Page "Annales School" Paragraph 5

Braudel was editor of Annales from 1956 to 1968, followed by the medievalist Jacques Le Goff.

However, Braudel's informal successor as head of the school was Le Roy Ladurie, who was unable to maintain a consistent focus.

Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe.

By the 1960s the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world.

Influence spread out from Paris, but did not come in.

Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history.

However, Paris ignored the powerful developments in quantitative studies underway in the U. S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political and demographic research in those countries, while France fell behind.

An attempt to require an Annales-written textbook for French schools was rejected by the government.

By 1980 postmodernist sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives.

As Jacques Revel notes, the success of the Annales School, especially its use of social structures as explanatory forces contained the seeds of its own downfall, for there is " no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real.

" The Annales School kept its infrastructure, but lost its mentalités.