Still it is true that Annales has changed. For the past ten years, the journal has taken to organizing in a systematic fashion interdisciplinary confrontations around limited fields. As early as 1967, Braudel organized debates on structural anthropology and on the attempts of model-building in the field of political analysis. Since then, a certain number of special issues, or, more and more, groups of articles coming from very different scientific horizons on the same subject, have tried to provoke - without any ecumenical intent, I insist confrontations between historians, anthropo logists, demographers, economists, etc. The very large space given in Annales to the analysis of cultural systems, following its early domination by econ- omic and social history, appears to me less the exploration of a sort of third level of knowledge, a grander level inaccessible to the questions and demands of historians, than the raising of a new set of questions posed to historians by thcir new partners(anthropologists, specialists in textual analysis, sociologists, psychoanalysts). We hone thus to reintroduce in the journal a concern with contemporary time, so important for Bloch and Febvre, so surprisingly absent from our historical reflection since the late 1930's. Must we, as some have done, charge the journal of scattering in all directions? It is not for me to judge. But it is perhaps useful to recall that this dispersal of subject matter can only be perceived to exist if one assumes the norms of a cumulative history, which assigns itself the task of capitalizing patiently the most complete material of positivist history, that is, a kind of history which appears to me foreign to the very spirit of Annales. Annales today emphasizes, on the contrary, experimentation and interrogation. In 1930, Bloch and Febvre had already defined the specificity of Annales in this way. In their premeditated infidelity, via necessary renovation, the present editors of Annales believe they have not been too unfaithful to the original definition of history as problem.