Fernand Braudel

French historian

• Born: August 24, 1902
• Birthplace: Luméville, France
• Died: November 28, 1985
• Place of death: Paris, France

Braudel expanded significantly the nature and scope of historical research by reintegrating history with the social and behavioral sciences and by devising a distinctive analytical theory and methodology to justify and make possible a major shift in the ways in which historical research was conducted. He distinguished three main levels or layers of temporal experience to be found in history: the geographic, the socioeconomic, and the individual.

Early Life

Fernand Braudel (fehr-nahn braw-dehl), born in a village in eastern France, received his early education in Paris, where his father taught mathematics in a secondary school and became a headmaster. Young Braudel’s interest in history was first aroused by an instructor who taught the history of France as high drama. Later, at the Sorbonne in Paris, Braudel specialized in historical studies, partly as an adolescent revolt against his father’s desire that he become a mathematician like himself. Braudel completed his undergraduate education in 1923, still undecided about his vocation.

Over the next decade (1923-1932), he taught history at the secondary level in French Algeria, following closely the prescribed curriculum based on the history of politics and of great figures. Having decided as early as 1923 to pursue doctoral studies, Braudel chose as his dissertation topic the policies of the sixteenth century Spanish monarch Philip II. Subsequently, from 1935 to 1937, he taught at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Braudel’s sojourn in the New World, coupled with his long residence in North Africa, contributed to a gradual broadening of the scope and focus of the dissertation topic. He found himself drawn increasingly to the history of the whole Mediterranean basin. The years 1927-1933 proved to be critical for the final transformation of Braudel’s original concept. When in 1927 he informed the eminent French historian Lucien Febvre of his project on Phillip II, Febvre responded, “Why not the Mediterranean and Philip II?” From this point, Braudel became aware that Philip II attracted him less and less, and the Mediterranean more and more.

Meanwhile, Febvre, with his renowned colleague Marc Bloch, had in 1929 founded in France a new historical journal, called Annales, devoted explicitly to countering the long-prevailing view of history as consisting primarily of politics and great men. The editors hoped to promote through their new journal the cultivation of what Bloch described as “all the sciences involved in the study of man and society,” especially the interaction of history with sociology, economics, and geography. This is the vision of a new interdisciplinary approach to history that Braudel imbibed while still teaching in Algeria. Henceforth he sought consciously to transcend the political, diplomatic, and military focus of conventional narrative history. In the process he would become for a time the most influential historian in the Western world.

Life’s Work

At first, however, Braudel was discouraged by the predominantly political and diplomatic character of the archival sources he found in Spain and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. He recalled vividly the deep satisfaction and joy he felt when in 1934 he discovered in the Dubrovnik archives in Yugoslavia the stuff of the new history he hoped to write. There were the names and precise routes of hundreds of commercial ships, along with their cargoes, the prices of the various commodities, and associated details of maritime commerce ranging over most of the sixteenth century. In these masses of economic and social data, Braudel says, he “saw the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century for the first time.” To duplicate these and similar documents elsewhere, he had adapted an old motion-picture camera to provide him with up to three thousand manuscript pages a day. This is the first known use of the microfilm technique for scholarly purposes.

By the fall of 1939, Braudel, having mastered the sources necessary to complete his task, had devised a full outline of a panoramic study of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Before he could begin the writing, however, the horrors of World War II enveloped most of Europe, including his native France. Mobilized as an officer in the French army, Braudel was captured early in 1940 and found himself confined for the remainder of the conflict in a German prisoner-of-war camp. It was partly to distance himself from the bitter reality of the fate of France and partly to occupy the long hours of forced inactivity that Braudel decided to write his history of the Mediterranean.

Over the five years of his imprisonment, Braudel wrote slowly, from memory, without a single note, the first draft of the book. While this feat was remarkable by any standard, he had immersed himself in the archival and other sources of his great subject and pushed the project doggedly to completion. Released at war’s end, in 1945, Braudel polished his draft, filled in the references, and in 1947 submitted the result to the Sorbonne to satisfy the requirements for the doctorate in history. It was published in 1949 in two volumes under the title La Méditerranée et la monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , 1972). Twenty-six years had elapsed from conception to completion of the project.

The book was immediately hailed as a masterpiece of historical scholarship, the closest and most impressive realization thus far of the Annales ideal of a “total history” that sought to encompass all the major facets of human experience. Braudel’s originality lay not only in his formulation of a new paradigm for understanding human history but also in his coining of a special terminology to express his insights.

In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel distinguished three main levels or layers of temporal experience to be found in history: the geographic, the socioeconomic, and the individual. Of these he clearly regarded the geographic component as most important. Braudel described this “geohistorical” layer as consisting essentially of the enduring major physical features of the Mediterranean basin: its mountains, plains, valleys, climate, and, above all, the great sea itself. Change in these phenomena was only very gradual, almost imperceptible, over millennia. The “long duration” that characterized the temporal dimension of these environmental factors effectively dwarfed the particular human activities that occurred in and around the Mediterranean, including the political and military conflicts of Spain’s Philip II with the Turkish sultan in the sixteenth century.

A second, more superficial, level of temporal experience lay for Braudel in slow-changing economic and social movements, rhythmic patterns discernible in human “economies, societies, and civilizations” that formed, in turn, collective trends of “intermediate duration,” able to be reckoned in cycles of five to fifty years and more. Finally, like “crests of foam on the waves” were the comparatively short-term events of conventional political and diplomatic history, the transient phenomena of daily life that depended for their significance on the broader geohistorical and socioeconomic contexts within which they occurred.

