Personal Testimony Author(s): Fernand Braudel Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 44, No.

4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 448-467 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1876804 . Accessed: 30/05/2012 17:59
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Personal Testimony
Fernand Braudel
Ecole pratique des hautes etudes

How was I shaped as a historian? And how can a historical account of the development of the Annales school be taken as an example of the particular circumstances of contemporary French historiography? Such was the double question put to me by the editor. I admit that for a long time I turned a deaf ear to this proposition which would compel me to look at myself in an unaccustomed way, to consider myself in some fashion as an object of history, and to embark upon confidences which must at first glance seem signs of self-satisfaction or even of vanity. I pondered these considerations over and over, but William McNeill was stubborn; if I would not write this particular article myself, would I be kind enough to provide someone else with the information necessary to write it? I finally gave in and will try to answer the double question with complete honesty, although I confess to having doubts as to whether this account, all too personal and of questionable interest to the reader, really gets to the heart of the matter. I Let us then begin with facts. I was born in 1902 between Champagne and Barrois in a little village which now has about a hundred inhabitants but which, during my childhood, had nearly twice that number. It is a village whose roots go back for centuries; I imagine that its central square, where three roads and an ancient track come together, may correspond to the courtyard of an old Gallo-Roman villa. Not only was I born there, to the peril of my parents' summer vacation, but I also lived there quite a long time with my paternal grandmother, who was the passion of my childhood and youth. Even today, transporting myself back into those early years, which remain so clear in my memory, always brings a warm satisfaction. The house where I lived, built in 1806, lasted almost unchanged until 1970-a pretty good record for a simple peasant house. I believe that these long and oft-repeated country visits were of no small significance for the historian I later became. Things that others had to learn from books I knew all along from first-hand experience. Like Gaston Roupnel, the historian of the Burgundian countryside, and like Lucien Febvre, above all a man of Franche Comte, I was in the beginning 448

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and I remain now a historian of peasant stock. .1 could name the plants and trees of this village of eastern France; I knew each of its inhabitants; I watched them at work: the blacksmith, the cartwright, the occasional woodcutters, the "bouquillons." I observed the yearly rotation of the crops on the village lands which today produce nothing but grass for grazing herds. I watched the turning wheel of the old mill which was, I believe, built long ago for the local lord by an ancestor of mine. And because all this countryside of eastern France is full of military recollections, I was, through my family, a child at Napoleon's side at Austerlitz, at the Berezina.... By a paradox which is not one after all, it is this same eastern France which, in the rear of the revolutionary armies of 1793 and 1794, remained loyal and saved the revolution at a time when it was not-nor would it become-revolutionary in spirit, particularly in the years that followed. My father was a teacher in Paris and ended his short life (1878- 1927) as director of an academic group. I had the advantage of living, from 1908 to 1911, in the outskirts of Paris; but at that time the suburbs were practically unspoiled countryside. Meriel is a large village of solid stone houses, with walled gardens full of gooseberry bushes and cherry trees, which disappeared each spring amidst the flowering lilacs. The river Oise, which flowed nearly though not quite next to it, brought convoys of Belgian tugboats from the north trailing their strings of barges. From time to time the Montebellos, the descendants of Marshal Lannes, would organize magnificent crosscountry hunts. At school, which I entered late, I had a superb teacher, a man who was intelligent, considerate, authoritarian, and who recited the history of France as though he were celebrating Mass. Next I studied at the Lycee Voltaire in Paris (1913-20). My father, a mathematician by nature, I may say, taught my brother and me with such ingenuity that our studies of that subject were astonishingly easy. I took a lot of Latin and a little Greek. I adored history, having a rather remarkable memory. I wrote poetry-too much poetry. In short, I got a very good education. I wanted to be a doctor, but my father opposed this insufficiently motivated career, and I found myself disoriented in that year 1920, which was, for me, a sad one. In the end, I entered the Sorbonne as a student of history. I graduated without difficulty, but also without much real enjoyment. I had the feeling I was frittering away my life, having chosen the easy way out. My yocation as a historian did not come to me until later. Of the benignant and not very crowded Sorbonne of those days I retain only one agreeable memory: the teaching of Henri Hauser. He

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spoke a different language from the rest of our professors, that of economic and social history. Marvelously intelligent, he knew everything and showed it without ostentation. A sign of the times: he lectured to a very small audience of six or seven persons. To be fair, I also enjoyed the courses of Maurice Holleaux, an extraordinary specialist in Greek history. He also spoke to only three or four listeners, including the Rumanian historian, Cantacuzene, and the future dean of the Sorbonne, Andre Aymard. My studies were over in the twinkling of an eye, and I became, at the age of twenty-one, a teacher of history in the lycee at Constantine in Algeria. I was then an apprentice historian like hundreds of others. Like thousands of others, I taught a superficial history of events, which pleased me because I was learning as I taught. I even plunged into the game of becoming what one may call a good teacher, because I liked my pupils, and they more than reciprocated the feeling, first in Constantine and then the following year in Algiers. I repeat, I was still a historian of happenings, of politics, of great men; the syllabus of secondary instruction condemned us to it. The paper which I wrote for my diploma, "Bar-le-Duc during the First Three Years of the French Revolution," is a conscientious work. (As was true of all leftist students at that time, the Revolution of 1789 attracted and held me.) In short, my watch kept the same time as everyone else's, which was only right and proper in the view of my most traditionally minded teachers. I strove to be as erudite and honest as they were and to stick as closely as possible to the facts. My diploma paper demonstrated this allegiance, as did my first article, published in 1928, "The Spaniards and North Africa," and my paper delivered at the Congress of Historical Sciences at Algiers in 1930. 1 was the assistant secretary at that Congress, and it was a good opportunity to see my professors again and to meet Henri Berr, the most sympathetic and generous of those who had "arrived," being anxious to convince and even more to charm the others. My stay in Algiers lasted until 1932, interrupted only by military service which, in 1925 and 1926, gave me occasion to travel throughout the Rhinelands and learn to know and then to love Germany. I thus had the opportunity to give myself over to the pleasures of living in a magnificent city with great joie de vivre, and to visit intensively all the countries of North Africa, into the Sahara, which fascinated me. I believe that this spectacle, the Mediterranean as seen from the opposite shore, upside down, had considerable impact on my vision of history. But the change in my viewpoint was slow. At any rate, at that

