Peter Burke 
The French Historical Revolution 
The Annales School 1929 – 2014

This book provides a critical history of the movement associated
with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the
present. This movement has been the single most important force in
the development of what is sometimes called ‘the new
history’.

Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between
four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The
first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought
against the old historical establishment and founded the journal
Annales to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The second
generation was dominated by Fernand Braudel, whose magnificent work
on the Mediterranean has become a modern classic. The third
generation, deeply associated with the ‘cultural turn’
in historical scholarship, includes recently well-known historians
such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby.
This new edition brings us right up to the present, and
contemplates the work of a fourth generation, including
practitioners such as Roger Chartier, Serge Gruzinski and Jacques
Revel. This new generation continued much of the cultural focus of
the previous Annales historians, while diversifying further, and
becoming increasingly ‘reflexive’, a move that owes
much to the sociocultural theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de
Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu.

Wide-ranging yet concise, this new edition of a classic work of
analysis of one of the most important historical movements of the
twentieth century will be welcomed by students of history and other
social sciences and by the interested general reader.

Table of Content

Acknowledgements

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

1 The Old Historiographical Regime and its Critics

2 The Founders: Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch

i The Early Years

ii Strasbourg

iii The Foundation of Annales

iv The Institutionalization of Annales

3 The Age of Braudel

i The Mediterranean

ii The Later Braudel

iii The Rise of Quantitative History

4 The Third Generation

i From the Cellar to the Attic

ii The ‘Third Level’ of Serial History

iii Reactions: Anthropology, Politics, Narrative

5 New Directions (1989-2014)

6 The Annales in Global Perspective

i Reception and Resistance

ii Striking a Balance

Glossary: The Language of Annales

Chronology

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Peter Burke is Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.