(Unknown painter, late 16th century. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, BHC0261. Public domain.)
(Saint-Rémy, June–July 1889. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Public domain.)
Lepanto, 1571 · the olive grove, 1889
Which of those two pictures is the sixteenth century?
- Lepanto is in every chronicle of the period. The hillside is in none of them.
- If the slow things decide more than the loud ones, what happens to a history built out of what participants saw and wrote down?
- An afternoon, against three centuries. Most of the galleys the Mediterranean possessed were in one gulf on one day, and the news reached Venice, Madrid and Rome within weeks. An olive takes decades to bear and then bears for centuries; these were planted by people nobody can name. A historian has to pick a span of time to work in. What does that choice settle before any evidence is read?
- Both are full of people. Neither names them. Every bank of oars is rowed by men chained to a bench — slaves, convicts, the very poor — and the painter gives them no faces. The terraces under the trees were cut by hand, by people equally unrecorded. The battle is the most documented day of the century here. Whose day is documented?
- Nothing on the map moved. Nothing on the hillside did either. Within a year the Ottomans had rebuilt the fleet; Venice made its peace in 1573; the frontier stayed where it was. The stony soil and the thin crop were the same in Philip II’s time and the same again in 1950. If the loud thing changed nothing and the quiet thing decided where people could live, which one is the history?
Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 5
Big Structures: the Annales and the longue durée
- Background: Green and Troup, The Houses of History, ch. 4: “The Annales,” 87–95
- Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée” (1958), 25–54
All Braudel page numbers are to On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago, 1980), the volume the assigned PDF is taken from. Your excerpt is the 1958 essay, pp. 25–54; quotations cited below p. 25 come from the two shorter pieces the same volume reprints — the 1949 preface to La Méditerranée (pp. 3–5) and the 1950 inaugural lecture (pp. 6–24). Bloch is cited by page in Peter Putnam’s translation, The Historian’s Craft (Knopf, 1953).
Today in context
What makes history happen?
Week 4 · Ranke, 1824
What the documents say, reported without invention. The historian’s task is to show what happened, not to judge it.
Week 5.1 · Marx, 1848
Conflict between classes over who owns the means of production. The motor is economic, and it runs inside society.
Week 5.2 · Braudel, 1958
Structures slow enough that the people living inside them cannot see them: sea, soil, climate, trade, habits of mind.
Week 6 · Thompson, 1963
People — making themselves, out of what they experience and what they do about it.
Part one · Annales, 15 January 1929
The founding statement is about who talks to whom
“Of course, clearly nothing could be better than that each scholar, while pursuing his own legitimate specialty, busily cultivating his own garden, should nonetheless make the effort to follow his neighbor’s work. But often the walls are so high that they cut off the view.” Bloch and Febvre, “À nos lecteurs,” Annales 1, no. 1 (1929), trans. in Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” p. 18
Which walls
Between historians and the people studying present-day economies and societies — two groups, the editorial says, made to understand one another who as a rule pass each other by.
How they propose change
Not by articles on method or theoretical dissertations, but by example and by deed.
What is not in it
No claim about what causes historical change. Their idea is a change of focus about change itself.
Part one · Bloch, written 1941–43
Bloch begins his defence of history with a child’s question
“TELL ME, Daddy. What is the use of history?” Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, p. 3
The circumstances, in his own words
France defeated and divided; Bloch, a Jew, teaching in the unoccupied zone and writing from what he has with him. Four pages in, he apologises for it: “the impossibility of reaching any large library, and the loss of my own books have made me dependent upon my notes and upon memory” (p. 6).
Why the question is not naive
Bloch’s own footnote: Langlois and Seignobos’s 1897 handbook, the standard French training manual, lists “What is the use of history?” among its “idle questions.” The problem it poses, Bloch answers, “is no less than that of the legitimacy of history.”
Where that puts the historian
A historian has to be able to say why the work is worth doing. That question is part of the job, not a distraction from it.
Part one · Bloch, The Historian’s Craft
The shape of a French field is older than any law that explains it
“Man spends his time devising techniques of which he afterwards remains a more or less willing prisoner.” Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, p. 39
The case
The arable of northern France is cut into strips so long and narrow they baffle an agriculturalist. Publicists blamed the Civil Code and proposed changing the inheritance law. Bloch: “The settlers in the era of the dolmens have more to do with it than the lawyers of the First Empire” (p. 40).
The argument in one case
A wrong date for a cause produces a wrong remedy in the present.
Discussion · part one
Why start a new history with a rule about who talks to whom?
Ranke’s answer to “what is history?” was a method for handling documents. Marx’s was a claim about what drives change. The 1929 editorial gives neither.
- What can economists, geographers and sociologists give a historian that another historian cannot?
- What does founding a journal commit you to that publishing a manifesto does not?
