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In spite of the promise many contemporaries perceived in Annalistes" activities, and the number of institutions lending these iconoclasts shelter, doubt about and acts of resistance to Annales bulked large even inside France, and often with greater vigour than internationally. Direct competition for position, resources and students in a centralized university system intensified scepticism, which, equally, reflected personal and disciplinary "moods", both in the psychological sense of a 'spiritedness' generated by the heart and mind and in the sense of the grammatical concept referring to the way in which speakers inflect verbs in order to express their attitude in relation to other propositions. ¹ Historiographical challenge was not new inside the Hexagon, and indeed their point often coincided with urges "to stigmatise rival and competing approaches, or to declare obsolete older practices".² Motive cannot mask, however, what the lapidary text and archival record preserve. For although contestation couched its discourse in the vocabulary of destruction and rebuttal, it resulted from the implicit or partial basic agreement with aspects of Annaliste proposals. In other words, shared sensibility or entanglement. So, like the shifting allegiances characterizing what journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce termed the "eternal anarchy of the French" in politics, opponents sometimes bit a hand sharing their own sustenance as often as they sought nourishment from elsewhere.³

DOI: 10.1057/9781137294982_4

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