Research Foundation of SUNY

The Annales School before the Annales [with Discussion]

Author(s): George Huppert
Source: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 1, No. 3/4, The Impact of the "Annales" School
on the Social Sciences (Winter - Spring, 1978), pp. 215-224
Published by: Research Foundation of SUNY for and on behalf of the Fernand Braudel Center
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Review, I, 3/4,
Winter/Spring 1978,
215-219.
The
Annales School
Before the Annales
George Huppert
We have been
gathered
here to celebrate the achievements of the Annales
school.
Naturally enough,
most of the
participants
in this celebration are
loyal
admirers of this
tradition,
themselves veteran
practitioners
of the Annales
method. Even
so,
there has
hardly,
been
unanimity
here on the
question
of
defining just
what the Annales school stands
for;
or on the
question: just
what is
the method of the Annales
exactly?
Or the
question:
what has been the in-
fluence of the Annales? Or even on the
question:
is there an Annales school?
I see no reason to be ashamed of this confusion. As a historian of historio-
graphy,
I find it
entirely
natural that we
(as historians)
should be
making
such a
hopeless
mess of
understanding
our aims and the direction of our
discipline.
Besides,
our confusion is
quite
on a
par
with the confusion
spelled
out in the
most recent authorized
philosophical musings coming
out of the
Annales,
namely,
the three-volume collection of articles entitled Faire de
l'histori,
which
was assembled
by
LeGoff and Nora and bears the
imprimatur
of the Vie Section.
The
preface
of this new summa is instructive:
you
will find in it the ritual denial
of the school's
existence;
you
will
find, also,
the ritual claim that here is a team
(animated by
the
spirit
of
Febvre, Bloch,
and
Braudel)
which is
seeking
a new
type
of
history; you
will find the claim to
being
an international movement in
no
way
culture-bound;
and
finally you
will find a collection of articles meant to
describe the
global
successes of this new
history
-
and written
entirely by
Frenchmen.
Mind
you,
the editors are aware of this last
anomaly
which strikes them as
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216
George Huppert
paradoxical.
Now it doesn't seem odd to me. It seems
entirely
natural. And I
don't for a minute believe that the editors should feel bad about
being
as
culture-bound as
they really
are. This
quality
which was
castigated
at the
open-
ing
of our conference as the academic sin
par
excellence
\
seems to
me,
in this
case,
to be
quite possibly
a virtue. Historical
scholarship,
we are
told,
has
always
been
culture-bound,
narrowly
defined
by
a national context. True.
Quite
so. We
are advised to
get
rid of this shameful
provincialism: history
must not
only
break
through
the barriers
separating
it from
sociology,
economics,
anthropology,
or
geography,
but it must also
stop being
French, German,
or British. Well this
sounds reasonable
enough.
But ask
yourself
whether the
history
of
historiogra-
phy
does not have a
splendid
record of
discovery,
creation,
and renewal
-
all of
it
accomplished
within narrow national limits. One could make a solid case for
the
argument
that the
history
of modern historical
writing
is
intimately
tied to
the
history
of the modern
nation-state,
and that this has not
necessarily
been a
bad
thing.
Now the Annales tradition has
always
been
very
much a French
tradition,
despite
all the
imagined
internationalism of its manifestos since 1900. It wished
to be international in its
scope,
it wished to
inspire
a worldwide
confraternity
of
like-minded creators of a new kind of
history
which would
supersede, replace,
and drive out the
oppressive
and detested kind of
history
which
reigned supreme
in the Sorbonne and in the Revue
historique
since
1876;
in a word to drive out
the German kind of
history,
introduced
by
Gabriel Monod and others after the
defeat at Sedan. This was the avowed dream of Febvre and his followers from
the start. Febvre 's kind of
history
won a
proud place
in France after two
genera-
tions of
combat;
but not in the
English-speaking
world,
not until
very recently,
and even
then,
not what I would call a serious
bridgehead.
This combative
legion
(legion
rather than
school,
I think Febvre would
approve
the choice of the
word)
has been no more serious about
permanent conquests
abroad than the Swiss of
the fifteenth
century.
