France

Abstract

Abstract The French historians who in the middle third of the twentieth century formed what has become known as the Annales school articulated the notion that time for human societies moves at different speeds. First there is the glacial slowness of the longue durée , in which human interaction with the physical landscape changes so slowly as to be almost imperceptible; then the structural time in which patterns of human organization and agency can be better perceived; and finally the time of events, or l’histoire événementielle , the latter described somewhat dismissively by historian Fernand Braudel as ‘surface disturbances’. A survey of the early years of the French twentieth century informed by a longer term perspective may thus not be quite so overwhelmed by the material and human destruction wrought by war.