achievements of the annales school

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Achievements of the Annales School Author(s): Robert Forster Source: The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 38, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History (Mar.,

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Achievements of the Annales School

IN his presidential address last year Robert Gallman quoted a let- ter 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 incorporat- ing 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 Eco- nomic 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



The Annales School 59 "ostensibly" because I think that with respect to economics there is a special problem for the Annales. Economic history as it was developed by the "Anglo-Saxon world" since the 1950s represents both a lure and a disappointment for Clio, Annales-style. Econometrics is appealing by its heavy reliance on quantification and by its claims to rigorous method in the testing of hypotheses. Even the notion of counterfactual history has reached the pages of Le Monde, though not, as far as I know, the pages of the Annales, except in the form of reviews of American research.5 But there is also an air of amused skepticism about such levels of abstraction. More important, there is a conviction that national income accounting-valid as far as it goes- is not appropriate for France, and surely not for the Annales.

First and foremost, the French data are not adequate, especially for the period before 1800.6 And for many French scholars-and even for the public at large "history" is pre-1789. It is not from a lack of lucidity that the French label post-1789 as "contemporary history" and that histoire moderne covers about three centuries from 1500. When a nation has two thousand years of history, the last century or so does seem "contemporary" and not quite as respectable or interest- ing as earlier epochs. Remember, too, that each national history has its moments of pride, even grandeur, which attract researchers and even determine the collection and organization of historical materials. The French Revolution has perhaps had a greater influence on the arrangement and accessibility of historical data than it has had on the social structure of France! Only recently has it been feasible to work in the archives on nineteenth-century materials; the whole archival organization is built on an overriding interest in the history of France from Charlemagne to the First Republic. The data for this millennium are rich and varied, sufficient to occupy researchers for centuries to come. But they are not appropriate for the imperatives of macro- economics or national income accounting.

Less palpable, but surely important as determinants of "research strategy" are certain values and attitudes that all French children imbibe early. The world of Asterix, Babar, the Little Prince, and

5 Maurice LUvy-Leboyer, "La croissance economique en France au XIXe siecle," Annales: E.S.C., 23 (1968), 788-807; id., "La New Economic History," Annales: E.S.C., 24 (1969), 1035-65.

6 David Landes, "Statistics as a Source for the History of Economic Development in Western Europe: The Protostatistical Era," in Val R. Lorwin and Jacob M. Price, eds., The Dimensions of the Past: Materials, Problems, and Opportunities for Quantificative Work in History (New Haven, 1972), pp. 61-75. Landes says that French data are much more appropriate for microanalysis. Ibid., p. 74.



60 Forster Tintin is still alive in French schoolrooms and playrooms. Until the recent past, the hero of French children has rarely been the businessman or technician; Jacques Prevert's robots still threaten the artisanal lives of the little chimneysweep and his companion. What has the history of industrialism and urban growth, of giantism and technocracy to say to historians brought up on such "petty-bourgeois sentimentality"? Marx and Ford would shake their heads together. One cannot miss a certain nostalgia for the "world we have lost" in the work of many members of the Annales School, reflected in Bloch's love of field and vine, Braudel's attachment to sailor and shopkeeper, and Le Roy's last line in his Civilisation rurale: "and perhaps the countryside has not had its last word-even today."7 The pre- statistical world is not only more suitable to the material at hand; it is a more congenial world to French historians brought up on the artisanal-rural utopia of Babar's Celesteville. And even present com- pany would concede that the pre- or proto-statistical centuries have an economic history that is worth studying and analyzing.8

What is the Annales School? If the founders of the journal, Bloch and Febvre, had their way, the Annales would never have become a "school." Their successor as editor, Fernand Braudel, continues to insist that success and institutionalization are bound to lead to com- placency, conformism, and stagnation.9 Nevertheless, Richard Cobb, for all of his obvious bias against what he sees as the new French historical establishment, is not wide of the mark when he evokes a collectivity-"nous des Annales."10 There is no doubt, in short, that an Annales school of historians exists, if by "school" we mean a group of research scholars who communicate with each other, share a few general assumptions about the subject matter and goals of history, and doggedly insist on searching for different approaches to the subject by a wide exposure to neighboring disciplines.1. But let me

7 Marc Bloch, Les caracteres originaux de l'histoire rurale fraWaise (Paris, 1951), 2 vols.; Fernand Braudel, La M6diterrange et le monde mediterranhen a rNpoque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949, 1966), English trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1973), 2 vols.; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l'historien (Paris, 1973), p. 168.

8 Even in the hard-nosed USA, "Economic Man" is losing some of his proclivity for profit maximization. See Leonard Silk, "Economic Man Acquires a Soul," New York Times: Business Section (July 17, 1977), p. 1.

9 F. Braudel, Icrits sur l'histoire (Paris, 1969), Pt. II; Foreword to Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976).

