Marc Bloch and the Annales School of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 06 July 2024 is the 138th anniversary of the birth of Marc Bloch (06 July 1886–16 June 1944), who was born on this date in Lyon in 1886. Bloch was shot by the Gestapo on 16 June 1944 because of his involvement in the French resistance.
Bloch is remembered as a medievalist and as one of the founders of the Annales school of historiography. The Annales school was so named for the journal that featured the work of Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. These historians were mostly known for their work on medieval and early modern history, but Bloch was also an historian of twentieth century that he himself witnessed. As an historian in France as France collapsed before the German invasion from 10 May to 25 June 1940, Bloch was uniquely positioned to record the events of this collapse, which he did in a manuscript that was posthumously published as Strange Defeat A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940. In this rare instance we have a first draft of history by an historian. In Strange Defeat, Bloch describes, not only from the point of view of a participant in the events, but also from the point of view of an historian, the catastrophe that France experienced:
“What drove our armies to disaster was the cumulative effect of a great number of different mistakes. One glaring characteristic is, however, common to all of them. Our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect — and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious.”
Bloch went into more detail on this, highlighting the technological and doctrinal innovations made by the German army that facilitated the German successes on the continent:
“Let me be more precise. One fact, but that one of radical importance, differentiates our contemporary civilization from any of those that preceded it. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the whole idea of distance has changed. This alteration in spatial values came about in little more than a single generation. But rapid though it was, it has become so much a part of our mental habit that we are inclined to forget how revolutionary its effects have been. What is happening to-day may serve to open our eyes. The privations resulting from war and defeat have had upon Europe the repercussions of a Time Machine in reverse. We have been plunged suddenly into a way of life which, only quite recently, we thought had disappeared for ever. I am writing these lines in my house in the country. A year ago, when I and the local tradesmen had all the petrol we needed, the county town, on which the economic life of the district centres, seemed close at hand. Now, when bicycles are the quickest means of transport available, and heavy loads have to be carried in donkey-wagons, every trip to market becomes a major expedition. We have gone back thirty or forty years! The ruling idea of the Germans in the conduct of this war was speed. We, on the other hand, did our thinking in terms of yesterday or the day before. Worse still: faced by the undisputed evidence of Germany’s new tactics, we ignored, or wholly failed to understand, the quickened rhythm of the times. So true is this, that it was as though the two opposed forces belonged, each of them, to an entirely different period of human history. We interpreted war in terms of assagai versus rifle made familiar to us by long years of colonial expansion. But this time it was we who were cast for the rôle of the savage!”
Bloch, as an historian of the Annales school, was better prepared to appreciate these forces of technology and historical pacing than a more traditional historian, but most wars are an admixture of innovation and timeless verities, and there was nothing new about the existential confrontation between Germany and France. Almost a century and a half previously, it was Germany (or, rather, the Germanophone regions of Europe not yet a German nation-state) that was trying to understand its defeat at the hands of France. Herder, Fichte, and Hegel might well have written a work on the successes of Napoleon and called it Strange Defeat.
The Annales school of historiography, of which Bloch was a founder, can help us to understand this Franco-German rivalry over more than a millennium of European history. From the Annales school we get an appreciation for the longest comprehensible periods of history, and for the mentalities of the peoples who populate these longest periods of history. Bloch’s colleague Fernand Braudel divided history into three classes of temporal duration. Shortest of all is the history of the event. Of the history of the event Braudel wrote:
“Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.”
Next is the conjuncture. The conjuncture is a trend that endures for a generation at the outside. The longest temporal duration Braudel called the longue durée, and this term has stuck and continues to be used even after the decline of the Annales school. Of the longue durée Braudel wrote:
“…it is in relation to these expanses of slow-moving history that the whole of history is to be rethought, as if on the basis of an infrastructure. All the stages, all the thousands of stages, all the thousand explosions of historical time can be understood on the basis of these depths, this semistillness. Everything gravitates around it.”
Braudel also simply calls the longue durée “structure,” as though it were the real structure of history. Braudel wrote about the longue durée of European history in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II and in his three volume Civilization and Capitalism. Bloch does not use this terminology, but he shared Braudel’s interest in the longue durée and constructed his histories on similar principles. Bloch applied the Annales approach to historiography in his two volume Feudal Society. In one paragraph of the introduction to Feudal Society, Bloch sketches the origins of Western civilization in broad outlines:
“Hemmed in by… three blocs, Mohammedan, Byzantine, and Slav, and ceaselessly engaged in pushing forward its ever-changing frontiers, the Romano-Germanic world was itself by no means homogeneous. Differences arising from their different backgrounds had deeply marked the various societies of which it was composed, and had lasting effects. Even where the points of departure were almost identical, the lines of development might subsequently diverge. Yet, however pronounced these differences may have been, how can we fail to recognize, over and above them, the predominant quality of a common civilization — that of the West? …European civilization arose and flowered, until in the end it covered the face of the earth, among those who dwelt between the Tyrrhenian, the Adriatic, the Elbe, and the Atlantic Ocean. It had no other homeland. The eighth-century Spanish chronicler who, after their victory over Islam, styled ‘Europeans’ the Franks of Charles Martel, had already dimly perceived this. So, some two hundred years later, had the Saxon monk, Widukind, who, when Otto the Great had driven back the Hungarians, enthusiastically hailed him as the liberator of ‘Europe’. In this sense of the word — and it is the richest in historical content — Europe was a creation of the early Middle Ages. It was already in being at the beginning of the feudal age proper.”
