Lucien Paul Victor Febvre

Lucien Paul Victor Febvre (born July 22, 1878, Nancy, France—died Sept. 27, 1956, Saint-Amour) was a French historian of the early modern period and organizer of major national and international intellectual projects. In his books and editorial efforts, Febvre embraced a “global” history that rejected all forms of pedantry and determinism.

Febvre, the son of a professor from the mountainous eastern border region of the Franche-Comté, was educated in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure (1899–1902), where he graduated as agrégé in history and geography. His first books, Philippe II et la Franche-Comté: étude d’histoire politique, religieuse et sociale (1911), a brilliant local as well as global study of an isolated, strife-ridden province during the second half of the 16th century, and Histoire de Franche-Comté (1912), a broad investigation of the region based on a problem-centred approach to historical analysis, displayed his talents in art and literature as well as the social sciences. After teaching in two secondary schools, he was appointed in 1912 to the University of Dijon.

During World War I Febvre performed valiantly at the front. He rose in rank from sergeant to captain, was decorated four times, received the Croix de Guerre, and was admitted to the Legion of Honour. In 1919 he was appointed to the newly liberated University of Strasbourg, where he remained until 1933. While there he produced La Terre et l’évolution humaine, introduction géographique à l’histoire (1922; A Geographical Introduction to History), examining the interplay among contingency, logic, and necessity in human history, and Un Destin: Martin Luther (1928; Martin Luther: A Destiny), placing the fiery reformer within the context of the socioeconomic, political, and religious elements of his age. In 1929 Febvre and his younger colleague Marc Bloch founded the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, a journal that championed a more dynamic and human history. Febvre was a popular, if forbidding, professor whose lectures and reviews were laced with candour, wit, and barbs at traditionalists.

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In 1933 Febvre left Strasbourg for the Collège de France, the most independent and prestigious institution in the French academic system. There he continued editing the Annales with Bloch and also initiated the publication of the 21-volume Encyclopédie française (1935–66), a major government-sponsored enterprise aimed at rivaling the German, Italian, and Soviet encyclopaedias. Under the Nazi occupation during World War II, Febvre stayed at his teaching post in Paris, edited the Annales alone, and occasionally retreated to his beloved country house in the Franche-Comté. During this dark time in his and France’s history, Febvre produced a virtuoso work of historical psychology. Entering the stormy spiritual environment—a universe “inhabited by demons”—of François Rabelais 400 years earlier, in La Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (1942; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais) Febvre probed the mental apparatus of Renaissance France as expressed in its words, feelings, and mental structures.

After the liberation, Febvre achieved national and global prominence at the head of several major institutions, journals, and international projects. He cofounded and directed the Sixth Section devoted to the social sciences of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1947). He also was director of the Revue d’histoire de la deuxieme guerre mondiale (1950) and the Cahiers d’histoire mondiale (1953), as well as leader of the French delegation to UNESCO. Without Bloch, who had joined the Resistance and was killed by the Germans in 1944, Febvre revived and renamed their journal Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations. In the postwar period the journal became a vanguard of original, interdisciplinary scholarship and the house journal of the Annales school of history. In Combats pour l’histoire (1953) Febvre’s essays reinforced the mystique of a crusader for original ideas, a versatile and contentious intellectual, and a severe, witty iconoclast. Neither a systematic nor a consistent thinker, his principal contributions were his acute critical skills and generous inspiration to younger scholars, especially Fernand Braudel, who succeeded him as editor of the Annales, head of the Sixth Section, and leader of the Annales school. Posthumous publications include L’Apparition du livre (1958; The Coming of the Book, with Henri-Jean Martin), a collaborative study of the impact of printing on the intellectual, social, and religious life of the 15th and 16th centuries; Pour une histoire à part entière (1962; Life in Renaissance France [1977]), five lectures displaying Febvre’s eclecticism and aggressive intellectual style, covering methodology, philosophy of history, and various aspects of Renaissance civilization; and A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (1973), a valuable selection of essays and reviews written between 1930 and 1950.