10 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (London, 1969), pp. 76-83.

11 Although the "school" is usually associated with the review, it also publishes monographs and collections of articles in the series Cahiers des Annales and the books of many of its members. "Membership," however, must be understood as extending beyond direct affiliation



The Annales School 61 say immediately that for all its sustained vitality over a half-century, I am not convinced that the Annales group practices, much less for- mally espouses, anything as precise as a "historical method" or a "paradigm," to use Traian Stoianovich's term from his recent book on the Annales. Braudel's introduction to that book indicates that he is not happy with the term either.12 In fact, the Annales editors have always insisted on their eclecticism and their openness, not only to new materials, but to new approaches; they seem adverse to such terms as "paradigm," "ideal type," and even "model" in any rigorous, methodological sense. Programmatic statements are also rare, partly because they would seem to hinder a literary style that relies heavily on imagery and evocative description, nuance and indirection. The French have a horror of being heavy-handed, despite some "block- busters" in the pages of the review. Sense of language thus adds to a conscious policy of backing away from any single methodology of historical explanation. Indeed, there are times when one wonders whether Annales historians care about "explanation" at all, in the sense of weighing factors or variables. 13 As we shall see presently, the Annales does have special views about explanation, but they will surely leave many Anglo-Saxon-style economic historians "still thirsty," as the French say.

Lest one suspect the Annales of avoiding the issue of historical explanation under the guise of a generous eclecticism, let us turn first to what it claims to oppose in historical writing. It is significant that a declaration about method first published by Franvois Simiand in 1903 was republished in the Annales in 1960 with the note: We publish this especially for younger historians in order to allow them to take stock of the road we have traveled in a half-century, and to gain a better understanding of the dialogue between History and the Social Sciences, which remains the goal and raison d'etre of our review.14

with the cole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, known for years as the "Sixth Section." The Ecole is a government-supported institute which organizes "research teams" on specific projects. Many, though not all, of the articles published in the Annales constitute progress reports on long-term research in the "historical sciences." The institutional history of the Annales would be a long paper in itself. See Comit6 Franpais des Sciences Historiques, La Recherche historique en France de 1940 a 1965 (Paris, 1965).

12 Traian Stoianovich, French Historial Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976). 13 The problem of "historical explanation" can carry us far. For "explanation" relating to

social theory, I have found these books especially helpful: Jerome Dumoulin and Dominque Moisi, eds., The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist (Paris, 1973); Gordon Leff, History and Social Theory (U. of Alabama Press, 1969); Elias H. Tuma, Economic History and the Social Sciences (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971).

14 Frangois Simiand, "Methode historique et science sociale," Annales: E.S.C., 15 (1960), 83n.



62 Forster In the article Simiand launched the attack upon the Sorbonne, an attack that is still part of the litany of the Annales. Down with the triple "idols" of political history, biography, and narrative history; they amount to no more than surface history, Whig history, "voluntarism," and chronicle. Join the historical data to sociology, geography, anthropology, psychology, and economics to construct a "new social science." But despite a long epistemological discussion, Simiand was not very precise about how these various social sciences could be made methodologically compatible.15 Indeed, it does not appear that this issue has ever been resolved.

On the other hand, Simiand presented a classification scheme for "the essential phenomena of an entire society" from "material conditions" to "material" and "intellectual" customs, and finally to social and political institutions, a taxonomy that was to prevail in its essen- tials in the organization of French doctoral theses well into the 1960s. As Eric Hobsbawm has put it, "The practice is thus to work outwards and upwards from the process of social production in its specific setting."''6 Simiand also emphasized the interlocking nature of all history, its Zusammenhang, which makes the historian's main task one of identifying "certain relations of correspondence or reciprocal influence," more in the manner of a biologist examining a process than of a physicist searching for the elegant parsimonious cause expressed in abstract symbols.'7 The same plea for a rejection of the "norm of outmoded physics" in favor of those of biology was published in the Annales in 1959 over the name of Walt Rostow.'8 A recent review of a major work in biology by a specialist in comparative anatomy puts the issue this way:

Biologists cannot use abstract symbolism and mathematics in the way that physicists do for the very reason that most living processes are influenced by many forces and by their long past history. This is why biology seems to mathematicians and other clever people to be an "inexact" science. But actually it involves knowing more, not less. . . . living processes do not have single "causes," but depend on many factors and a long, long history.19

Simiand, Febvre, or Braudel might have written this about their

15 Ibid., pp. 83-119. 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.



The Annales School 63 discipline which, for them, is akin to a biological science. It would be presumptuous to ascribe a single style of exposition to the hundreds of contributors to the Annales, yet the biological and physical metaphor is too frequent not to notice. There are mutations, glissements, fields of force, immobilisms, fissures, and fusions, and, as Jack Hexter has said so well, even geographic features have attractions and repulsions, paths and obstacles, desires and destinies.20 But especially there are ties (liens) and relationships (rapports).

