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Two Heirs of the Annales: Braudel &
Furet
These two discussions are from "Label France" the web-based publication of the Foreign Ministry of France. They are highlights of recent and past work by two heirs to the Annales School of Historiography. Press the Label France covers to travel to that issue of the magazine.
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 In keeping with the famous Ecole
des Annales*, which gave rise to modern historiography as such, Fernand
Braudel (1902-1985) upsets the way in which history is conceived and written.
Drawing from the various sources of the humanities - with geography and economics foremost
among them - and restoring to human history the variety of its rhythms, Braudel proposes a
global vision of history, whose influence has travelled well beyond the borders of France.Braudel, who died ten years ago, is one of those names that impress not only the specialists but also the more cultivated general public. For while the work is complex and filled with the prodigious memory of this agrégé graduate in history, who wrote his thesis from memory while in captivity, it expounds problematics that are all the simpler for seeming obvious once developed. Until the turn of the century, traditional history was built around the acts and facts of "great men", political and military personalities who became the stuff of legends: Alexander and Caesar, Gengis Khan, Louis XIV and Napoleon. These exceptional individuals defined the scale of history; their deaths signalled a change of era and also of books and authors. Without contesting the value of these accounts, Fernand Braudel nonetheless proposed a shift in the historian's focus. Beneath the rapid succession of events on a human scale, which the historian likens to ripples on the ocean's surface, Fernand Braudel attempts to charter a course through deeper waters to find the slower currents typical of the history of human groups relating to their environment, the structures that shape societies, be it essential trading and sailing routes or mentalities. A two-speed history With Braudel, the subject matter of history changes because the time frame of history changes. The swift pace of events, the short-lived and dramatic moments of battles are replaced by the lengthy rhythms of material life. However, with such a change in perspective, he has also had to rethink history itself. Braudel demonstrates quite clearly that history does not exist independently of the historian's gaze. As in all knowledge, the historian intervenes at every stage in the making of history; indeed, history per se does not exist, only past phenomena submerged under the dark cloak of all-consuming time. The approach adopted by Braudel leads him to tell of a history that not only calls on witness accounts and psychology but also on geography, political economics and sociology. Braudel introduces new disciplines like new colours on the palette of history: he brings social sciences to history. Braudel belongs to a line of historians from the Ecole des Annales who set about rethinking history's space-time. Mahomet et Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne, La Société Féodale by Marc Bloch, Rabelais ou le problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle by Lucien Febvre are all different attempts at extracting history from the strait-jacket of short-termism. The difference here is that Braudel also adds the geographer's considerations to this extension of history's time span. Hence, in Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II, the author is interested first and foremost in the environment in which the peoples of the Mediterranean basin used to live: the mountains and the plains, the sea and the rivers, the roads and the towns. He combines the almost fixed rhythm of "geographic time" with the rapid rhythm of "individual time" and the movement of peoples and their ideas. This research led him to study such focal points of human activity as Venice, Milan, Genoa and Florence and the exchanges that took place between them; to study the history of the development of capitalism, the flows of communication and money it induces, the shift in borders it results in, even the changes in the structure of the State it determines. The horizon for this incredible reconstruction of history is the world, global history, painted on a giant canvas. Reviewer: Eric Maulin * Born with the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, the Ecole des Annales was founded, in 1929, by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. It brought together a group of historians who rejected traditional factual history in favour of the longer term and sought to incorporate the other humanities. After the Second World War, the importance of the Annales was recognised with the founding of the Sixth Department of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, entrusted to Fernand Braudel. Since the seventies, such historians as Georges Duby, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, François Furet and Jacques Le Goff have pursued the interdisciplinary project of the founders of the Ecole des Annales, basing their work on anthropology and sociology. This "new history" is particularly interested in the history of mentalities. Principal works Ecrits sur l'histoire, (Writings on History) published by Flammarion, Paris, 1969, reissued in 1977. La Dynamique du capitalisme, (Dynamics of Capitalism) published by Arthaud, Paris, 1985. Identity of France, 3 volumes, published by Arthaud, 1986. Two biographies Fernand Braudel, Giuliana Gemelli, published by Odile Jacob, Paris, 1995. Braudel, Pierre Daix, published by Flammarion, Paris, 1995. © ministère des Affaires étrangères |
