Fernand Braudel: Biography from Answers.com

Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was the leading exponent of the so-called ""Annales"" school of history, which emphasizes total history over long historical periods and large geographical space.

Fernand Braudel was born August 24, 1902, in the small town of Luneville in eastern France. His father was an academic administrator. As a young agrégé in history, he went to Algeria in 1923 to teach in a lycée and to work on his thèse d'état, which was to be on Philip II of Spain and the Mediterranean. His thesis director, Lucien Febvre, made the fateful suggestion that Braudel invert the emphasis - the Mediterranean and Philip II. In 1935 he went to Brazil to teach in the university in São Paulo, Brazil, returning two and a half years later to France just before World War II, with an appointment in the IVe Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (E. P. H. E.) in Paris. He spent the war in German prison camps in Mainz and Lübeck. During this time he wrote from memory his thesis, which has come to be considered the classic exemplary work of the Annales school of history. It was titled The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (two volumes, 1949).

Elected in 1946 to the Collège de France, he joined his mentor, Febvre, as one of the founders in 1947 of the new VIe Section (economic and social sciences) of the E. P. H. E. He created the Centre de Recherches Historiques. On Febvre's death in 1956, he succeeded him as president of the VIe Section and editor of the journal Annales E. S. C. In 1963 he founded the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, a structure housing national and international research groups, and became its administrator. From 1971 to 1984 he served as the president of the Scientific Commission of the annual Study Weeks sponsored by the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica 'Francesco Datini' in Prato, Italy. These were major meetings of economic historians of Europe (both east and west) specializing in the period between the 12th and the 18th centuries. In 1985 he was received in the Académie Française. He was awarded a long list of honorary degrees, memberships in national academies of science, and similar honors. He was widely-read and influential in southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Turkey), Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary), Germany and the Low Countries, Britain, Quebec, and, since the 1970s, the United States, where a research center named after him was established at the State University of New York - Binghamton.

What was the nature of his accomplishment that he achieved so many honors, so much prestige and influence? Obviously he was a great organizer of scientific activity, as the list of his successive activities attests. But more important than that, he symbolized, incarnated, and promulgated an approach to history which responded to and was of great help in interpreting the long-term structures and middle-run cyclical shifts of the real social world.

There are three central themes which one may associate with Braudel as the culminating figure of the so-called Annales school of history. The roots of the Annales school itself, often traced to the work of French historian Henri Berr at the turn of the 20th century, was the creation in a formal sense of the collaboration of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at the University of Strasbourg in 1929, where they founded the journal Annales d'histoire économique et social. The very title of the journal indicates the initial concern, the enormous neglect of both economic and social history in the standard kind of political history that had prevailed in France, Germany, and Britain since the mid-19th century. The Annale sschool was determined to get at the long-term economic and social structures beneath the surface "events" which Braudel was later to describe as "dust." They turned toward the neglected arenas of rural life, demography, social ecology, everyday life, commerce, and mentalities and away from princes, generals, civil servants, and diplomats.

They were pushed by their subject matter to the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and economists for one fundamental reason. It was not only that the subject matter of Annales history was concerned with explaining, as opposed to merely describing, history. It was also that history was no longer seen as a mere collection of "facts." Facts "existed" only as responses to historical "problems." Intellectually, and therefore organizationally as well, the quest became the "totality" of human experience, and therefore the close collaboration of history and the social sciences.

Secondly, and this became Braudel's own great contribution, the Annales school saw time as a social - more than as a physical - phenomenon, whence the idea of a plurality of social times. The great trinity that Braudel constructed and used as the framework for his book on the Mediterranean was structure, conjoncture, événement: long-term, very slowly evolving structures; medium-term, fluctuating cyclical processes; and short-term, ephemeral, highly visible events. Braudel downplayed the time of events and rejected a fourth time, the universal very long-term, as mythical. History was consequently the story of the interweaving of the long-term structures and the cyclical movements (conjonctures).

Finally, 30 years after The Mediterranean, his second great work appeared in 1979 - the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. In it he developed the theme of the three layers of economic life - the bottom layer of everyday life, the middle layer of exchange (the arena of freedom), and the top layer of capitalist monopolies and constraints. This metaphor served to reorganize all of modern history into a constant struggle between the two bottom layers and the top layer of monopoly.

The contribution of Braudel was his sweep and therefore his relevance to the fundamental assessment of large-scale, long-term social change. His intellectual voice was stentorian - a firm line but one uncluttered by dogmatisms. His was a unifying influence, respectful of many strains but impatient of pomposity or foolishness. Above all, Braudel and the Annales school stood as a challenge to the narrow, the petty, the arrogance of power in the name of enduring realities, and the social change that is slow but inexorable.

