Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (112 page)

Davidson took care to emphasise that much remained to be discovered in Africa. But he achieved his aim, adding to the contributions of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, who were showing that Africa had a voice and a history. More, Davidson was helping flesh out the greater history of mankind across the globe – his book also explored the way stone tools and metal technology spread. The history of Africa, like history elsewhere, was shaped by larger forces than mere individuals.
¹⁴

The extent of those larger forces of history – economic, sociological, geographical, and climatological – rather than the actions of significant individuals, has been the main shift in history as an academic discipline throughout most of the century. And within this overall paradigm the two most prolific schools of thought have been the French
Annales
historians and the British Marxists.

The 1960s saw the publication of three enormously influential books from the so-called
Annales
school of French historians. These were:
Centuries of Childhood,
by Philippe Ariès (1960);
The Peasants of Languedoc,
by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie (1966); and
The Structures of Everyday Life,
by Fernand Braudel (1967), the first volume of his massive, three-part
Civilisation and Capitalism.
The 1960s were in fact the third great flowering of the
Annales
school – the first had been in the 1920s and the second in the 1940s.

Of the three authors
Fernand Braudel
was by far the most senior. He was older and was a close colleague of the two founders of the
Annales
school,
Lucien Febvre
and
Marc Bloch.
These two men came together at the University of Strasbourg in the 1920s, where they founded a new academic
journal, the
Annales d’histoire économique et social.
As its name implied,
Annales
from the first sought to concentrate on the social and economic context of events rather than the deeds of ‘great men,’ but what set it apart was the imagination that Febvre and Bloch brought to their writing, especially after they both returned to Paris in the mid-1930s.
¹⁵

Bloch (a resistance hero in World War II) wrote two books for which he is remembered today,
The Royal Touch
and
Feudal Society. The Royal Touch
was concerned with the belief, prevalent in both England and France from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, that kings – by the mere act of touching – could cure scrofula, a skin disease known as ‘the king’s evil.
¹⁶
But Bloch’s study ranged much further than this curious belief; it drew on contemporaneous ideas in sociology, psychology, and anthropology in search of a context for what Bloch called the
mentalité
of the period. In
Feudal Society,
published on the eve of World War II, he attempted to re-create the historical
psychology
of feudal times, something that was completely novel.
¹⁷
For example, he explored the mediaeval sense of time, better described perhaps as an ‘indifference’ to time, or as a lack of interest in the exact measurement of time. In the same way, Febvre’s
Rabelais
explored the
mentalité
of the sixteenth-century world. By an analysis of letters and other writings, the author was able to show, for example, that when Rabelais was denounced as an atheist, his critics didn’t mean what we would mean today.
¹⁸
In the early sixteenth century,
atheist
had no precise meaning, simply because it was inconceivable for anyone to be an atheist as we would recognise the term. It was, instead, as Peter Burke confirms in his history of the
Annales
school, a general smear word. Febvre also explored time, showing for example that someone like Rabelais would not have known the year in which he was born, and that time was experienced not in a precise way, as measured by clocks, but rather by ‘the length of an Ave Maria’ or ‘the flight of the woodcocks.”
¹⁹
It was the ability of Bloch and Febvre to get ‘inside the heads’ of individuals remotely removed in time that readers found exciting. This
felt
much more like history than the mere train of events that many historians wrote about. And it applied even more to Braudel, for he took the
Annales
approach much further with his first book,
The Mediterranean,
which appeared in 1949 and created a bigger stir.
²⁰

This book was conceived and written in extremely unusual circumstances. It had begun as a diplomatic history in the early 1920s. Then in 1935–7 Braudel accepted an appointment to teach at the University of São Paolo, and on the voyage back he met Febvre, who ‘adopted him as
un enfant de la maison.’
²¹
But Braudel didn’t get round to writing the book until he was a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck. He lacked notes, but he had a near-photographic memory, and he drafted
The Mediterranean
in longhand in exercise books, which he posted to Febvre.

