This unit of reference, this self-proclaimed community, constitutes a problem. What is there in common between the small marginal group of professors of the University of Strasbourg, who, at the end of the 1920's, took up arms against the citadel of the university and against its truths and the powerful network of scholars supported as of the 1950's by the VIe Section of the Fcolc Pratique des Hautes Etudes? Between the unified project of the early Annales in point of fact, thc intense focus of the first twenty years of the journal was perhaps never surpassed and the apparent splintering of orientation of the last ten years? If one examines the content of the Annales by ten-year segments, one might entertain legitimate doubts about its continuity, for it is not automatically discernible. I shall try to reply, at least by offering some hypotheses, to these doubts.