Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel (born Aug. 24, 1902, Luméville, France—died Nov. 28, 1985, Haute-Savoie) was a French historian and author of several major works that traversed borders and centuries and introduced a new conception of historical time. As leader of the post-World War II Annales school, Braudel became one of the most important historians of the 20th century.

Braudel’s family was descended from Lorraine peasants. The son of a schoolteacher who later became a headmaster, Braudel acquired a cosmopolitanism unusual for his generation. After studying in Paris at the Lycée Voltaire and the Sorbonne (now part of the Universities of Paris I–XIII), he taught for nine years at secondary schools in Constantine and Algiers, in Algeria (1923–32), where he developed his fascination with the Mediterranean as a prime subject of history. He returned to France to teach at secondary schools in Paris (1932–35) and afterward taught at the University of São Paolo in Brazil (1935–37) before joining the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1937. His mentor was the noted early modern historian Lucien Febvre, under whose influence Braudel shifted his dissertation from a conventional study of Philip II’s Mediterranean diplomacy to a grand examination of the “complex totality” of the Mediterranean region in the late 16th century.

While serving as a lieutenant in the French army in 1940, Braudel was captured by the Germans. During his next five years in prisoner-of-war camps in Mainz and Lübeck, with his phenomenal memory his main resource, Braudel produced drafts of the massive work that established his international reputation, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II). First submitted as a doctoral thesis to the Sorbonne in 1947 and subsequently published as a two-volume book, this geohistorical study centred not only on the conflict between Spain and the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century but also on the region’s history, geography, religion, agriculture, technology, and intellectual climate.

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After World War II Braudel emerged as Febvre’s protégé and heir. He became codirector (with Febvre), then director of the journal Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations (1946–85) and was elected professor at the Collège de France in 1950 (a position he held until 1972). In 1956 he succeeded Febvre as president of the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études; under his direction it became a leading centre for social science and historical research. In 1962 he founded and administered the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Thanks to the centralized character of French higher education, Braudel’s dynamic figure dominated historical scholarship in postwar France. A generous mentor, he also aided numerous historians from southern and eastern Europe, South America, and Africa, further extending his influence over international scholarship. He received more than 20 honorary foreign doctorates, gave his name to an international research centre at the State University of New York at Binghamton (opened 1976) in the United States, and was admitted to the prestigious French Academy in 1984.

Under Braudel’s direction the Annales school acquired a global reputation for promoting a new form of history. It replaced the study of leaders with the lives of ordinary people and supplanted the hallowed trio of politics, diplomacy, and wars with inquiries into climate, demography, agriculture, commerce, technology, transportation, and communication, as well as social groups and mentalities. Annales history further challenged the reductionism of the Marxists and the structuralism of the social sciences, its main competitors at the vanguard of postwar historiography. It aimed at a “total history” that relied heavily on quantification and also yielded dazzling microstudies of villages and regions. Braudel’s most significant contribution was his three-tiered view of historical time. Conceived while he was in captivity in 1944, it consisted of very long, practically immobile environmental time (the longue durée); the medium time of economies, societies, and cultures; and the short time of discrete events (the subject of histoire événementielle). Far from a simple flow, human experience was registered on all three clocks, operated with speed-ups and delays, and left a vast range of physical as well as mental traces.

Testing his concepts, Braudel produced a giant, three-volume study of the world between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution, based on a three-tiered arrangement of its material foundations, economic functioning, and capitalist developments, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2–3, 1979; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century). (The titles of the three individual volumes are Les Structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossible [The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible], Les Jeux de l’échange [The Wheels of Commerce], and Le Temps du monde [The Perspective of the World].) Incorporating geography, sociology, and economics, Braudel produced a sweeping study of the evolution of the European and world economy, encompassing an immense span of human activity and development. A nonrigid structuralist, Braudel acknowledged variations in the systems he constructed and admitted complexities that belied the most rigorous analysis. Despite the mass of detail, his was a unified vision, and he wrote in elegant prose. In his final, unfinished, three-volume work, L’Identité de la France (1986; The Identity of France), he applied the geohistorical method to his homeland, presenting a history that favoured the physical mutations of its diverse regions over the unruly lives and thoughts of their inhabitants.

Like all who treat huge subjects and periods, Braudel often relied on others’ scholarship; his zeal for detail revealed occasional gaps and misinterpretation. Because he minimized the importance of political and military power in human affairs, Braudel was blamed for the apolitical stance of the postwar Annales school and its members’ reluctance to study contemporary history or engage in the moral and ideological issues of the Cold War era. Nevertheless, his reputation as a prodigious scholar and discipline builder remains secure.

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