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point in my life I did not understand the social, political, and colonial drama which was, nevertheless, right before my eyes. It is true that it was not until after 1929 that the North African countryside grew darker, and then, suddenly, the night had fallen. I have my excuses. First of all, the need to live when one is twenty, paying attention to oneself alone -a good and a bad counsellor; the difficulty of learning Arabic (I tried seriously and did not succeed); my particular anxiety about Germany which I had just seen at close hand, a country which I loved but which, as a man of eastern France, I distrusted. And above all it must be said, in 1923, in 1926, and in the years which followed, French Algeria did not appear as a monster to my eyes. Some day perhaps a pied noire settler will write a book like Gone with the Wind about those lost years. At any rate, I did not personally feel any twinges of conscience. The bad conscience would be there twenty years later. About 1930, when Benjamin Cremieux arrived in Algiers to give a lecture, he telegraphed to Rudyard Kipling: "Having arrived in Algeria, I begin to understand France." Kipling and England had India-and a clear conscience. And India was the explanation for England. I therefore set out belatedly on the way to that which became my passion-a new history, breaking with traditional teachings. In choosing a topic for my thesis (the thesis was in ihose days an obligatory step on the way to advanced teaching status), I had naturally thought at first of turning to German history, as I knew the language tolerably well. But that history seemed to me poisoned in advance by my overly French sentiments. That is why I allowed myself to be tempted by the history of Spain, encountered by chance in the course of my studies in connection with a work on the Peace of Vervins (1598) under the direction of the sympathetic and prestigious Emile Bourgeois. I had learned Spanish for fun, and then consulted the very rich source "K" in the National Archives, the result of the pillage of Simancas by Napoleon I. Being in Algiers, I thought that a work devoted to Philip 11, Spain, and the Mediterranean would make an acceptable thesis subject. And in fact it was accepted at the Sorbonne without difficulty. There were no research fellowships or sabbatical leaves in France then. I had to wait for the summer vacation of 1927 to undertake my' lengthy labors in the archives of Simancas. But I had an unusual piece of luck: when I tried to buy an ordinary camera (microfilm is a postwar invention), an American cameraman offered me an -ancient apparatus intended for making movies, and proved to me that it could perform marvels in photographing documents. I aroused envy and

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admiration among the archivists and buscadores of Simancas by taking 2,000- 3,000 photos a day and rolling some thirty meters of film. I used it and abused it, in Spain and in Italy. Thanks to this ingenious cameraman, I was no doubt the first user of true microfilms, which I developed myself and later read, through long days and nights, with a simple magic lantern. Little by little, I grew more doubtful about the subject of my labors. Philip II the Prudent, the Sad, attracted me less and less, and the Mediterranean more and more. In 1927 Lucien Febvre had written to me (I quote from memory): "Even more than Philip 1I, it would be exciting to know about the Mediterranean of the Barbary states." In 1931, Henri Pirenne spoke at Algiers about his ideas on the closure of the Mediterranean after the Moslem invasions. His lectures seemed prodigious to me; his hand opened and shut, and the entire Mediterranean was by turns free and locked in! It was during these years, between 1927 and 1933, when I lived in the archives without hurrying - not even hurrying to choose my subject - that my decision ripened of its own accord. And so I chose the Mediterranean. But one still had to be able to write such a book. Among my friends and colleagues it was reputed that I would never finish this overly ambitious work. I had taken it into my head to rediscover the past of this sea, which I saw every day, and of which the low-flying hydroplanes of those days gave me unforgettable glimpses. But the files of ordinary archives talked mainly of princes, finances, armies, of the land, and of peasants. In one archive after another, I tunneled through fragmentary materials, poorly explored and often poorly classified, if classified at all. I remember my delight in discovering the marvelous registers of Ragusa at Dubrovnik in 1934: at last, here were ships, bills of lading, trade goods, insurance rates, business deals. For the first time, I saw the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century. But all historical subjects call for, indeed demand, their own organization around problems. I had another bit of luck. By chance in 1935 I was offered a position on the faculty at Sao Paulo in Brazil. I found it a paradise for work and reflection. Charged with conducting a general course on the history of civilization, I had attractive students-combative about some things, living close to you, obliging you to take a position on everything. I spent three marvelous years in this fashion: in winter, during the period of my southern vacations, I was in the Mediterranean; the rest of the year, in Brazil, with leisure and fantastic possibilities for reading. And so I read kilometers of microfilm. I also made direct contact with Lucien Febvre in 1932 and 1933, once at the home of Henri Berr (with whom I had been in touch

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since 1930), once at the Encyclopedie francaise, rue du Four, and once at his house, in his amazing office in the rue Val de Grace. And then, when I was finally leaving Brazil, at Santos in October 1937, as I was boarding the ship (there were no transoceanic airplanes in those days), I encountered Lucien Febvre, who was returning from a series of lectures in Buenos Aires. Those twenty days of the ocean crossing were, for Lucien Febvre, my wife and me, twenty days of happy conversation and laughter. It was then that I became more than a companion to Lucien Febvre-a little like a son; his house in the Juras at Souget became my house, his children my children. By this time all my hesitations had evaporated. I had reached port; I had been appointed the year before to the Ecole des hautes etudes. In the summer of 1939 at Souget, in Lucien Febvre's house, I prepared to begin writing my book. And then the war! I served on the Rhine frontier. From 1940 to 1945 1 was a prisoner in Germany, first in Mainz, then from 1942 to 1945 in the special camp at Lilbeck, where my Lorrainer's rebelliousness sent me. As I returned safe and sound from this long time of testing, complaining would be futile and even unjust; only good memories come back to me now. For prison can be a good school. It teaches patience, tolerance. To see arriving in Lubeck all the French officers of Jewish origin-what a sociological study! And later, sixty-seven clergymen of every hue, who had been judged dangerous in their various former camps -what a strange experience that was! The French church appeared before me in all its variety, from the country cure to the Lazarist, from the Jesuit to the Dominican. Other experiences: living with Poles, brave to excess; and receiving the defenders of Warsaw, among them Alexander Gieysztor and Witold Kula. Or to be submerged one fine day by the massive arrival of Royal Air Force pilots; and living with all the French escape artists, who were sent to us as a punishment; these are-and I omit much-among the picturesque memories. But what really kept me company during those long years -that which distracted me in the true etymological meaning of the word - was the Mediterranean. It was in captivity that I wrote that enormous work, sending school copy book after school copy book to Lucien Febvre. Only my memory permitted this tour de force. Had it not been for my imprisonment, I would surely have written quite a different book. I am not quite sure whether it was one or two years ago when a young Italian philosopher in Florence remarked: "You wrote that book in prison? Oh, that is why it always struck me as a book of contemplation." Yes, I contemplated the Mediterranean, tete-a-tete,

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for years on end, far though it was from me in space and time. And my vision of history took on its definitive form without my being entirely aware of it, partly as a direct intellectual response to a Mediterranean-which no traditional historical acspectacle-the count seemed to me capable of encompassing, and partly as a direct existential response to the tragic times I was passing through. All those occurrences which poured in upon us from the radio and the newspapers of our enemies, or even the news from London which our clandestine receivers gave us - I had to outdistance, reject, deny them. Down with occurrences, especially vexing ones! I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level. Choosing a long-time scale to observe from was choosing the position of God the Father himself as a refuge. Far removed from our persons and our daily misery, history was being made, shifting slowly, as slowly as the ancient life of the Mediterranean, whose perdurability and majestic immobility had so often moved me. So it was that I consciously set forth in search of a historical language-the most profound I could grasp or invent-in order to present unchanging (or at least very slowly changing) conditions which stubbornly assert themselves over and over again. And my book is organized on several different temporal scales, moving from the unchanging to the fleeting occurrence. For me, even today, these are the lines that delimit and give form to every historical landscape. 11 The testimony asked of me about the Annales school, its origin and program, involves three men: Henri Berr, Lucien Febvre, and Marc Bloch, all three of whom I knew, as will be seen, in quite different ways. The first, Henri Berr (1862- 1955), is the one who presents me with the most difficult problems. I am sure this will surprise those who knew this man as a person who was transparent in an old-fashioned way, committed to a grandiose task, disproportionate to tell the truth, before which, however, he never hesitated for an instant, having remained faithful always and throughout his life to what he was in his earliest writings. I refer to the article "Essay on the Science of History: The Statistical Method and the Question of Great Men," which appeared in the Nouvelle revue (May I and 15, 1890); and even more to his principal thesis, presented in 1898, Synthesis of Historical Knowledge: Essay on the Future of Philosophy; and I am thinking, too, of his secondary thesis (written according to custom in Latin, but translated and published in French thirty years later, in

Personal Testimony 455 1928, with the title Of the Scepticism of Gassendi), which was probably the finest and most successful of his works, and for which he himself had a certain preference. In re-reading today these very old writings, I hear very clearly the voice of Henri Berr just as it struck my ear, even though I met him very late-in .1930, when he was sixty-eight years old. Strange and appropriate coincidence: his open manner, warm and unassuming, of which I was so much aware, had affected in the same way another young man whom he must have encountered for the first time twenty or twenty-one years before. ".. . such a small young man, no matter how slender his accomplishments, still had access to you," Febvre wrote to him in 1942. "A perfect graciousness, to be sure, a perfect cordiality; more than that, an elan." Thus we see a man who seems to have changed little in the course of his very long life, which he enjoyed throughout, as a man of spirit and of industriousness. Yet this man was a bit of the Annales before the journal was created, from 1900 or even from 1890. It is to him one must turn if one wishes to know "How did it start?" But I must admit that nothing in the education or recorded biography of Henri Berr seems, at first glance, to have marked him out for the exceptional role which was well and truly his. He was what one may call a very brilliant pupil, and no doubt he was attracted from very early years by multiple interests, until in 1880-81 he attained many honors in national competition, notably the Prize of Honor in Rhetoric (Latin composition), first prize in French composition, and first prize in philosophy. Readers of the Journal of Modern History may not be familiar with these national competitions which in France mark the end of secondary instruction and distinguish exceptional pupils. So they can scarcely imagine the aureole of glory these three prizes projected upon the head of this child. Moreover, he had to get a special dispensation to enter the Ecole normale in 1881 because of his youth. Three years later he graduated in letters. Accordingly, it was the humanities-literature, Latin, and Greek-that he chose for his university studies. Therefore, is it not altogether astonishing, or at least aberrant, to see this brilliant graduate in letters, teacher of rhetoric (which he continued to be until 1925), fleeing, indeed betraying himself, at the beginning of his career, by leaving the subjects which he taught with undeniable talent in order to throw himself heart and soul into the philosophy of history? Yet, inasmuch as the French and Latin prize compositions by the end of the nineteenth century were no more than futile school ex-

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ercises, was it not logical that, under the impetus of his very great initial adolescent successes (first prize in philosophy!), Henri Berr remained a philosopher by temperament and vocation? And what philosophy, between 1884 and 1890, was not interested in history? At least since Hegel, philosophy had been obliged to nourish itself on the historical experience so profusely encountered by human beings. History was thus a kind of raw material, and had begun (as an additional merit) to transform itself, to organize itself even before 1870. Henri Berr noticed this: "The establishment [in 1868] of the Ecole des hautes etudes," he wrote, "by Victor Drury and the creation of the Revue critique in 1866 showed that the need for transforming our advanced instruction, of reviving our science, had been felt before our disaster." The history that was coming into focus aspired to analysis, alert erudition, and, in a word, science; it was the sort of history that would conquer the new Sorbonne in 1908, though in a way that did not please everyone and, in a later time, did not please Henri Berr himself, naturally indulgent though he was. As a philosopher, then, Henri Berr followed the great intellectual debates of his time, seeking to master them and discover their sense. The title of his thesis speaks for itself, and-a detail that may be significant -when he later had occasion to mention it, he designated it in brief, not by its main title, Synthesis of Knowledge and of History, but by its subtitle, Essay on the Future of Philosophy. The word "philosophy" took precedence over the others. So he was a philosopher. But perhaps it was exactly a philosopher who was needed for the first and necessary exploration of the horizon at a time when, long after the ancient thrust of August Comte (1798- 1857), a militant and almost completely new sociology rose like a sun in France with Emile Durkheim (1858- 1917), and the review he founded in 1897-the quickly famous Annee sociologique, which became a favorite reading matter for an entire generation of young historians, from Lucien Febvre to Marc Bloch, Andre Piganiol, and Louis Garnet. Nevertheless, Henri Berr's viewpoint, at least in 1898, was neither for nor against Durkheim, neither for nor against sociology. Good, very good, relations were established and maintained with the Anne'e sociologique. But the "synthesis," Henri Berr's essential preoccupation, was, at least for him, brought back to earth by being a philosophy of history -history of the kind practiced and still practiced in Germany-on condition, as he insisted, that one does not sacrifice minute analysis, intellectual prudence, and eliminates grand systems and gratuitous ideas that cannot be and are not demonstrable. Such

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was, if I perceive matters aright, the thought of the founder of the Revue de synthese historique in 1900, in that first year of the review of the century. Were the Annales already in potentia in that enterprise? Yes and no. Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch were not philosophers, either by taste or by temperament. What the Annales proclaimed, much later, was a history whose scope would extend to embrace all the sciences of man-to the "globality" of all the human sciences, and which would seize upon them all in some fashion or other to construct its own proper methods and true domain. Henri Berr was too courteous to proclaim any such imperialism, or even to conceive of it. What he set out to reunite were the diverse branches into which history obstinately subdivided itself: political history, social history, economic history, history of science, of art, etc. Could he, in drawing such fragile intellectual threads together, hope to take over economics, sociology, aesthetics, all at once? Certainly not. He was concerned at most to pay polite visits among these neighbors. The Revue de synthese historique was not born and did not live under a polemical star. At most, it allowed only courteous controversy. Abroad, for example in Germany, Spain, and Italy, the new review was seen as an expression of a need of the hour. "Something," said Benedetto Croce (Critica, vol. 1 [January 20, 1903]), "which had been awaited for some time, and which was destined to appear at one time or another." Yet in France this review aroused disquiet and raised the hackles of traditionalists and orthodox-minded men whose touch was generally surest when it was a question of finding and denouncing impious novelties. This comes out clearly in four unedited letters which I recently discovered by chance in the archives of the College de France. Since 1898, Henri Berr had been a teacher at the Lycee Henri IV, where Bergson was teaching at the same time. Twice, in 1903 and 19 10, he dreamed of becoming a candidate for appointment to the College de France, located close by. This aroused curious reactions, which for once led Henri Berr to defend himself, and thus to express his opinions precisely and even to enter into a bit of polemic. On October 30, 1903 he wrote to the administrator of the College: ". . . I am sure that I can do a good job, partly new, in your free, scientific College. M. Monod [then editor of the Revue historique, and himself a candidate for the College de France] is mistaken in writing to me that there are already enough chairs of pure history as there are of philosophy in the strict sense of the term. What is generally conceded about me, and whence arises the particular char-

