Lucien Febvre
A new kind of history?
Dermot Fenian
Lucien Febvre was one of the pioneers of the French revolution in historical studies which has transformed the writing of history in the twentieth century. Where Ranke and the great nineteenth century historians studied the relations between states and nations, Febvre and his colleagues turned to the submerged and ever changing world of human communities, in their regional geography, their material and religious environments, their collective mentalites, their fortunes and catastrophes. Together with Marc Bloch, and in the pages of the journal Anna/es, a new kind of geographical and social history came into existence. Febvre was its propagandist and its pioneer. Yet he did not, after his first incursion into the regional and political history of the France-Comte, devote himself predominantly to the task of writing social history.
His career was interrupted by the First World War. He served as a captain in the machine gun corps. He returned to a chair of history at Strasbourg, with a hatred of politics and warfare, and of the kind of history which chose such subjects as its themes. But he remained a combatant. His inaugural lecture mapped out an impassioned strategy for a new kind of history, a history without disciplinary or national frontiers, a history which would take its bearings from the social sciences, and its theme as civilisation in the largest sense.
The exhaustive research into a recomposidon of social history he left to Marc Bloch and his disciples. He wrote about how to write it, in La Terre et ?evolution humaine, and in a glittering array of essays which appeared between 1929 and his death in 1956. For the rest, his books and essays were about civilisation: studies in the social and religious sensibility of the sixteenth century, and in particular the sensibility of the 'rising' bourgeoisie. His Luther was about a man who provided for the spiritual needs of a 'new' social class, the emerging townsmen; a giant who lost his vocation and shrank in stature when he turned to politics. Febvre's analysis did not extend to the political Luther of the years from 1525. The founder of Lutheranism was not allowed to be a Lutheran.
But were the townsmen really new '? And why did Luther turn to politics? The history of the German Reformation is inseparable from its alignment with political forces and its development into an organised religion; but Febvre was by now an avowed opponent of political history. His historical civilisation belonged to a world without the state; his historical religion to a world without the Church. But how is it possible to write a history of the sixteenth century with neither? His Rabelais was a book about a religious man, an ' Erasmian,' a spokesman for the via media. Atheism was not a sixteenth century phenomenon. Again, his work served as a corrective to some modish nonsense, and a stimulus to his contemporaries to think afresh. But it also helped to perpetuate a myth. Erasmianism, in spite of Febvre, did not for long remain the guiding influence upon the minds of the sixteenth century European bourgeoisie, Why not? It was broken by the Reformation. Lutheranism, Calvinism, Tridentine reformed Catholicism: men wanted to join Churches in the sixteenth century. The formation and reformation of their Church was what they cared about. Febvre was not unaware of this. But his programmatic campaign against traditional history precluded him from the task of explanation„ At this point of tension his mind turned away from explanation to polemic: a polemic against the ecclesiastical, political, military, institutional history of Europe, and against what he called "the men of 1870," the intellectual revengers of the Franco-Prussian war, the xenophobic nationalist historians of the post-Ranke generation, whose narrow doctrines and perspectives were to be obliterated by the school of Anna/es. And so they were, or rather overwhelmed, in a series of great works which began to emerge after the second war: Braudel's Mediterranean, Goubert's Beauvais, Le Roy Ladurie's Paysans de Languedoc.
The school of Anna/es still has its giants. But the clamour for une histoire totale has also bred its opposite: a proliferation of microscopic monographs prompted by the same spirit of specialisation,' the same narrowing of horizons, against which Febvre and his colleagues protested so effectively. Perhaps the terms of this protest need to be reversed. There are signs that the social history of the kind pioneered by the French School is now in danger of freezing into a history without humans: a history without the element of time, a history of tables, pull-out charts and graphs resembling the Manhattan skyline.
' A selection of Febvre's essays has recentlybeen published, under the title A New Kind of History.* One may wonder if this is still an accurate description. It is perhaps rather a collection of manifestoes from the period between the two world wars and after. Its editor, Peter Burke, is right to say that Febvre is not well known in the English speaking world. He tends to be confused with Georges Lefebvre, the historian of an earlier French Revolution. No doubt Lucien Febvre deserves his meed of recognition. His essays crackle and sparkle with Gallic wizardry and caustic rhetoric. They are lively, unreliable, prejudiced and always readable, even in translation (and Febvre has been tolerably well served by his translator). Ufie question Mal pose: Les origines de la Reforme francruse ' emerges as 'The origins of the French Reformation: a badly-put question?' But there was no query at the end of Febvre's original title; the only questions he allowed himself were rhetorical ones: and in this devastatingly rhetorical essay of 1929 he established a landmark in Reformation studies.