I find it interesting that Bloch in this passage uses “Romano-Germanic.” The only other instance of know of this hyphenated term is in the Russian philosopher Nikolay Danilevsky, who in his book Russia and Europe refers to Europe was the Romano-Germanic world. Arguably there is a relationship between understanding history in terms of the cultural-historical milieux that Danilevsky posits and the longue durée of history.
In any case, if Europe was the creation of the Middle Ages, then the study of feudal society, which Bloch had undertaken, was at the same time the study of the origins of Europe. Much of the history of Europe has been a rivalry between France and Germany, which came to a head in the two world wars of the twentieth century, and which ultimately led to Bloch’s execution by the Gestapo. The world wars of the twentieth century were, at their core, wars between France and Germany. The rivalry between France and Germany has been only a rivalry between nation-states for about a century before it came to a head, but we can trace this much farther back into history.
Both France and Germany can look back to Charlemagne as a founding figure. When Charlemagne’s empire fell apart after his death, repeated divisions of the empire eventually yielded a French Kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire, which was also called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Peoples. We can think of the 1200 years of continental European history from Charlemagne to the present as a longue durée period during which France and the Holy Roman Empire were differentiated, and a period throughout which that differentiation led to different social institutions in these respective cultural spheres. France was always the most centralized monarchy on the continent. The Holy Roman Empire had a very loose structure, and was at times little more than a formality. The result of the different social evolution of France and German was a rivalry that defined Europe. We do not know what the future holds for Europe, whether the EU will survive, or if the rivalry between France and Germany will come to be expressed in other forms in the future. This wasn’t Bloch’s theme in his Feudal Society, but we can use the framework of historical time developed by the Annales school to understand how the Western world came to be what it is today.
In addition to an emphasis on the longue durée as the structure of history, the other lasting outcome from the Annales school was what is called the history of mentalities. I could argue that there is a connection between the study of mentalities and the idea that history is the re-thinking of past thoughts, which is a position associated with Collingwood and others. This connection especially comes out in a quote attributed to Marc Bloch in “The Fate of the History of Mentalites in the Annales” by Andre Burguiere:
“Social realities are a whole. One could not pretend to explain an institution if one did not link it to the great intellectual, emotional, mystical currents of the contemporaneous mentality… This interpretation of the facts of social organization from the inside will be the principle of my teaching, just as it is of my own work.”
Collingwood used the spatial metaphor of “the inside of history” to express the idea of re-enacting the thoughts of the past. For Collingwood, human history has an inside, a subjective side, and natural history does not, and this is the differentia. I don’t agree with this view, but I’m not going to pursue this at the moment, I only wanted to mention this potential connection with another school of thought in philosophy of history.
The summary that I would give of mentalities is that the history of mentalities is the history of the conceptual framework that is implicit throughout all social formations, though this isn’t the language that Bloch of his colleagues employed. Given the interest of the Annales school in the longue durée, and in the slow pace of social time in contradistinction to the rapid pace of political time or personal time, the emphasis in the history of mentalities has always fallen upon collective mentalities, but a lot of the power of the idea of a history of mentalities (as I see it) can be seen in considering the interaction of the mentality of the individual and the mentality of the age. The mentality of the age is what one imbibes with one’s mother’s milk, or what Alfred North Whitehead called the “climate of opinion.” But the relationship between the creative individual and the mentality of the age is one of give-and-take.
One borrows one’s language, one’s ideas, one’s culture and so on from the historical context into which one is born, but one can also generate one’s own ideas and contribute these in turn to the historical context, and, if these ideas have any traction, they will be passed in their turn to others and become part of the climate of opinion for the next generation. Probably the majority of individuals live entirely derivative lives when it comes to their mentality: even if they are great generals, or great kings, or great entrepreneurs, they may contribute nothing whatsoever to the conceptual framework that they did not themselves get from that framework, being successful not because of their conceptual innovation, but only because they were able to optimize something already present in their environment and successfully exploit it. Also, obviously, most unsuccessful people contribute nothing whatsoever to the conceptual framework.
Prior to the advent of recording technologies, the most important and decisive of which is written language (but language itself prior to the invention of writing is also a recording technology of a kind), the collective conceptual framework was limited by the capacity of the individual human mind. Without the possibility of recording experience and knowledge, no conceptual framework could exceed the capacity of the individual mind. This framework might change over time, with new ideas being introduced, but since the human mind has limits to its ability to memorize material, once the capacity of the individual mind is reached, any new idea must mean the abandonment of an old idea.
Prior to written records collective human mentalities were not larger than the mentality of any one individual. These mentalities probably slowly evolved over time, but they could not become absolutely larger because of the limitations of the human mind. A possible exception would be the introduction of new organizing ideas that would allow for a greater number of ideas to be maintained in the mind due to better organization, but even here there is a limit that, once met, means that the mentality of the group cannot be much larger than the mentality of the individual, and the mentality cannot become absolutely larger over time.