In America after
three-quarters
of a
century,
it has
achieved an enviable
reputation among
the
happy
few;
a
special
issue of the
Journal of
Modern
History
;
two or three translated
masterpieces
out of
50;
half
a dozen fanatical adherents introduced as a fifth
column;
a conference in
Bing-
hamton. Is this more than a token
bridgehead?
A
symbolic outpost,
a Macao in
our midst? We are worth
conquering,
that much is clear. We
present by
far the
most
tempting target
for cultural
imperialism.
A handful of skirmishes won in
Poland or
Hungary
can
hardly
make
up
for the deadlock on the Western Front.
Are not one-half of all
living
historians citizens of the U.S.?
Why
then so little
success here?
One
might propose
the
explanation
that our defenses are
superb, unequalled:
our main line of defense is our
ignorance
of the French
language. Very
few of
our historians can read French
fluently enough
to be at all vulnerable to the
charms of Braudel or Febvre. After
all,
we are
talking
about
gigantic books,
running habitually
to 1000
pages.
More to the
point
is the
difficulty
of the
style.
It is
quite
different from the more
prosaic
and and
predictable language
of
ordinary
French academic books. The followers of Febvre
go
out of their
way
to
avoid
sounding
like
ordinary
academics. Their aim is to be
different,
to
surprise
the reader. It is a
language
full of
allusions,
of references
mysterious
to for-
eigners.
For
instance,
when
LeRoy
Ladurie writes about the hard times of debt-
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Annales School Before Annales 217
ridden
share-croppers,
he
speaks
of the
coming
of Monsieur Dimanche. Now who
would know that this is a
pretty
allusion to an
entirely
minor character in a
seventeenth-century play?
Who
indeed,
except
someone who had the misfortune
once of
having spent
six or seven
years
on the benches of a French
lyce?
It is a
difficult
language,
dense and
rhapsodic,
a diction inherited from Febvre and
perhaps
from Michelet. Romantic in its
effects,
baroque
in its
means,
precious
and voracious in its search for
surprising
resonances,
it moves
very quickly
from
the most abstruse technical
vocabulary
to the most idiomatic
expression.
One is
expected
to know the names of
400-year-old agricultural implements,
and to be
attuned,
at the same
time,
to the latest structuralist debate in St.-Germain-des-
Prs. And at the turn of the same
paragraph,
one comes face-to- face
-
suddenly
-
with the
juicy, earthy language
of
sixteenth-century peasants
and
publicists.
I
admire these tricks. I use them. But I have to admit that such a
style simply
is
not for
export.
It cannot be understood
readily by English
or American histo-
rians if
they
are not native French
speakers.
It cannot be translated
successfully.
None of these
books,
not even Braudel's Mediterranean
,
has much of a chance of
influencing
historians across the Atlantic. The Mediterranean did receive a short
notice in the American Historical Review after its
original publication
in
1949,
but the review
by
the late Prof.
Mattingly
could not
possibly tip anyone
off to
the
importance
of the book. The
reputation
of BraudePs work or Febvre's was
an almost clandestine rumor here in the 1950's. As a
student,
I admit I heard the
rumor. But it was
impossible,
almost
impossible,
to
get your
hands on these
books.
They
were out of
print.
Ten
years
later I
inquired
into the
possibility
of
having
at least The Mediter-
ranean translated. I discovered that someone had been
working
on a translation
for several
years.
I looked at the result. It bore little
relationship
to the
original;
it made little
sense;
it was not
publishable.
It was then I
persuaded Harper
and
Row to take over the task. I
spent
at least a
year trying
to find a translator.
Eight capable
and
experienced
translators had to be
rejected. Among
them were
specialists
in French
history
and
experienced professional
translators. None
could
produce
a reasonable
English
version of even ten consecutive
pages
of the
book. At last we found that rare
person
who did the
job.
And then I went
through
the same difficulties with
LeRoy
Ladurie's Peasants
of Languedoc.
Someday
I
hope
to tackle Febvre's Franche-Comt which to
my
mind is the
unsurpassed masterpiece
of the Annales tradition.
