PERSON
Lucien Febvre
French historian (1878–1956), co-founder of the Annales School with Marc Bloch, mentor to Braudel, and the most forceful advocate of history of mentalities — the study of the habits of thought that structure what a civilization can and cannot imagine.
Lucien Febvre was the elder statesman of the Annales School, co-founding the Annales journal with Marc Bloch in 1929 and directing it alone after Bloch's 1944 execution. His most influential work, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1942), argued that Rabelais could not have been an atheist in any modern sense because the mental tools for modern atheism did not yet exist in his historical moment — the founding case for the history of mentalities. Febvre was Braudel's dissertation director, the man who read the Mediterranean manuscript that emerged from prisoner-of-war camps, and the intellectual godfather who placed Braudel at the Collège de France.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Febvre's intellectual project centered on what he called l'outillage mental — the mental toolkit of a historical period, the concepts, categories, and habits of thought that structured what members of that period could and could not think. Not what