The Mediterranean
is 1,200 pages long and divided into three very different sections. In the first part, Braudel treats his readers to 300 pages on the geography of the Mediterranean – the mountains and rivers, the weather, the islands and the seas, the coastlines and the routes that traders and travellers would have taken in the past. This leads to a discussion of the various cultures
in different geographical circumstances – mountain peoples, coastal dwellers, islanders.
²²
Braudel’s aim here is to show the importance of what he called
la longue durée —
that the history of anywhere is, first and foremost, determined by where it is and how it is laid out. The second part of the book he called ‘Collective Destinies and General Trends,’ and here the focus of his attention was on states, economic systems, entire civilisations – less permanent than the physical geography, but still more durable than the lives and careers of individuals.
²³
His gaze now centres on change that occurs over generations or centuries, shifts that individuals are barely aware of. Exploring the rise of both the Spanish and the Turkish Empires, for example, he shows how their growth was related to the size and shape of the Mediterranean (long from west to east, narrow from north to south); he also showed why they gradually came to resemble each other – because communications were long and arduous, because the land and the available technology supported similar population densities.
²⁴
And finally, there is the level of events and characters on the historical stage. While Braudel acknowledges that people differ in character, he thinks those differences account for less than traditional historians claim. Instead, he argues that an understanding of how people in the past viewed their world can help explain a lot of their behaviour. One example he makes much of is Philip II’s notorious slowness in reacting to events. This was not just due to his personality, says Braudel. During Philip’s reign Spain was financially exhausted (thanks again to geographical factors), and communications were slow – it could take two months to travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Philip’s deliberation was born as much of Spain’s economic and geographic situation as anything.
²⁵

Whereas Bloch’s books, and Febvre’s, had created a sensation among historians,
The Mediterranean
broke out of its academic fold and became known well beyond France. He himself was very ambitious for this to happen.
²⁶
People found the new type of information it contained every bit as fascinating as the doings of monarchs and prime ministers. For his part, Febvre invited his
enfant de la maison
(now turned fifty) to join him in an even more massive collaborative venture. This was a complete history of Europe, stretching over four hundred years, from 1400 to 1800, exploring how the mediaeval world became the modern world, and using the new techniques. Febvre said he would tackle ‘thought and belief,’ and Braudel could write about material life. The project hadn’t gone very far when Febvre died in 1956, but Braudel carried on, with the book eventually taking almost as long to complete as did his earlier work. The first volume of
Civilisation et capitalisme,
known in English as
The Structures of Everyday Life,
appeared in 1967; the last in 1979.
²⁷

Here again Braudel’s conception was threefold – production at the base, distribution, and consumption at the top. (This was Marx-like, rather than specifically Marxist.) In the realm of production, for example, Braudel explored the relationship of wheat and maize and rice to the civilisations of the world. Rice, he found, ‘brought high populations and [therefore] strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered’ in Asia.
²⁸
On the other hand, maize, ‘a crop that demands little effort,’ allowed the native Americans much free time
to construct their huge pyramids for which these civilisations have become famous.
²⁹
He thought that a crucial factor in Europe’s success was its relatively small size, plus the efficiency of grain, and the climate.
³⁰
The fact that so much of life was indoors fostered the development of furniture, which brought about the development of tools; the poorer weather meant that fewer days could be worked, but mouths still had to be fed, making labour in Europe relatively expensive. This led to a greater need for labour-saving devices, which, on top of the development of tools, contributed to the scientific and industrial revolution. The second volume,
The Wheels of Commerce,
and the third,
Perspective of the World,
followed the rise of capitalism. Braudel’s central point was that geography governed raw materials, the creation of cities (the markets) and trade routes. There was in other words a certain inevitability about the way civilisations developed, which made Europe, rather than Asia, Africa, or America the cradle of both capitalism and science.
³¹