Which
brings
me to the
question: why
are these books so different from the
mass of French academic
productions?
In
answering
this
question today,
I
hope
to
get away
from some conventional views of what the Annales school is all
about. The
view,
to
begin
with,
which holds that the Annalistes are a new
breed,
a new and
dangerous
breed,
of
barbaric, scientificating,
anti-humanist
quanti-
fiers. These historians in white
coats,
if one is to believe Richard
Cobb,
come
streaming
out of the laboratories of the Vie Section
-
and
worse, lately,
out of
those well-known dens of
iniquity,
the American universities. Those "dark
mechanized forces of the social
sciences,
those armies of the
night",
are
depicted
as a fearful menace of the future of
genuine, gentlemanly scholarship, perhaps
even a menace to the future of civilization.
There is no
denying
it: the Annales
people, quite willfully,
have indeed
managed
to
give
this kind of
impression.
There is much talk about
quantifica-
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218
George Huppert
tion,
much talk about
teamwork,
and even about
sophisticated equipment
in-
cluding computers.
It is not
entirely
talk. There is a fashion in Paris for
gadgets,
for new
techniques,
for rather outlandish new
subjects.
One could
easily
be
persuaded
that what the Annales is all about is new
techniques.
Well,
I
defy anyone
to show me the
important
book which was
produced by
teamwork and those
ingenious, expensive
new
techniques,
which,
according
to
Mr.
Cobb,
take all the
vitality
out of
history.
Let us be serious: Braudel's
Mediterranean was written without
them,
without new
techniques,
and
long
before the
coming
of the
computer.
There is
nothing
in the Peasants
of Langue-
doc or in Bennassar's Valladolid or in
Meyer's
Breton
Nobility
which an intel-
ligent
man cannot do
singlehanded, equipped only
with a
pen, paper,
ten
years
of
time,
and a
cooperative
wife. To the extent that the Vie Section does now-
adays adopt
new
techniques,
this is a trait in no
way
limited to Annalistes. What
distinguishes
the Annales tradition is not an unusual
propensity
for
trying
gadgets
or a fondness for
laboratory
coats. It is
something utterly
different. It is
a
style,
it is a
way
of
posing problems,
a
way
of
thinking,
which all
go
back to
the turn of the
century.
The
origins
of this tradition must be
pushed
back,
as
Jacques
Revel
among
others
pointed
out,
to the
years
before the First World War. The
journal
Annales
did not
begin publication
until 1929. But it was
thought
of before
1914,
and it
was in Henri Berr's Revue de
synthse
between 1900 and 1914 that all the
characteristic traits of what was to become known as the Annales school were
invented. It was also
then,
in
1910,
that Febvre
published
his thse on the
Franche-Comt which served as a model of the Annales tradition.
What were the most
striking
features of this
history
which
proclaimed
its
novelty
in a
fiercely aggressive
tone in the first
years
of the
century?
Were we in
the
presence
of new
techniques,
of secret
weapons,
of a technical
breakthrough?
Not at all. The methods of research
employed by
Febvre in 1910 were
entirely,
unimpeachably,
orthodox: a
thorough investigation
of the archives of
Besanon
in the best German tradition. What was new then? The narrative
style, certainly:
it was
visibly, triumphantly
different. There was
nothing
academic about the
narrative. The historian addressed the reader in a
very personal way.
The reader
was
cajoled
and
lectured,
the reader was asked to share the author's enthusiasm.
And the author took risks.
But the
style
was
only
the most visible
novelty.
The
subject
was new:
utterly,
strikingly
new. In the Franche-Comt in the
Age of Philip
II,
it was the
province,
not the Prince which was the
subject.
This doctoral thesis
began
with an ac-
counting
of the human
geography
of the
region.
The reader was
transported
into
the hill
country
of the
Jura.
He was taken
along
the narrow
twisting valleys
of
little-known mountain streams. The size of the
towns,
the number of
people,
the
pressure
of these numbers
against
the resources of the
woods,
the
harvesting
of
timber,
the
hammering
of the tanneries
along
the
river,
the
mining
of
salt,
the
pattern
of the
grain
trade and the
map
of the wine
country,
even the under-
ground
resources
-
all this was sketched in
masterfully.
I need
hardly
remind
you
that such
geographical
introductions have become standard features in the
Annales tradition.
From
geography
to
economy,
from the rural
economy
to the
map
of indus-
trial
production,
on to the re-creation of the urban
habitat,
for hundreds of
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Annales School Before Annales 219
pages
the reader was led into a dense recreated
sixteenth-century province
with-
out
meeting
a
single
event.
Already
in 1903 the
phrase
histoire vnementielle
had been coined as a
pejorative description
of the narrow vision of traditional
historians. On
purpose
I avoid the false distinction between
political
or
diploma-
tic
history
and socio-economic
history.
Febvre and his
companions
did not think
in those terms.
They
too did
political history
and
diplomatic history.
There was
no human
activity
which was not
part
of the total
history
which
they
claimed
for their ideal. Politics and
diplomacy
were
important subjects.
In his Franche-
Comt,
Febvre shows how
politics
and
diplomacy slowly strangled
this
province.
But
politics, diplomacy,
warfare could not be
understood,
Febvre
argued, sepa-
rately
from all the other
aspects
of life as it was lived in this
province.
The
material
civilization,
the flora and
fauna,
the social
structure,
the
agrarian
tech-
niques,
the
functioning
of
municipal
and
regional
institutions,
the
machinery
of
credit,
the
mobility
of social
groups,
the
religious
observances of the
population,
the tensions
surrounding
accusations of
heresy
and
witchcraft,
the culture of the
towns,
the local
patriotism expressed
in travel books and
private correspond-
ences
-
all this was
part
of an
inseparable
whole. Here
again
the
ground
rules of
the Annales kind of
history
were laid out. Instead of
catching
a
piece
of
history
and
holding
it down so it would stand still while
being
dissected,
Febvre was
determined to catch
glimpses
of the motion of
history.
The movement alone was
worth
studying.
He
groped
for
ways
of
getting past
the documents at "the
collective historical
person caught
at a
specific
moment of its evolution." The
historian,
no
longer
a
pedantic bystander
who holds
up
an album of
snapshots
for us to
see,
was
becoming
a film director. He zoomed in for
closeups,
moved
away,
came back when the
subject changed
his
pose,
moved
away again,
and
came back
again,
until we were at last able to discern "a new
order,
dynamic
and
genetic
at the same
time,
in which
nothing
in
separate
which
ought
to be to-
gether."
It would be
pretentious
to call this total
history.
Let us
say
with Febvre
that the
goal
was a more
living history,
better
thought
out.
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220 Discussion
STOIANOVICH:
My
friend Professor
Huppert
is
very witty
and
very cynical.
For all our admiration of Voltaire should we
forget
that there is
perhaps
a more
permanent
value in
Montesquieu?
Is it
impossible
for Americans to make use of
the Annales
paradigm?
Is there
anything
in the American culture that makes this
impossible?
There
may
be,
and I think there
is,
and I think that on several
occasions that we have been on the
point
of
determining
what that
problem
is. I
think that the
problem
lies with two
different,
two hostile
interpretations
of the
way
of
learning.
How do we learn? One
explanation
is in terms of stimulus-
response.
We
begin
with a tabula rasa and then we are hit
by things
from outside
-
culture, environment,
everything
else
-
to which we
respond
in one
way
or
another. That is one
way
of
looking
at
it,
stated
crudely.
It comes to us from
Aristotle,
transmitted to
Locke,
today by way
of Skinner. And we
get
it
through
the French tradition too: not the tradition of French
philosophy,
but
through
the tradition of French
psychology, through
Condillac. Destutt de
Tracy,
and
the
Idologues.
The other is a volistic
tradition,
an
attempt
to
interpret
in terms
of
cognitive patterns.
It comes to us from
Plato,
from
Descartes,
and Vico and
Michelet. Now I
myself
think that both
explanations
have some
value,
but that
you
use them under different
occasions,
and
you explain
some
problems
in
terms of one tradition and
you explain
other
problems
in terms of the other
tradition.
