Historians by training, both Bloch too aware o the specificity of and Febvre were their discipline to think that they could completely eliminate the unique, the non-repeatable, phenomenon from the field of observation The whole rereading of the social sciences proposed by the early Annales consisted precisely in testing general theory against specific situations. But this was not all. In the organization of the social sciences within the French university system, history occupied a special place. To a lesser extent so d geography, with which history had a special relationship. While, up to mid-century, sociology was suffering a long purgatory, remaining along with psychology as part of philosophy, while ethnology was confined to the Musée de l'Homme, history, both the innovators and the traditionalists, had chairs, offered possible careers, rewarded intellectual competence. To adopt the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, it disposed an extremely important symbolic capital. of structure that And it is into this institutional graphical innovation the Annales offensive was to insinuate itself. The result of intellectual success was maximum reward and institu- tionalization. The most plausible explanation for the particular shape of the field of social sciences in France is that, for thirty years, they have centered around history.