Canadian Journal of History April 1992 v27 n1 p154(3)

The French Historical Revolution. The Annales School, 1929-89 (paper)., by Peter Burke. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1990. vii, 152 pp. $27.50 U.S. (cloth); $9.95 U.S.

No twentieth-century historiographical tradition has received more attention, or more publicity, than that associated with the French periodical, Annales, founded in 1929. There are reasons other than the obvious importance of the Annales contribution to the discipline which explain why this new account by Peter Burke is but the latest in a long line of books, articles, and colloquia devoted to celebrating Annales historians' contribution to widening horizons and renewing methods. One is that from the combative Lucien Febvre onwards historians associated with the review have frequently but not always - Marc Bloch is a notable exception - aggressively proclaimed themselves to be explorers of new frontiers. Thus the La nouvelle histoire, a dictionary on new methods which Jacques Le Goff and others published in 1978. unabashedly proclaimed that there existed a new history and that it was a French invention. More recently, the death of Fernand Braudel in 1985, the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the review and perhaps a growing realization, in France and elsewhere, that Paris was losing what pre-eminence in historical research it had previously enjoyed, gave rise to another spate of publications, though this time some were more nostalgic in tone, like the collection of autobiographies, appropriately titled Essais d'ego-histoire, that Pierre Nora edited in 1987. Foreign admirers of the dominant current in French historiography have also zealously propagated the word in books and articles that praise the achievements of the Annales "school."

It must therefore be asked whether it is useful to have yet another book dealing with the Annales and written by a foreign sympathizer, this time by someone who has long described himself as a fellow-traveller and is inevitably familiar with the advantages enjoyed by scholars at 54 boulevard Raspail in Paris. It has to be said, indeed, that his discussion of what he terms the French historical revolution - "la nouvelle histoire, he writes, is at least as famous, as French, and as controversial as la nouvelle cuisine" - adds little to what we already know. This does not mean, though, that his analysis is not useful. Both graduate and undergraduate students will appreciate his account for its succinctness and its readability - though they may at times feel bombarded by the rapid succession of names and books that fill his pages - as well as for his aim to present a history of the movement as a whole. They will also be grateful for his clear chronological approach, organized around three generations of scholars, the first being that of Bloch and Febvre, the second dominated by Fernand Braudel, the third those who followed in his large footsteps from the 1970s onward. His study enjoys still other qualities Burke refuses to accept stereotypical images of the main thrusts of the early Annales critique of the dominant mode of historical research and readily recognizes that others outside France, and especially in Germany and the United States, were already making similar criticisms and proposing new directions that historians might explore. He even makes some effort to recognize the limits to what la nouvelle histoire achieved, and to determine not just the strengths but also the weaknesses of the major works by Annales historians that he examines.

Even if we bear in mind that the purpose of this study is to offer only a general account of Annales historiography for historians not familiar with the movement and scholars in other disciplines, this is nevertheless a flawed book. It suffers three principal weaknesses. One is that Burke fails to sufficiently stress the limits to what Annales historians achieved before the 1970s: the ideas that did not prove fruitful, the domains like economic, urban, or women's history, the periods like the later modern, and all too often the world beyond the Hexagon, where their contributions were much more slender. A second is that his discussion of the third generation and its achievements in the last twenty years is the least convincing part of his study. He has to admit that in the period from the 1970s French historians are no longer the lone pioneers they once might have been and that many of them have been influenced by American historians and social scientists. He even comes close to admitting (pp. 106-107) that the Annales movement is over. It is indeed clear that recent decades have been marked by an increasing eclecticism in the methodological orientations of Annales historians and a toning down in their opposition to political history and to the narrative and biographical genres. It may well be, then that by the seventies the Annales moment had passed and that Burke's dense analysis of recent works by French historians only holds together thanks only to a sleight of hand: his narrow emphasis on historical anthropology and his inclusion within the Annales orbit of a number of highprofile scholars, many of whom developed either independently or at the margin of the Maison des sciences de l'homme and by ignoring others. He thus includes historians marginal to the Annales, such as Philippe Aries, Maurice Agulhon and Michel Vovelle, but passes over others, like Jean-Pierre Boussou  Yves Lequin, or Louis Bergeron. The criteria Burke adopts for inclusion/exclusion are not at all evident to this reviewer.

The most serious drawback to Burke's study, however, is the methodology he adopts to analyse the Annales movement. He studies historians whose originality lay not only in their openness toward other social sciences and willingness to explore new territories but in their opposition to dominant research modes - to studying elites and the nation state, individuals and the short term. Yet he approaches them by studying individuals and their principal publications. He refrains from analyzing the institutional and intellectual milieu, and, just as strangely given the nature of French academic and intellectual life, refuses to discuss politics and power. He even fails to put French historiography in the wider context of the historiographical revolution that has affected the discipline everywhere since the 1950s. Here, then, is an opportunity missed to write une nouvelle historiographie of la nouvelle historie. In a well-known metaphor, Le Roy Ladurie once divided historians into the truffle hunters, who scratch at the surface of events in search of gastronomic delights  and the parachutists, who jump from great heights and are able to discern wide patterns in landscapes as they float down to earth. Burke has sniffed around familiar French - and especially Mediterranean - oak trees when it might have been hoped that the time had come to adopt a more Olympian vantage point. Until a more detached and penetrating study is made, students might do well to compare Burke's account with the sometimes too critical but always stimulating discussions of Annales history made by French outsiders: Herve Coutau-Begarie, Le phenomene nouvelle histoire (Paris, 1983) and Marie-Claude Bartholy and Jean-Pierre Despin, Le passe humain: histoire (Paris, 1986).

Universite Laval         Barrie M. Ratcliffe