A special notion of time the tongue duree-is Fernand Braudel's contribution to the Annales. And if the Annales has a paradigm, it is his Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip 11.21 Braudel likens his three conceptions of historical time- structure, conjoncture, and event-to the sea depths, the -tides, and the surface waves. The "structure" is the glacier-like macrocosm of an entire society conditioned by impersonal forces (geographic, climatic, biological, productive) and so interlocking as to defy alteration for a millennium. The conjuncturee" is the half- to full-century cycle where technology, price gyrations, cumulative population changes, and even mental or cultural shifts gradually undermine the "structure" and eventually form a new equilibrium. The "events" are mere surface noises, often full of sound and fury but signifying little, indicators at best of the deeper currents of history. As Jack Hexter has put it in reviewing Braudel's work, each "time" has its corresponding kind of history, even its own special package of social sciences.22 Under this scheme, demography and the study of geographic milieu are obviously fundamental; the investigation of new techniques of production and exchange and of cultural shifts is somewhat less so; and explanations of political events and formal ideas have only marginal importance.

The Braudellian schema was too Gargantuan to encourage many followers. The fact that Braudel applied his notion of time to the entire Mediterranean basin and far into the interiors of three conti- nents gave his work a spatial dimension to which few historians could aspire. What is more, even the Annales researchers must have wor- ried about some of the methodological problems-including Braudel's handling of economic statistics-that were occasionally ex- posed in foreign reviews. Hexter's review was good-humored, and

20 Braudel, tcrits sur l'histoire, p. 132 and passim; Hexter, "Fernand Braudel," p. 518. As Hexter puts it, geographic features become "non-people persons."

21 (Paris, 1949, 1966), English trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1973), 2 vols. 22 Hexter, "Fernand Braudel," p. 531f.



64 Forster rightly characterized Braudel's relation to numbers as one with a mistress who fascinates but is not taken too seriously. Hexter also praised him for his evocative style, his voracious appetite for the picturesque, and his almost anatomical sense of geography, qualities that Bernard Bailyn had once summarized as a "poetic response to the past," totally lacking in central theme or argument.24 The Annales praised this kind of histoire totale as the highest goal of the school, but only a few exceptional historians, such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, have been able to control their data and recreate their "world" in the Braudellian mold.25 It is not surprising, therefore, that some An- nalistes have sought respite from histoire totale and the tongue duree and recommended a microanalysis of the functioning parts of the "structure," in other words, subjects of narrower temporal and spatial scope.26 They might investigate a social group over two or three generations, a village or a port over a century or, at most, the attitudes toward death or children over two centuries.27 This more limited approach has also deferred the problem of identifying the linkages with those Braudellian "grand themes and vague forces" that, as Jan de Vries says, "hover about without fixed moorings high above the factual landscape. "28

Whatever reservations one might have about Braudel's histoire totale, it was under his editorship and direction since 1957 that the Annales perfected a number of auxiliary historical disciplines.

23 Ibid., pp. 515-18. Braudel regards most of economic history as part of a "day-to-dayness" or the routine habits of the mass of human beings, including their material concerns, all within the framework of a pre-industrial society. See Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, English trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 6-7 and passim. See also Braudel, Civilisation mat6rielle et capitalisme (XVe-XVIIIe sicle) (Paris, 1967), I.

24 Bernard Bailyn, "Braudel's Geo-History-A Reconsideration," this JOURNAL, 11 (Summer 1951), 277-82. Melvin Knight's review was more kind; he alluded to the "connective tissue" between social and natural phenomena in Braudel's work, a phrase that would please him. Melvin M. Knight, "The Geo-History of Fernand Braudel (Review Article)," this JOURNAL, 10 (Nov. 1950), 212-16.

25 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1965), 2 vols.; English trans. John Day (Urbana, 1974). One might also add Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, S6ville et l'Atlantique (1504-1650) (Paris, 1955-60), 11 vols. and annexes, and Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 a 1730 (Paris, 1960), 2 vols.

26 Frangois Furet, "Le quantitatif en histoire," in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire (Paris, 1974), I, p. 55; Adeline Daumard, "Donnees 6conomiques et histoire sociale," Revue gconomique, 1 (Jan. 1965), 79-80. See Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 122-24.

27 See the collections Ports, routes, traffics and Les Hommes et la terre and the recent work on the family by Philippe Aries and Jean-Louis Flandrin, and on death by Michel Vovelle and Frangois Lebrun.

28 Jan de Vries, "The Classics in Transition," Reviews in European History, 1 (March 1975), 473.



The Annales School 65 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 examina- tion 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 prear- ranged 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'Nvolution humaine (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&pouillement et de l'exploitation de l'tat civil ancien (Paris, 1965).



