Michael Harsgor

Total History:
The Annales School

In spirit of self-mockery Heinrich Heine wrote that other nations

a

may be powerful on land and sea but Germans dominated the air.
He was, of course, referring to that thin spiritual atmosphere in
which the philosophers floated their dreams and theories.
Today, in the second half of the twentieth century, while other
powers measure their strength in terms of armoured divisions or
technological prowess, the French reign supreme in historiography.
That at least is the view of Professor Traian Stoianovich in his in-
structive study of the contemporary French historical school -

especially as represented by Annales.’ According to Stoianovich,

there are three nations who have led the world in the field of
historical scholarship; in two, Greece and Germany, the flame of
creativity has been extinguished but it continues to burn brightly in
France.
The Greeks, and nobody will disagree with Professor
Stoianovich about their merits, are praised as the pioneers of
historiography. By their exemplary presentation of facts they in-
tended to train historians in the spirit of wisdom anud virtue and so
fit them for public service. For the Greeks, then, history was a
’useful’ discipline. As well as the classical authors, Stoianovich also
includes Machiavelli, Guicciardioni, Bodin and Francis Bacon as
belonging to this school i.e. history as useful. The second
historiographical paradigm, according to Stoianovich, appeared
only in the eighteenth century when the study of history was
redefined and given a sense of development. But this second model
only came to fruition with Leopold von Ranke’s, ’wie es eigentlich
war’, who with his deep respect for the infinite variations of past
experience was determined to write history strictly as a scientific
report (or aspiring to be such); his only concession to fashion being
his florid style.

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills),

Vol 13 (1978), 1-13
1-1
2

Now it has happened again (for only the second time in 2,300
years). A third model of historiography has emerged on the banks
of the Seine and has been developed to its present brilliant form by
the historians gathered round the periodical Annales: Economies,
Sociétés, Civilisations. For Stoianovich, not since Ranke has there
been a more important school or better method of historical re-
search. The origins of this Annales method can be found in the
work of Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944). It
had its roots in the French tradition but was also inspired, as its
sub-title suggests, by the German Yierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Annales first appeared in 1929, a time when Marxist scholars
were attempting to uncover the economic base of the political and
cultural superstructure. If their results were uninspiring they never-
theless encouraged interest in a more scientific approach. However,
from the beginning the founders of Annales felt that both the Third
Republic style of history and the economic determinism of the
Marxists were too constricting for the kind of historiography they
had in mind. They aspired to higher things -

to a discipline which
both dominated and embraced all other studies of the human con-
dition. They celebrated every attempt to enlarge Clio’s realm.
Hence their admiration for Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897) who
brought about a shift from conventional history to
Kulturgeschichte, which for Karl Lamprecht could only be
’primarily a socio-psychological science’, a formulation which un-
doubtedly influenced later Annales evolution. And Wilhelm
Dilthey (d. 1911) produced with his kind of Geistesgeschichte the
outline of what would in a more advanced stage of Annales growth
appear as histoire des mentalit6s. However, the detection of
sources cannot impair the originality of the enterprise launched by
Febvre and Bloch at the end of the 1920s, which also witnessed the
publication of the first volume of Henri Berr’s collection -
L’Evolution de I’Humanit6 with its overall title Synthese Histori-
que. The need for a fusion of economic, social and cultural history
was increasingly felt and the magic word ’synthesis’ was em-
broidered on the new flag. Even if in those days nearly half a cen-
tury ago the first Annales researchers were still far from the recent
proudly imperialistic cri de guerre uttered by Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, one of the present champions of the current: ’History is
the synthesis of all social sciences (sciences de I’homme) turned
towards the past’ -
where the original braquees is far stronger
 3

