The End of the Annales? Some Thoughts on the So-called Death of the French Historical School MARTYN LYONS Ihe Annales school of history is dead. Or so François Furet told us in an article entitled "Beyond the Annales" in 1983. 1 In 1987, François Dosse lamented the present state of the historical school. Historians, according to Dosse, had lost touch with the original ideas of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre which had once inspired the Annales to revolutionize the history of economies, societies, and civilizations (the journal's three-pronged subtitle) since its foundation in 1929. 2 The medievalist Georges Duby, in an interview later that year, spoke in more restrained terms of an essoufflement—the movement had run out of steam. 3 "We ere," said Duby, "at the end of a long conquest organized around the An- nales. ... We have reached a certain level, and we must confront other problems." There is a consensus that a turning point was reached in the 1980s. In spite of this perception of decline and exhaustion, the journal still flourishes, its international reputation apparently undiminished. French governments have regarded his- torians like Leroy Ladurie, Braudel, and Duby as ornaments of national culture and funded their enterprises accordingly. In spite of the feeling that the social sciences are in crisis, the historical discipline has a very strong presence in the public arena. Annales historians in particular have achieved unprecedented control over the communications media. The he- gemonic poskion of Annales historians is spectacularly clear, and it is deeply resented in other quarter;; of French academia. This paradoxical combination of commercial success and alleged crisis prompts an assessment of the legacy of the Annales. What is the contribution of the now-fashionable history of mentalities to that legacy? Is the era of the Annales over? Or is it inevitable that, having triumphantly assaulted the French academic establishment, Annales historians would disperse in different directions? The Annales may have lost their homogeneity and purpose as a coherent school of thought, but the prolific creativity of those influenced by its ideas remains impressive. Many past hallmarks of the Annales school, however, have been jettisoned. In the current phase of disintegration, historians have abandoned the longue durée in favor of case histor- ies and Italian-style "microhistory." The vogue is over for quantification and for 'serial history' (the examination of long series of homogeneous data, such as the market price of bread or the dates of the wine harvest, which Leroy Ladurie used as a key to long-term climatic variations). 4 Other elements of the legacy have endured. The interdisciplinary banner is still un- furled, even if the notion of history's sister disciplines has changed enormously. Today, interdisciplinary means that the historian must become an anthropologist, an ethnogra- University of New South Wales, POB 1, Kensington, NSW 2033, Australia. The European Legacy, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 8-13, 1996 Copyright © 1996 by the International Society for the Study of European Ideas 8