Fernand Braudel, Personal Testimony
Transcript of Fernand Braudel, Personal Testimony
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Personal TestimonyAuthor(s): Fernand BraudelSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 448-467Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1876804 .
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Personal Testimony
Fernand Braudel
Ecole pratique des hautes etudes
How was
I
shaped
as a
historian? And how
can a historical account
of the development of the
Annales school be taken as
an example of
the
particular
circumstances of
contemporary
French
historiography?
Such
was the double
question
put
to me
by
the
editor. I admit
that for
a
long
time I turned
a deaf ear to this
proposition
which would
compel me to look
at
myself in an unaccustomed way,
to consider
myself
in some
fashion as an
object
of
history,
and
to embark upon
confidences which must at
first glance seem
signs of self-satisfaction
or
even of
vanity.
I
pondered these considerations
over
and over, but
William McNeill
was
stubborn;
if
I
would not
write this
particular
article myself, would
I
be
kind
enough to provide someone
else with
the
information
necessary
to write
it?
I
finally gave
in
and will try to
answer the double
question
with
complete honesty,
although I con-
fess
to
having doubts as to whether this
account, all too personal and
of
questionable interest to the
reader, really
gets to the heart of the
matter.
I
Let us
then
begin
with
facts.
I
was born in
1902
between
Champagne
and
Barrois
in
a little
village
which now has
about a hundred
in-
habitants but
which, during
my
childhood,
had
nearly twice that
number. It
is
a
village
whose roots
go
back for
centuries;
I
imagine
that
its
central
square,
where three roads and an
ancient
track come
together, may
correspond
to
the
courtyard
of an
old
Gallo-Roman
villa. Not only was
I
born
there, to the peril of
my parents'
summer
vacation, but
I
also lived
there quite a
long time with my paternal
grandmother, who was
the passion
of
my
childhood and
youth. Even
today,
transporting myself
back
into
those
early years,
which remain
so
clear in
my
memory, always brings
a warm satisfaction. The
house
where
I
lived,
built
in
1806,
lasted
almost unchanged
until
1970-a
pretty good record for a
simple peasant
house.
I
believe
that these
long and oft-repeated country visits were of no small significance for
the
historian
I
later became.
Things
that others
had to learn from
books
I
knew
all along from
first-hand experience.
Like Gaston
Roupnel, the
historian
of
the Burgundian
countryside,
and
like Lucien
Febvre,
above all
a man
of Franche
Comte,
I
was in the
beginning
448
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Testimony
449
and
I
remain now a
historian
of peasant
stock. .1
could
name
the
plants
and trees of
this
village of
eastern
France;
I
knew
each of its
inhabitants;
I
watched them
at work:
the
blacksmith,
the
cartwright,
the
occasional
woodcutters, the "bouquillons." I observed the yearly
rotation of
the
crops on the
village lands
which
today
produce
nothing
but grass
for
grazing
herds.
I
watched the
turning wheel
of the
old
mill which
was,
I
believe,
built
long ago
for the
local lord
by an
ancestor of
mine.
And
because
all this
countryside
of
eastern
France
is full
of
military
recollections,
I
was,
through
my family, a child
at
Napoleon's side at
Austerlitz,
at
the
Berezina....
By a
paradox
which
is
not one
after
all,
it is this
same
eastern
France
which,
in the
rear of
the
revolutionary
armies
of
1793 and
1794, remained
loyal and saved
the revolution
at a time
when
it was
not-nor would
it
become-revolutionary in
spirit,
particularly in
the
years that followed.
My
father
was a teacher in
Paris
and ended his
short life
(1878-
1927)
as
director of an academic
group.
I
had the
advantage of
living,
from
1908 to
1911,
in
the
outskirts of
Paris;
but at
that time
the suburbs
were
practically unspoiled
countryside. Meriel
is
a
large
village
of solid stone
houses, with
walled
gardens full
of
gooseberry
bushes and cherry trees, which disappeared each spring amidst the
flowering
lilacs. The river
Oise,
which
flowed
nearly
though
not
quite
next to
it,
brought convoys
of
Belgian tugboats from the
north
trailing
their
strings
of
barges.
From
time to time
the
Montebellos,
the
de-
scendants of Marshal
Lannes,
would
organize magnificent
cross-
country hunts.
At
school, which
I entered
late,
I
had
a
superb
teacher, a
man who
was
intelligent,
considerate,
authoritarian, and
who recited
the
history
of France as though he were celebrating Mass.
Next
I
studied
at the
Lycee
Voltaire in
Paris
(1913-20).
My
father,
a
mathematician
by
nature,
I
may say,
taught
my
brother and
me
with such
ingenuity
that our studies
of that
subject were
as-
tonishingly easy.
I
took a
lot of Latin
and a
little Greek.
I
adored
history,
having
a
rather
remarkable
memory.
I
wrote
poetry-too
much
poetry. In
short,
I
got a
very good
education.
I
wanted to be
a
doctor,
but
my
father
opposed this
insufficiently motivated
career,
and
I
found
myself
disoriented in
that
year 1920,
which
was,
for
me,
a
sad
one. In the end,
I
entered the
Sorbonne as
a student
of
history.
I
graduated
without
difficulty,
but also
without much
real
enjoyment.
I
had
the
feeling
I
was
frittering away
my
life, having
chosen the
easy
way out. My
yocation as a
historian did
not come
to
me
until later.
Of the
benignant
and
not
very
crowded
Sorbonne
of those
days
I
retain
only
one
agreeable
memory:
the teaching
of
Henri Hauser. He
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450
Fernand
Braudel
spoke a
different language from the rest
of our
professors,
that of
economic
and social
history. Marvelously
intelligent,
he knew
every-
thing and
showed it without
ostentation. A sign
of
the
times: he
lectured to a very small audience of six or seven persons. To be fair, I
also enjoyed the courses
of Maurice
Holleaux, an extraordinary spe-
cialist
in Greek
history.
He
also
spoke
to
only
three or four
listeners,
including the
Rumanian
historian, Cantacuzene, and
the future dean
of the
Sorbonne,
Andre
Aymard.
My
studies were over in the
twinkling
of an
eye,
and
I
became,
at
the
age
of
twenty-one,
a teacher of
history
in
the lycee
at Constantine
in Algeria.
I
was then
an
apprentice
historian like hundreds
of others.
Like thousands of others, I taught a superficial history of events,
which
pleased
me because
I
was learning as
I
taught.
I even
plunged
into
the
game
of
becoming
what one may call a good teacher,
because
I
liked
my pupils,
and
they
more than
reciprocated
the feeling, first in
Constantine
and then the
following year
in
Algiers.
I
repeat,
I
was
still
a
historian
of
happenings,
of
politics,
of great men; the syllabus of
secondary instruction
condemned us to
it.