than my ’turned’, because this past participle alludes both to a

pointed telescope and to a beaming search-light ... without men-
tioning a levelled gun.
Nevetheless Traian Stoianovich did not pen his historical sketch
of the Annales school just to show how it arrived at its present all-
embracing conceptions. He offers the reader something better: a
profound thematic analysis accompanied by chronological land-
marks. If at times the reader feels quite overwhelmed by the riches
which are relentlessly heaped on him, it is his own fault: a work
concentrating in 217 pages the intellectual adventures and victories
of a brilliant Pleiad of researchers, necessarily must be tightly pack-
ed ; even if it was only some years after the second world war that
the Annales method with its secular trinity of Serialism, Struc-
turalism and Functionalism finally took shape.
Serialism* is the outcome of every Annales historian’s burning
desire to achieve the greatest possible measure of scientific rigour.
As historical research is rarely able to provide coherent statistics for
unstatistically-minded ages, the researcher is obliged to proceed by
extrapolations and inferences. Often it means skating on very thin
ice; history is not yet a branch of mathematics! In any case, as both
the Founding Fathers’ generation and their spiritual descendants
were specialists in pre-industrial societies notably poor in statistics,

they were forced to depend on archival information, chronological

lists of prices or demographic material. This is a field Annales
researchers have made their own. Of course they had earlier ex-
amples to follow and perfect, such as Frangois Simiand’s price
studies and Henry Hauser’s price history, published in 1936.22
Traian Stoianovich is therefore understandably fascinated by the
’admirably systematic analyses of Ernest Labrousse, Jean Meuvret
and Frank Spooner’,3 who opened the way for a renewed serial
history. Prices, followed over centuries if possible, play a cardinal
role in building up the ’long period’ model in historical economic
analysis; such a model must integrate, according to some Annales
views, both the oscillatory variations of cyclical change and the
mutational variations of structural change - an example of the in-
fluence exercised in the fifties by ’pure’ economics on the thought
of French historians.
Further cultivation of serialism bore fruit in the rich

*Senatism (analyse sénelle In the original) is the critical examination of very long
trends in demographic or economic processes.
4

demographic studies published by Annales researchers. Historical

demography, an autonomous discipline developing in an at-
mosphere permeated by ’the growing attraction of non-consensual
history’ (T. Stoianovich) turned out to be an Annales speciality.
Pierre Goubert’s eagerness and talent in the study of parish records
brought forth a work hailed as a masterpiece when it was pub-
lished, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730;4 the breakthrough
in serial history proved that, once mastered, the method could
successfully deal with subjects like religious history -

a field of
research to whose ‘serialisation’ Pierre Chaunu had attracted atten-
tion -
or like the study of sexual behavior in the past, a domain in
which Jean-Louis Flandrin has won his spurs.
Structuralism is not accepted by everyone sheltering under the
Annales umbrella. It is also true that very much is asked: not only
the analysis of an economic structure, that is, the organization of a
given economic variable with its significance to the general
economic system and its precise relationship to other variables such
as cost, prices, income, money, interest rates, rents; but also the

analysis of the impact of conjunctures, that is, factors of cyclical or

oscillatory movement. The problem of Annales researchers was to
build models of social structures (not only economic ones) ’taken
from life’, which means covering the skeleton of the basic
economic analysis with the flesh of demographic, cultural, mental
and even psychoanalytical data. An uphill task. Structuralism in-
deed elevated historiography seen through Annales eyes to the posi-
tion occupied by theology in the Middle Ages and by philosophy
during the Enlightenment - the imperial highway to the sum of
human knowledge (even if representatives of the trend are modest
enough to disclaim any such ambitions).
Thus, for instance, was geography annexed by Annales his-
toriography with Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerrannée et le monde
mOditerran6en d l’époque de Philippe II in 1949.5 The reader
navigating Braudel’s Mediterranean for the first time discovers not
only a new kind of geohistory; he floats on a sea of pretentious
language -
a literary style, heir to a secular tradition of belles-
lettres, serves the writer’s aim: suggesting more than a prosaic
rendering can bear, somehow evoking the untold wealth of ’total’
or ’global’ history (the use of which adjectives by Annales
historians suggests that they claim for themselves all the territories
occupied by the various social sciences).
A generation later, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie showed how
 5

climatology can be transformed into an auxiliary science of history.

