École des Annales

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unreferenced=December 2006
orphan=March 2008
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L'École des Annales (The School of Annales) is an important movement in historic discipline founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Thanks to its evolution, the Annales will dominate practically all the French historiography of the Twentieth century. It succeeds the historical current of the founded Historical Review in 1876 by Gabriel Monod.

First Generation

In 1929, these two historians founded the "Annales d’histoire économique et sociale", a revue which re-examined historical analyses and which broke with a history of political or military events based on a more social study. Their approach privileges the long duration and seeks to use other social sciences like auxiliary sciences. Years 1920 at the years 1945, the movement taken along by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch are radically opposed to the primacy political history, and to the positivist method of C. V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, and base their work on interrogations of an economic, social or cultural nature by multiplying the types of historiography.

econd generation

From "Liberation" on, major thinkers of this school are in particular Fernand Braudel, Pierre Goubert, and Ernest Labrousse, who produced a very economic history and is interested more still in "long history", which makes it possible to appreciate the evolution of the companies, rather than microhistory, that of the event, too unstable to be significant. George Duby wrote in the foreword of its work "Le Dimanche de Bouvines" that the history that he and his historian colleagues made "rejected on the margins the eventual, felt reluctant with the account, stuck on the contrary to pose, solve problems and, neglecting trepidations of surface, intended to observe in the long one and the lasted average, the evolution of the economy, the company, civilization." George Duby, heir to work of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, belong to the second generation of the school of Annals, and revolutionize the kind by writing "Sunday of Bouvines" in 1973. It reintroduced the particular event into historiography, ideas in rupture with the initial spirit of "the Annales".

Third generation

The school of les Annales is rooted in economic and demographic history, was very productive in the years 1950 and 1960, took interest in cultural history, in full rise in the years 1970 (Philippe Poirrier, 2004). This last current gave birth in 1978 with New History of Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora.

Fourth Generation

Whereas history seems to gravitate more towards current historiographic disciplines, the School of les Annales tries to answer the movement towards a turning critique, initiated at the end of 1980 by the editorial board of the review.