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acter of the review I founded, is that I combine philosophical preoccupations with a taste for and the methods of learned research. For me, there is no worthwhile synthesis except through patient analysis." The matter became even clearer when, for a second time in 19 10, he again tried, and in a more serious way, to make a move to enter the College. Since 1892, he declared, "The College de France has offered no instruction at all in philosophical history and not even in general history. Literary history, history of art, of philosophy, of laws, economic history-all are taught there; many histories are taught there, but no one teaches history." I fear that these direct, clear-sounding words did little to help the candidate. I read in the College records of the deliberation of January 1910: "M. Bedier [the administrator of the College] informs his colleagues that M. Berr has changed the title of the course he wishes to offer, and that he henceforth proposes this name, 'Theory and history of history.' M. Bedier says, in this connection, how well he thinks of the works of M. Berr and of his useful Revue de synthese historique. M. Bergson associated himself with M. Bedier's remarks." A little later, Henri Bergson presents the proposal of which he was the main supporter. "He analyzes," says the record of the meeting "and explains the proposal, indicates that it arises from a just appreciation of the actual condition of historical studies, but he leaves to the historians [of the College] the task of deciding as to the possibility and desirability of creating a course in historical synthesis." That is to say, Henri Berr was abandoned by his supporter to the enmity of the historians on the spot. The vote came, Berr received not a single aye. Miraculous! In 19 10, therefore, Henri Berr was already, to his own surprise and no doubt in spite of himself, the black sheep of the university establishment, a position which Lucien Febvre later occupied with even more eclat, as also did Marc Bloch, though in lesser degree. No doubt the reason was, as much as the ideas discussed in the Revue which disturbed the quiet of the establishment, the fact that Henri Berr had begun to assemble around himself a group of lively, active, enthusiastic, and assertive intellectuals who came from all the fringes-historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, biologists, anthropologists, and, of course, philosophers. If I am not mistakenbut can one err in view of all the evidence? - French intellectual life, as no doubt elsewhere, depends on small groups, active minorities, salons of today and of times past, circles, coteries, editorial offices, minority political parties. Consider the role in the astounding contemporary American literature of the house opened in Paris to friends and passing acquaintances by the intelligent and passionate

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Gertrude Stein. The Revue de synthese historique was more than the articles, fine though they were and which one has pleasure in re-reading even today; it was also meetings, conversations, exchanges of information and ideas. At 14 rue de St. Anne, "one entered," as Lucien Febvre, who was among the first visitors, reminisced, "and in a small study, rather narrow, depressing and dark, one found behind a desk a young man, svelte, sober but elegant in manner.... Many visits, always in the small study. Young and old. On the left, I still can see Paul Lacombe, sometimes sleepy and silent, then suddenly awake, alert, petulant, the habitue of habitues, an original mind that played its part with authority in the first contacts of the Synthese." Other names should obviously be mentioned: Henri Hauser, Frangois Simiand, Abel Rey, Lucien Febvre, Paul Mantoux, and later Marc Bloch. If Henri Berr wrote little, and when he did write perhaps let his pen move too facilely, the fact is that his main contribution was to summon, speak, instruct, discuss, listen, bring together, and lose himself in dialogues and innumerable small councils. After 5 P.M. every day, or nearly, he opened his doors to visitors, preferably at his office at 2 rue Villebois-Mareuil. He was above all good company, a man of intelligence, prepared and skillful in talk. No doubt this slow, patient, multiple work would have borne fruit sooner if the war had not come in 1914. It was only after 1920 that Henri Berr carried through the task so much talked of, planned for, projected, and in the end only partially completed. In that year he started his monumental collection, Evolution of Humanity (Albion Michel); he founded in 1925 the Centre de synthese, and a little afterwards, his very famous Semaines de synth0se. The review continued, but changed its title in 1931 to become Revue de synth?se. The disappearance of the adjective "historical" was symptomatic: to reign supreme. philosophy-universality-came I do not wish and indeed cannot assess the multiple prefaces Henri Berr wrote for the fine books of his Collection, about which the university establishment liked to jest. From my point of view, the essential thing was, in Lucien Febvre's words, the "group of active, lively, combative, conquering men" around him, and thanks to him. A group of heretics, according to the wise; but were they not needed? Henri Berr, administrator of heresy: this fine title would have surprised, but would not have entirely displeased, him. The Semaines were the medium for his marvelous activity. In 1933, for instance, the Semaine was dedicated to the notions of science and laws of science. Mathematicians, physicists, a biologist, psychologists, a sociologist (Maurice Halbwachs), a historian of sci-

