The Transformations of Fernand Braudel

In May 1967 I met Fernand Braudel for the first time. At the end of my ‘audience’ I asked him what constituted the greatest asset for a historian. I expected something along the lines of Leopold von Ranke’s famous formulation (‘Good history requires three things: critical use of the material, insight into how things happen, and good fortune in describing them’). Braudel disagreed. He answered my question without hesitation: ‘imagination’. It was Braudel’s imagination that made him the 20th century’s greatest Western historian.

It is now 40 years since Fernand Braudel died on 27 November 1985. Four decades on, his reputation does not rest upon his teaching, although for 20 years he trained several cohorts of historians at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Nor does it rest upon his editorship of the Annales, as he once claimed, for it was but one journal – however influential – among many. Nor yet does it rest upon his publishing career: he took 25 years to publish his first book, which did not appear until 1949 when he was 45 (he would have found it hard to get tenure at any university in the United States). He published only one more in his lifetime, when he was 79. No: his reputation stands on that first book alone, The Mediterranean.

First view

Braudel was born in Lorraine in 1902 but he grew up in Paris. He wanted to be a doctor, but his father opposed it (the training took too long), so at the Sorbonne he read history instead. After graduating in 1923 he travelled to Constantine in Algeria to take up a job as a schoolteacher. It was his first view of the Mediterranean.

While teaching in Algeria, Braudel began work on his thesis: ‘Philip II and the Mediterranean’. French Algeria was no backwater: several prominent intellectuals visited, among them Henri Pirenne who impressed Braudel when he gave a course of lectures there in 1931. Braudel later wrote that ‘his lectures seemed prodigious to me; his hand opened and shut, and the entire Mediterranean was by turns free and locked in!’ It was, as Braudel later wrote, a ‘transformative moment’.

In 1927 he made his first visit to the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), the largest repository in the world of documents concernin Philip II. In 1998, when the AGS mounted a small exhibition in honour of Philip’s quatercentenary, it listed the 300 or so bundles of documents Braudel had consulted on his first visit. In 1935 Braudel visited Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) where, as he later wrote, he discovered the true ‘personality’ of the Mediterranean: the ships, cargoes, freight contracts, and rhythms of international trade.

That year he got a job at the new university of São Paolo, founded with French help. ‘It was in Brazil that I became intelligent’, he wrote. There he learned how to use a camera to photograph documents and for the next three years he spent his winter holidays in Mediterranean archives ‘making kilometres of microfilms’ which he then read in Brazil during the term: ‘I was shooting 2,000-3,000 photos a day.’ Before long, his thesis became unmanageable.

In 1937, returning for another season of ‘research and recreation’ in archives around the western Mediterranean, he found another French historian was a passenger on the same ship: Lucien Febvre, co-editor of the Annales. This proved a second transformative experience. He already knew Febvre, having been influenced by his book A Geographical Introduction to History (1922), but during those ‘twenty days of gossip and laughter’ on the ship from South America Braudel, 35, captivated Febvre, 59, and from then on the latter treated the former ‘a bit like a son’.

Febvre did his new protégé major favours. First he got him a research post in Paris with no teaching obligations; second, he argued that although ‘“Philip II and the Mediterranean” [was] a good subject … why not “The Mediterranean and Philip II”? A much larger subject’. Third, Febvre ensured that, in the summer of 1939, Braudel finally got his 12 years of notes in order and began to write his dissertation at Febvre’s retreat in the Jura mountains.

The timing could hardly have been worse. The Second World War broke out in September and Braudel was drafted, serving first onthe Alpine front and then on the Maginot Line in Alsace. In June 1940, having seen no fighting, he surrendered along with most of the French army. Braudel would spend the next five years in captivity because a fellow-prisoner denounced him as anti-Pétain and pro-Gaullist.