The
paper
which
I
wrote for my diploma,
"Bar-le-Duc during the
First Three Years of the French Revolution,"
is a
conscientious
work. (As was true of all leftist students at that time, the Revolution
of 1789 attracted
and held
me.)
In
short,
my
watch kept the same
time as
everyone else's,
which
was only right and proper
in the view
of
my
most
traditionally
minded
teachers.
I
strove
to be as
erudite
and
honest as
they
were and to stick as
closely
as
possible
to the
facts.
My
diploma paper
demonstrated this
allegiance,
as did
my
first
article, published
in
1928,
"The
Spaniards
and North
Africa,"
and
my
paper
delivered at the Congress of Historical Sciences
at Algiers in
1930. 1 was the assistant secretary at that Congress, and it was a
good opportunity
to
see
my professors again
and to
meet
Henri
Berr,
the
most
sympathetic
and
generous
of those who had
"arrived," being
anxious
to convince and even more to charm
the
others.
My stay
in
Algiers
lasted until
1932, interrupted only
by military
service which,
in
1925
and
1926, gave
me occasion
to travel
through-
out
the
Rhinelands
and
learn to
know
and then to
love
Germany.
I
thus had
the
opportunity
to
give myself
over
to the
pleasures
of
living in a magnificent city with great joie de vivre, and to visit
intensively
all
the
countries
of
North Africa,
into the
Sahara,
which
fascinated
me.
I
believe that this spectacle,
the Mediterranean
as
seen from
the
opposite
shore, upside
down,
had considerable
impact
on
my
vision of
history.
But the change in my viewpoint
was slow.
At
any
rate,
at
that
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Personal
Testimony 451
point in my life
I did not understand the social, political, and colonial
drama which
was, nevertheless, right before my eyes.
It is true that it
was not until after 1929 that the
North African countryside
grew
darker, and then, suddenly, the night had fallen. I have my excuses.
First
of all, the
need to live when
one is twenty, paying attention to
oneself alone -a good and
a
bad counsellor;
the difficulty of learning
Arabic (I tried
seriously and did not succeed); my
particular anxiety
about Germany which
I
had just
seen at close hand,
a country which
I
loved but which, as a man of
eastern France,
I
distrusted.
And
above all it must be said, in 1923,
in 1926, and in
the years which
followed,
French Algeria did not appear
as
a
monster to my eyes.
Some day perhaps a pied noire settler will write a book like Gone
with the Wind about
those lost years.
At any rate, I did not personally
feel
any twinges
of conscience. The bad conscience
would be there
twenty years
later. About 1930, when Benjamin Cremieux
arrived in
Algiers
to
give
a lecture, he telegraphed
to Rudyard Kipling: "Having
arrived
in
Algeria,
I
begin
to understand
France."
Kipling
and
Eng-
land had
India-and a
clear conscience.
And
India
was the ex-
planation
for
England.
I
therefore
set
out
belatedly
on the way
to
that which became
my
passion-a
new
history, breaking
with traditional
teachings.
In
choos-
ing
a
topic
for
my
thesis
(the
thesis
was in ihose
days
an
obligatory
step on the way to advanced
teaching status),
I
had naturally thought
at first of turning
to
German
history,
as
I
knew the
language tolerably
well. But that
history seemed
to me
poisoned
in
advance by my
overly French
sentiments. That
is
why
I
allowed
myself
to be
tempt-
ed
by
the history
of
Spain,
encountered
by
chance
in the
course
of
my
studies in connection
with
a
work
on the Peace
of
Vervins
(1598)
under the direction of the sympathetic and prestigious Emile
Bourgeois.
I had learned
Spanish
for
fun,
and
then
consulted
the
very
rich source "K"
in the National
Archives, the result of the pillage
of
Simancas
by
Napoleon
I.
Being
in
Algiers,
I
thought
that a
work
devoted
to
Philip 11, Spain, and the
Mediterranean
would make
an
acceptable thesis subject.
And in fact it
was
accepted
at
the
Sorbonne
without difficulty.
There were
no
research fellowships
or
sabbatical
leaves
in France
then. I had to wait for the summer vacation of 1927 to undertake my'
lengthy labors
in the archives of Simancas.
But
I
had
an unusual
piece
of luck:
when
I
tried to buy
an
ordinary
camera
(microfilm
is a
postwar
invention),
an American cameraman
offered
me an -ancient
apparatus
intended
for
making
movies,
and
proved
to me that
it
could
perform
marvels in
photographing
documents.
I
aroused
envy
and
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452
Fernand Braudel
admiration among
the archivists and buscadores of Simancas by tak-
ing 2,000- 3,000 photos a day
and rolling
some
thirty
meters of
film.
I
used it and abused it, in Spain and
in
Italy.
Thanks to this
ingenious
cameraman, I was no doubt the first user of true microfilms, which I
developed myself
and later
read, through long days
and
nights,
with a
simple magic lantern.
Little
by little,
I
grew
more doubtful about
the
subject
of my
labors. Philip II the Prudent, the
Sad, attracted
me
less and less,
and
the Mediterranean more and
more. In 1927
Lucien
Febvre
had writ-
ten
to me
(I quote
from
memory):
"Even more than Philip 1I,
it would
be exciting to know about the
Mediterranean of the Barbary states."
In 1931, Henri Pirenne spoke at Algiers about his ideas on the
closure
of the Mediterranean
after
the
Moslem invasions.
His lectures
seemed prodigious to me;
his hand opened and shut, and the entire
Mediterranean
was
by
turns
free and locked in
It
was
during
these
years, between 1927
and
1933,
when
I lived in the archives without
hurrying
-
not even hurrying to choose my subject
-
that my decision
ripened of its own accord. And so I chose the Mediterranean.
But one still had to
be
able
to write
such a book. Among my
friends
and
colleagues
it
was
reputed
that I
would never finish
this
overly
ambitious work. I had taken it into my head to rediscover the past of
this
sea,
which
I
saw
every day,
and of which the low-flying hydro-
planes of those days gave me
unforgettable glimpses. But the files
of
ordinary archives
talked
mainly
of
princes, finances, armies,
of
the
land, and of peasants. In one archive after another,
I
tunneled through
fragmentary materials, poorly
explored and often poorly classified, if
classified at all.
I
remember
my
delight
in
discovering
the
marvelous
registers of Ragusa
at
Dubrovnik
in
1934: at
last,
here were
ships,
bills of lading, trade goods, insurance rates, business deals. For the
first time,
I
saw the Mediterranean
of the sixteenth century.
But all historical
subjects
call
for,
indeed
demand, their
own
organ-
ization around problems.
I
had another bit of luck. By chance in 1935
I
was offered a position on the faculty at Sao Paulo in Brazil. I found
it a
paradise
for work and reflection. Charged with conducting
a
general course on the history
of civilization, I had attractive stu-
dents-combative about some things, living close to you, obliging you
to take a position on everything. I spent three marvelous years in this
fashion: in
winter, during the period
of
my
southern
vacations,
I was
in
the
Mediterranean; the rest of
the year, in Brazil, with leisure and
fantastic
possibilities
for
reading.
