Annales School in the context of "Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales"

Lucien Paul Victor Febvre (/ˈfɛvrə/ FEV-rə; French: [lysjɛ̃ pɔl viktɔʁ fɛvʁ]; 22 July 1878 – 11 September 1956) was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He was the initial editor of the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (/blɒk/ BLOCK; French: [maʁk leɔpɔld bɛ̃ʒamɛ̃ blɔk]; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936 and 1940 to 1941), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944).

Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the École Normale Supérieure, and from an early age was affected by the antisemitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 and became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. There, he formed an intellectual partnership with modern historian Lucien Febvre. Together they founded the Annales School and began publishing the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Bloch was a modernist in his historiographical approach, and repeatedly emphasised the importance of a multidisciplinary engagement towards history, particularly blending his research with that on geography, sociology and economics, which was his subject when he was offered a post at the University of Paris in 1936.

Pierre Goubert (French: [pjɛʁ ɡubɛʁ]; 25 January 1915 – 16 January 2012) was a French historian. A member of the Annales School, he is considered one of the founders of historical demography and modern rural history. He was a noted specialist on the 17th century, especially of the Ancien Régime societies and mentalities.

Robert Mandrou (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ mɑ̃dʁu]; 31 January 1921 – 16 June 1984), was a French historian, one of the members of the Annales School and the secretary to its journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history") . He was also, with Georges Duby one of the pioneers of what Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80's came to call the "history of mentalities".

Jacques Le Goff (French: [ʒak lə ɡɔf]; 1 January 1924 – 1 April 2014) was a French historian and prolific author specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries.

Le Goff championed the Annales School movement, which emphasizes long-term trends over the topics of politics, diplomacy, and war that dominated 19th-century historical research. From 1972 to 1977, he was the head of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. He was a leading figure of New History, related to cultural history. Le Goff argued that the Middle Ages formed a civilization of its own, distinct from both Classical Antiquity and the modern world.

The history of mentalities, from the French term histoire des mentalités (lit. 'history of attitudes'), is an approach to cultural history which aims to describe and analyze the ways in which historical people thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them, as opposed to the history of particular events or of economic trends. The history of mentalities has been used as a historical tool by several historians and scholars from various schools of history. Notably, the historians of the Annales School helped to develop the history of mentalities and construct a methodology from which to operate. In establishing this methodology, they sought to limit their analysis to a particular place and a particular time. This approach lends itself to the intensive study that characterizes microhistory, another field which adopted the history of mentalities as a tool of historical analysis.

The longue durée (French pronunciation: [lɔ̃ɡ dyʁe]; English: the long term) is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist). It concentrates instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and replaces elite biographies with the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns.