Lucien Febvre

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Lucien Febvre (July 22, 1878, Nancy - Saint-Amour, Jura, September 11, 1956) was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history.

Born in Nancy, Febvre was influenced early on by geographer Vidal de la Blache during his time at the Ecole Normale Superieure (1899-1902) and earned his doctorate in history in 1911 after submitting a thesis on Phillip the Second and the Franche-Comté. Shortly thereafter he took a position at the University of Dijon.

Febvre fought in World War I and took up a position at the University of Strasbourg in 1919 when the province was returned to France. In 1929, he founded the journal Annales d'histoire, économique et sociale with Marc Bloch, from which the name of their distinctive style of history was taken. In 1933 Febvre was appointed to a chair at the Collège de France. He published vigorously throughout the thirties and early forties, although World War II interrupted his work. The war also resulted in the death of Marc Bloch, and so Febvre became the man who carried the Annales into the post-war period, most notably by training Fernand Braudel and cofounding the VI section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, later known as EHESS. Febvre died in 1956.