In fact with his Les Paysans du Languedoc6 he demonstrated the
usefulness of zoogeography, meteorology and phytogeography -
which is, as everybody knows, the biogeography of plants for
-

the study of history.

Of course, with fields of enquiry widening to such cosmic pro-
portions an historical study must grow mammoth-like and consume
the scholar’s best years, which is a rule for a French These d’Etat;
(but only the existence of this peculiar institution permitted the
Annales’ flowering). Thus Pierre Chaunu’s monumental thesis
Seville et l’Atlantique -
1504-1650’ was an oceanic work in more
than one sense, eight volumes which in print amounted to eleven.
Chaunu elaborated Braudel’s notion of pesee globale -

global
weighing -

an important stepping-stone on the journey to total

historiography. What is meant by that is the weighing up of whole

civilizations in order to compare them one with another: the ’direc-
tions for use’ ask, roughly speaking, for an approximate evaluation
of the energy sources of a given society -

horses, oxen, firewood,

waterwheels, ships, workingmen, etc. -
of its logistic facilities, its
notions of time and space, its leadership techniques -
and balanc-
ing these data with a similar summing up of another society:
Western Europe and China, for instance. Here one has struc-
turalism vindicated by comparative history.
As for functionalism, the least elaborated notion of the Annales
triad, it must be understood as the study of the interaction of the
three traditional fields of interest -

6conomies, sociétés, civilisa-

tions -
the dynamics of their triple relationship and their hierar-
chical and dialectical interdependence.
This very ambitious view of historiography has been under
attack, often with political overtones, from rival schools in spite
-

of the fact that Annales people include researchers of left-wing

views, such as the distinguished specialist of Greek history Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, and the people active on the centre-right, like the above-
mentioned Pierre Chaunu. But all the Annales scholars, conscious
that they are considered as standing at the vanguard of historical
research, see themselves not as ’intellectual revolutionaries’ but as
revolutionaries in the realm of intellectual discovery. It must be
added also that their horror of dogmatism, in spite of a certain set
of totems and taboos of which more later, serves as a saving grace.
Marxist historians followed the genesis of the Annales current
with deep misgivings. During the Cold War the ’school’ was under
6

Marxist attack for its supposed inclination to regard capitalism as a

permanent category and for its alleged neglect of the dialectical
links between infrastructure and superstructure. Annales people,
on their side, have always been contemptuous of Marxist analyses
and studies ’congealed in their simplicity’, of ’a priori and
automatic explanations’ and of the Marxist ’love... for a model
for the model’s sake.’8
Generally speaking, Annales welcomed Marxist studies in order
to absorb their elements as a part of a total synthesis, more
elaborated and more sophisticated than the economic determinism
which characterizes so much of French Marxist historiography. In
such a way, Annales won over young researchers who considered
themselves as Marxists without taking into account that a cardinal
Annales conception, that of the long duration (longue durée), was
rather at variance with the orthodox Marxist ideas about historical
discontinuities. These contradictions exploded suddenly in the, by
now famous, 1970 Richet-Soboul controversy.9 There is little doubt
that the relations between Marxist scholars and the Annales way of
research proceeded towards a working compromise wholly on
Annales terms -

its richer, more imaginative vision attracting

minds eager to shed the fetters of dogmatism. So, for instance, in
the French academic world this collaboration brought about a
revival of interest by Marxists in the ’Asiatic mode of production’
and ’oriental despotism’ -