66 Forster births. Puritan England has nothing on seventeenth-century France in these matters. (Less Rabelais, more Jansenism!) It was in demographic studies that hypotheses were more explicitly stated, especially those intended to explain the appearance of birth control in the peasant family with all of its implications of a deep historical change.34 Family history had come into its own, and it even yielded spinoffs in occupational analysis, studies of geographic mobility, community networks, and even literacy rates based on the study of signatures.35 No wonder that Anthony Wrigley, no amateur demographer himself, still refers to Louis Henry as the "Great White Father."36

IfAnnales interest in demography owed something to France's own population problems before World War II, its interest in economics owed much to the world depression of the 1930s. In fact, it appears that Ernest Labrousse and his many students took business cycle theory only too seriously. Labrousse's adaptation of the cycle to French sources was the crux of the problem. The mercuriales are recordings of the wholesale grain prices in local markets and exist for all of France for almost two centuries. These are solid "serial sources" and it is tempting to graph and overlay them with demographic and weather series over long periods. But lacking adequate production data, it was unwise of Labrousse to use the grain prices, not only as a statistical indicator of the entire agrarian economy and the distribu- tion of income within it, but also of the entire economy of the nation, including industry and commerce. In addition, he applied the gyrations in grain prices-arranged in a series of overlapping cycles based on time periods of varying length-to explain the French Revolution largely in terms of the price of bread.37 How frequently did French professors of the French Revolution cite 14 July 1789 as the highest point of the grain-price chart for the century! In 1950 David Landes published an excellent critique of the Labrousse thesis from the point of view of economic theory, but only in the last decade has that criticism been recognized in France.38 In this case, the centralized

34 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l'historien, pp. 23-37. The Times Literary Supplement devoted several issues (April 7, July 28, Sept. 8, 1966) to the "New History"; among the articles was Le Roy Ladurie's "From Waterloo to Colyton"-from "battle history" to the peasant family, written with his characteristic elan. TLS (Sept. 8, 1966), pp. 791-92.

35 More accurately, family history "came into its own" when the quantitative data of the demographers were joined to the qualitative findings of the anthropologist. See Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Family and Society: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore, 1976).

36 Anthony Wrigley made this comment in a seminar at Johns Hopkins University in 1975. 37 Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenues en France au XViiie

siecle (Paris, 1932), 2 vols.; La Crise de l'gconomie franpaise a la fin de l'Ancien Regime et au debut de la Revolution (Paris, 1944).

38 David Landes, "The Statistical Study of French Crises," this JOURNAL, 10 (Nov. 1950),



The Annales School 67 university system, among other factors, has tended to enshrine the Labrousse thesis for much too long. Even today Pierre Chaunu continues to cite Labrousse's-and his own-cycles as France's major contribution to economic history. The Annales group as a whole is now less than unanimous about Labrousse's work, but still praises it as a pioneering achievement in "serial history."39

In the mid-1960s, thanks in part to Simon.Kuznets and a grant from the SSRC, Jean Marczewski launched the "American approach" to economic history, national income accounting. In an article in the Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto Marczewski asserted that quantitative history was still little understood in France, that his French colleagues really did not know how to employ statistical analysis, build mathematical models, use statistical inference and a system of references, and test hypotheses explicitly and rigorously.40 The reaction was quick and rather heated, and in the end the New Economic History "lost," at least among the Annalistes. Criticism ranged from the marked hostil- ity of Vilar and Chaunu to the milder reactions of Furet and Richet who, while full of admiration for the rigor of the method and the sophistication of the techniques, concluded that European data are simply not adequate for periods before 1800 and that to limit history to one century and to one social science would reduce it to "nothing more than an additional field of data for political economy. "41 Pierre Chaunu's more vigorous riposte even suggested that "retrospective econometrics" was not history. This so-called history is hardly history at all. It is restricted to a very short, almost contemporary time-span, and it is confined to the hyper-developed American sector, where it refines, without great merit, an abundant statistical material, essentially pre-prepared already.42

I cite Chaunu's strong reaction to stress again a certain French

195-211. Even so, the recognition has been very tentative. See Denis Richet, "Croissance et blocages en France du XVe au XVIIIe siecle," Annales: E. S.C., 23 (1968), 783.

39 Pierre Chaunu, "Conjoncture, structures, systemes de civilizations," in Jean Bouvier, Pierre Chaunu, et al., Conjoncture 9conomique, structures sociales: Hommage a Ernest La- brousse (Paris, 1974), pp. 21-35 and passim.

40 Jean Marczewski, "Buts et m6thodes de l'histoire quantitative," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, No. 3 (1964), pp. 127-64.