They
are both
probably incomplete
in
themselves,
but both
highly
necessary.
Therefore,
what I would
urge
is that if the Annales school has ceased
to be a
school,
if it has been
miett,
that there is no need for the
paradigm
itself
to be
lost,
at the
very
moment it is in the
process
of
arriving.
I therefore
suggest
that the rest of
us,
whatever our traditions
-
French, English,
American,
German, Polish, yes
Polish
-
go
on with this
great
adventure of
creating
an
histoire
globale.
HOBSBAWM: Could I
just disagree
with
Huppert
on one
thing.
The Annales is
an international
phenomenon
in
spite
of the fact that these three
volumes,
about
which
opinions
can be
very
divided,
are written
exclusively by
Frenchmen.
Only
I think we are
looking
for the
wrong
kind of international
phenomenon.
We are
thinking
in terms of the influence of the Annales school. We are
seeing
how
many people
have
got
a
bumper
sticker on
saying
"I am for Annales." But that is
not the
way
in which in fact an international movement
develops.
What we have
seen,
what we are
seeing
here,
is a confluence of various trends in various
countries,
of which it so
happened,
for historical and other
reasons,
in France
the revue
Annales,
the Vie
Section,
and so on became the main carriers. But in
other countries it
exists,
either
organized
or less
organized.
And it is this con-
fluence which we notice.
Those of us who are old
enough
to remember what we were
taught
in univer-
sities before the
war,
or even until let us
say
1945-50,
know how
totally history
has
changed.
The textbooks
-
even the kind of "Western Civ" textbooks
-
that
undergraduates
are
taught
from
today
contain stuff
which,
in the
days
when I
was an
undergraduate, nobody, except
on the one hand the Marxists and on the
other hand
people
like Marc
Bloch, thought
was worth
putting
in or even
mentioning.
To this
extent,
the transformation
of
history
in certain directions
-
for
instance,
to
put
it into its lowest common denominator,
the
growing
im-
portance
of social and economic structures and so on
-
is
something
that has
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Discussion 221
happened
and is
happening,
and of which the Annales is at least one national
expression.
Due to the
great
merits of the French
school,
broader than
Annales,
as I said
previously,
it has had a considerable amount of international resonance.
I think there is another
thing
which I have noticed in the course of this
conference itself. A lot of
people,
even
though they
haven't been
up
to the latest
policy
discussions in
Annales,
are in fact
thinking along
the same lines. For
instance,
there is the
tendency
of Annales to draw closer towards what
might
be
called
broadly
an
anthropological approach.
Well,
we have had it in
England.
And we have had it
independently.
We didn't have to read Annales for
it,
though
some of us have benefitted
by reading
some of the
things
that the
people
in the
Annales have done. So to the extent that we
have,
in a
sense,
a
community, you
might say
with luck an
avant-garde community
which
hopes
to become as it
were the main
army,
which is
moving
in the same kind of direction or in
convergent
directions,
we are
facing,
we are
part
of,
an international movement.
But we should be
wrong
if we look at it in terms of cultural
imperialism,
the
conquest
of the United States
by
the
Annales,
or the
conquest
for that matter of
France
by
the United States. There have been
attempts
to do
this,
and
attempts
I think even in the Annales
uncritically
to
borrow,
partly
on
ideological grounds,
techniques
and
approaches
from other countries. I don't think that is the
way
it
works. I don't think that is the
way
it
ought
to work.
JOHN
AGNEW
(Geography, Syracuse):
It strikes me that
many people's
com-
ments have been directed
exclusively
to the
impact
the Annales school has had
upon history.
I
thought
the title of the conference was "The
Impact
of the
Annales School on the Social Sciences." A
point
I would like to make in relation
to this is that
perhaps
the lack of influence the Annales school had
upon
the
social sciences in the United
States,
in
Britain,
even in
France,
may
be due to the
fact
that,
in terms of its
origins,
it was in fact a reaction to the
developments
of
social science in France at the turn of the
century.