terms used by Marx himself, the study

of which was discouraged over a long period of time by Soviet
historiography.’°
The anti-Marxist criticism of Annales, as expressed by the emi-
nent Sorbonne specialist of social history Roland Mousnier,&dquo; is
directed both against its contents and form. About the latter, a
peculiarly Annales feature since the publication of Braudel’s
Mediterranean, and especially about its influence upon the style of
the younger generation of historians, Mousnier does not mince
matters. He lashes out at a style ’abundant and tumult-
uous ... characterized by a torrent of words, by numerous violent
images, by a luxury of metaphor ...’’2 Further scholars of the
Mousnier school, and there are many of them, take a very dim view
of the alleged lack of consideration exhibited by the Annales re-
searchers towards the volitional-intellectual-spiritual element of
social life; the Mousnierists consider the use made by Annales
scholars of extra-historical material as tainting their whole approach
with a too heavy biological tendency. Recently other historians, this
 7

time from inside the Annales empire, have started to express a cer-
tain uneasiness about the neglect of what was once considered the
mainstream of historical writing. Jacques Le Goff,13 a specialist in
the study of various cultural and ethnic medieval traditions, was
perhaps the first to ring the alarm bell. He complained that the in-
clination to relegate ’events’-

generally speaking, political history

-
to the background presents the reader with only
an ’atrophied appendix’ of real history (since, paradoxically,

political history is allegedly seen by Annales eyes as such an

appendix). Bernard Guenee’4 too is concerned at the absence of in-
terest in the history of the State demonstrated by researchers too
absorbed by ’economics’ and ’society’. It was mainly for these
reasons, as was at least recognized by Braudel himself, that it took
so long for the Annales school to gain recognition outside France.
Another reason lay in its specific Frenchness, and a third could
have been its bold and wide synthesizing. For G.G. Diligenskij, a
Soviet critic,’6 the school’s main vices are its refusal to accept the
Marxist periodization of history, its too narrow chronological
limits resulting from a curiosity directed especially towards pre-
industrial societies, its publication of ’outright’ anti-Soviet material
(this argument contradicts the previous one), its attempts to include
the study of mentalities in a general synthesis, which can only lead
to the publication of articles reflecting a basic reliance upon faith
accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason, a most
extraordinary accusation to be aimed at Annales. Further on,
Professor Diligenskij finds ’a vulgar biological materialism’ in
articles published by the review and considers that in spite of
studies of a certain value, as a whole the journal expresses ’the
crisis of bourgeois historical thought and its panic-stricken fear of
historical materialism.’ 16 Other historians, Anglo-Saxon this time,
could not stomach Braudel’s method, which can be rightly
considered as an epitome of the Annales style. Professor Geoffrey
Parker, an admirer of both Braudel and his review, enjoyed himself
collecting critical opinions about the French historian’s master-
piece&dquo;: G.R. Elton was disappointed back in 1967 that the only
things missing in Braudel’s Mediterranean were ’policy and action’;
H.S. Hughes thought that the different sections of the book ’never
quite came together’; Felix Gilbert remarked in 1971 that ’Braudel
never fully succeeds in showing the relevance of the long-range de-

velopments for the events in the period of Philip II’; and John
Elliot, in 1973, that’Braudel’s mountains move his men, but never
8

his men the mountains.’ Geoffrey Parker, on the other hand, states
that this work, which took 26 years in the writing, is ’a masterpiece
which will stand for ever’, a sweeping statement concerning a study
in history. Other sincere admirers of both Annales and Braudel,
such J.H. Hexterl8 who praises the French historian’s proud
formula ’History is the science of the sciences of man’, cannot
nevertheless conceal a certain uneasiness about the hatred felt by
Annales scholars for poor histoire événementielle. Hexter is even
led to complain that about that kind of history Braudel ’writes
with a passionate and at timers unreasonable antipathy’ -

unreasonableness being not usually considered a virtue in an

historian.
Professor H.R. Trevor-Roper appears no less favourably dis-
posed towards his French colleagues of the Annales tendency; but
thinks the kind of ’great history’ they are attempting sometimes
’seems beyond human powers.&dquo;’ He is also somewhat taken aback
by their above-mentioned ’antipathy’ (especially that of Braudel)
towards political history, the study of the domination of man by
man and of the way in which the many are led by the few. Trevor-

