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By Root 1717 0

the Second World War was held in Paris in 1950. Before the war the historical establishment had ruled supreme – for by driving the best of their social sciences into emigration fascism if anything reinforced it. The innovators had at best managed to establish a foothold in a broadly defined zone of ‘economic and social history’, as in France and Britain. However, the war had so disrupted the old structures that for a brief moment the rebels had actually taken charge. The congress, organized by an Annales man, Charles Morazé, shortly but politely to be eliminated from power in the review by the rising star Fernand Braudel, was planned on heterodox lines, essentially by the French, with some input by the Italians and some from the Low Countries and Scandinavia, plus by some very uncharacteristic Anglo-Saxons: Postan himself, the Australian historical statistician Colin Clark, and a Marxist ancient historian. The Germans were, of course, virtually absent, even though it was not known at the time quite how much their eminent historians had been involved in the Nazi system. The historians of the USA attended the congress in droves – when have Americans not been keen on visiting Paris? – but they had plainly not been much consulted about the planning. Apart from one report on ancient history, and a last-minute Texan disquisition on world history as frontier history, they were kept outside the main planned sections. The Soviet Union and all its dependencies were absent, with the one exception of Poland. They all turned up in full force in 1955 after Stalin’s death, at the next international congress in Rome. Times were tense in those months immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War when the (French) President of the International Committee said gloomily that ‘the congress would provide future historians of historiography with an important record of the mentality of historians after the crisis of the second world war … while they waited for the third’.3

One innovation in which I found myself involved directly was a section on Social History, probably the first in any historical congress. In fact, there was as yet very little of it, at all events for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor was it at all clear in the minds of the planners what the term implied. It was obviously more than the somewhat narrow study of labour and socialist organizations which had previously had first claim on the name (that is the Amsterdam International Institute for Social History, holder of the Marx–Engels manuscripts). Equally obviously it should be concerned with labour, with social classes and social movements, and with the relations between economic and social phenomena, not to mention ‘the reciprocal influences between economic facts and political, juridical, religious, etc. phenomena’.4 To my surprise, since I had barely published my first article in a learned journal, I found myself nominated as the official chairman of the ‘Contemporary’ session, presiding over a splendid report by a crippled Marxist scholar on fifteenth to sixteenth-century Poland. I assume Postan must have proposed me, since nobody else could have. My session was attended by an odd collection of anomalies and the unestablished, soon due to move closer to the centre of the historical world. There was J. Vicens Vives, a lone visitor from Franco’s Barcelona in search of intellectual contact, who was to become the inspirer of his country’s historians. There was Paul Leuillot, secretary of the Annales, who saw himself as spokesman for Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, as well as myself, about to become co-founder of Past & Present. There were the often brilliant French researchers with uncompleted but vast theses, such as Pierre Vilar and Jean Meuvret, and therefore not yet integrated into the university system, who would shortly be fitted into Braudel’s new rival to the Sorbonne, the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (now Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). There were the Marxists and their critics. In short, the face of historiography