God’s perspective

This proved to be Braudel’s third transformative experience. Looking back in October 1985, a few weeks before his death, Braudel still saw his years in prison as the key to his historical vision: 

The problem was somehow to escape from the events that surrounded us, by saying ‘it isn’t important in the long run’. Could one not rise above the tides, the rise and fall, to see something entirely different? I developed what I soon came to call ‘the perspective of God the Father’. For God the Father, a year is nothing; a century but the blinking of an eye. And slowly, above the history of fluctuations, above the history of events, the history of the surface, I became interested in the past that scarcely changed, in the things that changed but slowly, in the things that recurred.

Braudel’s fellow prisoners elected him camp rector, which provided him with an office where he began to write the first two parts of his study of the Mediterranean. He sent drafts of his handwritten text back in more than 100 school exercise books to Febvre in Paris, who sent back criticisms while the Red Cross sent more empty ‘cahiers’ for Braudel to fill with more drafts. When he regained his freedom in 1945 Braudel immediately wrote the third part. He submitted his PhD, aged 45, in 1947.

Western sources

Naturally, in a work of such breadth – covering half a century and 100 million people living in a space that took 60 plus days to cross – other scholars have found much to criticise. (‘The book offers some splendid understanding of the circumstances which contributed to the shaping of policy and action; the only things missing are policy and action’, opined Geoffrey Elton). Some of the facts (dates and details) are incorrect. Then there is the neglect of the Islamic lands. Braudel’s book is really about the northern, Christian, Mediterranean. Islam, he writes, is ‘on the outskirts of the Mediterranean World’. But most seriously, as Andrew C. Hess pointed out in The Forgotten Frontier (1978) – a book on Iberia and the Maghreb which used Turkish and Arabic as well as Western sources – while there was an ‘underlying life rhythm that was culturally neutral’ (such as climate change and disease), ‘the main theme of Mediterranean history during the 16th century was the cumulative divergence of its two civilizations’ – Latin Christian and Turkish Muslim. For Braudel, using only Western sources, the Mediterranean world in 1500 was homogeneous and growing more so as the 16th century advanced, whereas for Hess there were two distinct worlds in 1500 – and they were growing farther apart.

Aberrations

But if these criticisms diminish the book’s value, why did I spend a month struggling through the first French edition as an undergraduate in 1964? Why did I buy the very expensive second edition three years later? Why do I have a photograph of Fernand Braudel in my office? And why was Braudel named as the most important historian of the previous 60 years in a 2011 poll in History Today? It is hard to answer those questions today because, as Oswyn Murray wrote in 2001, ‘it is almost impossible for us to remember what history was like before Braudel’. But let me suggest three broad reasons.

The Mediterranean refashioned the entire framework of history. It showed that geography, climate, and distance – what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie would later call ‘l’histoire immobile’ – formed the essential context without which history makes no sense. The book also emphasised that the true task of the historian is to distinguish the dynamic from the static, the aberration from the trend. It is impossible to convey the excitement of that approach back in 1964. I had never considered those self-evident truths.

The Mediterranean provided a manifesto against specialisation and specialists. Here was a historian who would read and use anything that shed light on the problem he studied. Moreover, it was devoid of theoretical jargon. In the first issue of Annales in 1929, Febvre and his co-editor Marc Bloch proclaimed that their journal would show what history was really about ‘not by means of theoretical disquisition’ but ‘by means of achieved results’. The sole criterion for good history was whether it works. Braudel’s Mediterranean works because it shows how things happen. If the men in Braudel’s book ‘never move mountains’, as John Elliott once objected, it is surely because few achieved that feat – in the 16th century, Luther and Calvin, perhaps, but who else? Certainly not Philip. It was, as Febvre put it, not ‘Philip II and the Mediterranean’ but ‘The Mediterranean and Philip II’.

We might measure Braudel’s achievement through what can be called the ‘Das Kapital test’. When Karl Marx lived in London in the 1850s, he received a letter from his Leipzig publisher:

Dear Herr Doctor: You are already ten months behind time with the manuscript of Das Kapital, which you have agreed to write for us. If we do not receive the manuscript within six months, we shall be obliged to commission another author to do this work.

No other author could have written Das Kapital; no other author could have written The Mediterranean.

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History at the Ohio State University.