 Longue durée

The longue durée (; ) is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history.It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called "histoire événementielle" ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography.