Braudel, Fernand (1902–1985)

Fernand Braudel was a leader of the group of French historians associated with the journal Annales, who took a long view of history (longue durée) in which the emphasis was on historical structures rather than [Page 118]events. Instead of the traditional approach to history that focused on the sequence of political events surrounding rulers of nations—their wars, laws, alliances, and succession—the Annales historians tried to understand the gradual changes in the everyday lives of people throughout the world. Braudel was distinctive in charting the economic life of people rather than of nation-states; much of his writing focused on the everyday consumption of goods and on the practices of local production rather than on monetary or mercantile systems.

After an early career teaching in Algeria and Brazil, Braudel returned to Paris in 1938 and began research for what was to become his magnum opus; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. He wrote much of it while a German prisoner of war, defended it as a thesis in 1947, and published it in 1949, with a second revised edition in 1966, which was translated into English in 1972 (1995). In this work, Braudel began to explore how the material conditions of existence, such as the slowness of transport and communication lines, constrained the actions of rulers and generals. The structures that affect everyday life are not exclusively political but range beyond the nation-state and even the empire to cover larger geographical areas—such as the Mediterranean Sea—and involve environmental features such as mountains, mineral deposits, and rainfall. He writes of dividing “historical time into geographical time, social time and individual time” (1995, 21) and developed an approach to history that explained events not in terms of the personal qualities of individuals but in the circumstances under which they could act.

Braudel is most important to the study of consumption as a historian of the almost imperceptible pace of change in the lives of ordinary people up until the advent of modern communications in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In 1979, his account of “material civilization,” subtitled “The Structures of Everyday Life” (English trans. 1992), became the first in a three-volume work with the overall title of Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century. In it, he describes the flow of gradual changes through the preindustrial world in terms of population, food, clothes, shelter, money, and towns. Material culture is not designed or constrained by political boundaries but contributes to what Braudel calls “civilizations”—groups of people who share cultural characteristics. He records, for example, how wheat was grown in many parts of the world, but in Europe it was a staple crop characteristic of the regional civilization. Other grains, vegetables, and pulses were grown but, because only the rich regularly ate meat, dependence on bread led to chronic scarcities when wheat crops failed.

Typically, Braudel moves between these broad generalities and the specificity of archival detail, such as the lease granted to Carthusian monks in Picardy in 1325 to arbitrate in disputes over the distribution of manure for improving wheat yields (1992, vol. 1, 116). Braudel spells out the lack of light, fresh water, and sanitation, domestic amenities that we take for granted, but he does not dismiss fashion as a frippery indulged in only by the rich. He reports the contrasts among ordinary folk in seventeenth-century Flanders and Germany who sometimes wore ruffs and hats trimmed with gold and silver to express taste and distinction but at other times were characteristically dirty and lacking shoes. Braudel suggests that fashion among ordinary people began in 1350, as men's tunics became short and tight and women began to wear close-fitting bodices cut with a large décolleté (317). As well as food, houses, and fashion, he explores technology, weaponry, energy, and mobility as the background for the discussion in later volumes of the more traditional historians' themes of trade, industrialization, and state politics. Braudel's work continues to serve as a reminder to all those interested in consumer culture that it is socially and historically embedded in the everyday lives and material practices of people in processes extending far beyond those of markets, exchange, advertising, selling, and buying.

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