And
so
I
read kilometers
of
mi-
crofilm.
I
also made direct contact with Lucien Febvre in 1932 and
1933,
once
at the home of Henri Berr (with whom
I
had been in touch
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453
since 1930),
once at the Encyclopedie
francaise, rue du Four,
and
once at his house,
in his amazing
office in the rue
Val de
Grace.
And
then,
when
I
was
finally leaving Brazil,
at
Santos
in
October 1937,
as
I was boarding the ship (there were no transoceanic airplanes in those
days), I
encountered Lucien
Febvre,
who was returning from
a series
of lectures
in Buenos Aires.
Those
twenty
days of the ocean
crossing
were, for Lucien
Febvre,
my wife and
me, twenty days of
happy
conversation and
laughter. It
was then that I became
more
than a
companion to Lucien
Febvre-a
little like a son;
his house
in the
Juras at
Souget became my
house, his children
my children.
By
this time
all
my
hesitations
had
evaporated.
I had reached
port;
I had been appointed the year before to the Ecole des hautes etudes.
In the summer of
1939 at Souget,
in Lucien Febvre's
house,
I
pre-
pared
to
begin
writing my
book.
And then the
war I served on
the
Rhine
frontier.
From
1940
to 1945 1
was a
prisoner
in
Germany,
first
in
Mainz,
then from
1942 to 1945 in
the special
camp at Lilbeck,
where
my Lorrainer's
rebelliousness sent
me. As I returned
safe and
sound from this long time
of testing,
complaining
would be futile
and
even
unjust; only
good
memories
come back to
me now. For
prison
can be
a good
school. It teaches patience,
tolerance.
To
see
arriving
in Lubeck
all the
French
officers of
Jewish
origin-what
a
sociologi-
cal study
And
later, sixty-seven
clergymen
of
every hue,
who had
been
judged
dangerous
in their
various former
camps
-what a
strange
experience
that
was The French
church
appeared
before
me in all its
variety,
from the country
cure
to the Lazarist,
from the
Jesuit
to the
Dominican. Other
experiences:
living
with
Poles,
brave to
excess;
and
receiving
the defenders of
Warsaw,
among
them
Alexander
Gieysztor
and Witold
Kula. Or
to be
submerged
one
fine
day by
the
massive arrival of Royal Air Force pilots; and living with all the
French
escape
artists,
who were sent to
us
as a
punishment;
these
are-and
I
omit
much-among
the
picturesque
memories.
But what
really
kept
me
company
during
those
long years
-that
which distracted
me
in the true etymological
meaning
of
the
word
-
was the Mediterranean.
It
was in
captivity
that
I
wrote that
enormous
work, sending
school
copy
book after
school
copy
book
to
Lucien Febvre. Only
my
memory permitted
this tour
de force.
Had it
not been for my imprisonment, I would surely have written quite a
different
book.
I
am
not quite
sure whether it
was one or two
years ago
when a
young Italian philosopher
in Florence
remarked: "You
wrote that
book
in
prison? Oh, that
is
why
it always
struck me as a book
of
contemplation."
Yes,
I
contemplated
the Mediterranean,
tete-a-tete,
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454 Fernand Braudel
for years on end, far though
it was from me in
space
and time. And
my
vision of
history
took
on its definitive form without
my being
entirely
aware of
it, partly
as a direct intellectual response
to a
spectacle-the Mediterranean-which no traditional historical ac-
count seemed
to
me capable
of encompassing,
and
partly
as a
direct
existential response
to the tragic times
I
was passing through. All
those
occurrences which
poured
in
upon
us from the radio and the
newspapers
of
our enemies,
or
even
the news from
London which
our
clandestine receivers gave
us
-
I
had
to outdistance, reject, deny
them. Down
with
occurrences, especially vexing
ones I
had to be-
lieve
that history,
destiny,
was written
at a
much
more
profound
level.
Choosing a long-time scale to observe from was choosing the position
of God the Father himself as a refuge.
Far removed from
our
persons
and our
daily misery,
history was being made, shifting slowly,
as
slowly as the ancient life
of the Mediterranean,
whose perdurability
and
majestic immobility
had so often
moved me. So it was that I
consciously set forth in
search of a historical language-the
most
profound I could grasp or invent-in order to present
unchanging (or
at least very slowly
changing) conditions which stubbornly assert
themselves over and over
again.
And
my
book
is
organized
on
several
different temporal scales,
moving from the unchanging to the fleeting
occurrence.
For
me, even today, these
are
the
lines that delimit and
give form to every historical
landscape.
11
The
testimony
asked of me about the Annales
school,
its
origin
and
program, involves three
men: Henri Berr, Lucien
Febvre, and Marc
Bloch,
all
three of whom
I
knew,
as will be
seen,
in
quite
different
ways.
The
first,
Henri
Berr
(1862- 1955),
is
the one
who presents me with
the most difficult
problems.
I
am sure this
will
surprise
those
who
knew this
man as a
person
who was
transparent
in an old-fashioned
way, committed to a grandiose task, disproportionate
to tell the truth,
before which, however, he never hesitated for an
instant, having
remained faithful
always
and throughout his life to what he was in his
earliest
writings.
I
refer
to
the article "Essay on
the Science of
History: The Statistical Method and the Question of Great Men,"
which
appeared
in the Nouvelle
revue
(May I
and
15, 1890);
and
even
more
to his
principal
thesis, presented
in
1898, Synthesis of
Historical
Knowledge: Essay
on the Future
of
Philosophy;
and
I
am
thinking, too,
of his
secondary
thesis
(written
according
to
custom
in
Latin,
but
translated and
published
in French
thirty years later,
in
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Personal Testimony 455
1928,
with
the title
Of
the
Scepticism of Gassendi),
which
was
prob-
ably
the finest
and most successful of his
works,
and
for
which
he
himself had a certain
preference.
In re-reading today these very old writings, I hear very clearly the
voice of Henri
Berr
just
as it struck
my ear, even though
I
met him
very late-in .1930, when he
was sixty-eight years old. Strange and
appropriate
coincidence:
his
open manner,
warm
and
unassuming,
of
which I was so much
aware,
had affected
in
the same
way another
young man
whom he must have
encountered for the
first time
twenty
or
twenty-one years before.
".. .
such
a small young man, no matter
how slender his
accomplishments, still had access to you," Febvre
wrote to him in 1942. "A
perfect graciousness, to be sure, a perfect
cordiality; more than that, an
elan."
Thus
we see
a
man who seems
to have changed little in the course
of his
very long life,
which
he
enjoyed throughout, as a man of spirit
and of industriousness.
