Lucien Febvre

Lucien Febvre (Nancy, July 22, 1878 - Saint-Amour, Jura, September 26, 1956) was one of the most important French historians. Focusing on the modern age, he is remembered for the role he played in establishing the Annales school which he founded in 1929 with Marc Bloch.

Biography

Febvre came from a family of university students, in a city like Nancy with an intellectual tradition. He did some brilliant studies. He was early influenced by the work of the geographer Vidal de la Blache during his stay at the École Normale Superior (1899-1902). He obtained his doctorate in history in 1911 after defending his thesis Felipe II and Franche-Comté , on the relations between economy and society, already introducing the weight of mental representations, which will be the innovative shade of him. A short time later he was at the University of Dijon.

Febvre fought in World War I, and began his activities at the University of Strasbourg in 1919, when the Alsatian province returned to French rule, having lost it in 1870. He was working there in 1929, when he and Marc Bloch founded the publication Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, around which the so-called Annales School crystallized, of enormous importance in the historiography of the XX. In 1933 Febvre obtained a professorship at the College of France, from where he had a notable influence.

He published numerous titles during the 1930s and early 1940s, but World War II interrupted his work. The war also resulted in the violent death of his friend and colleague Marc Bloch by the Germans, and Febvre became the man who headed the Annales school in the postwar period, being its greatest disciple and heir the historian Fernand Braudel, father in turn of many later scholars. The recent heroization of Marc Bloch (for having been a member of the Resistance and witness to the French collapse in 1940), has left his colleague in the background a bit.

Febvre also created the sixth section of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in 1947, which has given shelter to several generations of outstanding historians up to the present.

Trajectory

When Febvre was twenty years old, in 1898, the methodical school (of Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos) dominated in France, which gave the document a fundamental role in establishing the facts and marking the objective course of their discipline. The decline of this current will facilitate the new multidisciplinary impulse of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, with the breaking down of partitions between geographers, economists, historians and sociologists.

Lucien Febvre wrote a work of considerable size, which marked his generation, such as his thesis on Philippe II et la Franche-Comté, as well as his great books on the century XVI; Martin Luther, un destin (1928), or the extensive and widely read Le probleme de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle (1942). His general books on History as a discipline still count for a lot: Combats pour l'histoire (1953), Pour une histoire à part entière (1962).

Febvre criticized the so-called «historical history» of his predecessors, which focused on the facts of the «great ones» (biographies, dates, diplomatic acts, battles) and focused on brief times and «events». For him, this was an unbalanced vision that ignored social movements structured around «long-lasting times», which are part of human life but nevertheless constitute an essential part of what was positively called in the XIX as "what really happened" ("wie es eigentlich gewesen", according to von Ranke). Today, this new perspective, which succeeded in introducing itself after many battles, seems quite natural to us.

Works

• Philippe II et la Franche-Comté. Étude d'histoire politique, religieuse et socialeParis, Honoré Champion, 1911.
• Notes et documents sur la Réforme et l'Inquisition en Franche-ComtéParis, 1911.
• Histoire de la Franche-ComtéParis, Boivin, 1912.
• La Terre et l'évolution humaine, Paris, Albin Michel, « L'évolution de l'Humanité », 1922.
• A Destin. Martin LutherParis, PUF, 1928. Tr. Martin LutherMexico, FCE, 1975.
• Civilisation. Évolution d'un mot et d'un groupe d'idéesParis, Renaissance du livre, 1930.
• Le Rhin. Problèmes d'histoire et d'économieParis, Armand Colin, 1935.
• Encyclopédie française, 11 vols. appeared between 1935 and 1940, director of the edition.
• Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. The religion of Rabelais]Paris, Albin Michel, 1947. Tr.: The problem of unbelief in the sixteenth centuryMexico, UTEHA, 1959.
• Origène et Des Périers ou l'énigme du Cymbalum MundiParis-Geneva, Droz, 1942.
• Autour de l'Heptaméron. Amour sacré, amour profaneParis, Gallimard, 1944.
• Les Classiques de la liberté: MicheletLausanne, Traits, 1946.
• Combats pour l'histoireParis, Armand Colin, 1952. Tr. Fighting for history, Altaya, 1999, ISBN 978-84-487-1960-9
• Au cœur religieux du XVIe siècleParis, SEVPEN, 1957. Tr. Erasmus, Counter-Reformation and Modern Spirit, Orbis, 1985 (EHESS articles, posthumously approved by Braudel), ISBN 978-84-270-0071-1.
• L’Apparition du livreParis, 1958, with Henri-Jean Martin.
• Pour une histoire à part entièreParis, SEVPEN, 1962.
• Europe, the genesis of a civilizationCritics, 2001, ISBN 978-84-8432-252-8.

Fonts

• G. Bourdé, H. Martin, Les Écoles historiquesSeuil, 1983.
• Bertrand Müller, Bibliographie des travaux de Lucien FebvreArmand Colin, 1990.
• Peter Burke, The French Historic RevolutionGedisa, 1993.
• Lapeyre, Henri (1970). «A grand historien: Lucien Febvre (1878-1956)». Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto (in French) 8 (22/23): 151-162. Consultation on 8 March 2016.