Roper tries to explain that to Braudel and his disciples ’this political
history is merely the topmost layer of his multidimensional study:
the long-exposed layer which has been rendered familiar by
previous research’.The point is, of course, that ’previous research’
had been done outside the Annales sphere of influence.
Accordingly it was done ’flatly’, without the benefit of the deep
synthesizing research which is a must for this French historical
school. Therefore, for a rational, consistent, coherent Annales
scholar all that Trevor-Roper calls the ’familiar... layer’ of
political history appears not only as unfamiliar but even as
completely useless. On the other hand, to outsiders, the original sin
of Annales scholarship is its lack of interest in political history
which has led to the subsequent dearth of studies in this field, so
that the Annales stalwarts disdainfully criticize the way other
historians tackle the problem without being able to point out how
it could have been done in their new fashion. Till a couple of years
ago, Annales scholarship escaped the dilemma by denying, en bloc,
the need for political history; this created an atmosphere in which
the study of such history was considered as being beneath the
dignity of a fully-fledged French docteur d’Etat. Until quite
recently the Annales editorial board refused to print articles dealing
with purely political problems, oligarchies, ruling groups, social
 9

hierarchies: such stuff was thought of as good for the classical

trend represented by Roland Mousnier and the Revue Historique,
but unfitting for a review dedicated to the study of ’economics,
societies, civilizations ...’
There would have been no way out had not some younger
Annales scholars grown restless. They started, somewhat belatedly,
to publish in their review a series of fine studies in which political-
social history was treated in ’the new way’. Such were the
articles by Jean Bérenger about the institution of the ministeriat
(’ministry’ is an awkward translation) during the seventeenth cen-
tury,20 Daniel Dessert’s innovating ’Colbert lobby’,2’ Dominique
Bouret’s illuminating study about politics in medieval epic poetry22
and the remarkable work done by Marc Ferro on the birth of Soviet
bureaucracy, with the help of archive research on the spot (a rare
23
event anyway).
And, indeed, at this point one arrives at the heart of the Annales
paradox. Eager as they were to enlarge to the utmost the vast
regions circumscribing the kernel of classical historiography, the
Annales pioneers tended to neglect the kernel itself. But surely if
the heart of the matter is lost no grandiose synthesis can ever be
achieved (one shrewd observer remarked that there is no sense in
conquering the world only to lose one’s soul in the process) .2’ The
proof of the pudding is in the eating and therefore the reader is in-
vited to attempt the following daunting experiment: let him read
everything published since the second world war on a certain sub-
ject let us say England, or France, or Spain during the last three
-

or four centuries before the industrial revolution, in any scholarly

review of historical studies belonging to the classical school, which
for our purpose means not of the Annales type. Even if the
editorial board seems to be still 6v,6nemen t- oriented, a careful
reader should be able to extract from his lengthy reading much
useful information concerning the economy, the society, the
civilization of a given country at a given time. Now let him turn to
the same subject, as it has appeared in Annales since 1945 to our
own day: it would be very difficult for the reader to learn

something about the policy, the constitutional structure, about

what the French call polémologie (the study of wars), about
diplomacy,. about the body politic, about the ruling groups and
social hierarchies, lost as he would be in an ocean of economics,
sociology and ’civilizationics’, if the crude neologism can be
forgiven.
10

It has already been said that the flaw in the majestic structure
was felt by the younger Annales scholars, who consequently started
to produce political-historical studies. Lately the master himself,
Professor Braudel, has had second thoughts about the matter: ’I
don’t think of society the way I did forty years ago’, he said in a re-
cent interview; ’there is no society without hierarchy. You have
economic hierarchy -

the rich and the poor; cultural hierarchy -

the knowledgeable and the ignorant; political hierarchy -

the
rulers and the ruled. The hierarchies maintain themselves. The per-
manence of hierarchies -