Yet
this man was a bit
of
the Annales before the journal was
created, from 1900 or even from 1890. It is to him one must turn
if
one wishes
to
know
"How did
it
start?" But I must admit that nothing
in
the education
or
recorded
biography of Henri Berr seems, at first
glance, to have marked him out for the exceptional role which was
well and truly his.
He was what one may call a
very brilliant pupil, and no doubt he
was attracted from very
early years by multiple interests, until in
1880-81 he attained
many
honors in
national competition, notably
the
Prize of
Honor in
Rhetoric
(Latin composition),
first
prize
in
French composition, and first
prize
in
philosophy. Readers of the
Journal of
Modern
History
may
not
be familiar with these national
competitions which in France mark the end of secondary instruction
and
distinguish exceptional
pupils. So they
can
scarcely imagine
the
aureole of
glory
these three
prizes projected upon
the head of
this
child.
Moreover,
he
had to
get
a
special dispensation
to enter the
Ecole
normale
in
1881
because of his
youth.
Three
years
later
he
graduated
in
letters.
Accordingly,
it
was
the
humanities-literature,
Latin,
and Greek-that he chose for his
university
studies.
Therefore,
is
it not
altogether astonishing, or at least aberrant, to see this brilliant
graduate in letters, teacher of rhetoric (which he continued to be until
1925), fleeing,
indeed
betraying himself,
at the
beginning
of
his
career,
by leaving
the
subjects
which
he
taught
with
undeniable
talent in
order to throw himself
heart
and soul into
the
philosophy
of
history?
Yet,
inasmuch
as the French and
Latin
prize compositions by
the
end
of the
nineteenth
century
were no more than futile
school
ex-
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456 Fernand
Braudel
ercises,
was
it not
logical that,
under
the
impetus
of his
very great
initial adolescent successes
(first prize in
philosophy ), Henri Berr
remained a
philosopher by
temperament
and
vocation?
And
what
philosophy, between 1884
and 1890, was
not
interested in
history? At
least since
Hegel,
philosophy had
been obliged
to nourish
itself on the
historical
experience
so
profusely
encountered
by human
beings. His-
tory was thus a kind of raw
material,
and
had
begun (as an
additional
merit) to transform
itself, to
organize
itself even
before
1870. Henri
Berr
noticed this: "The
establishment
[in
1868]
of the
Ecole des
hautes
etudes,"
he
wrote,
"by Victor Drury
and the
creation of the
Revue
critique
in
1866 showed
that the need for
transforming our
advanced instruction, of reviving our science, had been felt before our
disaster."
The
history that was
coming
into focus
aspired
to
analysis,
alert
erudition, and,
in a
word,
science;
it was
the sort of
history that
would
conquer the new
Sorbonne in 1908,
though in a
way that did
not
please
everyone and, in a
later
time,
did
not please
Henri Berr
himself,
naturally indulgent
though he
was.
As a
philosopher, then, Henri
Berr
followed the
great intellectual
debates of
his
time, seeking to master them and discover
their
sense.
The title of his thesis speaks for itself, and-a detail that may be
significant -when he
later had
occasion
to mention
it,
he
designated it
in
brief,
not
by
its
main
title,
Synthesis of Knowledge and
of
History,
but
by its
subtitle, Essay
on the
Future of
Philosophy. The
word
"philosophy" took
precedence over
the
others. So
he
was a
philoso-
pher. But
perhaps
it was exactly a
philosopher who was
needed for
the
first and
necessary exploration
of the
horizon
at a time
when, long
after the
ancient
thrust
of
August Comte (1798-
1857),
a
militant and
almost
completely
new
sociology
rose like
a
sun in France
with
Emile
Durkheim
(1858-
1917),
and
the review he
founded
in
1897-the
quickly
famous
Annee sociologique,
which
became a favorite
reading
matter
for an entire
generation
of young
historians, from
Lucien
Febvre to
Marc
Bloch,
Andre
Piganiol,
and Louis
Garnet.
Nevertheless,
Henri Berr's
viewpoint, at
least in
1898,
was neither
for
nor
against
Durkheim,
neither for nor
against sociology.
Good,
very good,
relations were
established and
maintained
with the Anne'e
sociologique.
But
the
"synthesis,"
Henri Berr's
essential
pre-
occupation, was,
at least
for
him,
brought
back to earth
by
being
a
philosophy of
history -history
of
the
kind
practiced
and still
practiced
in
Germany-on condition,
as he
insisted,
that one
does
not sacrifice
minute
analysis,
intellectual
prudence,
and
eliminates
grand
systems
and
gratuitous
ideas
that cannot be
and are not
demonstrable.
Such
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Personal
Testimony
457
was, if
I
perceive matters
aright, the thought of the founder of the
Revue
de
synthese
historique
in
1900,
in
that first year of the review
of the
century.
Were
the
Annales already in potentia
in that enterprise? Yes and
no. Lucien Febvre and
Marc Bloch were not philosophers, either by
taste or by temperament. What
the
Annales proclaimed,
much later,
was a history whose scope
would extend to embrace
all the sciences
of man-to the
"globality"
of all the human sciences, and which
would seize upon them
all in some fashion or other to construct its
own proper methods and true domain. Henri Berr
was too courteous
to
proclaim any
such
imperialism,
or
even to conceive of it. What he
set out to reunite were the diverse branches into which history obsti-
nately subdivided itself: political history, social
history, economic
history, history of science, of art, etc. Could he,
in drawing such
fragile intellectual threads together, hope to take
over economics,
sociology, aesthetics,
all at once? Certainly not. He was concerned at
most
to pay polite
visits among these neighbors. The Revue de syn-
these
historique
was not born and did
not live under a polemical star.
At
most, it allowed only
courteous controversy. Abroad, for example
in Germany, Spain, and Italy, the new review was seen as an ex-
pression of a need of the hour. "Something," said
Benedetto Croce
(Critica,
vol. 1
[January 20, 1903]), "which had
been awaited for
some time, and which was destined to appear at one
time or another."
Yet
in
France
this review aroused
disquiet
and raised the hackles
of
traditionalists
and orthodox-minded men
whose touch
was
general-
ly
surest when it was a question
of
finding
and
denouncing impious
novelties.
This comes out
clearly
in
four
unedited
letters which
I
recently discovered by chance
in the archives of
the
College
de
France.
Since
1898,
Henri Berr
had been a teacher
at the
Lycee
Henri
IV,
where
Bergson
was
teaching
at the same
time.
Twice,
in
1903
and 19
10,
he
dreamed
of
becoming
a candidate for
appointment
to the
College
de
France,
located close
by.
This aroused
curious
reactions,
which
for once
led Henri Berr to
defend
himself,
and
thus
to
express
his
opinions
precisely
and
even to enter into
a bit of
polemic.
On October 30, 1903
he wrote to the administrator
of
the
College:
".
. .