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ence, an economist, and Paul Langevin, "the greatest of our philosophers of science," came together. Lucien Febvre also. "I was there," he wrote, "and I listened to these men who sought, with burning good faith, to delimit, settle, and measure precisely the ravages made in our theories by the great advances of modern physics. And behold, from this concert of voices, normally separated and who scarcely listened to one another, there emerged a harmony: they said the same things with different accents; they made everyone conscious, humanly conscious, of the fundamental unity of the human spirit. A great lesson ... .which ... has ended for us; a lesson which ceased to be abstract. It had, if I may say so, taken on a human form." These words indicate the sort of activities that went on in the circle set up around Henri Berr between 1900 and 1910, and constantly renewed thereafter. And it was in this circle that the desire was born, belatedly, to make a more combative journal than the Revue de synthese, one that would be less philosophical, based on concrete new researches. And it was this desire - I would gladly say this necessity-that finally gave birth to the Annales. But the birth was slow. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre met one another at the University of Strasbourg, where they were both appointed in 1919. They waited ten years to launch their review, in 1929. During that long interval, they collaborated regularly with Henri Berr. Lucien Febvre traveled ten times from Strasbourg to Paris for one such joint enterprise. And it was at the Centre de synthese that I met him for the first time in October 1934 in connection with a marvelous discussion of humanism. Moreover, Lucien Febvre was the inspirer, the man centrally responsible, for the Semaines which, in my opinion, were by far the most successful of all the activities of the Centre on the rue Colbert. In 1938, the Semaine on sensibility in history was in essence the work of Lucien Febvre. He even dreamed at that time of taking over the Revue de synth0se. Perhaps he would have done so, save for the Second World War. All the same, the creation of the Annales in 1929 involved a break. At least it assumed that significance in time, especially after the war, during the years of increasing solitude through which Henri Berr passed from 1945 to 1955. The break between father and son, one might think, and I have thought so. The father scarcely complained. Everything happened silently. The announcement of the new review in 1929 made no allusion to the Revue de synthese. But was that not in itself significant? The destruction by Henri Berr's heir of the abundant correspondence he had with Lucien Febvre, especially during the interminable years of the war of 1914- 18, deprives us of the

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decisive documents. But the matter is settled; assuredly, the thought of Lucien Febvre was formed and nourished, as he himself has said, in the Synthese. 111 The justification - but is justification needed for any project? - of the founders of the Annales was the immense intellectual success of their joint labors between 1929 and 1939. There was no common ground between the Revue de synthese historique, the Revue de synthese, and the Annales. The Synthe'se opened itself too much to theoretical discussion, had too many ideas that passed from the scene like phantoms or clouds. With the Annales we are firmly on the ground. In its pages, men of times present and past appear with their concrete problems, "alive," as Gaston Roupnel has said. Certainly, collaborators of the Revue de synthese took part in creating the Annales; but in changing abodes they changed demeanor and tone. The house of the son - it was the joy of life, of understanding, and also of attacking, arguing; it was the house of youth. Add the exceptional talent of the two editors, far and above most of us, and who can be compared only with the greatest historians writing in French - with Henri Pirenne, Fustel de Coulanges, Michelet. Add, finally, that at Strasbourg, France set up in 1919 the most brilliant university our history has known. The Annales had no trouble in finding there the best collaborators - Andre Piganiol, Henri Baulig, Charles Edmond Perrin, Georges Lefebvre, Paul Leuilliot, Gabriel Le Bras. But their success, at the most fundamental level, was the success of an editorial collaboration, marvelously managed and unique in the history of French historiography. Years passed. From 1946 to 1956 Lucien Febvre was in fact the sole editor of the Annales; from 1956 to 1968 1 was, in fact, sole editor in my turn. But it is undeniable that the great, the very great, Annales are the volumes published from 1929 to 1939. The force of their impact was enhanced by the fact that they came at a time of satisfied and widespread mediocrity in French historiography. Almost all of the university, insofar as it entered into the matter at all, was hostile. Marc Bloch could not get into the lVe section of the Ecole des hautes etudes. Twice he tried in vain to enter the College, and it was only in 1936 that he was able to enter the Sorbonne in succession to Henri Hauser. Lucien Febvre entered the College, of which he became one of its glories, only on his second attempt. Henri Hauser, their friend and fellow combatant, was not admitted to the Institute. At the Revue historique, where I often met

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people between 1933 and 1935, what established figure did not criticize the Annales? I disputed regularly with Charles Seignobos, who, despite his age, was an adversary who, eyeglasses on the alert, took great pleasure in provoking others. (But it was thus that I learned to like him.) In short, the hostility was perfectly obvious. That is why the Annales were so lively, condemned to be so: the journal defended itself and struck out eagerly, not for personal reasons, but against pretentious and puerile obstinacy. The list of the Annales' enemies was impressive. Marc Bloch, the more moderate in his critique, was often pitiless. Lucien Febvre amused and was amused; he brought to his articles a Rabelaisian joyousness. Reflecting upon the matter, I think that this combative atmosphere contributed to the exceptional quality of the first Annales. In 1945, in effect, no more hostility; all the youth of the university turned toward the Annales kind of history, following Lucien Febvre, Ernest Labrousse, and myself. The Sorbonne had lost its aggressiveness, even while refusing to change its style. "We simply cannot remake our courses," said Charles Moraze (about 1945), one of the masters of the Sorbonne who became famous later. In 1929, by unprecedented good luck, the hostility stood firm. Everything in history was to be done or redone or rethought conceptually and practically. History could not transform itself except by incorporating all the sciences of man as auxiliaries to our profession, and by mastering their methods, results, and even points of view. Lucien Febvre, who wrote the advertisement that opened the first issue of the Annales, said so without mincing words, with a forcefulness which has to be imagined today because, with the passage of time, his views now seem altogether expected. He denounced isolated research, either by historians on the one hand or by specialists in social studies who concerned themselves solely with the present on the other. He denounced specialized history in which everyone viewed his field as though it were enclosed by high walls; also sociologists interested only in "civilized" peoples or in "primitives" and who paid no attention to one another. "It is against these serious schisms," said Lucien Febvre, "that we intend to rise. Not by means of articles about method, not by means of theoretical disquisitions, but by means of examples, by means of achieved results! The exand specialample of workers of different backgrounds izations . . . who will show the results of their research on subjects within their competence and of their choice." In this phrasing, if one notices especially the words I have italicized, there is an allusion to