If we could
perhaps
draw an
analogy
between the work of the Annales school and the
development
of human
geography
in France under Vidal de la
Blache,
which has been
interpreted by
many
writers as a
response
or a reaction to the
development
of Durkheimian
sociology,
we can then
perhaps
see the seeds of resistance
being
sown in social
science,
the seeds of resistance to
particularism,
the seeds of resistance to the
uniqueness
of
places,
the
very things
that Vidal de la Blache and certain of the
writers in the Annales tradition seem to have
emphasized.
I raise this
question,
one that has not been addressed so far in
attempting,
in
trying
to account for the
impact
of the Annales school
upon
social
science,
which I see as
being pretty
minimal.
HUPPERT:
Well,
I can't
really give
a
very good
answer to that last
observation,
which
may
be
just.
After all I am an
historian,
an historian of
history,
not a
social scientist. If I turn
my
mind back to the moment which
you conjure up
in
your
remarks, namely
that arcane and
magically-charged
decade
just
before the
first World War in
Paris,
I am not sure that
your
observation is correct.
Certainly
nobody
admitted to it. To the
contrary.
The
people
who collaborated
in the
intellectual salons of the time and who
published
in the Revue de
synthse,
included historians, economists,
psychologists,
some of them
writing
from
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222 Discussion
Vienna even.
Geographers always
had
pride
of
place.
Febvre and these
people
were
disciples
and
great
admirers of the French school of human
geography
of
Vidal de la Blache. There never was
any question among
the historians of
"counterattacking",
for fear that the newer social sciences would take
away
their
territory. Perhaps
that was the
unexpressed
motive,
I can't
really say.
But
the actual mechanism was a sort of
preemptive
mechanism.
Perhaps
that is what
you
have in mind. That is to
say,
we love
you
and we will take
you
in. We will
swallow
you up
like
Saint-Exupry
's
elephant
or snake. Let's have 100
pages
of
geography
in our books. Let's have 100
pages
of
economy.
Let's have some
psychology.
Let's have it all. And I
guess your
remark,
coming
from a
discipline
which has been
historically slighted
in this
country
in the last two or three
generations
I
think,
makes sense in a
way.
I understand. There is a kind of
motivation of
bitterness,
perhaps,
which I understand. I
guess
the
way
it is
finally played
out in the French tradition is that the historians
cleverly
took over
the social sciences and
reigned
over them in the Vie Section. At least that is one
way
of
looking
at it. This is not meant to be
anything
new or a
surprising
answer
to the observation
you
made,
but I think that is how I feel about it more or less.
As for
Hobsbawm,
well I can't
really argue
with that. He knows
perfectly
well I
wasn't too serious in
my
remarks.
WALLERSTEIN: I would like to talk to that last
question
because I am not
sure that it
poses
the
question correctly
at all. In his
talk,
Jacques
Revel claimed
as the
key
article in the whole cultural
history
of Annales the article
by Simiand,
who was not a historian but an
economist,
very
much of a social scientist. He
asserted it was the
cornerstone,
if
you
will,
of Annales
ideology,
and he
pro-
ceeded to
say
that Simiand had been
very
influenced
by
Durkheim,
and that
Annales was in fact in the heart of the social scientific
tradition,
which I think is
how
they always thought
of themselves.
I would see the issue
differently.
I would
see,
in
fact,
Annales as
fighting
on
two fronts. It was
fighting against
one
enemy,
which in fact had two different
faces. If the
enemy
was,
as I
suggested
in
my opening
remarks,
the kind of
British
imperial
view of the world as it
got expressed
in social science and
history,
this view took two forms
-
the form of
universalizing generalizations,
and the form of the absolute
segregation
of the social sciences one from the
other,
which
relegated
to
history
the role of
being totally idiographic,
of
speak-
ing only
of the
nonrepeatable phenomenon. People
like Febvre and
Bloch,
quite
specifically
Febvre in that section I
quote
in
my
editorial in
Review,
assert that
the
enemy
is
Bourgeois,
the
idiographic
historians.
Against
them,
Febvre is
push-
ing
the claim for social science. On the other
hand,
there was also the other
enemy
who
disregarded
the fact that all of the world was not of a
single piece.