I
am sure that
I
can
do
a
good job, partly
new,
in
your
free, scientific College. M. Monod [then editor of the Revue histo-
rique,
and himself a candidate for the
College
de
France]
is mistaken
in
writing
to me that
there
are
already enough
chairs of
pure history
as there are of
philosophy
in
the strict
sense of
the term.
What
is
generally
conceded about
me,
and whence
arises the
particular
char-
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458 Fernand
Braudel
acter of the
review
I
founded,
is
that I combine
philosophical
pre-
occupations with a taste for and the
methods
of learned
research. For
me,
there
is
no
worthwhile
synthesis except
through patient
analysis."
The matter became even clearer when, for a second time in 19 10,
he
again
tried, and
in
a more
serious
way, to make a move to
enter the
College. Since
1892,
he
declared,
"The
College
de
France has
offered
no instruction at all in
philosophical
history and not even
in general
history. Literary history,
history of
art, of philosophy, of
laws, eco-
nomic
history-all are
taught there;
many histories are
taught there,
but no one
teaches history."
I fear that these
direct,
clear-sounding
words did little to
help the
candidate. I read in
the College
records of
the deliberation of January 1910: "M. Bedier [the administrator of the
College]
informs his
colleagues that M. Berr
has
changed the title of
the
course he
wishes to
offer,
and that
he henceforth
proposes this
name,
'Theory and
history of history.'
M.
Bedier says, in this con-
nection,
how
well
he thinks
of the works of M.
Berr and of
his useful
Revue
de
synthese
historique.
M.
Bergson
associated
himself with M.
Bedier's
remarks." A
little
later,
Henri
Bergson
presents
the
pro-
posal of which
he was
the main
supporter. "He
analyzes," says
the
record of the
meeting
"and
explains
the
proposal,
indicates
that it
arises from a
just
appreciation
of
the
actual condition of
historical
studies,
but
he leaves to
the historians
[of
the
College]
the
task of
deciding
as
to the
possibility
and
desirability
of
creating
a course
in
historical
synthesis."
That is to
say,
Henri Berr was
abandoned
by
his
supporter to the
enmity
of the historians on
the
spot.
The vote
came,
Berr
received not a
single aye.
Miraculous
In 19
10,
therefore,
Henri
Berr was
already,
to
his
own
surprise and
no
doubt
in
spite
of
himself,
the black
sheep
of
the
university
estab-
lishment, a position which Lucien Febvre later occupied with even
more
eclat,
as also did Marc
Bloch, though
in
lesser
degree.
No
doubt
the reason
was,
as
much
as
the
ideas discussed in
the Revue which
disturbed the
quiet
of the
establishment,
the fact
that Henri Berr
had
begun to assemble
around
himself
a
group of
lively,
active,
enthu-
siastic, and
assertive
intellectuals who came from all the
fringes-historians, geographers,
economists,
sociologists, biologists,
anthropologists,
and,
of
course,
philosophers.
If I
am
not
mistaken-
but can one err in view of all the evidence?
-
French intellectual
life,
as
no doubt
elsewhere,
depends on
small
groups,
active
minor-
ities,
salons
of
today
and
of times
past,
circles, coteries,
editorial
offices, minority
political
parties. Consider the role
in
the
astounding
contemporary
American
literature of the house
opened
in Paris to
friends
and
passing acquaintances by
the
intelligent
and
passionate
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Personal Testimony 459
Gertrude Stein.
The
Revue de
synthese historique
was
more than
the
articles,
fine
though they were and which
one has pleasure in
re-reading even today; it was
also meetings, conversations, exchanges
of information and ideas. At 14 rue de St. Anne, "one entered," as
Lucien Febvre,
who was
among
the
first visitors, reminisced, "and in
a small
study,
rather
narrow, depressing and dark, one found behind a
desk a young man, svelte, sober
but elegant in manner.... Many
visits, always in the small study. Young and old. On the left,
I
still
can see Paul Lacombe, sometimes
sleepy and silent, then suddenly
awake, alert, petulant, the habitue of
habitues,
an
original mind that
played its part with authority in
the first contacts of the
Synthese."
Other names should obviously be mentioned: Henri Hauser, Frangois
Simiand,
Abel
Rey,
Lucien
Febvre,
Paul
Mantoux,
and
later Marc
Bloch. If
Henri Berr wrote little,
and when he
did write perhaps let
his pen move too facilely, the fact is that his main
contribution was to
summon, speak, instruct,
discuss, listen, bring together, and lose
himself in dialogues and innumerable
small councils. After 5
P.M.
every day, or nearly, he opened
his
doors
to visitors, preferably at his
office
at 2
rue
Villebois-Mareuil.
He
was above all
good company, a
man of
intelligence, prepared and
skillful
in
talk.
No doubt this slow, patient,
multiple
work
would have borne
fruit
sooner
if
the war had not come
in
1914. It
was
only
after
1920 that
Henri Berr carried through the
task
so much talked
of, planned for,
projected,
and in
the
end
only
partially completed.
In that
year
he
started his
monumental
collection,
Evolution
of Humanity (Albion
Michel);
he founded in
1925
the
Centre
de
synthese,
and a
little
afterwards,
his
very
famous
Semaines
de
synth0se.
The review con-
tinued,
but
changed its title
in
1931
to become
Revue
de
synth?se.
The
disappearance
of the
adjective
"historical" was
symptomatic:
philosophy-universality-came
to
reign supreme.
I
do
not
wish and indeed
cannot
assess the
multiple prefaces
Henri
Berr
wrote
for the
fine
books
of
his
Collection,
about
which the
university
establishment
liked
to
jest.
From
my point
of
view,
the
essential
thing was,
in Lucien
Febvre's
words,
the
"group
of
active,
lively, combative, conquering
men" around
him,
and thanks
to him. A
group
of
heretics, according to the
wise;
but
were
they
not needed?
Henri Berr, administrator of heresy: this fine title would have sur-
prised, but
would
not have
entirely displeased,
him.
The
Semaines were the
medium for his marvelous
activity.
In
1933,
for
instance,
the
Semaine
was dedicated to the notions
of
science and laws of science.
Mathematicians, physicists,
a
biologist,
psychologists,
a
sociologist (Maurice
Halbwachs),
a historian
of sci-
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460
Fernand Braudel
ence, an economist,
and Paul
Langevin,
"the
greatest
of our
philoso-
phers of science,"
came
together.
Lucien
Febvre
also.
"I
was there,"
he wrote,
"and
I
listened to
these men who
sought, with burning good
faith, to delimit, settle, and measure precisely the ravages made in our
theories by the great advances of modern physics. And behold, from
this concert of
voices, normally separated
and who
scarcely
listened
to
one
another,
there
emerged
a
harmony: they
said the
same
things
with
different
accents; they
made
everyone conscious, humanly con-
scious,
of
the
fundamental
unity
of
the human
spirit.
A
great les-
son ...
