Y-a-t-il une « école française de l’histoire culturelle » ? Retour sur les origines

While the French school of cultural history adopts this identity in the 1980s, it is in fact the outcome of several approaches that have renewed an old project dating back to the French as well as to the German Enlightenment: i.e. a socio-historical approach issuing from a critical evolution of the Marxist doxa; an approach of political history issuing from a critical evolution of liberal reading patterns; finally and most importantly an approach in historical anthropology, anchored in a critical evolution of the economic hypotheses formulated by the dominant group of the Annales School. It is paradoxical that after WWII the distinctive French characteristic, expressed in the notion of ‘mentality’ has, by way of recovering the concept of culture, facilitated the reintegration of that school into an international movement.