ABSTRACT
“What A said to B, what C heard from D, that’s diplomatic history.” This little ditty seems to say it all about writing from diplomatic documents about the foreign policy of the great powers and the origins of great events such as the world wars. It reflects a common attitude of historians of the 1920s who were not among those who engendered the great controversy about the origins of the First World War, the Great War, as it was called. In view of these unfortunate events, a small school of diplomatic historians, mostly American and British, had dominated and almost remolded the history writing of their generation in the pursuit of presumed revelations from diplomatic documents, for the most part correspondence between officials of the various foreign ministries of the great powers. The biographer of Stanley Baldwin, G.M. Young, called it a history based on “what one clerk wrote to another clerk.” This withering judgment rang in the ears of the generation who were inventing the field of diplomatic history, so much so that their students of the next generation would insist on renaming the field, calling it “international history,” and reorienting its approach to its subject matter. Fernand Braudel, founder of the Annales school and inspirer of the World Systems Theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi and others, proposed to found a new history in flight from this history of facts and dates, of documents and events, a “delusive smoke that fills the minds of its contemporaries.” He struggled to get free of the events of the difficult years (1940–45) when he was a prisoner of the Germans, to release himself and the minds of all the French from gloomy contemplation of the tide of histoire evénementielle. 1
