FEBVRE, LUCIEN (1878–1956)

French historian.

The historian Lucien Febvre left his intellectual imprint on both historiography and the French intellectual world of his time. Born into a Burgundian family in Nancy, he always remained strongly attached to his regional origins, even though he spent most of his life in Paris. He was a student at the É cole Normale Supérieure from 1898 to 1902 and was a member of the student generations strongly marked by the Dreyfus affair. He also sympathized with the labor movement, and from 1907 to 1909 he wrote for a socialist paper in Besançon. Later he was close to the Socialist Party of Léon Blum (1872–1950), but he also maintained contacts with the Radical Party and among the Communists. His closest friend, for example, the psychologist Henri Wallon (1879–1962), was a member of the French Communist Party. Their relationship broke off only during the Cold War.

Febvre was mobilized into the army on 3 August 1914 and served at the front until February 1919, with the exception of several months of hospitalization and convalescence after being seriously wounded. By the end of the war he was a captain in command of a machine gun regiment in the Rhineland. However, unlike his colleague and friend Marc Bloch (1886–1944), he felt no nostalgia for those years of "butchery," as he took to calling them: he thus always advocated policies whose aim was to avoid any return to war. He abandoned this pacifist stance only during the Spanish civil war, when he argued for aiding the Republicans, and later at the time of the Munich pact, when he criticized the opportunistic politics of the government of É douard Daladier (1884–1970).

In 1911 Febvre defended his thesis on the politics of the Spanish king Philip II (r. 1556–1598) in Franche-Comté. He was first appointed professor of Burgundian history at Dijon; in 1919 he was one of the first professors to be named to the new University of Strasbourg. There he met the medievalist Marc Bloch, eight years his junior, with whom he shared the project of renewing historiography based on a critical conception strongly influenced by the sociology of É mile Durkheim (1858–1917) and the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918). Together they founded a new interdisciplinary journal that revolutionized the human sciences, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, whose approach combined socioeconomic history with a new type of cultural history that would come to be known as the "history of mentalities." But Febvre, who divided his time and energies between the Annales and the Revue de synthèse historique, which Henri Berr (1863–1954) had headed since 1900, had a tendency to spread himself thin. Thus, in 1932 he took on the editorship of another major endeavor, the Encyclopédie française, of which some ten volumes appeared by 1939. The aim of this project, in which Febvre demonstrated a singular talent for "making connections," comparable to that of Denis Diderot (1713–1784), was to present the most advanced state of human knowledge in all the scientific disciplines.

Alongside these tasks, in which he had help from efficient collaborators such as the writer Pierre Abraham (born Pierre Bloch, 1892–1974) and the Austrian-born historian Lucie Varga (1904–1941), Febvre taught at the Collège de France, to which he had been elected in 1933, and wrote a great many articles and book reviews that enabled him to participate directly in the debates of his times. His own works, by contrast, took time to come to fruition: after Un destin: Martin Luther (1928) and Le Rhin (1931; The Rhine), his subsequent books (on François Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Bonaventure Des Periers) took much longer than anticipated and were completed only during the occupation, when the author enjoyed long periods of solitary work. It was during this same period that relations between Febvre and Marc Bloch soured over the issue of whether publication of the Annales should continue under the regime imposed by the Germans. Whereas Bloch, after some hesitations, argued for suspending publication until the end of the war, Febvre was prepared to adapt it, as a matter of form, at least, to the new conditions to preserve this forum for French historical science; he consequently asked Bloch to remove his ("Jewish") name from their common enterprise. Bloch finally agreed to this strategy, but only after bitter debate; from May 1942, he signed his contributions, which remained numerous, with a pseudonym, "M. Fougéres."

After the liberation, Febvre was the sole editor of the Annales and headed many other projects: a revitalized Encyclopédie française, the sixth section (social and economic sciences) of the É colé tudes, created in 1948, and several other journals and series. He was also a member of the Langevin-Walon Commission for educational reform from 1945 to 1948 and was one of the French delegates at the founding of UNESCO. In short, until his death he was a central figure in the French academic world and the founding father of the "new" historiography that, thanks to Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) in particular, soon became a sweeping international success.

See alsoAnnales School; Bloch, Marc; Braudel, Fernand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burke, Peter, ed. A New Kind of History and Other Essays. London, 1973.

Candar, Gilles, and Jacqueline Pluet-Despatin, eds. Lucien Febvre et l' "Encyclopédie Française." Special issue of Cahiers Jean Jaurès, no. 163/164 (2002).

Massicotte, Guy. L'histoire problème: La méthode de Lucien Febvre. Paris and Québec, 1981.

Müller, Bertrand. Lucien Febvre, lecteur et critique. Paris, 2003.

Schöttler, Peter. Lucie Varga: Les autorités invisibles: Une historienne autrichienne aux "Annales" dans les années trente. Paris, 1991.

Peter SchÖttler