Fernand Braudel and the "Annales" School

Abstract

L'Ecole des Annales (the Annales School) is designated as a French study group of socioeconomic history, publishing its trimester journal, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. This journal, founded in 1929 under the title of Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, by two historians with a profound knowledge of geography-Lucien Febvre (1898-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944)-often changed its name-Melanges d'histoire sociale and Annales d'histoire sociale during the World War II, and Annales d'Histoire-Economies-Societes-Civilisations in 1946, before it obtained present name in 1994.One of the two founders, Lucien Febvre, is well-known to Japanese geographers because of his fine work, La terre et l'evolution humaine: Introduction geographique a l'histoire, translated into Japanese by K. Iizuka and Y. Tanabe. That was not the case, in contrast, with Marc Bloch, whose work Caracteres originaux de l'histoire rurale francaise was also translated under the direction of K. Kawano.Fernand Braudel (Lumeville-en-Ornois, Meuse, 1902-Cluses, Haute-Savoie, 1985) was a member of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1937 (fourth section, history and philology). He succeeded Lucien Febvre in 1956 as a Professor of the College de France and then was appointed Director of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes which published the journal Annales. While Professor Braudel was a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal from 1947 to 1968, I had the honor of meeting him in the fall of 1958 through the recommendation of Professor Roger Dion, his colleague in the College de France. This gave me the opportunity to publish my monograph entitled Systemes agraires, le Jori dans le Japon ancien in the journal Annales, 14th year, No 4, in 1959.Fernand Braudel was a historian who took such a great interest in geography that, in his famous work, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l'epoque de Philippe II in 1949, he proposed to incorporate into it a historical research to found a new discipline geohistory. Unfortunately, this new discipline, which he proposed to call super social science, was neither accepted by the world of history, nor that of geography.On the contrary, applying the geographical method to his homeland in his posthumous study in three volumes L'identite de la France, he affirmed that geography was unable to rejuvenate French history.