Life

Braudel was born in Luméville-en-Ornois (as of 1973, merged with and part of Gondrecourt-le-Château), in the département of the Meuse, France, where he also lived with his paternal grandmother for a long time. His father, who was a natural mathematician, aided him in his studies. Braudel also studied a good deal of Latin and a little Greek. He loved history and wrote poetry. Braudel wanted to be a doctor, but his father opposed this idea. At the age of 20, he became an agrégé in history. While teaching at a secondary school in Algeria, 1923-32, he became fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea and everything about it. From 1932 to 1935 he taught in the Paris lycées of Pasteur, Condorcet, and Henry IV. He met Lucien Febvre, the co-founder of the influential Annales journal, who was to have a great influence on his work.

Brazil

By 1900 the French solidified their cultural dominance in Brazil through the establishment of the Brazilian Academy of Fine Arts. São Paulo still lacked a university, however, and in 1934 Francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel to help establish one. The result was formation of the new University of São Paulo. Braudel later said that the time in Brazil was the "greatest period of his life."^[2] He returned to Paris in 1937 and in 1939, he joined the army but was captured in 1940 and became a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck in Germany, where, working from memory, he put together his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II). Part of his motivation for writing the book, he said, was that, as a "Northerner," he had come to love the Mediterranean. After the war, he worked with Febvre in a new college, founded separately from the Sorbonne, dedicated to social and economic history.

Braudel had already started archival research on his doctorate on the Mediterranean when he fell under the influence of the Annales School around 1938 when he entered the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes as an instructor in history. He worked with Lucien Febvre, who would later read the early versions of Braudel's magnum opus and provide him with editorial advice. At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was called up and subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans, 1940-45. While a prisoner of war Braudel was without access to his books or notes; he relied on his prodigious memory to contemplate and draft his work.

In 1949 he was elected to the Collège de France upon Lucien Febvre’s retirement. In 1947, with Febvre and Charles Morazé, Braudel founded the famous Sixième Section for ‘Economic and social sciences’ at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He retired in 1968, and in 1983 was elected to the Académie Française.

In 1962, he wrote A History of Civilizations to be the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, which rejected it ^[3]

Besides La Méditerranée, his most famous work is the three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme, XV^e-XVIII^e (Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800), which first appeared in 1979. [Note: Braudel published the first volume of Civilization and Capitalism in 1967, and it was translated as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 in 1973.]^[4] The entire, three-volume work is a broad-scaled history of the pre-industrial modern world, presented in the minute detail demanded by the school called cliometrics focusing on how people made economies work. Like all his major works, it mixes traditional economic material with much description of the social impact of economic events on everyday life, and gives much attention to food, fashion, social customs and similar areas.

Braudel claims that there are long-term cycles in the capitalist economy which developed in Europe in the 12th century. Cities and later nation-states follow each other subsequently as centers of these cycles. Venice and Genoa in 13th to 15th century (1250–1510), Antwerp in 16th (1500–1569), Amsterdam in 16th to 18th (1570–1733), London and England in 18th and 19th (1733–1896). He argued that "structures" — a word he uses to mean many kinds of organized behaviours, attitudes, and conventions, as well as literal structures and infrastructures — that were built up in Europe during the Middle Ages contributed to or were perhaps responsible for the success of European-based cultures up to the present day. Much of this he appears to attribute to the long-lived independence of city-states, which although later subjected by geographic states, were not always completely suppressed—probably for reasons of usefulness.

One feature of Braudel's work is his evident compassion for the suffering of marginal people.^[5] He points out the obvious: that most surviving historical sources come from the wealthy (or at least literate) classes — those who are either rich or aspire to be. He gives importance to the apparently ephemeral lives of slaves, serfs, and peasants, as well as to the urban poor, and shows their contributions to the wealth and power of their respective masters and societies. Indeed, he appears to think that these people form the real material of civilization. His work is often illustrated with contemporary depictions of daily life, rarely with pictures of noblemen or kings.

La Méditerranée

His first book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II (1949) (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) was his most influential. The Mediterranean legacy in Europe included cultivated crops consumption habits, monotheistic religion, and mental and cultural tools such as the language, laws, and pretensions of the state, as well as urbanism, the prestige of the written word, and the instruments of chronology. The culture ceased to be dominant in the 15th or 16th century, but the new Atlantic culture embodied much of it and extended its elements to Siberia, the Americas, and the Antipodes.^{[citation needed]}

For Braudel there is no single Mediterranean sea. There are many seas—indeed a "vast, complex expanse" in which men operate. Life is conducted on the Mediterranean: people travel, fish, fight wars, and drown in the many seas. Again, the sea gives on to plains and islands. Life on the plains is diverse and complex; the poorer south is affected by religious diversity (Catholicism and Islam), as well as by intrusions - both cultural and economic - from the wealthier north. In other words the Mediterranean cannot be understood independently from what is exterior to it. Any rigid adherence to boundaries is a way of falsifying the situation.