Personal Testimony 463 the manner of the Revue de synthe'se, but also a reassertion of the leitmotiv of that Revue. The real novelty was that debate centered on a single focus of research: a single science, history, confronted all the rest. More than this, as far as the privileged science of history was concerned, even though it kept the entire social spectrum and all levels of consciousness within its domain, nonetheless it was economics above all that was attended to. The first Annales, following the much admired pattern of the Vierteljahrschrift far Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte was entitled Annales d'histoire e'conomique et sociale. Thus the opportunity arose for Marc Bloch to establish himself, through this auxiliary activity, as the greatest economic historian of his country. The gap between the Annales and the Revue de synthese widened. For Henri Berr "society included economics," and the Annales therefore only cast light upon "an aspect of the life of societies which has long remained obscure, and to which the Marxians drew attention." A pin prick, which provoked others. "The Annales," Lucien Febvre wrote later, "which Henri Berr always followed after, far in the rear . . ." Thus the Annales, during the first ten years of their existence were, I repeat, the fruit of a constant collaboration, of an unparalleled friendship between Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. This friendship with its logical polarities, its agreements, its exceptional results was at the heart of the enterprise. From 1919, when they met at Strasbourg, until 1944, when Marc Bloch was shot by the Germans, this friendship of twenty-five years explains their common achievement, marvelously in unison. In his dedication to Lucien Febvre (1941) in his Me'tier d'historien (published only in 1949), Marc Bloch explained the relationship aptly: "We have long striven together for a more comprehensive and more human history.... Among the ideas I intend to advocate, more than one assuredly comes directly from you. As to many others, I cannot truthfully decide whether they came from you or from me, or from us both. I flatter myself that you will often approve. You will occasionally savor what I write. And all that will create one more tie between us." "Yes," said Lucien Febvre in commenting on these words, "yes, in all that time we had nothing but an exchange of ideas -seized, seized again and intermingled." Observe on both sides the trustful, affectionate tone, and in the text of Marc Bloch, if I am not mistaken, a touch of deference. "You will occasionally savor what I write." Not only were there many and strong differences of character, tempera-

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ment, intelligence, and personal taste between Lucien Febvre (1 878- 1956) and Marc Bloch (1 886- 1944), there was. also a difference of age which should not be forgotten, especially at the beginning. When they met for the first time, at the University of Strasbourg in 1919, Lucien Febvre noted: "Marc Bloch was there, who seemed very young to me. One is always very young at 32 in the eyes of a man of 40." And he continued: "Bloch was there, ardent, contained, full of an unyielding desire to be of service, suddenly in confidence questioning me as one questions an older brother." Lucien Febvre already had a book behind him (his magnificent thesis on Philip 11 and the Franche Comte dated from 191 1). He was the elder, the confessor, the initiator; in short, the master. Marc Bloch, at that time, was still in a certain sense a student. And the young men (among them my good friend Henri Brunschwig) who had the good fortune to listen to these remarkable professors at Strasbourg, were not deceived. One, Lucien Febvre, was a master, fully developed in his teaching and thought; the other, Marc Bloch, was a master just emerging from apprenticeship. No doubt some trace of this relationship always remained, which explains Marc Bloch's tone at almost the end of his life. But when in 1929 they undertook the enormous task of the Annales together, they assuredly were marching in step. Their concert was so perfect that, in many cases, if one does not look ahead to the signature, an article by Marc Bloch could be attributed to Lucien Febvre. It is clear that Marc Bloch's style was modeled on Lucien Febvre's. But they finally created, the two of them, with their turns of phrase and special vocabulary, an Annales style, with a literary quality, to be sure, but which irritated their adversaries to the marrow. Is history, perhaps, though aspiring to be a science, a matter of writing, of literary style? These two men, what were they? Unfortunately, I scarcely knew Marc Bloch personally, having seen him only three times in Paris in 1938 and 1939. He was the son of a great historian, Gustave Bloch, specialist in Roman history, long a professor at the Ecole normale superieure;and then at the Sorbonne. His son, Marc Bloch, winner of the school competition while a student at the Ecole normale, graduate in history, won a fellowship for study in Germany at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig (1908-9), and then held a post in Paris in the Thiers Foundation. In 1920 in Strasbourg he published his thesis, Kings and Serfs: A Chapter in Capetian History. By 1929, when he took on the editorship of the Annales, he had behind him several publications, among them his great work, Thaumaturgic Kings

