How did the Annales school transform what counts as historical evidence and time, and why does its idea of total history matter for the question of how history is constructed?
Students examine the Annales school, its founders Bloch and Febvre and its leading figure Braudel, and its concepts of total history, mentalities and the longue duree
A deep dive into the French Annales school, from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre to Fernand Braudel. How total history, the longue duree and the study of mentalities widened historical evidence beyond politics, and how Braudel's layered time reshaped what a history could even be about.
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What this dot point is asking
This dot point asks you to explain the most influential twentieth-century alternative to the Rankean model: the French Annales school. It wants more than a label. You must be able to name the founders, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and the towering second-generation figure, Fernand Braudel, and explain three connected ideas, total history, the longue duree, and the history of mentalities, and then argue why this school changed what counts as evidence and even what a history can be about. The Annales is your best example of how a new set of questions remakes the historian's method and sources, which is exactly the key question of how history is constructed.
The answer
The Annales school takes its name from the journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. They were in revolt against the dominant history of their day, the Rankean history of politics, diplomacy and great men reconstructed from state archives. They wanted instead a total history that embraced economics, society, geography, climate and the inner mental world of ordinary people. The Annales is best understood not as a single theory but as a programme for widening the historian's questions and, with them, the historian's sources.
Bloch, Febvre and the new questions
Marc Bloch, whose Feudal Society and posthumous The Historian's Craft are central, insisted that the historian must interrogate sources actively, asking questions the documents were never written to answer, and must draw on disciplines such as geography, sociology and economics. Lucien Febvre pioneered the history of mentalities, the reconstruction of the mental frameworks, beliefs and emotional worlds of past societies, arguing that people in the past did not think as we do and that recovering that difference is the historian's task. Bloch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French Resistance, a detail that underlines how the school's commitments were lived as well as written.
Braudel and the three speeds of time
Fernand Braudel gave the school its most famous concept in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. He divided historical time into three layers. The longue duree is the almost motionless history of the relationship between humans and their environment, geography, climate and the sea, changing across centuries. Beneath the events sits a middle layer of social, economic and demographic history, the slow rhythms of trade, prices and population. Only at the surface, the fastest layer, is the history of events, of battles and kings, which Braudel famously dismissed as mere foam on the waves of deeper time. This reordering demoted the political narrative that empiricism had centred.
Widening the evidence
Because the Annales asked new questions, it admitted new evidence. Parish registers, price series, harvest records, maps, climate data, wills, folk customs and material objects all became sources. Later Annales historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose Montaillou reconstructed a medieval village from inquisition records, and the quantitative historians of the third generation, pushed this further. The price was real: critics argued that the longue duree drained human agency from history and that mentalities risked speculation, and the school itself later turned back toward narrative and culture.
Using this in an answer
Use the Annales as your prime case of method following questions. The argument to make is that by asking about structures and mentalities rather than events and statesmen, the school redefined what counted as evidence and even relegated the political narrative that empiricism took to be history itself. Set Braudel's foam-on-the-waves against Ranke's archive to show two incompatible answers to the same key question of how history is constructed, then judge what each gains and loses.