I didn’t see this problem with enough

depth. ,25 Mieux vaut tard que jamais ... A system of thought able
to overcome its idiosyncrasies has an open future; the formidable
Annales ’school’ has not yet said its last word.
The storms of May-June 1968 in France - the students’ revolt
and the collapse of the university system - affected the academic
institution which was the main basis of Annales scholarship during
its struggling years. A chain reaction of reforms abolished that in-
stitution -

the Sixième Section de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes -

which became finally, in 1975, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, with the right to grant degrees.
And so, after all, Annales finally conquered most of the French
academic system dealing with historical research and even crossed
the ocean. In May 1977 a Fernard Braudel Center for the Study of
Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations was inaugurated
at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The inter-
disciplinary synthesis is turning into an international, global one,
under the blue-white-red flag -
in the realm of history, France is a
super-power!
Professor Stoianovich was therefore quite correct when, sum-
ming up his analysis he stated that the total effect of Annales in-
quiry since its foundation has been to create an historical paradigm
for the world community of historical scholarship. This community
is now challenged by an intellectual realm fabulously rich, teeming
with fertile ideas, with daring initiatives, an ever-expanding
universe of research and synthesis, to which Traian Stoinovich’s
book is the best passport, the more so as it is the only one.
 11

NOTES

1. Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method, The Annales Paradigm,

with a foreword by Fernand Braudel, (London 1976).
2. Francois Simiand is the author of Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le
mouvement général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècles (Paris 1932); Inflation et
stabilisation alternées; le développement économique des Etats-Unis (Paris 1934); an
old Simiand article was reprinted in Annales (January-February 1960) ’Méthode
historique et science sociale’; for material on Simiand cf. Stoianovich, op. cit., 200
n.38 & 40. Henri Hauser was Marc Bloch’s predecessor in the Sorbonne chair of
economic history; among other books he is the author of La response de Jean Bodin
à M. de Malestroit (1568) (Paris 1932); Recherches et documents sur l’histoire des
prix en France de 1500 à 1800 (Paris 1936).
3. C.-E. Labrousse is the author of Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des
revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris 1933); La Crise de l’économie francaise à

la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris 1944); on Meuvret, cf.

Stoianovich, op. cit., 172 n. 46; 199, n.36 and on Spooner, ibid., 199 n.37.
4. Goubert’s thèse was published in Paris in 1960 (a paperback edition for the
general public appeared in 1968 under the title Cent Mille provinciaux au XVIIe
).
siècle
5. Braudel’s thought was influenced both by the structure and style of Lucien
Febvre’s thèse d’Etat: Philippe II et la Franche-Comté: Etude d’histoire politique,
religieuse et sociale, (Paris 1911) (a paperback edition without foot-notes was
published in 1970); another influence was that of Simiand’s theories, discussed in
Georg (sic) I. Iggers, New directions in European Historiography (Middletown,
Conn. 1975), 59. Braudel’s Mediterranean appeared in a new edition in 1966 and
was translated by Siân Reynolds under the title: The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II (London 1972-3). Other works by
Braudel include Ecrits sur l’histoire, (Paris 1969), and Civilisation matérielle et
capitalisme - XVe et XIXe siècles, (Paris 1967).
6. Le Roy Ladurie’s Paysans was published in 1966; his history of the climate
was translated by Barbara Bray under the title Times of feast, times of famine, a

history of the climate since the year 1000 (London 1971); this author, together with
Jean Paul Aron, published Anthropologie du conscrit français d’après les comptes
numériques et sommaires du recrutement de l’armée 1819-1826 (Paris 1972).
7. Chaunu’s Séville was published, with a preface by Lucien Febvre, in
1955-59. This historian is a very prolific writer, an astounding feat considering the
quality of his output. He is the author, inter alia, of L’Amérique et les Américains
(Paris 1964); L’expansion européenne du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Paris 1965); La
Civilisation de I’Europe classique (Paris 1966); Conquête et exploration des
nouveaux mondes - XVIe siècle (Paris 1969); L’Espagne de Charles Quint (Paris

