The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales

Abstract

In a letter addressed to the medievalist Ferdinand Lot and dated June 1941, Charles Seignobos, hereditary enemy of the Annales, declared, “I have the impression that, for approximately the last quarter-century, the effort to think about historical method, which was vigorous in the 1880s and especially so in the 1890s, has reached a stalemate,” and noted that, as a sign of the times, “the Revue de Synthese Historique … has changed its name.” Seignobos, then only a year before his death, was writing a book on “the principles of the historical method.” His letter alluded to American and German output (“a mediocre American, Barnes, published a fat book in 1925 in which he summarized a large number of works….”), but made no mention of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, or of the Annales, then in its twelfth year. To choose to ignore the Annales while discoursing on historical method is of course unjust and absurd. But aside from this omission, Charles Seignobos's remarks are not without pertinence. It is true that France at the turn of the last century and particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century, had been the center of a passionate and fascinating debate on the nature of historical knowledge, on the legitimacy of its pretensions to be a science, and so forth, and that by the 1940s this debate had ceased.