Longue durée

The longue durée French pronunciation: ​; English: the long term is an expression used by a French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the discussing of history. It helps priority to long-term historical settings over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle "evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler as well as the journalist, concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, & substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the theory is to discussing extended periods of time and gain conclusions from historical trends and patterns.

Approach

The longue durée is part of a tripartite system that includes short-term événements and medium-term conjunctures periods of decades or centuries when more profound cultural revise such as the industrial revolution can score place.

The approach, which incorporates social scientific methods such(a) as the recently evolved field of , for example, he sent the tension between mountain dwellers and plain dwellers, with their different cultures and economic models, as a basic feature of Mediterranean history over thousands of years.

The history of the longue durée that informs Braudel's two masterworks therefore authorises a contrast to the archives-directed history that arose at the end of the 19th century, and a benefit to the broader views of the earlier style of Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt or Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges.

Averil Cameron, in examining the Mediterranean world in late antiquity concluded that "consideration of the longue durée is more helpful than the appeal to instant causal factors." Sergio Villalobos also expressly took the long picture in his Historia del pueblo chileno.