.which
... has ended for
us;
a lesson which ceased
to be ab-
stract.
It
had,
if I
may say so,
taken on a human form."
These words indicate the sort of activities that went on in the circle
set up around Henri Berr between 1900 and 1910,
and
constantly
renewed thereafter. And it was in this circle that the desire was born,
belatedly, to make
a more
combative journal
than the Revue de
synthese, one that
would be
less
philosophical,
based
on
concrete new
researches. And it
was this
desire
-
I
would gladly say
this necessi-
ty-that finally gave
birth to the
Annales.
But the birth was slow.
Marc
Bloch
and
Lucien Febvre
met one
another
at the
University
of
Strasbourg,
where
they
were
both
appointed
in 1919.
They
waited ten
years to launch
their
review,
in
1929. During that long interval, they
collaborated regularly
with Henri
Berr.
Lucien Febvre traveled ten
times from
Strasbourg
to Paris
for
one such
joint enterprise.
And it
was at the Centre de synthese that
I
met him for the first time in
October
1934
in connection with a
marvelous discussion
of human-
ism.
Moreover,
Lucien Febvre was
the inspirer, the man centrally
responsible, for the Semaines which, in my opinion, were by far the
most
successful of all the
activities
of the
Centre
on the
rue
Colbert.
In 1938, the Semaine on sensibility in history was in essence the
work of Lucien Febvre. He even dreamed at that time of taking over
the Revue de
synth0se. Perhaps
he would
have done
so,
save
for the
Second World War.
All the
same,
the creation
of
the Annales in 1929 involved a
break.
At least it assumed
that significance
in
time, especially
after the
war,
during
the
years
of
increasing
solitude
through
which Henri Berr
passed
from
1945 to 1955. The break between father and son, one
might think, and I have thought so. The father scarcely complained.
Everything happened silently. The announcement of the new
review
in
1929 made no allusion to the Revue de synthese. But was that not
in
itself significant? The destruction by Henri Berr's
heir of
the
abundant
correspondence
he
had with
Lucien
Febvre, especially
dur-
ing
the interminable
years of the war of 1914- 18, deprives
us of the
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decisive documents. But the matter is settled; assuredly, the thought
of Lucien Febvre
was
formed and nourished, as he himself has said,
in the Synthese.
111
The justification
-
but is
justification
needed for
any project?
- of the
founders of the
Annales
was the
immense intellectual success
of
their
joint labors between 1929 and 1939.
There
was
no common
ground
between the Revue de synthese historique, the
Revue de
synthese,
and the Annales.
The
Synthe'se opened itself
too much to
theoretical
discussion,
had
too
many
ideas
that
passed
from the scene like
phan-
toms or clouds. With the Annales we are firmly on the ground. In its
pages,
men of times
present
and
past appear
with their
concrete
problems, "alive," as Gaston Roupnel has said. Certainly, collabora-
tors
of the
Revue
de
synthese
took
part
in
creating
the
Annales;
but
in
changing
abodes
they changed
demeanor and tone.
The
house of the
son
-
it
was
the
joy
of
life,
of
understanding,
and also of
attacking,
arguing;
it was
the
house of
youth.
Add the
exceptional
talent
of
the
two
editors,
far and above most of
us,
and who can be
compared only
with the greatest historians writing in French
-
with Henri Pirenne,
Fustel
de
Coulanges, Michelet. Add, finally, that at Strasbourg,
France
set
up
in
1919
the
most
brilliant
university
our
history has
known. The Annales had no trouble in finding there the best colla-
borators
-
Andre
Piganiol,
Henri
Baulig, Charles Edmond Perrin,
Georges Lefebvre,
Paul
Leuilliot,
Gabriel Le Bras.
But their
success,
at
the most fundamental
level,
was the success of
an editorial
collaboration, marvelously managed
and
unique
in
the
history of French historiography.
Years
passed.
From
1946
to
1956
Lucien Febvre
was in fact the
sole
editor of the Annales;
from
1956 to 1968 1 was,
in
fact,
sole
editor in my turn. But it
is
undeniable that the great,
the
very great,
Annales are
the
volumes
published
from
1929
to
1939.
The
force of their impact was enhanced by the fact that they came
at a time
of satisfied
and
widespread mediocrity
in French historio-
graphy. Almost all of the university, insofar as it entered into the
matter at
all,
was
hostile. Marc
Bloch could not
get
into the
lVe
section of the Ecole des hautes etudes. Twice he tried in vain to enter
the
College,
and it was
only
in
1936
that
he was able to enter
the
Sorbonne
in succession to Henri Hauser.
Lucien Febvre entered the
College,
of
which he became one of its
glories, only
on his second
attempt.
Henri
Hauser,
their
friend
and fellow
combatant,
was
not
admitted to the Institute. At the Revue historique,
where
I
often
met
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462 Fernand
Braudel
people between 1933 and 1935,
what established
figure did not criti-
cize the Annales?
I
disputed
regularly with Charles
Seignobos, who,
despite
his
age,
was an adversary who, eyeglasses
on the alert, took
great pleasure in provoking others. (But it was thus that I learned to
like him.)
In
short,
the
hostility
was perfectly obvious. That
is
why the
Annales
were so
lively,
condemned to
be so:
the journal
defended
itself and
struck out eagerly,
not for personal reasons, but against
pretentious and
puerile obstinacy. The list of
the Annales' enemies
was impressive. Marc Bloch,
the more moderate
in his critique, was
often
pitiless.
Lucien Febvre amused and was amused; he brought
to
his articles a Rabelaisian joyousness.
Reflecting
upon
the
matter,
I
think that this combative atmosphere
contributed to
the exceptional quality of the first
Annales. In
1945,
in
effect,
no
more
hostility;
all the
youth
of the
university
turned
toward
the
Annales
kind of
history, following
Lucien
Febvre,
Ernest
Labrousse,
and
myself.
The
Sorbonne
had lost its aggressiveness,
even while
refusing
to
change
its
style. "We simply
cannot
remake
our
courses,"
said Charles Moraze (about 1945),
one
of
the
masters
of the Sorbonne who became famous later.
In
1929,
by unprecedented good luck, the
hostility
stood firm.
Everything
in history was to be done
or redone or
rethought
con-
ceptually
and practically. History could not transform
itself except by
incorporating all the sciences
of man as auxiliaries
to our profession,
and
by mastering
their
methods,
results, and
even points of view.
Lucien
Febvre,
who
wrote the advertisement
that
opened
the
first
issue of
the
Annales, said so
without mincing words, with a
forceful-
ness which
has to be imagined
today because, with the passage
of
time,
his views now seem
altogether expected.
He denounced isolated
research, either by historians
on the one hand
or by specialists
in
social studies who
concerned
themselves solely
with the
present
on
the other.
