Braudel, Fernand (1902–1986)

Fernand Braudel was a preeminent French historian and historiographer. He studied history at the Sorbonne; taught the subject in Algeria (1923–1932), Paris (1932–1935), and Brazil (1935–1937); and was appointed to the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE, Section VI), Paris, in 1937. As a German prisoner of war from 1940 to 1945, he wrote from memory his thesis, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean at the Time of Philippe II, 1949, 1st English ed., 1972). It immediately established [Page 131]Braudel's reputation, his place in the French Annales tradition, and led in 1949 to his appointment at the Collège de France.

The journal, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, founded in 1929, changed its name, emphasizing its scope, to Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations in 1946. The movement exhibited three interconnected characteristics. The writing of history was to be totale and problem oriented, rather than idiographic (unlike traditional history, such as Leopold von Ranke's, 1795–1886, “as it really happened”), resulting in an interdisciplinary outreach to all the sciences of man. Attention broadened from the political and the diplomatic to the economic and the social, clear in the original title of the journal.

Finally, and particularly as a consequence of La Méditerranée, the longue durée, the time of the longterm structures of social reality, was privileged over the time of events (only “dust,” for Braudel). Braudel's elaboration of time as a social construct rather than a simple chronological parameter appeared in his 1958 “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée.” He conceived time as durée (duration or term, a unit of time), differentiating a plurality of social times. The short term is the time of events (for instance, political history). The medium term is that of conjunctures (such as economic cycles). The long term (of structures) characterizes the ever-so-slowly changing regularities of social life. Braudel avoided the nomothetic trap of ahistorical generalization prevalent in the traditional social sciences, however, by insisting that the long term is not eternal. Although scholars considered La Méditerranée to epitomize the Annales approach, Braudel arrived at his conception of history independently; it was a product of his very personal efforts to seize the spectacle of the Mediterranean that he had come to know over two decades of archival research.

In Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme: XVe–XVIIIe siècle (1967–1979; English 1982–1984), Braudel looked at the world from three levels: everyday life, exchange, and, at the top, capitalism. Moreover, he reconceptualized space, analogous to his rethinking of time. His économie-monde (rendered in English as “world-economy” by Immanuel Wallerstein and deployed as a key concept of world system analysis) refers not to the whole world of interacting national economies but to a single, large-scale segment that forms an autonomous “world” unto itself.

With great sweep of vision, Braudel was at once an innovator, organizer, and institution builder. In 1956, he became editor of Annales and president of Section VI, EPHE, the center of Annales scholarship. From 1962, he was chief administrator of the Maison des sciences de l'homme. Braudel was elected to the Académie française in 1984.

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