In 1929, two historians, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, a medievalist and a 16th-century expert, respectively, following their meeting in Strasbourg, founded a French historical journal whose historiographical thinking would forever revolutionise the very concepts of the discipline: Les Annales (d’histoire économique et sociale).

They wanted to transcend the old 19th-century way of understanding and making history, which focused almost exclusively on political history, the individual histories of great men (kings, emperors, and related wars), and the pretentious history of origins. Bloch & Febvre—despite their different personalities—developed a historiographical method that began 'from the bottom up.' It focused on social issues and the relationships between people and their surroundings. This method would later be called 'social history.'

Starting from their respective core interests (geography for Febvre and psychology for Bloch), the two historians integrated other disciplines into their strictly historical studies, such as geography, philosophy, psychology (one of the Annales contributors was a psychologist and a friend of Bloch), and even religion. In this way, they placed history and these subjects, which until then had operated in separate fields, on the same level, providing readers and experts in the field with articles and publications that, for the first time, analysed man, his actions, and the environment in which they were carried out in a profound and extremely critical manner.

Published in January 1929, the first issue of the journal contained a double introduction by Bloch and Febvre on social history and their historiographical method, followed by an article on economic history, then by social and environmental issues, particularly in the Mediterranean and in France. In the very homeland of human rights, Les Annales achieved resounding success (thanks also to the second and third generations of historians, such as Braudel and Le Goff), consolidating its position as a point of reference for 20th-century French historiography and then, thanks to its members, also worldwide.