Answer · part one
New neighbours bring new evidence, and new evidence changes the questions
What the neighbours had
Price series, harvest records, population counts, soil and climate, field patterns. None of it is anyone’s testimony about what happened, so none of it can be read the way Ranke read an ambassador’s report.
Why that changes the question
Evidence that runs in a series over centuries answers “what changed, and how fast.” It answers “who decided” badly or not at all. Bloch’s field strips are the case in point: there is no decision to find.
What follows
Change the sources and the subject of history changes with them.
Part two · preface to La Méditerranée, 1949
The book is built in three layers, by speed
01 · geographical time
Almost changeless
“a history that is almost changeless, the history of man in relation to his surroundings,” working itself out “in cycles which are endlessly renewed.”
02 · social time
Gentle rhythms
“a history of gentle rhythms, of groups and groupings”: economies and states, societies and civilizations — and war.
03 · individual time
Events
L’histoire événementielle: “a surface disturbance, the waves stirred up by the powerful movement of tides.”
Descriptions quoted from Braudel, 1949 preface to The Mediterranean, in On History, 3; the three names above are his own, 4.
Part two · 1949
An event is the visible end of something slower
“Resounding events often take place in an instant, and are but manifestations of that larger destiny by which alone they can be explained.” Braudel, 1949 preface to The Mediterranean, in On History, p. 4
What it does to the order of work
The event is not thrown out. It is put last, and read only once the currents under it have been charted — which is why events occupy the third part of the book rather than the first.
The charge against narrative
Braudel, on the same page: “narrative history is not an objective method, still less the supreme objective method, but is itself a philosophy of history.” Telling the story in order is already a claim about what causes what.
The reversal
Events do not explain structures. Structures explain events.
(Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, 1582 German edition. Public domain. Cropped — see
images/README.md.)
- Follow the sandspit. It reaches out from the shore and curls back, closing the bay to a narrow mouth. That shape is why Greeks settled here, why grain moved through it, and why Don John’s galleys could lie safely inside it for weeks. Which of Braudel’s three layers does a harbour belong to?
- Count the hulls inside the hook against the ones outside. The sheltered water is packed; the open strait holds a handful. The strait is narrow, and its current was famous and feared long before any of these ships. How much of Mediterranean trade was settled by where the water is calm?
- Read the cartouche, bottom right. Its Latin praises Messina for its site, its wealth and its “safe anchorage for ships, in which the marvellous force of nature appears,” and names the strait’s saeua Charybdis before a single building. The engravers thought the geography was the story. Why would a chronicler of 1571 disagree?
Part two · inaugural lecture, Collège de France, 1 December 1950
Braudel’s own image for an event is a firefly
“I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.” Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History, pp. 10–11
Said on taking Febvre’s chair
The lecture that opened his professorship, given after La Méditerranée was already in print: a method defended in public, not proposed. On the same page he refuses Treitschke’s “Men make history”: “No, history also makes men and fashions their destiny — anonymous history, working in the depths and most often in silence” (p. 10).
What the lit events cost you
Everything a historian can see easily is also everything that does not last.
Discussion · part two
Lepanto killed tens of thousands in an afternoon. In what sense is that a surface?
Braudel puts the battle in his third part and calls events “a surface disturbance, the waves stirred up by the powerful movement of tides.”
- What would have to be true about 1571 for him to be right?
- Whose history is it that the battle is the surface of?
Answer · part two
“Surface” is a claim about consequences, not about importance
What the test is
Not how many died, but what the sea looked like afterwards. The Ottomans rebuilt the fleet quickly, Venice made terms in 1573, and the frontier stayed roughly where it had been. The structures that produced the battle survived it.
The good objection
For the men chained to the oars it was not a surface, and a test that scores history by what survives a decade ranks their deaths at zero. Braudel is choosing what counts as a result.
Where the disagreement really is
Not over what happened at Lepanto, but over what a historian should count as an outcome.
(National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Public domain. Cropped to the neatline — see
images/README.md.)
Part three · Annales E.S.C., October–December 1958
Every history is already a choice about how long a span to work in
“All historical work is concerned with breaking down time past, choosing among its chronological realities according to more or less conscious preferences and exclusions.” Braudel, “The Longue Durée” (1958), p. 27
The three spans on offer
- The event — a day, a year: “the time of the chronicle and the journalist.”
- The conjuncture — ten to fifty years, the span of a price curve or a demographic trend.
- The longue durée — “a history to be measured in centuries this time.”
Why “more or less conscious” is the sharp phrase
A historian who never picked a span still picked one.
Part three · 1958
A structure is what a society cannot get past
“Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations: they get in the way of history, hinder its flow, and in hindering it shape it.” Braudel, “The Longue Durée” (1958), p. 31
His examples
- Geography — “For centuries, man has been a prisoner of climate, of vegetation, of the animal population, of a particular agriculture.”