He
denounced specialized history
in which
everyone
viewed his field as though it
were enclosed by high walls; also
sociol-
ogists interested
only in
"civilized" peoples or in "primitives"
and
who paid no attention to one
another. "It is
against these serious
schisms,"
said Lucien
Febvre,
"that
we
intend
to rise. Not by
means
of articles about method, not by means of theoretical disquisitions,
but
by
means
of
examples,
by
means
of
achieved results
The
ex-
ample
of
workers of different
backgrounds
and special-
izations . . .
who will
show the results of their
research
on
subjects
within their
competence
and of their choice."
In this phrasing, if
one
notices
especially
the words I have
italicized,
there
is an allusion
to
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Personal Testimony 463
the manner of the Revue de
synthe'se,
but also a
reassertion of
the
leitmotiv
of that Revue. The real
novelty
was
that debate centered
on
a single focus
of research:
a
single science,
history,
confronted all the
rest. More than this, as far as the privileged science of history was
concerned,
even
though
it
kept
the
entire social
spectrum
and
all
levels of consciousness within
its
domain, nonetheless it
was
econom-
ics above
all that was attended to. The first
Annales, following the
much
admired pattern of the
Vierteljahrschrift
far Sozial- und Wirt-
schaftsgeschichte
was
entitled
Annales d'histoire
e'conomique
et so-
ciale.
Thus the opportunity arose for
Marc Bloch to establish himself,
through
this
auxiliary
activity,
as the
greatest
economic
historian of
his country.
The
gap between the
Annales and the Revue de
synthese widened.
For
Henri Berr "society
included economics," and
the Annales there-
fore only cast light upon
"an aspect of the life
of societies which has
long remained
obscure,
and
to which the Marxians drew
attention." A
pin
prick, which provoked
others. "The Annales," Lucien Febvre
wrote
later, "which Henri
Berr always followed after, far in the
rear . . ."
Thus
the
Annales, during
the
first ten
years
of
their
existence
were,
I
repeat,
the
fruit of a constant
collaboration,
of an
unparalleled
friendship between Lucien Febvre
and Marc Bloch. This friendship
with its logical polarities, its
agreements, its
exceptional
results
was at
the heart
of
the
enterprise.
From
1919,
when
they
met at
Strasbourg,
until
1944,
when Marc Bloch was shot
by
the
Germans,
this friend-
ship
of
twenty-five years
explains
their
common
achievement,
marve-
lously
in
unison.
In his
dedication
to
Lucien Febvre
(1941)
in his
Me'tier d'historien
(published only in 1949), Marc Bloch explained the relationship aptly:
"We
have
long
striven
together
for a more
comprehensive
and
more
human
history.... Among the ideas
I
intend to advocate, more than
one
assuredly
comes
directly
from
you.
As to
many others,
I
cannot
truthfully
decide
whether
they
came from
you
or from
me,
or from us
both.
I
flatter
myself
that
you
will
often
approve. You
will occasion-
ally
savor what
I
write.
And all that
will
create one more tie between
us."
"Yes," said Lucien Febvre in commenting on these words, "yes, in
all
that time
we
had
nothing
but
an
exchange
of
ideas
-seized, seized
again
and
intermingled."
Observe
on both
sides
the
trustful,
affectionate
tone,
and in the text of
Marc
Bloch,
if
I
am not
mistaken,
a
touch
of
deference.
"You
will
occasionally
savor what
I
write." Not
only
were
there
many
and
strong
differences of
character, tempera-
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464
Fernand Braudel
ment, intelligence,
and
personal
taste between
Lucien
Febvre
(1
878- 1956)
and Marc Bloch
(1
886-
1944),
there was.
also
a
difference
of age
which
should not
be
forgotten,
especially
at
the
beginning.
When
they met
for the first
time, at the
University
of
Strasbourg
in 1919, Lucien
Febvre noted:
"Marc
Bloch was
there,
who seemed
very
young to me. One
is always
very young
at 32
in the
eyes
of a man
of
40."
And
he
continued:
"Bloch was there,
ardent,
contained,
full
of an
unyielding
desire to be of
service, suddenly in
confidence questioning
me as one questions
an
older brother."
Lucien
Febvre already
had a book behind
him (his
magnificent thesis
on
Philip
11
and the Franche Comte
dated
from 191
1).
He was
the
elder,
the confessor, the initiator; in short, the master. Marc Bloch, at that
time,
was still in a certain
sense a student.
And
the
young
men
(among
them my
good
friend Henri
Brunschwig)
who
had the
good
fortune
to listen to
these
remarkable professors
at Strasbourg,
were
not
deceived.
One,
Lucien
Febvre, was a
master,
fully developed in
his
teaching
and thought;
the other,
Marc Bloch,
was
a master just
emerging
from apprenticeship.
No
doubt some
trace
of this relation-
ship always
remained,
which
explains
Marc
Bloch's tone at almost
the end of his life. But when in 1929 they undertook the enormous
task
of
the Annales
together, they
assuredly
were marching in
step.
Their concert was so perfect
that, in many
cases, if one does not
look
ahead to the
signature,
an
article by Marc
Bloch
could be
attributed
to
Lucien
Febvre.
It
is clear
that
Marc Bloch's style
was modeled on
Lucien Febvre's. But they finally
created,
the two of them,
with
their
turns
of
phrase
and
special
vocabulary,
an Annales
style,
with a
literary quality,
to
be sure, but
which irritated
their adversaries
to the
marrow. Is history, perhaps, though aspiring to be a science, a matter
of
writing,
of literary style?
These
two men,
what
were they? Unfortunately,
I
scarcely
knew
Marc
Bloch
personally,
having
seen him
only
three
times
in Paris in
1938
and 1939.
He
was
the
son of a
great
historian,
Gustave
Bloch,
specialist
in Roman history,
long
a
professor
at
the Ecole
normale
superieure;and
then at the Sorbonne.
His
son,
Marc
Bloch,
winner of
the
school
competition
while a student at the
Ecole
normale, graduate
in
history,
won a
fellowship
for
study
in
Germany
at the
universities
of Berlin and
Leipzig (1908-9),
and then
held
a
post
in
Paris in the
Thiers Foundation.
In
1920
in
Strasbourg
he
published
his
thesis,
Kings
and
Serfs:
A
Chapter
in
Capetian
History. By
1929,
when
he
took on the
editorship
of the
Annales,
he had behind
him
several
publications,
among
them
his
great
work,
Thaumaturgic
Kings
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Personal
Testimony 465
(1924),
whose
inspiration went back
to
a
suggestion from
his elder
brother,a doctor
of great distinction,who died prematurely.
Lucien
Febvre, born in 1878 at
Nancy, the capital of Lorraine,was
in fact
the son
of parents from Franche
Comte.
His father, a
gradu-
ate
of
the
Ecole
normale
and
a
teacher of grammar,
assigned by
chance
to
the
Lycee
of
Nancy, made his entire career there.