Braudel defined the relationship among the principal temporal levels of his paradigm as a dialectic process marked by the continual interaction of the natural and human dimensions of experience. The fundamental problem, in his view, was “how to convey simultaneously both the surface history [of events] that holds our attention by its continual dramatic changes and that other, submerged history.”

The history that Braudel described in his book on the Mediterranean world took place at three distinct hierarchical levels, of which the most meaningful by far was the deep structural base composed of the geographic and climatic features complemented by the socioeconomic cycles and other patterns found in human societies and subject to quantitative analysis. He consistently minimized the significance of the third level of individual people and events, regarding them as locked inexorably within the iron frame of their physical and socioeconomic environments. Braudel alludes to this determinist theme in the concluding words of the book: “When I think of the individual I . . . see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he . . . has little hand. . . . In historical analysis . . . the long run always wins in the end.”

This was the chief conclusion that Braudel conveyed to his readers and especially to dozens of younger scholars coming to professional maturity after midcentury. After 1950, he deepened and extended his thesis through further publications as well as in seminars conducted at the College of France in Paris, where he assumed an endowed professorship in history. In 1956, Braudel succeeded Febvre as president of the prestigious “Sixth Section” (history) of the School of Higher Studies (École Pratique des Hautes Études). The following year he became sole editor of the journal Annales. These positions not only assured a permanent institutional base for the new French history but also placed Braudel at the very center of it over the next quarter century and beyond. His reputation and influence spread across the Western world. He was elected to the French Academy in 1984.

Braudel’s other major work was a social and economic history of the world from the late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. He entitled this trilogy Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XV-XVIII siècle (1967-1979; Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century , 1982-1984). In it he traced the gradual emergence of the market economy of modern capitalism out of the age-old agricultural subsistence economy of the Middle Ages. He left unfinished at his death a history of France.

Significance

Braudel’s most notable achievements lie not only in the theory and methodology of his approach to history but also in the institutional base that he provided for the Annales movement that he personified for nearly two generations. Braudel sought to reenergize historical studies by effecting a fresh synthesis of the perspectives and methods of history with those of related disciplines such as sociology, economics, and human geography. He was convinced that the resulting cross-fertilization would allow historians to deepen and enliven their understanding of the past, far beyond the narrow political and diplomatic frame of “great events” history.

Closely related to this belief is Braudel’s contention that the standard descriptive history of persons and events can be meaningful only against the backdrop of the environmental structures that surround it. It is the mountains, the oceans, and the long-term patterns of climate that shape and constrain human life with binding force across the centuries, effectively supplanting the human agent as the chief element in social explanation. Braudel considered his most important innovation to be the uncompromising shift away from the individual and the event of short-term history through primary concentration on the long and intermediate perspectives.

Finally, Braudel, in advocating a “total” or “global” history, extended permanently the scale of the historical enterprise, in space as well as time, in methodology as well as subject matter. He urged historians to take for their proper study not only human life in all its rich diversity but also, in particular, the close analysis of those large impersonal forces of history that most affected the human condition. In the process, and above all through his majestic history of the Mediterranean, Braudel profoundly changed the ways in which students of the human past now approach their subject.

Bibliography

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. The classic work on which, above all, the Annales paradigm of history rests. Any serious attempt at assessing Braudel’s achievements as a historian should begin here.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memory and the Mediterranean. Translated by Siân Reynolds, edited by Roselyne de Ayala and Paule Braudel. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2001. The first American edition of Braudel’s classic study of the region from prehistory through classical antiquity.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Personal Testimony.” Journal of Modern History 45 (Fall, 1972): 448-467. Braudel’s own account of the genesis of his historical theories. Particularly illuminating for the early career and the strong encouragement he received from his friend and mentor Febvre.

Cannon, John, ed. The Historian at Work. London: Allen & Unwin, 1980. Contains a clear, very informative discussion of the leading features of Braudel’s thesis by the noted British social historian Peter Burke. Most valuable for the careful examination of the more serious criticisms leveled against Braudel.

Green, Peter. “Fruits of the Sea.” New Republic, January 28, 2002. A review of Braudel’s book Memory and the Mediterranean, which appeared in its first American edition in 2001. This lengthy article places the book into context by providing information about Braudel’s life and career.

Hexter, Jack. On Historians: Some Reappraisals of the Masters of Modern Historiography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. A probing, detailed analysis of Braudel’s leading ideas and contributions to the “new history” by an eminent American scholar. Balances a thorough critique with full appreciation of what Braudel achieved. The best brief examination of the subject in English.

Iggers, Georg G. New Directions in European Historiography. Rev. ed. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. Sets Braudel’s achievement firmly in the context of the vigorous intellectual debates on the nature of history and society that flourished at the turn of the century. Traces the specific influences on Braudel’s thought.

Lai, Cheng-Chung. Braudel’s Historiography Reconsidered. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004. Contains sixteen essays in which Lai analyzes Braudel’s ideas, methodology, and principal books from the perspective of an economist.

Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm. Foreword by Fernand Braudel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976. The major work in English on the Annales theory of history. Braudel’s work receives major attention throughout. A generally sympathetic account by an American scholar with close ties to the Annales school.