Braudel’s influence lay not just in his books but in the inspiration he offered to others (he died in 1985). Since World War II, the
Annates
school has spawned a very successful series of investigations, among them
The Peasants of Languedoc; Montaillou; Centuries of Childhood; The Hour of Our Death; The Coming of the Book; The Identity of France; The Great Cat Massacre; Catholicism from Luther to Voltaire; The Birth of Purgatory;
and
The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie.
Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie was widely regarded as Braudel’s most brilliant pupil.
³²
He too was interested in
la longue durée,
and in
The Peasants of Languedoc
and
Montaillou
he sought to recreate the
méntalité
of mediaeval Europe. Montaillou, situated in the Ariège region of southwest France, was in an area that had been ‘home’ to a number of nonconformists during the Cathar heresy of the fourteenth century. These heretics were captured and interrogated by the local bishop, and a written record of these interrogations has survived. This register was used by Ladurie, who interpreted it in the light of more recent advances in anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
³³
Among the names on the register of interrogations, twenty-five came from one village, Montaillou, and for many readers Ladurie brought these individuals back to life. The first part of his book deals with the material aspects of village life – the structure of the houses, the layout of the streets, where the church was.
³⁴
This was done with wit and imagination – Ladurie shows, for instance, that the stones were so uneven that there were always holes in the walls so that families could listen to their neighbours: privacy was unknown in Montaillou. But it is in the second part of the book, ‘An Archaeology of Montaillou: From Body Language to Myth,’ that the real excitement lies. Here we are introduced, for example, to Pierre Maury, a gentle shepherd, but also politically conscious, to Pierre Clergue, the obnoxious priest, too big for his boots and the seducer of Béatrice des Planissoles, impressionable, headstrong, and all too eager to grow up.
³⁵

The
Annales
school has proved very influential. Its attraction for many people lies in the imaginative use of new kinds of evidence, science added to a humanity that provides a technique to bridge the gap across the centuries, in such a way that we can really understand what happened in the past, and how people thought. The very idea of recreating
mentalités,
the psychology of bygone ages,
is ambitious, but for many people by far the most intriguing use of history, the closest to time travel we have ever had. A second reason why the
Annales
form of history has proved popular is its interest in ‘ordinary’ people and everyday life, rather than in kings and parliaments, or generals and armies. This shift of interest, very marked during the century, reflected the greater literacy achieved in Western countries at the end of the nineteenth century; poorer readers naturally wanted to read about people like themselves. It was also yet another fruit of World War I – that disaster affected the lives of ordinary people far more profoundly than it affected the generals or the leaders. Finally, the shifts in history writing formed part of a general trend: with the growth of mass society, of new media and popular forms of entertainment, the worlds of ‘ordinary’ people were a focus of interest everywhere.

But in some quarters there was a more specific reason, and this found an outlet particularly in Britain, in the work of a small but very influential group of Marxist historians. The
British Marxist historians
were less original than their French counterparts but more coherent in their aim, which was essentially to rewrite British history from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘from the bottom up’ (a favoured phrase, which soon became hackneyed). Most of its seminal works were produced in or near the 1960s:
Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century,
by Christopher Hill (1958);
Primitive Rebels,
by Eric Hobsbawm (1959);
The Age of Revolution,
by Hobsbawm (1962);
Studies in the Development of Capitalism
(1963), by Maurice Dobb;
The Making of the English Working Classes
(1964) by E. P. Thompson (‘the pivotal work of British Marxists,’
³⁶
‘probably the most important work of social history written since the Second World War’);
Labouring Men,
by Hobsbawm (1964);
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution,
by Hill (1965);
A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century,
by Rodney Hilton (1966);
Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530–1780,
by Hill (1967);
The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England,
by Hilton (1969);
Bandits,
by Hobsbawm (1969);
God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution,
by Hill (1970); and
Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Movements and the English Rising of 1381,
by Hilton (1973). Three men stand out in this history of the lower orders, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson. The issues they focus on are the way feudal society changed to capitalist society, and the struggle which produced the working class.