The creation of the Annales de Géographie (1891): University Strategy and Human Geography

Abstract

Annales de Géographie is one of the rare periodicals left from the time of geographical enthousiasm in the 1870s- 1890s. The journal has illustrated for almost a century the vitality of the ccFrench geographical schoob; during the last twenty years, new French serials have animated the debates in the field. The founding of Annales de Géographie can be explained as a strategy to break away from the lobbies linked to geographical societies or to economic and rnilitary interests. The journal has contributed in a decisive manner to the institutionalization of an academic geography whose purpose was, in the context of the Third Republic, both scientific and pedagogic. Annales de Géographie and the group of scholars from the Ecole normale supérieure that supported the journal around Vidal de la Blache were also creative by the invention of c<human geography,, and of the duality between physical and human geography.