"Le travail qui se fait": Managerial activity in the Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (1929-1938)

Abstract

This article analyzes the devices of managerial work to which Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre resorted for the administration of the Revue des Annales between 1929 and 1938. Identified through the letters exchanged between them, such devices are interpreted as potential ways of apprehending the constrictions that weighed on the journal and its directors, as well for perceiving how Bloch and Febvre handled such constrictions. The aim is to demonstrate the potential of these sources and problems, which can shed light on the less visible — although not less important — the journal’s working mechanisms in its first years and the objective conditions engraved on these mechanisms. In that sense, the instability that marked the Annales during this period becomes a key element to the understanding of some crucial directorial decisions that conveyed a particular type of cohesion to the journal, which could be related to how the ‘myth’ of the Annales was built.