I
see the Annales as
always having fought
on these two
fronts,
which were the
same
front,
the same
enemy coming together,
the
pure
universalizers and the
idiographers.
CONRAD BIEBER
(French, SUNY,
Stony Brook):
I am not a social historian. I
am a
literary person.
After Mr. Hobsbawm 's
enlightening
critical
remarks,
it
may
seem
merely
frivolous to come back to a minor
point
that Professor
Huppert
made. But it is not so minor so as not to deserve
perhaps
a footnote. The
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Discussion 223
translation of the
Annales,
and the translation of the books to which
you
refer,
is indeed a
problem,
but it
may
be more than the fact that one falters over
allusions to French classical literature. If
foreigners
read American social
science,
they
are not the
only
ones to be turned off
by
what in the 1940's and 1950's
was called
by
Malcolm
Cowley
the
impossible jargon
of social science. Now this
meeting
has been to
my
ears
refreshingly
free from
jargon,
so I have no axe to
grind
in this
respect.
But if
you
read what is written in social sciences
very
competently,
the references are not to writers of the
quality
of
Molire,
but
sometimes to "B"
category
movies,
baseball or
basketball,
or
very
minor
authors. Thus the
problem
is an international one indeed.
HUPPERT: I
just
have a one or two sentence
reply
to that
very
true remark. I
think there is a difference
though
between the
predicament
of the French
Annalistes who cannot make themselves understood
among English-speaking
readers.
They
want to be understood. American social science was never meant
to be understood in the first
place.
WALLERSTEIN: Nor has it ever succeeded.
ANDREWS: I would
just
like to make one
very
brief comment in a critical sense
as to the reasons it seems to me
why
in
say
the
1940's, 1950's,
into the
1960's,
why
the most
significant
works of the Annales school in fact did not succeed or
were not
permitted
to enter within the mainline or
anywhere
near the summit of
serious consideration
by very important
and
powerful
American historians. I
think one
gets
a clue to this not
just
in the short notice
given by
Garrett
Mattingly
to the first edition of The
Mediterranean, but,
when the second
edition was
published
in
1966,
in the review
by
Bernard
Bailyn.
It is
very
interesting
to note what Bernard
Bailyn
said. He found the book
incompre-
hensible and a
methodological
failure,
because he could see no causal links
established between this
very long
discussion in the first
part
of the
geographical,
biological
milieu in the
progression
to social
systems
and
finally
to
politics.
The
bulk of
Bailyn's
review consisted in a discussion of the
politics
and
diplomacv
which forms the final section of The
Mediterranean, declaring
the
demograpny
practically
irrelevant,
the role of
geography
in it to be irrelevant to what
Bailyn
considered to be
relevant,
which is his
political
discussion. Let us
go
further. In
the New York Review
of
Books,
J.
H. Elliot reviewed the first volume. Now we
are not
talking
about an American historian at this
point.
This was
only
a few
years ago, right
after the
Harper
and Row translation. He taxed Braudel and The
Mediterranean for
introducing
500 or 600
pages
of
physical,
economic,
demo-
graphic
discussion which doesn't
explain
the Battle of
Lepanto,
and that it was
therefore all the more a
failure,
a
lyrical masterpiece
but a failure.
J.
H. Plumb
reviewed the first volume in the New York Times Book Review somewhere at
the end of
1973,
and used that review to launch into a massive attack
really
on
the whole
geographic,
economic,
or
biological
determinism. Now the latter two
historians are
English
-
but within a
very
definable tradition and a certain
type
of
English
determinism,
which shares certain
very
basic characteristics with the
major preoccupations
of American historians since
roughly
the 1930's
up
to
about the 1960's. That is an
overwhelming
insistence on the event or the
policy
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224 Discussion
or the individual as a
subject
matter of
history,
an
overwhelming
concern with
the and voluntaristic
basically
Lockean
reading
of
history.
This work is corrosive
of,
and
challenging
to,
that
reading
and I think it has been
rejected by
a certain
main tradition of American
historiography,
not because it is
occasionally
exotic
or difficult to read in its
language,
but because it
challenges
certain
very
funda-
mental
assumptions
of
twentieth-century
American
intelligentsia.
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