But is it a reliable landmark? And was the landscape which it now unfolded so uncharted? To read this essay more than forty years on is to arrive at the conclusion that it does a. grave injustice to one of the greatest French historians of the present century, Pierre Imbart de la Tour. The second volume of Imbart's Les Origines de la Reforme was reviled in a review by Febvre when it appeared. Its' successor, Imbart's masterpiece, L'Evengelisme, was published in 1914, an unlucky year for everyone, including writers. L'Evangelisme was reviewed in the learned journals, once in France and once in Sweden. Febvre, no doubt, was too busy to read scholarly journals. It is just possible that he never read L'Evangelisme. But if not, why not? In Germany and Italy between the wars, and later in America and Britain,--it was recognised as a seminal work, and one which slowly transformed the study of the sixteenth century Reformations. What Imbart brought to light in his masterpiece of 1914 was something which historians had hitherto failed to recognise in the search for origins: a missing third dimension in the religious history of the sixteenth century — the non-Lutheran, unTridentine world which had come into existence by the eve of the Reformation; a world * A Neu, Kind of History from the writings of Lucien Febvre, edited by Peter Burke, translated by K. Folca (Routledge and Kegan Paul £6.00). which possessed a momentum distinguishable from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in the sense that those movements became, in the ensuing thirty years, mutually exclusive possibilities. In France, Imbart s work seems to have passed virtually without recognition. But it was exactly to this missing 'third world ' of sixteenth century religion that Febvre triumphantly pointed in his resounding essay of 1929, with its claim, which brought the academic world to its feet, that until now the whole question of Reformation origins had been mis-stated, mai posee. It would probably be wrong to speak of plagiarism on Febvre's part. Doubtless the intellectual revolution had occurred within hls own mind, and he certainly had the capacitY to transmit it with effect. But why did his essay relegate Imbart's second volume to a couple of dismissive footnotes? And why was there no mention of Imbart's third volume; L'Evangelisme, which was to be so influential everywhere except in France? Lucien Febvre has been hailed as a great historian. The contrast with Imbart is in every way instructive. Imbart's writing was the product of long years of assiduous study arid reflection. His history is all-encompassing; his prose is stately and deliberative. Febvre's hls,' tory moves always at top speed; his prose Is charged with urgent rhetoric; his writing is a style of permanent warfare. Everything he wrote after his first book was a manifesto, an combat. Such writing does not survive the test, of time. He lacked the settled character 01 mind, the capacity for patient labour, the ut' timately contemplative habit of mind which ls the hallmark of the truly great historians Ranke, Mommsen, Mark Bloch. His essaYs should be read with a mind alert to the polemic which gave rise to them. They have pungency and character, and they retain the flavour of their time and their tradition. We read how Michelet (one of Febvre's most honoured mentors) 'invented the Rena's' sance '; how the debt-ridden peasants of the Franche-Comte suffered excommunication through the unreformed church courts controlled by comfortable lay creditors living la the towns; what the archives of Amiens tell us about the artistic and religious history of the place and of the period. The Amiens essay Is 'not a complete, painstaking and detailed study' but an example' designed to 'suggest . . a subject of research ' to those volun' teering to come forward in the pursuit of 'a truly living history of French civilisation.' The, capacity to arouse, prompt, organise, direct. this was the essence of Febvre's genius. fie always remained a captain of artillery' directing fire against the enemy and ea: couraging his troops. Some of his troops weal on to become statesmen. Lucien Febvre has his abiding memorial in the dedication to Braudel's Mediterranean: 'a Lucien Febvre, toujours present.' Toujours? Well, yes, as the inspiration of this greatest-of all the products of the Anna/es revolution. But that ' wider and more humane history' for which Febvr,e so eloquently argued, the study of man la time' of which Bloch wrote, necessarily coll. pels the reconciliation of the traditions dern" ing from Ranke and the school of ilenates. Perhaps it is as well that historians have never completely ceased to recognise that the lives, of human communities are decided not on') by their geography and environment, but els.° by their politics, their institutions, their tiatives, and the movement of events themselves: that whole histoire evenementielle se distrusted even by the greatest of the An' nalistes. The best writing of recent years gives ample opportunity to perceive that the 041 traditions, the German and French schools 0 historical analysis, can encounter each other to their mutual advantage, not that the men
of 1870 are safely dead. of 1870 are safely dead.
Dermot Fenton is a fellow of Gonvi d
lle an
Caius College and lecturer in history in the University of Cambridge.
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