The first level of time, geographical time, is that of the environment, with its slow, almost imperceptible change, its repetition and cycles. Change may be slow, but it is irresistible. The second level of time comprises social and cultural history, with social groupings, empires and civilizations. Change at this level is much more rapid than that of the environment; he looks at two or three centuries in order to spot a particular pattern, such as the rise and fall of various aristocracies. The third level of time is that of events (histoire événementielle). This is the history of individuals with names. This, for Braudel, is the time of surfaces and deceptive effects. It is the time of the "courte durée" proper and it is exemplified by Part 3 of The Mediterranean which treats of "events, politics and people."

Braudel's Mediterranean is a complex of seas but just as important it is also the desert and the mountains. The desert creates a nomadic form of social organization where the whole community moves; mountain life is sedentary. Transhumance is also a factor—that is, the movement from the mountain to the plain, or vice versa in a given season.

Braudel's vast panoramic view used insights from other social sciences, employed the concept of the longue durée, and downplayed the importance of specific events. It was widely admired, but most historians did not try to replicate it and instead focused on their specialized monographs. The book dramatically raised the worldwide profile of the Annales School.

Annales School

Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945. He obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and founded the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which was devoted to the study of history and the social sciences.^[6] In 1962 he and Gaston Berger used Ford Foundation money and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. It was housed in the building called "Maison des Sciences de l'Homme". FMSH stressed international networking to spread the Annales gospel across Europe and the world. After a sort of palace coup in 1968 he had to share power, and in 1972 he gave up all editorial responsibility on the journal (although his name remained on the masthead).

Historiography

Prior to the Annales approach, says Braudel, the writing of history was focused on the courte durée (short span), or on what is known as histoire événementielle (a history of events). Political and diplomatic history has been the prime example of histoire événementielle, which he rejected as too trivial.

His followers admired his use of the longue durée approach to stress slow, and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.^[7] The Annales historians, after living through two world wars and incredible political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress inertia and the longue durée. That is, the continuities of the deepest structures were central to history, beside which upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries. They rejected the Marxist idea that history should be used as a tool to foment and foster revolutions. ^[8] A proponent of historical materialism, Braudel rejected Marxist materialism, stressing the equal importance of infrastructure and superstructure, both of which reflected enduring social, economic, and cultural realities. Braudel's structures, including both mental and environmental frameworks, actually determine the "long-term" course of events in constraining actions on, and by, humans over a duration which escapes the consciousness of the actors involved.

Capitalism

Braudel in his three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Economie, et Capitalisme (1979) (Capitalism and Material Life ), a sweeping study of preindustrial capitalism the world over, returned to economic themes that interested the Annales historians of the 1930s but had otherwise been neglected by the school. There is little original research but instead a synthesis of a great deal of work by many scholars, some of it outdated. Braudel prefers descriptive detail rather than theoretical constructs, avoids all economic theory, and uses statistical data as illustration rather than an analytic tool.

Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists, not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets. He thus diverged from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel's view, under capitalism, the state has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than as the protector of competition usually portrayed. He said capitalists have had power and cunning on their side, and they have been arrayed against the majority of the population.^[9]

Recognition

SUNY Binghamton in New York has a Fernand Braudel Center, and there is an Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil.

Works

La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II 3 vols. (Originally appeared in 1949; revised several times)

* La part du milieu (vol. 1) ISBN 2-253-06168-9

* Destins collectifs et mouvements d'ensemble (vol. 2) ISBN 2-253-06169-7

* Les événements, la politique et les hommes (vol. 3) ISBN 2-253-06170-0

Ecrits sur l'Histoire (1969) ISBN 2-08-081023-5
Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XV^e-XVIII^e siècle

* Les structures du quotidien (vol. 1, 1967) ISBN 2-253-06455-6

* Les jeux de l'échange (vol. 2, 1979) ISBN 2-253-06456-4

* Le temps du monde (vol. 3, 1979) ISBN 2-253-06457-2

Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, 3 vols. (1979) English translation by Siân Reynolds

