Longue durée

The longue durée (French pronunciation: ​[lɔ̃ɡ dyʁe]; English: the long term) is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their 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), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for élite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography.

The approach, which incorporates social scientific methods such as the recently evolved field of economic history into general history, was pioneered by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the Interwar period. The approach was carried on by Fernand Braudel in the second part of the century: Braudel took stock of the current status of social studies in crisis, foundering under the weight of their own successes, in an article in 1958, "Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée". Among the works which Braudel remarked on as examples of the longue durée was Alphonse Dupront's study of the long-standing idea in Western Europe of a crusade, which extended across diverse European societies far beyond the last days of the actual crusades, and among spheres of thought with a long life he noted Aristotelian science. In the longue durée of economic history, beyond, or beneath, the cycles and structural crises, lie "old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic." In this sense the history of the longue durée that informs Braudel's two masterworks offers a contrast to the archives-directed history that arose at the end of the 19th century and a return to the broader views of the earlier generation of Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt or Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges.

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