 In his latest work, Le Passé
d'une illusion1, the historian François Furet, anauthority on the French Revolution, lends his views to an argument put forward more than 30 years ago by the French political writer Raymond Aron and the German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt2 : Communism and Nazism, two facets of one and the same totalitarian monster. François Furet has recently been awarded the 1995 Prize for Political Writing. According to François Furet, the Communist and Nazi régimes, which came on to the historical scene at the same time, resorted to the same practices, subjected individuals to the same constraints and, in similar albeit rival workshops, toiled in blood to create tomorrow's "new man". To support this argument, the author has, however, adopted an original approach by relating the history of how Communism was received in the liberal West. Unlike Nazism, the régime set up in Russia, after 1917, enjoyed a veritable aura among European intellectuals. Marx was, of course, the real reason for that radiance, and no serious thinker, even today, questioned the philosopher's genius; but the French Revolution soon came to be seen as the historical model for the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Many historians, particularly in France, were to take that comparison further and justify in the name of the former the moments of terror perpetrated by the latter. Thus, the purges among the Bolshevik Party ordered by Stalin in the thirties were likened to Robespierre's liquidation of Hébert's and Danton's followers, and political murder was thus invested with the legitimacy of a past revolution. A blinding fascination Le Passé d'une illusion is first and foremost the story of that particular conjuring trick which consists, to quote the English philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1921, of transforming a tyranny, within Russia, into the hope of liberation, outside Russia. The Second World War was to rekindle that hope: Stalin's Soviet Union, betrayed by Nazi Germany, contributed substantially to the latter's collapse and, with it, to the slaying of the totalitarian hydra - or so they thought. For a long time the sacrifice borne by the Soviet Union served to obscure, in the eyes of those who did not wish to see it, the nature of the régime established by Stalin. Furet reminds us that that blind spot has spawned an entire historiography by systematically constrasting Nazi barbarism and its bourgeois accomplices (big capital had, after all, supported Hitler) with Communist resistance and tomorrow's brighter future. But Furet demonstrates that, by the inter-war period, there were already suspicions as to the fundamental identity of Nazism and Communism. Writers such as the German Marxist Karl Kautsky, or the French revolutionary Boris Souvarine, made it the central theme of their work; and even if they still had not coined the concept of totalitarianism to describe a hitherto unknown form of political organisation, they did describe its principal features. But their warnings went unheeded in the blast of war and the glory of a victory which the West shared with the Soviet Union. This history of how Communism was perceived in the West never turns into an indictment. Modestly, the author remembers his own involvement among Communist ranks between 1949 and 1956; that is why he includes himself in all those "deluded illusionists who built the mirage of Communism". Furet's work does, however, pose a number of questions. Written after the collapse of the "East Bloc" it deals harshly with a historiography closely linked with a world balance of powers. It is an opportunity, once again, to underline the essential relation that exists between the constitution of knowledge and power relations. But, Furet's book is, precisely, the work of a social democrat, a typical representative of the West's intelligentsia, which embodies everything Nazism and Communism sought to combat. That is why there are two ways of reading this book: as a great book on the truth of the Communist régime and an attempt to reflect on the monstrosity of a recent past. But also as the discourse that issues forth from liberal democracy, triumphant. Today, as in the past, the historian stands before us, holding the attributes of objectivity and impartiality. But we may well wonder whether the historiography he is rewriting is not that of the new world balance settling in today. Such objections do not in any way diminish the strength of the work, its learning and its style. But it does perhaps suggest that from the critique of yesterday's historiography we draw a lesson on the art of reading today's. Reviewer: Eric Maulin François Furet is professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and at Chicago University and the author of many works on the French Revolution, whose understanding he has reshaped by freeing it of Marxist concepts. His most famous work, Penser la Révolution française (published by Gallimard, Paris, 1978), looks less at the Revolution itself than at the way in which, since 1789, we have looked at the founding event. Notes
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