ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Behind the École des Annales: the Marc Bloch Society between scientific publishing and research support, 1949-1984

• In Event: Researchers and the Management of Scientific Journals in the Mid-20th-Century: Franco-British Perspectives

English Abstract

In 1929, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre created the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. The impact of the École des Annales on world historiography has given rise to countless publications. Less well known, however, are the daily life of this journal and the institutional links that enabled it to establish itself as a historiographical school. Drawing on studies of scientific entrepreneurship, this paper focuses on a particular object that served as an institutional support for the publication of this famous journal: the « Association Marc Bloch ».
Founded in 1949 by Lucien Febvre, André Allix, Charles Morazé, Gabriel Le Bras and Fernand Braudel, the Association had a dual objective: on the one hand, "to ensure the editing of the Annales and the publication of booklets and books", and on the other, "to develop the use of the historical method for the study of civilization and to develop its teaching". The Marc Bloch Association was thus simultaneously the institutional support for a journal and a school. It is this connection that the present paper aims to analyze, over the thirty years of the association's existence, in order to understand how one mission was able to take precedence over the other. Thanks to the mobilization of various sources (the records of the association, the archives of the Ministry of the Interior), it is possible to understand how the journal became a school.

Author

• Gabriel Galvez-Behar, Université de Lille