The Annales School and the Enlightenment

Abstract

The Annales School and the Enlightenment ARAM VARTANIAN Daniel Mornet, in his classic Origines intellectuelles de la Revolution frangaise, initiated a half-century ago the historiographic method which has evolved into that of the Annales School. His use of the socio-cultural survey to interpret the French Enlightenment was prompted by a spe­ cific issue: the relationship of the philosophes to the Revolution of 1789. Nineteenth-century historians had generally believed, some approvingly, some disapprovingly, that the Revolution was the outcome of the "philo­ sophic du dix-huitieme siecle." To challenge this facile assumption, Mornet reconstructed in depth the climate of opinion that was the indispensable medium through which the Enlightenment could have had any impact on the Revolution. He found several reasons for rejecting the theory of a causeand -effect connection between the two: first, the philosophes' ideas had been overwhelmingly reformist, not revolutionary; secondly, those same ideas had been parallelled by, or assimilated to, the outlook of a large sector of the public well before 1789 without any revolutionary, or other­ wise destabilizing, effects on the Ancien Regime; finally, Enlightenment thought, having met with both resistance and indifference in the years leading up to the Revolution, had failed to dominate politics at the deci­ sive moment. Because Mornet was intent above all on characterizing the movement of Lumieres as either revolutionary or non-revolutionary, he dealt only tangentially with a problem that was to become more impor­ tant to some of his successors in the Annales School, and which will be of central concern to us: namely, how can we determine, apart from the 233 234 / VARTANIAN intellectual origins of the French Revolution, the degree of kinship there was between the views of the philosophes and the various 'collective men­ talities" prevalent in eighteenth-century France? To be sure, the answer to such a question was, in 1933, beyond the scope of Mornet's inadequately quantitative method, which consisted not in a statistical analysis but in a mere compilation of relevant data, along with random use of represen­ tative instances. Attempts to interpret the Enlightenment, from the early nineteenth century until the present, have suffered for lack of the sort of information provided by the Annales historians, which now makes it possible to fit—even if still only tentatively— the canonical texts of Lu­ mieres into their proper context of a public consciousness. Without that context, the historical, and therefore also the hermeneutic, status of the texts is subject to distortion. Even Mornet's old problem, which is by no means settled today, about the linkage between the Enlightenment and the Revolution will be, as we shall see, nearer to a solution, if the "collec­ tive mentalities" in the midst and often for the sake of which the philo­ sophes composed their works are taken into consideration. In short, the purpose of this paper is to ask what bearing recent investigations in the sociology of eighteenth-century culture have on our understanding of the Enlightenment—of its sources, its nature, and its role in French history. The bibliography of the subject is already too extensive to be used here without restraint. I shall, therefore, concentrate on three major and ex­ emplary studies, each of which is preeminent in delineating a particular aspect of the eighteenth-century mind: Michel Vovelle's Piete baroque et dechristianisation (1973); Daniel Roche's Le siecle des Lumieres en prov­ ince: Academies et academiciens provinciaux (1978); and Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment (1979). Vovelle's book is a statistical measurement of the sharp decline of "ba­ roque piety," that is, of ostentatious and elaborate religiosity, in the whole of Provence during the course of the eighteenth century. This change in public attitudes and behavior is inferred from an exhaustive examination of wills. One may wonder, at first, what there is in common between the great texts of the Enlightenment and a dusty heap of testamentary documents. Let us recall, however, that the drawing up of a will, by its sober confrontation with death and therefore with the meaning of life as well, can be a moment of "philosophical truth," eliciting from the testa­ tor a statement of his deepest convictions. The filiation...