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The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

André Burguiére
André Burguiére
Affiliation:
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
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Extract

In a letter addressed to the medievalist Ferdinand Lot and dated June 1941, Charles Seignobos, hereditary enemy of the Annales, declared, “I have the impression that, for approximately the last quarter-century, the effort to think about historical method, which was vigorous in the 1880s and especially so in the 1890s, has reached a stalemate,” and noted that, as a sign of the times, “the Revue de Synthese Historique … has changed its name.” Seignobos, then only a year before his death, was writing a book on “the principles of the historical method.” His letter alluded to American and German output (“a mediocre American, Barnes, published a fat book in 1925 in which he summarized a large number of works….”), but made no mention of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, or of the Annales, then in its twelfth year. To choose to ignore the Annales while discoursing on historical method is of course unjust and absurd. But aside from this omission, Charles Seignobos's remarks are not without pertinence. It is true that France at the turn of the last century and particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century, had been the center of a passionate and fascinating debate on the nature of historical knowledge, on the legitimacy of its pretensions to be a science, and so forth, and that by the 1940s this debate had ceased.

Type
The Historical Mind
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , July 1982 , pp. 424 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1982

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References

1 Letter of Seignobos, Charles to Ferdinand Lot. Published in Revue Historique (July- September 1953).Google Scholar

2 It became the Revue de Synthèse in 1931.

3 For the details of the debate, see Maurice Crubellier, Histoire et culture. Recherches sur l'histoireet la culture en France de 1871 à 1914, typescript, Paris, 1971. Cf. also, for the polemic between Simiand, and RevelSeignobos, J. Seignobos, J., “Histoire et science sociales. Les paradigmes des Annales,” Annales, 34:6 (11–12 1979).Google Scholar

4 PaulLacombe, , “L'histoirecommescience,”Revue de Synthèse Historique, 111:7(1901) 1–9.Google Scholar

5 On the “strategy” of the Annales, see Burguière, André, “Histoire d'une histoire: la nais- sance des Annales, “ Annales, 34:6 (11–12 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Péguy, Charles, “De la situation faite à l'histoire et à la sociologie dans les temps modernes,” Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 8e sèrie, 3e cahier (cited by Lucien Febvre in his initial lecture at the Collège de France, 13 12 1933).Google Scholar

7 A thematic analysis of the articles published in the Annales and in a certain number of other journals of history (currently being written by Oliver Dumoulin), undertaken under the auspices of the project that I am directing on the history of the Annales, gives us the following percentages for the place occupied by the history of mentalités and cultural history: 1929–38, 3.7 percent; 1946–56, 15.7 percent; 1957–67, 18.7 percent; 1968–75, 16.2 percent. For comparison, three neighboring journals for the period 1929–38 show the following figures: the Revue Historique,17.2 percent; the Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 5.5 percent; the Revue d'Histoire Économique et Sociale, 5.6 percent.

8 Bloch, Marc, “Pour une histoire comparée des societés européennes,” Revue de Synthèse Historique, 46:136–38 (12 1928), 15–50.Google Scholar

9 This refers to Krauss, Werner's book, Das tätige Laben und die Literatur im mittelalterischen SpanienGoogle Scholar, reviewed in “Litterature et soci´té,” Annales, n° 7 (15 07 1930), 470.Google Scholar

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11 Duby, preface to Bloch, Apologie.

12 “Üne vue d'ensemble: histoire et psychologie,” Encyclopédie française, VIII (1938).Google Scholar

13 “Folklore et folkloristes,” Annales, 11 (1939), 152–60.Google Scholar

14 “Comment reconstituer la vie affective d'autrefois? La sensibilité et l'histoire,” Annales, 13 (1941), 5–20.Google Scholar

15 Particularly in “Histoire et psychologie.”

16 For a survey of the research, see my article, “L'anthropologic historique,” in La nouvelle histoire, LeGoff, Jacques, ed. (Paris: Retz, 1978).Google Scholar

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18 “La sensibilité et I'histoire.”

19 Elias, Norbert, Uber den Prozess der Zivilization, II (1939), French translation: volume II, La dynamique de I'Occident (1975).Google Scholar

20 “La sensibilité et I'histoire.”

21 Elias, La dynamique de l'occident.

22 “Sorcellerie, sottise ou revolution mentale,” Annales, 3:1 (1948).Google Scholar

23 Mandrou, Robert, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1968).Google Scholar

24 Freud, Sigmund, “Eine Teufel neurose in XVII Jahrhundert,” (1922), French translation in Essais de psychanalyse appliquée (1952).Google Scholar

25 Certeau, Michel de, La possession a Loudun (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).Google Scholar

26 Furet, François, “Les intellectuels francjais et le structuralisme,” Preuves, n° 192 (02 1967).Google Scholar