- Economy — one system “from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century,” in which “all movement was dominated by the primacy of water and ships” (p. 32).
- Ideas — “mental frameworks too can form prisons of the longue durée.”
The word he keeps using
Prison. A structure is defined by what it forbids.
Part three · 1958 and 1950
The document-led method produces a chronicle and calls it a science
“All we need to do,” Louis Halphen wrote only yesterday, “is allow ourselves to be borne along by the documents, one after another, just as they offer themselves to us, in order to see the chain of facts and events reconstitute themselves almost automatically before our eyes.” Halphen, Introduction à l’histoire (1946), 50, quoted in Braudel, “The Longue Durée,” pp. 28–29
Braudel on the training manual
Of Langlois and Seignobos, 1897: the historian is a landscape painter who “must leave nothing out, not a shrub, not a puff of smoke. Nothing must be left out except, of course, that the painter himself must be overlooked” (p. 8).
What that method cannot reach
Documents are made by people doing something, mostly in a hurry. Follow them one after another and you get the order they were written in, which is the order of events. Compare Ranke in 4.2.
The objection
Rigour about each document is no protection against a scale the archive chose for you.
Part three · Braudel on Marx
Braudel’s complaint about Marx is not the models. It is that they stopped moving.
“Marx’s genius, the secret of his long sway, lies in the fact that he was the first to construct true social models, on the basis of a historical longue durée. These models have been frozen in all their simplicity by being given the status of laws, of a preordained and automatic explanation, valid in all places and to any society.” Braudel, “The Longue Durée” (1958), p. 51
The repair he proposes
Put the models back “within the ever-changing stream of time” and they reappear with different emphases, beside other structures needing other models. “It cannot regain its youth and vigor except in the longue durée” (p. 51).
The shared ground
Both explain by structures. Marx names one motor; Braudel refuses to name any.
Comparison · 5.1 and 5.2
What actually separates Marx from Braudel
Marx, 1848
One structure does the driving — how people produce what they need — and it runs in a direction. It breaks when people act, which is what a revolution is. The argument is tested by whether the prediction comes true.
Braudel, 1958
Many structures at once, running at different speeds and heading nowhere in particular: no single motor, and no stage the Mediterranean is on its way to. Mostly they do not break at all; they outlive everyone inside them. The argument is tested by how much of the record it accounts for.
Where they part
Marx explains why an order ends. Braudel explains why one lasts.
Discussion · part three
If structures are prisons, who in this history decides anything?
Marx allowed that people “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please” (quoted in Green and Troup, p. 36). Braudel’s slow history “almost borders on the motionless” (Braudel, “The Longue Durée,” p. 33), and his events are fireflies.
- What kind of question about the past can the longue durée not answer?
- Is there a scale at which a person’s choice is the right explanation?
Answer · part three
The longue durée explains limits well and decisions badly
What it answers
Why some things were not possible, why a pattern held for four centuries, why a remedy failed. Bloch’s field strips and Braudel’s water-borne economy are both answers of that kind.
What it cannot answer
Why this person did this thing on this day. Braudel does not deny that it matters — choosing one history “to the exclusion of all others” is for him the cardinal error (p. 34) — but his own method leaves it to someone else.
Who took up the rest
The historians in Weeks 6 and 7, working at the other end of the scale.
The lecture · three parts
A journal, a book, and an offer to everybody else
01 · 1929, and 1941–43
The journal
Bloch and Febvre start a review to break down the walls around history. Bloch, later and in worse circumstances, writes down what the craft is for.
02 · 1949 and 1950
Three kinds of time
Braudel, out of five years in prison camps, divides the past by how fast it moves and puts events last.
03 · Annales, 1958
The offer, and the objection
The longue durée is proposed to every social science. Where, in it, did people go?
The take home
The span of time you choose decides what you can explain
Where it starts
Bloch and Febvre founded a journal, not a theory. Their opening statement of 1929 asks historians to talk to economists, geographers and sociologists, and says nothing about what the new history should conclude.
What Braudel did with it
He split the past into three levels running at three speeds: an almost motionless geographical time, a slower social time of economies and civilizations, and the fast individual time of events.
The cost
Zoom out far enough and nobody is deciding anything.
Next
The other end of the scale
Week 6 · history from below
Thompson rescues the English working class “from the enormous condescension of posterity,” and Vansina treats oral tradition as evidence. Both need people who act and remember.
Week 7 · microhistory
The Annales produced its own opposite. Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975) is one Pyrenean village; Ginzburg’s miller reads books in one Friulian town.
- Braudel says structures are what people cannot get past. Thompson says class is something people make. Can both be true at once?