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(1924), whose inspiration went back to a suggestion from his elder brother,a doctor of great distinction,who died prematurely. Lucien Febvre, born in 1878 at Nancy, the capital of Lorraine,was in fact the son of parents from Franche Comte. His father, a graduate of the Ecole normale and a teacher of grammar, assigned by chance to the Lycee of Nancy, made his entire career there. Lucien Febvre completed his secondary school and even began higher studies at Nancy. I accused him in jest of having kept a bit of the Lorraine accent, which I am able to speak and can claim to recognize. But without repudiatingLorraine, Lucien Febvre felt and wished all his life to be a man of Franche Comte'-enthusiastically, and when the occasion arose, with a bit of animus against the Duchy of Burgundy and the neighboringSwiss cantons. A student at the Lycee Louis le Grand and at the Ecole normale, he graduated in history in 1902. Next he was on the staff of the Thiers Foundationin Paris. It was there, surely, having finished with instruction,that he worked on his thesis. It was then that he, a "small young man," knew Henri Berr, who liked later, not without some malice, to recall old times when Lucien Febvre would come to ask his advice or submitarticles to him. Unfortunately, I have not been able to read any of the youthful letters to Lucien Febvre, many of which have been preserved. The man must therefore be understood from the outside. Suffice it to emphasize, during these final years of his youthful development, his very lively taste for literature, as shown by his attraction to the elegant instruction of Joseph Bedier, his sympathy with Gustave Bloch and Gabriel Monod, the historian(and even more the man and professor). A socialist, or socialistically inclined, he listened to the evening lecturer Jean Jaures project his dreams. On the other hand, he was allergic to Henri Bergson, as much if not more so than his friend and inseparable companion, Henri Wallon. Finally, he was inspiredby Lucien Gallois (1857-194 1), the geographer,disciple, and friendof Vidal de la Blache (whom Lucien Febvre also knew). Lucien Gallois was an extrordinaryteacher. And throughouthis life, Lucien Febvre remained a professed geographer, a marvelous observer of
land, plants, men, countrysides. The Earth and Human Evolution,

published in 1920, is a fine work which has not been superseded or replaced, as the geographer Pierre Gourou, a good judge of the subject, said recently. But the most important observation is that Lucien Febvre had
matured all at once. His thesis, Philip 11 and the Franche Comte

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( 191 1), which Flammarion is in process of reissuing in a pocket edition and which will probably soon be translatedinto English, is a masterpiecewhich realized ahead of time all the futureprogramof the Annales. In 1972 this book has not aged, and still ranks, without even a wrinkle, with the best and most recent French regional studies-those by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Rene Baehrel, or Pierre Goubert-a most exceptional record indeed. To have seized upon the entire past of a province, observing it both in its historical reality and in its geographicalaspects, is that not, to use a recent expression, to achieve "global thought," the only form of history capable of satisfying us now? Much later he commanded a tremendous capital of reflection and reading. He had a universal curiosity and a gift for understandingeverything, even matters he met for the first time. He was always admirablyattentive to what others had to say, knowing
how to listen-a rare quality-and how to cut to the heart of an

argument,no matter how complicated. He wrote with disconcerting ease. And with all this went the prodigy of his discoveries, of his ideas, expressed in telegraph form, to be sure, because he was not naturally inclined to careless speech, although he could tell stories admirablywhen he felt like it. In short, a man as receptive as he was generous, he seemed to me a bit like the Diderot of his times. All by himself he was a "bank of ideas for a generation." And in the first Annales, there was also the same passion and lust for polemic and argument as in the Encyclopedie of the "philosophes" of the eighteenth century. Obviously, I have not said all there is to say, nor entirely explained the men and works that gave rise and life to the Annales. For instance, I should have shown how Lucien Febvre yielded to the ardor of Marc Bloch in the area over which he had become master: economic and especially rural and agrarian history. Lucien Febvre gave way gladly. His drivingcuriosity turnedmore toward the history of states of mind, a line of investigation that culminatedin his Rabelais, though it had started, to be sure, as far back as 1924 with his Martin Luther. From that time onward, the major focus of his researchand preoccupationsturnedin this direction. His last book, of which I saw the finished manuscriptbefore his death, but which has mysteriously disappeared, was entitled Honor and Fatherland. It explored a field where little has yet been done, that of collective states of mind, being a study of the transition from fidelity to a

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person-the prince (that is, honor) to fidelity to. the nation (patriotism). The history, in short, of the birth of the idea of fatherland. Nor have I said that the Annales, despite their vivacity, never constituted a school in the strict sense, that is to say, a pattern of thought closed in upon itself. On the contrary. The password for the Annales was nothing more than passion for the past-but that is a great deal. And joined with that passion there was the search for all the new possibilities, a readiness to accept changes in the way problems were put, according to the requirements and logic of the hour. For past and present mingle inextricably together. On that point, all the successive editors of the Annales agreed. And yet, who will not smile to see me write a history "historisante," as Henri Berr would say, or "evenementielle," as Paul Lacombe put it? I have spoken of men, of occurrences. But it is very evident that this little stream, narrow and lively, from the Synthese to the Annales, ran through a vast countryside, during a particular epoch of history-a much disturbed one, from 1900 to 1972, as all will admit-and in a particular country, France. And "France means diversity," as Lucien Febvre said. Is it by chance that Henri Berr, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and myself all four came from eastern France? That the Annales began at Strasbourg, next door to Germany and to German historical thought? Finally, was I right to decide more than four years ago that it was in the tradition of the Annales, as I understood it, to hand over the management to young men: Jacques Le Goff, a medievalist; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a modernist; and Marc Ferro, a specialist in Russian history? I have found myself directly disagreeing with them. But, thanks to them, the old dwelling has become a house of youth once more.