# The Annales School and the Longue Duree

History I · Thinking History · https://tryals.app/learn/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree

## History Was Written at the Wrong Speed

In 1929 Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre attacked **histoire événementielle** (event history): battles, treaties, and kings. They argued this is mere froth.

| Approach | Focus | Key Feature |
|---|---|---| 
| **Event History** | Surface acts | Archives record it, but it hides daily reality |
| **Problem-Oriented** | Total human activity | Uses geography, economics, and anthropology |

Fernand Braudel built this into **three speeds of time**:

| Layer | Speed | Contents |
|---|---|---| 
| **Longue durée** | Centuries | Climate, mountains, soil |
| **Conjoncture** | Decades | Prices, wages, states |
| **Événement** | Days | Battles, treaties |

Braudel's verdict: events are foam on the tide. Philip II was constrained by geography far more than he shaped it.

## What It Bought, and What It Cost

**The Gains:** Serial quantification, history of **mentalités** (how ordinary people felt), and geography as a historical actor. Works like _Montaillou_ rely on this.

**The Cost:** Structures move so slowly that human agency vanishes. Critics called the extreme version **history without people**.

$$\text{event} \ll \text{conjuncture} \ll \text{longue dur\'{e}e}$$

**The Pitfall:** Most bad historical arguments are speed errors. They explain structural shifts with events, or dismiss contingencies because structures loom large.

**The Exception:** Marc Bloch, who founded the school, was shot by the Gestapo in 1944. An **événement** can end everything. Use the three speeds to ask which clock a question runs on.

## Practice questions

7 of this lesson's 11 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Braudel ranks battles and treaties lowest and the near-motionless history of terrain and climate highest. Why is that a claim about causation rather than about importance?

A. Because political events are less interesting to modern readers
B. Because he denied that individual decisions have any effect whatever
C. Because documents about battles are less reliable than climate records
D. Because slow structures set the limits fast events move within

**Answer:** D. Because slow structures set the limits fast events move within

**Why:** The three tiers are a hierarchy of constraint. A treaty is real, but the range of treaties available was fixed by things moving too slowly to appear in that year’s archive.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/braudel-ranks-battles-and-treaties-lowest-and-the-near-motionless

### 2. Complete Braudel’s architecture.

**Answer:** Braudel divided historical time into three speeds. The **longue durée** moves over centuries and holds climate, terrain, and mental habit. The conjoncture breathes across **decades**. And the event, which he called a crest of **foam** on the tides of history, flickers past in days.

**Why:** Centuries, decades, days, and the metaphor that demoted the entire previous discipline to surface disturbance.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/complete-braudels-architecture

### 3. Sort each item: an Annales **gain** or an Annales **cost**?

**Answer:**

- Gain: Climate and disease admitted as historical actors, The history of mentalités: how ordinary people felt, Serial history: long runs of prices and populations
- Cost: Human agency shrinks until nobody can decide anything, It becomes hard to explain why anything ever changes, Contingency dismissed as noise beneath the structures

**Why:** A total history that could explain everything except decisions. Le Roy Ladurie named the extreme himself: "history without people".

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/sort-each-item-an-annales-gain-or-an-annales-cost

### 4. Braudel's three speeds require different sources. Which mismatch would a reviewer flag hardest?

A. Using price series to argue about the conjuncture, since prices move too slowly
B. Using a battle report to evidence a claim about the longue durée
C. Using an event to illustrate a structure, which the method forbids entirely
D. Using climate data alongside political narrative in a single chapter

**Answer:** B. Using a battle report to evidence a claim about the longue durée

**Why:** A dispatch records a week and a structure moves over centuries, so the source cannot bear the claim, matching evidence to timescale is the method's practical core. Illustrating a structure with a well-chosen event is legitimate and common; what fails is treating the event as the evidence for it.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/braudels-three-speeds-require-different-sources-which-mismatch

### 5. Marc Bloch was shot by the Gestapo for his work in the French Resistance.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** True. Bloch joined the Resistance in his fifties, was captured, tortured and shot in June 1944. *The Historian's Craft* was left unfinished on his desk, which is why the book that argues most carefully for history as a patient science breaks off mid-sentence.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/marc-bloch-was-shot-by-the-gestapo-for-his-work-in-the-french

### 6. Match each figure or work to its contribution.

**Answer:**

- Bloch and Febvre → Founded Annales in 1929 as an attack on event-history
- Braudel → Built history in three layers of time
- Le Roy Ladurie → Montaillou: a village from an inquisition register
- Histoire des mentalités → How ordinary people felt about death and hunger

**Why:** A journal, an architecture, a village, and a subject nobody had thought was a subject.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/match-each-figure-or-work-to-its-contribution

### 7. What did the Annales programme introduce to historical practice?

A. A rule that only quantitative evidence may be used
B. The whole of human activity — diet, fear, marriage, climate — as subject matter
C. Borrowing freely from geography, economics, and anthropology
D. Problem-oriented history in place of narrative of events

**Answer:** B. The whole of human activity — diet, fear, marriage, climate — as subject matter; C. Borrowing freely from geography, economics, and anthropology; D. Problem-oriented history in place of narrative of events

**Why:** Problems, total subject matter, and cheerful disciplinary raiding. They loved numbers but never confined themselves to them. Montaillou is a village of gossip, reconstructed from an inquisitor’s notes.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/the-annales-school-and-the-longue-duree/what-did-the-annales-programme-introduce-to-historical-practice