Lucien
Febvre
completed his secondary school and even began higher
stud-
ies at Nancy.
I
accused him in jest of
having kept a bit of the Lorraine
accent,
which
I
am
able to
speak
and can claim
to recognize. But
without
repudiatingLorraine, Lucien
Febvre felt and wished all his
life
to be a
man of Franche
Comte'-enthusiastically, and when the
occasion arose, with a bit of animusagainst the Duchy of Burgundy
and the
neighboringSwiss cantons.
A student at the
Lycee
Louis
le
Grand
and
at
the
Ecole normale,
he
graduated in
history
in
1902. Next he was on the staff
of the
Thiers Foundation in
Paris.
It
was
there, surely, having finished with
instruction,
hat
he
worked on his
thesis.
It was
then that he, a "small
young man," knew Henri
Berr, who liked later, not
without some
malice,
to recall
old times when Lucien
Febvre
would
come to
ask his
advice or submitarticles to him.
Unfortunately,
I
have not
been
able to
read
any
of the
youthful
letters to Lucien
Febvre, many of which have been
preserved. The
man must therefore
be understood from
the
outside. Suffice
it to
emphasize,during
these final
years of his
youthful
development,
his
very lively
taste for literature, as shown by his attraction
to the
elegant
instruction of Joseph
Bedier,
his sympathy with
Gustave
Bloch
and Gabriel
Monod,
the historian
(and
even more the man and
professor). A socialist, or socialistically inclined, he listened to the
evening
lecturer
Jean Jaures project
his dreams.
On
the other
hand,
he
was allergic to
Henri Bergson,
as much
if not more
so
than his
friend and
inseparable companion,
Henri
Wallon.
Finally,
he was
inspiredby
Lucien
Gallois (1857-194
1),
the
geographer,
disciple,
and
friend of
Vidal de la Blache
(whom
Lucien
Febvre
also
knew).
Lucien
Gallois
was an
extrordinary
eacher. And
throughout
his
life,
Lucien
Febvre remained a
professed
geographer,
a marvelous observer
of
land, plants,
men, countrysides. The Earth and Human
Evolution,
published
in
1920,
is
a fine work which has not been
superseded
or
replaced,
as
the
geographer
Pierre
Gourou,
a
good judge
of
the
subject,
said
recently.
But the most
important
observation
is
that Lucien Febvre had
matured
all at once.
His
thesis, Philip
11
and
the
Franche
Comte
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466 Fernand Braudel
(
191
1),
which
Flammarion
is
in
process
of
reissuing in a pocket
edition and which will
probably soon be translated into English, is a
masterpiece
which
realized
ahead
of
time
all
the futureprogramof the
Annales.
In
1972
this book has
not
aged,
and
still
ranks, without even
a wrinkle,
with the
best
and
most recent French
regional
stud-
ies-those
by
Emmanuel
Le
Roy Ladurie, Rene Baehrel, or Pierre
Goubert-a
most
exceptional
record
indeed.
To
have seized
upon the
entire
past
of a
province,observing
it both in its
historical reality and
in its
geographicalaspects,
is
that not, to
use
a recent expression, to
achieve
"global thought,"
the
only
form of
history capable of satis-
fying us now? Much later he
commanded a tremendous capital of
reflection and reading. He had a universal curiosity and a gift for
understanding verything,even matters he met for the first time. He
was always admirablyattentive
to what others had to say, knowing
how to listen-a rare
quality-and
how to
cut to the heart of an
argument,
no matter
how
complicated.
He
wrote with
disconcerting
ease.
And
with
all this
went
the
prodigy
of his
discoveries, of
his
ideas, expressed
in
telegraph
form,
to
be sure,
because he
was not
naturally
inclined
to
careless
speech, although
he could
tell stories
admirablywhen he felt like it. In short,a man as receptive as he was
generous,
he seemed to me a bit like
the Diderot of his
times. All by
himself
he
was
a "bank
of
ideas for
a
generation."
And
in the first
Annales,
there
was also
the
same
passion
and lust for
polemic
and
argument
as
in the
Encyclopedie
of
the
"philosophes"
of
the
eigh-
teenth
century.
Obviously, I have not saidall there is to say, nor entirely explained
the men
and works thatgave
rise
and life to the
Annales.
For
instance,
I
should have shown how
Lucien Febvre yielded
to
the
ardor of
Marc
Bloch
in
the
area
over
which he had become
master: economic and
especially
rural and
agrarian history.
Lucien
Febvre
gave way gladly.
His
drivingcuriosity
turned
more
toward the
history
of
states
of
mind,a
line of
investigation
that culminated n
his
Rabelais, though
it had
started,
to
be
sure,
as
far back
as
1924
with
his
Martin Luther.
From
that
time
onward,
the
major
focus of his
research andpreoccupationsturned in this direction.His last book, of
which I saw the finished
manuscript
before
his
death,
but
which has
mysteriously disappeared,
was entitled Honor
and
Fatherland.
It
explored
a field
where
little
has
yet
been
done,
that
of
collective
states
of
mind, being
a
study
of the transition from
fidelity
to a
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Personal Testimony 467
person-the prince (that is, honor)
to
fidelity
to. the nation
(patri-
otism).
The
history,
in
short, of the birth of the idea of fatherland.
Nor have I said that
the Annales, despite their vivacity, never
constituted a school in the
strict sense,
that is to
say,
a
pattern
of
thought
closed in
upon
itself.
On
the
contrary.
The
password
for
the
Annales was
nothing
more
than
passion
for the
past-but
that is
a
great deal. And joined with that passion there was the
search
for
all
the
new
possibilities,
a
readiness
to
accept changes
in
the
way prob-
lems
were
put, according to the requirements and logic of the
hour.
For past and present
mingle inextricably together. On
that point, all
the successive editors of
the Annales agreed.
And yet, who will not smile to see me write a history "histori-
sante," as Henri Berr would say,
or
"evenementielle,"
as
Paul La-
combe put it?
I
have spoken of men, of occurrences.
But it is very
evident that this
little stream,
narrow
and
lively,
from the
Synthese
to
the
Annales, ran through a vast countryside, during a
particular epoch
of
history-a much
disturbed one, from 1900 to 1972, as all will
admit-and
in a
particular country,
France.
And "France means
diversity," as Lucien
Febvre said. Is it by chance that
Henri Berr,
Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and myself all four came from eastern
France?
That
the
Annales began at Strasbourg, next
door
to Ger-
many
and
to German historical thought?
Finally, was
I
right to
decide more than four years ago that it was
in the tradition of the
Annales, as
I
understood it, to
hand over the
management to young
men: Jacques Le Goff, a medievalist; Emma-
nuel
Le
Roy Ladurie, a
modernist;
and Marc Ferro, a
specialist in
Russian
history?
I
have found myself directly disagreeing
with them.
But,
thanks
to them, the old dwelling has become a
house of youth
once
more.