From what we know of early human thought, and early human language, most early concepts were highly concrete; abstraction comes very late in the development of human thought, so that the possibility of abstract ideas of organization employed to increase the total content of the mentality prior to record keeping technologies is somewhat unlikely, even if not impossible. With the advent of written language (and, in a weaker sense, much earlier with the advent of spoken language), it becomes possible for individuals to record significant quantities of their experience and knowledge, and to pass this down to succeeding generations. As the written record grows, it grows beyond the capacity of any one individual to hold the entirety of the mentality of an age in their individual mind, so that the mentality on the whole is only jointly maintained through the work of an entire society seeking to preserve the experience and knowledge they have been able to record.
With the advent of written language, a gap opens up between the mentality of the individual and the mentality of the social whole, and the mentality of the social whole can become absolutely larger. The mentalities of social groups with written language grow significantly beyond the limits of mentalities of peoples who did not develop written languages, so a gap also opens up between literate peoples and non-literate peoples. In my episode on Hugh Trevor-Roper I discussed his attitude toward non-literate, and therefore ahistorical societies. Finn Fuglestad in his criticism of Trevor-Roper contrasted history as purposive development to what he called “ebb and flow” history. Presumably what Fuglestad meant by ebb-and-flow history is the history of ahistorical societies in which one tribe annihilates another, takes over their land, and then they in turn are annihilated and another tribe takes over their land. Thus there are always events occurring, but nothing that amounts to directional development. What I just called the absolute increase in size of a social mentality possible with written language is one possible form of directional development, and it is a directional development peculiar to literate societies.
Even when an absolutely larger conceptual framework develops in the wake of written language, the individual is still limited in their conceptual framework by the limits of their own mind, but because the conceptual framework is stored by recording technologies and only maintained socially, the individual can specialize in one area of experience and knowledge and push this much farther than was ever possible in a non-literate society, in which the total conceptual framework had to include fundamental knowledge about how to stay alive, like what plants are edible, how to hunt game, how to sew clothing, and so on. With the specialization possible in settled societies with written languages, the specialist doesn’t have to master any of these practical tasks, so they don’t have to take up any of their personal conceptual framework with such matters, and they therefore have greater freedom for conceptual innovation.
In circumstances such as this, more abstract concepts can be introduced and be shown to be useful in a specialized conceptual framework, and if they become sufficiently widely adopted, they pass beyond that specialized conceptual framework and can become abstract ideas employed by ordinary folks to improve their cognition. An example of this is the introduction of the concept of zero, which was once advanced mathematics, but is now taught to children in elementary school and considered to be within the grasp of any mentally competent individual.
While the Annales school and the history of mentalities was originally French, and was primarily influential among French historians, the Austrian Historian Heinrich von Fichtenau was influenced by these ideas in his Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders. Given the title of the book, we aren’t surprised to see him mentioning Marc Bloch and the Annales school:
“Sources for the tenth century are not as meager as historians used to believe before they learned to use charters, saints’ vitae, contracts, and so forth. Unfortunately, the documents of that period have uneven geographic representation and concern the upper classes more than the mass of the population. We know all too little about the lower strata, their daily life and their conceptions. This is also true, in part, for the upper levels of lay society. With meager sources, a ‘history of mentalities,’ such as is called for by our French colleagues, must be written piecemeal. It is a very important task, however, and one which has its background not only in Marc Bloch’s work. This approach to history can be found here and there in the works of Max Weber and Oswald Spengler. Unlike Bloch’s successors in the French Annales school, their suggestions found little echo among German historians.
“Ultimately, all history is a history of mentalities. The word should not be overused. It will be employed in this book as rarely as other words that cannot be defined unambiguously and are in danger of becoming catchphrases. It would also be a pity if research into mentalities should be carried on in too abstract a manner and thereby fall into the errors of what was once called intellectual history: the products of thinking and meaning cannot be separated from the existence of people in this world.”
This passage is interesting not only for its use of the idea of mentalities as a category of historical thought, but also for its suggestion that something similar is to be found in Max Weber and Spengler. We know from many previous episodes that many historians and philosophers of history engage in a ritual denunciation of Spengler much as they engage in a ritual renunciation of Hegel, but here Fichtenau has simply mentioned Marc Bloch and Spengler in the same breath, without pausing to pronounce the usual curse. It is worth noting in this context that Braudel also mentions Spengler briefly, without pausing to condemn him.
Another interesting thing here is the warning Fichtenau issues for the histories of mentalities not to be allowed to approximate intellectual history and thus to fall into the same errors. With the history of ideas and conceptual history flourishing today, after a fashion, as we have seen in discussion of Reinhart Koselleck, J. G. A. Pocock, and others, it would seem that his warning has not been heeded.
The Annales school has only begun its longue durée of development, and already it has changed significantly since Bloch contributed to its formation and founding. Whether or not we could return in five hundred years and find the longue durée of the longue durée is an interesting question to which no one alive today will ever know the answer.