41 Pierre Chaunu, "Histoire quantitative ou histoire s6rielle," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, No. 3 (1964), pp. 165-176; Pierre Vilar, "Pour une meilleure comprehension entre 6conomistes et historiens: Histoire quantitative ou 6conom6trie retrospective?" Revue historique, 233 (1965), 293-312; Furet, "Le quantitatifen histoire," p. 44; Richet, "Croissance et blocages," pp. 783-84. Richet pointed to the dangers of "hypercriticism" of the "model." More sympathetic to the new economic history have been Maurice LUvy-Leboyer and Franpois Crouzet, but neither can be considered part of the Annales school.

42 Pierre Chaunu, "L'6conomie-depassement et prospective," in Faire de l'histoire, II, p. 62.



68 Forster aversion, not only to mathematical model-building, but also to "growth" itself, especially industrial growth, and the source materials that it requires.43 Chaunu, among others, is careful to draw a distinction between "growth" and "development," especially as applied to Latin America, which is his main research interest. "Development," he argues, goes beyond national and per capita income; it concerns an alteration in the mental (structures mentales) and social habits of a population, "deeper modifications which are the condition of a har- monious growth."44 How many times have I heard French sociologists, or even well-read lay persons, speak of a future where life is plus facile et plus douce; it is rare to hear American futurologists speak in quite this way about douceur.

In fact, Chaunu recommends that the next phase of economic history should be in the area of "collective mentalities," investigating the reaction of large groups of people to the total material environment.45 It seems to me that here Chaunu reflects a larger shift within the Annales school as a whole, the new emphasis on anthropology, and especially that branch of anthropology called cultural ecology which assigns greater independence to values and customs and their interplay with the material environment or "resource base."6 This opens the way for a measure of "voluntarism" and also joins the proposal of Daumard and Furet to postpone the "total history" of Braudel.

Consider, for example, the Annales articles in rural history over the last thirty years. One can discern an early interest in the tension between "agrarian individualism" and communal rights, between

43 That "growth" has not always been the prime goal of French entrepreneurs themselves is discussed in Edward Carter, Robert Forster, and Joseph Moody, eds., Entreprise and Entre- preneurship in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore, 1976), essays by Charles Kindleberger, David Landes, Maurice LUvy-Leboyer, and Albert Boime.

" Pierre Chaunu, "Croissance ou developpement (?): A Propos d'une veritable histoire economique de l'Amerique latine aux XIXe et XXe siecles," Revue historique, 244 (1970), 359-60. Italics mine.

45 Chaunu, "L'economie," pp. 66-67; "Un nouveau champ pour l'histoire serielle, le quantitatif au troisieme niveau," Melanges en 1'Ionneur de Fernand Braudel (Toulouse, 1973), pp. 105-25.

46 More accurately, a "renewed emphasis" on anthropology, since it was Lucien Febvre in 1941 who wrote "Comment reconstituer la vie affective d'autrefois? La sensibility et l'histoire," Combats pour l'histoire (Paris, 1965), pp. 221-38; and Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVie siecle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1942). For the "renewed emphasis," see the papers by Frangois Furet, Jacques Le Goff, and Georges Duby in Jerome Dumoulin and Dominque Moisi, eds., The Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist (Paris, 1973), pp. 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).



The Annaes School 69 seigneur and village, between town and countryside; in short, an interest in social conflict in general. Then, in the 1960s, Le Roy Ladurie's "deserted villages" stressed continuity, the Braudellian tongue duree and "structural constraints" that relegated such factors as domain-building, "seigneurial reactions," and royal tax policies to secondary importance. And in the last few years-since 1970-the emphasis has again shifted to the village as a tightly-knit community held together by habit and custom, by deference, clientage, and paternalism, and by a host of ceremonial and ritualistic bonds that contain or transform the conflicts a strictly economic (or Marxist) analysis might suggest. The anthropological approach is manifest here, a new interest in language and popular culture, a radical reduc- tion of the spatial scope of the investigation, the use of qualitative sources, and even a new conservative tone, a stressing of the con- stante fondamentale that defies individual calculation and innova- tion.47

But this apparent turning to anthropology-and to what some historians would call "soft data"-has not dampened the interest of other Annalistes in quantification, albeit quantification with a special twist. If Francois Furet insists that, "scientifically speaking," social history can only be quantitative, he does not mean that all social history can be reduced to numbers, much less mathematical models.48 Like Chaunu, he prefers the term "serial history," the analysis of data that can be ordered in series-often computerized-to identify long-run or recurring patterns which must then be interpreted and related to more qualitative evidence. This half-way house, as it were, between the new economic history and traditional im- pressionistic history is admirably suited to the sources available, and I sometimes suspect the Annales of concocting stratagems that pass for historical method but which are in reality techniques for the deployment of French data.49 As with much sociological research in this country, the deployment of data or taxonomy is the point where quantification or the ordering of uniform parts ends; interpretation is a separate operation.