* The Structures of Everyday Life (vol.1) ISBN 0-06-014845-2

* The Wheels of Commerce (vol. 2) ISBN 0-06-015091-2

* The Perspective of the World ('vol. 3) ISBN 0-06-015317-2

On History (1980), English translation of Ecrits sur l'Histoire by Siân Reynolds
La Dynamique du Capitalisme (1985) ISBN 2-08-081192-4
The Identity of France (1986)
Ecrits sur l'Histoire II (1990) ISBN 2-08-081304-8
Out of Italy, 1450–1650 (1991)
A History of Civilizations (1995)
Les mémoires de la Méditerranée (1998)
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World (UK) and Memories of the Mediterranean (USA): (2001) English translation of Les mémoires de la Méditerranée by Siân Reynolds
Personal Testimony Journal of Modern History, vol. 44, no. 4. (December 1972)

References

Aurell, Jaume. "Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel." Biography 2006 29(3): 425-445. Issn: 0162-4962 Fulltext: Project Muse
Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89, (1990), excerpt and text search
Carrard, Philippe. "Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel," Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2-19 in JSTOR
Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, (1992)
Pierre Daix, Braudel, (Paris: Flammarion, 1995)
Dosse, Francois. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, (1994, first French edition, 1987) excerpt and text search
Giuliana Gemelli, Fernand Braudel (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995)
Harris, Olivia. "Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity." History Workshop Journal 2004 (57): 161-174. Issn: 1363-3554 Fulltext: OUP
Hexter, J. H. "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 1972, vol. 44, pp. 480-539 in JSTOR
Hufton, Olwen. "Fernand Braudel", Past and Present, No. 112. (Aug., 1986), pp. 208–213. in JSTOR
Hunt, Lynn. "French History in the Last Twenty Years: the Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm." Journal of Contemporary History 1986 21(2): 209-224. Issn: 0022-0094 Fulltext: in Jstor
Kaplan, Steven Laurence. "Long-Run Lamentations: Braudel on France," The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 63, No. 2, A Special Issue on Modern France. (Jun., 1991), pp. 341-353. in JSTOR
Kinser, Samuel. "Annaliste Paradigm? The Geo-historical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel." American Historical Review 1981 86(1): 63-105. Issn: 0002-8762 Fulltext: in Jstor
Lai, Cheng-chung. "Braudel's Concepts and Methodology Reconsidered." European Legacy 2000 5(1): 65-86. Issn: 1084-8770 Fulltext: PDF document
Lai, Cheng-chung. Braudel's Historiography Reconsidered, Maryland: University Press of America, 2004. Book PDF file
Moon, David. "Fernand Braudel and the Annales School" online edition
Santamaria, Ulysses, and Bailey, Anne M. "A Note on Braudel's Structure as Duration." History and Theory 1984 23(1): 78-83. Issn: 0018-2656 Fulltext: in Jstor
Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, (1976)
Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Time and Duration: The Unexcluded Middle" (1997) online version

Notes

^ i.e. Fernand Braudel, "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
^ Thomas E. Skidmore, "Levi-Strauss, Braudel and Brazil: a Case of Mutual Influence." Bulletin of Latin American Research 2003 22(3): 340-349. Issn: 0261-3050 Fulltext: Ebsco
^ Richard Mayne, "Translator's Introduction" in Fernand Braudel, "A History of Civilization," (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. xxvi-xxvii.
^ Review Essay by Alan Heston, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism,EH.net,http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/heston
^ Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, translated by Richard Mayne (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).
^ He received an additional $1 million from the Ford Foundation in 1960. Francis X. Sutton, "The Ford Foundation's Transatlantic Role and Purposes, 1951-81." Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 2001 24(1): 77-104. Issn: 0147-9032
^ See Wallerstein, "Time and Duration" (1997)
^ Olivia Harris, "Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity." History Workshop Journal (2004) (57): 161-174. Issn: 1363-3554 Fulltext: OUP
^ Immanuel Wallerstein, "Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down." Journal of Modern History 1991 63(2): 354-361. Issn: 0022-2801 Fulltext: in Jstor

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Preceded by André Chamson	Seat 15 Académie française 1984-1985	Succeeded by Jacques Laurent

Annales School

Historians

First Generation	Marc Bloch · Lucien Febvre

Second Generation	Fernand Braudel · Ernest Labrousse · Pierre Goubert · Georges Duby

Third Generation	Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie · Marc Ferro · Jacques Le Goff · Pierre Nora

Concepts

Longue durée · History of mentalities · History from below · New history

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Fernand Braudel

Contents

Life

Brazil

La Méditerranée

Annales School

Historiography

Capitalism

Recognition

Works

References

Notes

External links