or revival of Bloch/Febvre?
• Women historians arrive on the Annales
scene: Arlette Farge, Michele Perrot
• Shift away from quantification (wave 2)
towards ‘mentalités’ again
• Micro-history, history of minorities, women,
children – not all white-male elite history
• Influence of cultural anthropology: symbols
and culture, history of meanings
Influence of Annales beyond France
• Became globally influential in 1960s-1970s. Why?
– French funding for research was generous. (Les Trente
glorieuses – economic boom in these years)
– US funding (Ford, Rockefeller), especially of the 6th
section of the École pratique des hautes études, which
became the École des hautes études en sciences
sociales, directed by Braudel
– International academic exchanges increase (think
Erasmus programs but global and professors)
– Translations into other languages
– Hierarchy, patronage in French university system
Chief legacies
• History and social science – self-conscious
interdisciplinarity, often as ‘cultural
history’: sociology, anthropology, critical
theory [Foucault]
• ‘Longue durée’/ ‘total history’ still
current notions (making a comeback with
‘deep history’ and ‘big data history’ in
recent years)
• Global, postmodern, gender history
• From narrative political history to political
culture (ideas, practices, mentalités)
Annales in perspective
• 1st wave – desire to avoid politics while
acknowledging ordinary workers (a somewhat
Marxist sentiment but also desire to remain
neutral in troubled times)
• 2nd wave – dominated by former
communist/socialists who rejected Marxism.
Non-dialectical in approach. Shift from modes of
production (Marx) to modes of exchange
(Braudel)… stress on market integration (a good
thing for Braudel), not capitalist exploitation of
workers and peasants (as Marxists would
emphasise)
Origins of Longue durée