47 This pattern of evolution seems apparent in the eight articles published in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Rural Society in France: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore, 1977), Intro. and passim.

" Adeline Daumard and Franpois Furet, "Les archives notariales et la mecanographie," Annales: E.S.C., 14 (1959), 676; Furet, "Le quantitatif," pp. 42-61.

49 See Appendix. Obviously, not all of these types of sources lend themselves to "measure- ment" in the same way. The data from parish registers can be computerized; those from newspaper affiches cannot, to my knowledge at least.



70 Forster For example, marriage contracts and wills from the well-stocked

notarial archives can be treated "serially," but not "quantitatively." For besides dowries and sometimes family capital, marriage contracts in France include residence, occupation (of parents and often grand- parents), signatures, and a list of witnesses. Wills contain these same data plus charities, bequests, requests for perpetual masses and other manifestations of religious sentiment that can be reduced to uniform units and in fact "measured" over time. Daumard and Furet have not only constructed a socio-professional code from the vocabulary of a set of marriage contracts but also attempted to chart occupational and residential mobility as well as literacy among social categories.50 Michel Vovelle has investigated 50,000 wills in Provence and attempted to "measure" religious sentiment by social class over a century. His work has been criticized by those who cannot accept outward signs of religious conformity as a reflection of true religiosity, but the variations even of formal observance among social groups over time is itself revealing and presents a pattern to be interpreted.51

This kind of procedure places the Annales group close to the sociologists with whom, I suspect, the Annalistes are still most at home. Charles Tilly claims that characteristic problems treated by French historians which have "quantitative edges" to them are (1) composition of particular populations, (2) group differences, (3) trends or shifts in trends, (4) paths (the spreading of epidemics or panics, for example), and (5) correlations. Tilly concludes that the French by and large use quantification descriptively, not analytically. Even where they have firm numbers in series-and the Annales is replete with graphs, tables, maps, and charts-there is no use of statistical inference, of statistics of relationships (for example, correlation co- efficients), or of other statistical procedures or tests. "Normally,"> writes Tilly, "the French quantifier lines up numerical descriptions

50 Franpois Furet and Adeline Daumard, Structures et relations sociales a Paris au milieu du XVIIIe sicle (Paris, 1961); Furet, "Pour une definition des classes inf6rieures a I'6poque moderne," Annales: E. S.C., 18 (1963), 459-74; Daumard, "Une reference pour l'etude des soci6tes urbaines en France aux XVIIIe et XIXe siecles: Projet de code socio-professional," Revue dhistoire moderne et contemporaine, 10 (1963), 185-210, including the occupational codes for the 19th and 20th centuries (pp. 208-10) that have now become standard references for all occupational analyses undertaken by the "school." Furet's assertions about "quantification" as essential to "scientific" social history elicited the criticisms of Jean-Yves Tirat, "Problemes de methode en histoire sociale," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 10 (1963), 211-18; a rejoinder by Furet and Daumard appeared in the same review in 1964 (pp. 293-98).

M Michel Vovelle, PiWt6 baroque et d6christianisation: Attitudes provenwales devant la mort au siecle des Lumueres (Paris, 1973); Jean Delumeau, "Au sujet de la dechristianisation," Revue dhistoire moderne et contemporaine, 22 (1975), 52-60.



The Annales School 71 on the way to conducting an essentially nonquantitative analysis."52 After the numbers are deployed-often very artfully, it should be added, with the aid of balls, bars, boxes, concentric circles, dotted lines, hash marks, and infinite cartographic shadings-the reader is usually asked to check correlations by eye; sometimes, as Tilly dem- onstrates, with disastrous results.53 The same kind of criticism can be made about simple economic concepts and tools, ranging from Lorenz curves to rent-income ratios; they are rarely used, even when the data exist.54

Enough has been said to establish the fact that the Annales scholars are not captured by the legacy of Descartes and Newton. They would seem to prefer that of Lamarck and Buffon, with a strong seasoning of Courbet and Millet. More precisely, the main pillars of the Annales school today are still sociology and anthropology with auxiliary sup- port from demography, geography, economics, psychology, linguistics, and art history, roughly in that order of importance. But lest we become immersed in a kind of Braudellian enthusiasm for the "dialectic" of history and the social sciences,55 it should be recognized that the researchers who contribute regularly to the Annales appear in- terested less in any "theory" or formal methodology that these disciplines offer than in some of their techniques and approaches which they adapt, almost unconsciously it would appear, to their source materials.56 Perhaps effective integration is never obvious. One can

52 Charles Tilly, "Quantification in History as Seen from France," in Lorwin and Price, eds., The Dimnensions of the Past, p. 114 and passim, pp. 94-125.

