A new kind of history: from the writings of Febvre

Article number 10124033

A NEW KIND OF HISTORY Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) was one of the greatest French historians of the twentieth century. He made his reputation with a pioneering work on social history, Philippe II et la Franche-Comté, and extended it with a book on the relation between geography and history, La Terre et l’évolution humaine, and with studies of Martin Luther and François Rabelais. But he is best known for the fact that in 1929 (together with his friend Marc Bloch) he founded Annales, an historical journal designed to revolutionize the study of history by making historians more aware of the social sciences, in particular of social geography, sociology, and social psychology. Febvre was an uncompromising foe of what he called the “spirit of specialization” and “the idolatry of the fact”, and an unwearying advocate of a problem-oriented history without intellectual frontiers. He put even more of himself into his essays than into his books – essays in which he alternately encouraged and scolded historians into practising the “wider and more human history” for which he was fighting. Some of the most famous of these essays are collected into this volume; for example, “Une question mal posée”, in which he told other historians of the French Reformation that they were asking the wrong questions, and suggested what questions they should ask; an essay on witchcraft written in 1948 and suggesting the lines which research on this subject was to pursue for the next twenty years; and two pioneering essays on what is now called “psycho-historical process”, or the attempt to write the history of changes in sensibility and perception. R.K.P. THE AUTHOR Born at Nancy in 1878, Febvre spent the years from 1898 to 1902 at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1911 he published Philippe II et la Franche-Comté, the book which established him as a leading historian. After serving in the First World War, he went to teach at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and became friendly with Marc Bloch. Together they founded in 1929 a journal to promote the kind of history they both believed in, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, later Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations. Febvre’s most important books include La Terre et l’évolution humaine (1922), Un Destin: Martin Luther (1928) and (produced between 1942 and 1944) Le Problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle, Origène et des Périers, and Autour de l’Heptaméron. After the Second World War he helped to reorganize the École des Hautes Études and became president of its famous “sixième section”, devoted to the social sciences. Lucien Febvre died in 1956. THE EDITOR Peter Burke is Lecturer in History in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the editor of Europe (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), a collection of essays from Annales. ISBN 0 7100 7422 0 Printed in Great Britain Contents Sources vii Introduction: the development of Lucien Febvre ix 1. History and psychology 1 2. Sensibility and history: how to reconstitute the emotional life of the past 12 3. A new kind of history 27 4. The origins of the French Reformation: a badly-put question? 44 5. Dolet, propagator of the Gospel 108 6. Excommunication for debts in Franche-Comté 160 7. Witchcraft: nonsense or a mental revolution? 185 8. Amiens: from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation 193 9. Frontière: the word and the concept 208 10. Civilisation: evolution of a word and a group of ideas 219 11. How Jules Michelet invented the Renaissance 258 12. Religious practice and the history of France 268

xvl, 275 p. 24 cm. historiography. Historiography. France--Historiography. Text