1973); Histoire Science Sociale, la durée, l’espace et I’homme à l’époque moderne
(Paris 1974); Le Temps des Réformes (Paris 1975).
8. For the relations between Annales and Marxist historians, see the index of-
Stoianovich’s book, 253.
12

9. The ’official’ Marxist historian of France, Jacques Soboul, was accused by a

brilliant Annales man, Daniel Richet, of carelessness (it is an understatement) and
failure to make proper acknowledgements; to follow the tragi-comic incident one
must read the letters exchanged between the two historians in Annales XXV, (1970),
1494-96.
10. It is instructive to notice that the basic book on ’oriental despotism’
appeared in 1957: Karl August Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A Comparative
Study of Total Power (New Haven) was reviewed by S.N. Eisenstadt in the Journal
of Asian Studies, XVII, May 1959, 435-46; but it took six years for Annales to
publish in its XIX, May-June 1964 (531-49) issue; a very pungent review by Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, ’Histoire et idéologie; Karl Wittfogel et le concept de "Mode de
production"asiatique.’
11. Roland Mousnier, the Grand Old Man of what is considered classical French
historiography, is none the less a daring innovator with his theory of ’Order Society’
as an explanation of West-European pre-industrial societies. Its most striking and
succinct presentation is found in Les hiérarchies sociales de 1450 à nos jours (Paris
1969), translated by Peter Evans under the title Social Hierarchies — 1450 to the pre-
sent, (London); other works by R. Mousnier are La vénalité des offices sous Henri
IV et Louis XIII (Pans 1972); L’assassinat d’Henri IV, (Paris 1964); Fureurs
Paysannes: les paysans dans les révoltes du XVIIe siècles (Paris 1967), translated by
Brian Pearle as Peasant uprisings in the Seventeenth century: France, Russia, China
(New York 1970); La plume, la faucille et le marteau (Paris 1970); Le Conseil du roi
de Louis XII à la Révolution (Paris 1970); Les Institutions de la France sous la
monarchie absolue, 1598-1789, (Paris 1975).
12. Stoianovich, op. cit., 116 and n.33.
13. Jacques Le Goff is the author of Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age (Paris
1957); La Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (Paris 1967); Marchands et banquiers
du Moyen Âge (Paris 1972) among others.
14. Bernard Guénée published Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le baillage de
Senlis à la fin du Moyen-Âge (vers 1380-vers 1550) (Paris 1963); L’Occident au XIVe
et XVe siècles: les Etats (Paris 1971).
15. In Voprosy Istorii (No 7) Moscow 1962, 185-91.
16. G.G. Diligenskij’s article was published in a French translation in Annales
1963, 103-13.
17. Geoffrey Parker, ’Braudel’s Mediterranean: the Making and the Marketing
of a Masterpiece’ in History, 1974, 238-93.
18. J.H. Hexter, ’Fernand Braudel and the "Monde Braudellien"’ in Journal of
Modern History, Vol. 44, December 1972, 480-539.
19. H.R. Trevor-Roper, ’Fernand Braudel, the Annales and the Mediterranean’
in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 44, December 1972, 468-79.
20. Jean Bérenger, ’Pour une enquête européenne: le problème du ministériat au
XVIIe siècle’ in Annales XXIX (1974), 166-92.
21. Daniel Dessert et Jean-Louis Journet, ’Le lobby Colbert, un royaume ou
une affaire de famille’ in Annales XXX (1975) 1303-36.
22. Dominique Boutet, ’La politique et l’histoire dans les chansons de geste’ in
Annales XXXI (1976), 1119-29.
 13

23. Marc Ferro, ’La naissance du système bureaucratique en URSS’ m Annales

XXXI (1976) 243-67.
24. The shrewd observer alluded to was Jesus of Nazareth who expressed
himself on the subject in the following terms: ’For what is a man profited, if he shall
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?’, Matthew, XVI, 26. What is the historian profited, if what he writes is
no longer history?
25. Time 23 May 1977.

Michael Harsgor
is Professor of Early Modern History at the
University of Tel Aviv.