53 Ibid., pp. 114-16. " Jan de Vries, "The Classics in Transition," pp. 473, 568-73, passim. While full of admira-

tion for the breadth of vision and the density of the source materials employed in the Annales articles under review, de Vries is less happy about "a sloppy use of elementary economic concepts" and what he calls a "conceptual gap" between the facts and the "grand themes" such as "crises," "structures," phases "A," "B," and so on.

55 J. H. M. Salmon in a review of Braudel, tcrits sur l'histoire, in History and Theory, 10 (1971), 346-55, makes the point well: "The trouble is that Braudel has not given us a close analysis of the methodology of this dialectic. He has preferred, instead, to communicate both his enthusiasm about the kind of integral historical reality it will make intelligible and his faith in its role as a meeting place for the social sciences" (p. 354). In short, one must not confuse a panegyric with a "method."

" When Fransois Furet talks about importing a "model" from contemporary demography, he simply means (as I read him) employing the procedures of a demographer; that is, charting changes in the composition of the family (age at marriage, number of children, rates of illegitimacy, birth and death, and so on) in order to discover or uncover a pattern of behavior over time. Furet says this is a "heuristic" process, a "building up of a body of data" from which "discoveries" can be made, such as the unexpected fact that French peasant women married at the late age of 28 in the seventeenth century. "Of course," continues Furet, "the problem of causality remains unsolved." The word "model" as used here-and too often throughout our profession, I fear-has nothing to do with "explanation," at least as analytical philosophers define the word. This is not to say that the discovery and deployment of new data is not part of



72 Forster detect, of course, such elements as social classification and cross- sectional analysis-a comparative perspective if not comparative method57-and perhaps, above all, a reliance on the kind of 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 enor- mously extended the subject matter of history and suggested new issues, new relationships.61 More, given the French orientation to-

the 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, "Toward a 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 complex- ity, 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



The A nna/es School 73 ward archival materials, it has led to a very imaginative use of sources. I venture to say that the Annaliste scholar is more likely to begin with a block of sources-in "series," if possible-and then search for a problem to which to relate them, than to begin with the historical question. The "trick," of course, is to marry the source, the problem, and some ancillary social science discipline; and if this mewnage a trois seems unlikely, so much the better.62 The element of surprise, eclat, of assuming the professional limelight by a tour d'esprit-backed always by those torrents of archival citations-is also part of the Annales style and achievement.

Recent examples of this meld include: the nutritional analysis of a set of pensions for the aged and a study of their implications for public health and village customs; a social and occupational analysis of one city's declarations of pregnancy over time to identify the change of partners in illicit love-and, perhaps, in the expression of affection itself; a linguistic analysis of court records to get at the motives and nature of crime in the eighteenth century; an investigation of the reports of country doctors to construct a typology of disease and also to understand the nature of rural resistance to professional health services; the use of oral testimony as well as fiscal and notarial records to construct the value system of clientage in a Picard village for a century; content analysis of episcopal visitations to trace changes in religious observance and sentiment.' At this level of investigation it seems especially inappropriate to talk about an "Annales methodology"; here we must defer to the professional competence of individual historians, judged by the logic of their extrapolations from the sources, about which they are usually very explicit, much more so than about their "method." However empiric and pragmatic these monographic studies are, at least they avoid that series of assumptions upon which most "models" must rest.64 economic history being sacrificed, being treated as preliminary spade-work to higher pursuits, such as the study of social structures and mentalitcs-which are a French obsession. Franvois Crouzet, "The Economic History of Modem Europe," this JOURNAL, 31 (March 1971), 143 and passim, 135-52.

62 For many examples of this see Le Goff and Nora, eds., Faire de l'histoire. 13 R. J. Bernard, "Peasant Diet in Eighteenth-Century G6vauden," in Elborg Forster and

Robert Forster, eds., European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times (New York, 1975), pp. 19-46; Jacques Depauw, "Illicit Sexual Activity and Society in Eighteenth-Century Nantes," in Forster and Ranum, eds., Family and Society, pp. 145-91; Yves Castan, Honratetg et relations sociales en Languedoc, 1715-1780 (Paris, 1974); Jean-Pierre Peter, "Disease and the Sick at the End of the Eighteenth Century," in Forster and Ranum, eds., Biology of Man in History (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 81-124; Alain Morel, "Power and Ideology in the Village Community of Picardy: Past and Present," in Forster and Ranum, eds., Rural Society, pp. 107-25; Dominque Julia is completing a catalogue of the French sources of episcopal visitations.

