Let me start by justifying the title I have chosen for my paper. When Immanuel Wallerstein proposed that I deal with the perspective of the nnales, I hesitated, and then suggested a slightly different subject: continuities and discontinuities in what has come to be called the Annales school. This was for at least two reasons. The first was one of the principle. This intellectual movement has lasted for more than half a century. It may seem that its continuity has been selfevident to the participants, opponents, and observers. But we ought not to accept this continuity and this homogeneity as a given; I think that the purpose of these days of reflection is to consider this subject in some detail. There is a legend attached to the Annales It is a black legend of a journal which, in its early years, was combative and badgering, and which defined its role as jostling a university system whose rules and customs were archaic. This biack legend has faded with the suc- cess of the undertaking. It would be unwise, however, to think it has completely vanished, for it constantly reappears in different forms. But there is most of all a golden legend, sustained by an intellectual and an institutional success which none can deny, and which consecrates both the founding fathers, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and the continuity of a tradition. I hope that no one will take this affirmation to be in the slightest way ironic. It is after all remarkable that such an intellectual movement, which was so collective, and involved so many people, has so explicitly adopted an identity and continues to irsist upon its origins. Until the end of the 1960's, editorials, anniversary articles, and obituary notices tirelessly repeated that the Annales were a project carried on by a specific scientific community.