64 This touches a debate of long standing among economic historians. Most relevant here are



74 Forster Along a spectrum from "scientific" to "humanistic" history, the

largest number of Annalistes seem nearer the second "ideal type." For all of the prodigious apparatus of numbers and tabular materials, theirs is nonetheless a qualitative empiricism, a working outward and upward from the sources,65 with the Braudellian grand themes held at a distance, but with an awareness of a stock of middle-range questions that sociologists and anthropologists-and sometimes econ- omists and even art historians-ask about historical materials. Fran- Vois Furet comes close to expressing an Annales view of history today:

One takes history in the widest sense, that is as a discipline not strictly reducible to a set of concepts, and with countless levels of analysis, and then addresses oneself to describing these levels and establishing simple statistical connections (liaisons) between them on the basis of hypotheses which, whether original or borrowed, depend on the intuition of the researcher.8

As I see it, these "simple statistical connections" may be charted as correspondences and correlations; they are descriptions of rapports or interrelationships, but they are not, strictly speaking, explanations, the distillation and isolation of independent variables, or the reduc- tion to the parsimonious "cause."`67 Tout se tient. At the same time, sociology and anthropology surely reinforce certain habits of thought, and implicitly give great weight to such general factors as milieu, demographic pressures, the resource base, social groups, and collective attitudes and values. These are the categories in the back of every Annaliste's mind which "inform"-an anthropologist's word-the subject matter.

And beyond this is a kind of conservatism implicit in the sociologist-anthropologist's approach, reinforced no doubt by a kind of Old World wisdom. The Annales would abandon certain nineteenth-century assumptions-liberal or Marxist-about progress and the possibilities of rational action. The Braudellian schema still

Fritz Redlich, "New and Traditional Approaches to Economic History and Their Interdepen- dence," this JOURNAL, 25 (Dec. 1965), 480-95; "Potentialities and Pitfalls in Economic History," Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 6 (1968), 93-115; Wassily Leontief, "Theoretical Assumptions and Nonobserved Facts," American Economic Review, 61 (1971), 1-7.

0 Redlich, "Potentialities and Pitfalls," pp. 93-94. " Furet, "Le quantitatif," Faire de l'histoire, I, p. 44. 67 Raymond Aron writes that the historian often creates the illusion that he is "explaining"

when he is in fact juxtaposing and aligning. R. Aron, "Postface," in Dumoulin and Moisi, The Historian Between Ethnologist and Futurologist, p. 235. H. W. G. Runciman claims that the "general theory" of Talcott Parsons "rests on so blatant a confusion of explanation with taxonomy as to make it puzzling that it should be taken as seriously as it has." He goes on to say, however, that there is "nothing wrong with taxonomy." Runciman, Sociology in its Place and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 16-17.



The Annales School 75 lives in the sense of presenting the world beset by profound impersonal constraints in which Whig politics and Marshallian economics, class conflict and simplistic views of superstructure are but dust in the balance.68 Not only is "economic man" a myth; neither faith nor reason can move mountains. Not Braudel's mountains-not even with bulldozers, wretched machines anyway.

ROBERT FORSTEB, Johns Hopkins University

APPENDIX

"SERIAL SOURCES" FROM FRENCH ARCHIVES FOR THE PROTOSTATISTICAL PERIOD

1. Parish Registers (baptisms, marriages, burials). 2. Tax Rolls (includes occupational, residential, income data).

Old Regime: taille, capitation, vingtieme, centiwmte denier, compoix, cadastre.

Post-1789: contribution fonciefre, mobiliere, patentes Indirect taxes: octrois, aides; Church tithes.

3. Notarial Documents (wills, marriage contracts, partages, inventories after death, wardship accounts; land leases, house leases; apprenticeship contracts, partnership agreements).

4. Law Cases and Legal Briefs; Lists of Accused. 5. Grain Prices (mercuriales, monthly). 6. Military Conscript Lists (physical condition, age, residence). 7. Electoral Lists (lists of "notables," eligible voters, dossiers). 8. Cahiers (1789). 9. Revolutionary Confiscations (property of emigres, Church, etc.).

10. Municipal Minutes (villages, towns, sections). 11. Special Enquetes (on forges, wood, cattle, harvest, clearings, vineyards,

communal land, ateliers, industry, communication, etc.). 12. Medical Reports (village questionnaires, declarations of pregnancy, lists

of prostitutes with occupation of parents; epidemics). 13. Institutional Accounts (hospitals, hospices, monasteries, cathedral chap-

ters, guilds, universities, charities). 14. Private Accounts (seigneuries, partnerships, banks, stock-companies,

livres de raison). 15. Admiralty Records (port customs, ship inspections). 16. Bankruptcy Balance Sheets.

" 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.



76 Forster 17. Administrative Correspondence and Police Reports (17th-19th cen-

turies). 18. Reports of Episcopal Visitations. 19. Matriculation Lists (schools and universities, academies and clubs). 20. Royal Censor's Lists (book titles). 21. Newspapers, literary journals, affiches.



achievements of the annales school

Documents

journal of economic

service of economic

tasks of economic history

total history

marxist history

journal annales

new social history

annales group