Fernand Braudel and the Audacity of Scope

In 1949, Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête opened in France. The nearly silent film follows a provincial mailman making his daily rounds on his bicycle. Tati captured the reality of a French countryside that seemed closer in many ways to the 19th century than the 20th, with its population growth stagnant, its industrial output anemic, and its agricultural practices outdated. It was as if history, tied to a past that stretched back centuries, was moving forward at a glacial crawl. It was a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles — “an almost timeless history.”

That last phrase is not mine but is instead lifted from a book published that same year: a massive tome that, in a suitably slow but inexorable manner, would have an equally massive impact on the writing of history. This was Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Époque de Philippe II. By 1972, when Siân Reynolds’s English translation of Braudel’s heavily revised second edition was published as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, the author had become the world’s most influential historian, and his book a modern classic.

Seventy-five years later, it is easy to forget just how improbable this destiny was for a son of peasants, raised in a village in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. The Mediterranean was Braudel’s first book; he was virtually unknown in French academic circles before it appeared. Moreover, it is what the French call a pavé, or “paving stone” (the English equivalent would be a “brick”): The two-volume English edition runs to over 1,200 pages, excluding sources. No less improbably, Braudel wrote the book entirely from memory, while a prisoner in a German stalag during the Second World War, without access to primary sources or the copious archival notes he had been amassing since 1938. Yet his captivity proved vital, according to Braudel’s remarkable wife and collaborator, Paule Braudel, for it gave him “the freedom to meditate on the subject.”

That subject was a vast one: Nothing less than the history of the entire Mediterranean region, stretching from the Balkans to the Sahara, the Rhône delta to the Nile wetlands, the Iberian kingdom to the Ottoman caliphate, over the course of the latter half of the 16th century. Though Philip II, who ruled Spain (and, thus, much of the Mediterranean) from 1556 to 1598, is given pride of place in the title, Braudel rather impudently relegated him a mere walk-on role. The true star of the book was the Mediterranean Sea. When he first glimpsed the Mediterranean as a young man, Braudel was dazzled by what he described as the “spectacle” of the many peoples and places that encircled it, but most of all by the sea itself. He took it into his head, he recalled many years later, “to rediscover the past of this sea, which I saw every day, and of which the low-flying hydroplanes of those days gave me unforgettable glimpses.”

The more time he spent in dozens of archives dotting the Mediterranean littoral, the more convinced Braudel became that this region, despite the many and often-conflicting cultures that inhabited it, was fundamentally unified. The Mediterranean world, he proposed, was a vast web of maritime and overland trade lanes shaped by the imperatives of weather patterns and geological constraints. In The Mediterranean, Braudel surveys in staggering and loving detail the unyielding physical barriers its inhabitants had to navigate, literally and socially, in pursuit of their various ends. Yet these coasts and mountains not only keep people apart, they also bring them together as they engage in common and commercial activities.

Braudel gave his readers the audacity of scope: a vast and varied space joined by shared material realities. These commonalities belied the apparent division between its western (Christian) and eastern (Muslim) halves, which solidified in the late 16th century when western powers, at the Battle of Lepanto, assured their military and economic ascendancy over the Ottoman Empire. Political and religious divisions aside, Braudel insisted that the Mediterranean was a single unit, knit together by “the amazing freedom of its sea-routes": one entity, “with its many regions, so different yet so alike, its cities born of movement, its complementary populations, its congenital enmities.”

The immensity and complexity of this subject called for a creative historical approach. Braudel was deeply respectful of tradition. In his autobiography, he recalled his childhood in the tiny village of Luméville: “I knew each of its inhabitants; I watched them at work: the blacksmith, the cartwright, the occasional woodcutters.” Yet he proved iconoclastic when it came to the métier of history. Worried that “no traditional historical account seemed … capable of encompassing” the subject of the Mediterranean, Braudel bolted together a tripartite temporal schema to organize the otherwise-unmanageable wealth of archival findings he had collected. The depth of the Braudelian sea of history is la longue durée, “the long term,” where demographic, climactic, and geographic change is measured in vast blocks of time: centuries, millennia. As for l’histoire événementielle — the history of events — it is the waves and whitewater of current events that race along the sea’s surface, measured in days, months, and years. Finally, there is the conjunctural, the medium term of economic, social, and intellectual change, a place of mediations between the surface and depths of historical movement.

As he wrestled with his material, Braudel conceded the need of theory, citing the German economic historian Werner Sombart’s declaration, “No theory, no history.” Yet rarely has there been a more reluctant theorist. Braudel was no more enamored of theory than was Herodotus — tellingly, the product of another port city, Halicarnassus — who was less concerned about the causes of the Persian Wars then he was about the many marvels he encountered or learned about during his travels. To be sure, there are problems with Braudel’s conceptual Holy Trinity. Indeed, Braudel himself recognized the difficulties in establishing causal ties between three currents of history of differing speeds and densities. In the work’s second volume, he suggests that reconstructing the “chain of events” that comprise l’histoire événementielle gives historians the illusion of mastery. But this is “une chasse aux papillons” — a butterfly hunt, or wild-goose chase — that will tell us little about the conjuncture or the longue durée: “For us, there will always be two chains, not one.” Nevertheless, while he acknowledged that his divisions and subdivisions “may not altogether satisfy the intellect,” this did not keep him awake at night: They were good enough for his purposes. In the end, the shortcomings of Braudel’s theory were dwarfed by the insatiability of his curiosity and beauty of his writing, the generosity of his intelligence, and the authenticity of his love for the Mediterranean and the multitudes it contains.

To historians, Braudel is important not only for his own books but for his role as the postwar director of the Annales group — the name of the revolutionary school of historiography started in 1929 by Braudel’s mentor, the great early modern historian Lucien Febvre, and the incomparable medievalist Marc Bloch. The Annales school broke from the narratives of political and diplomatic historians wedded to the idea that great men (and the occasional great woman) drove events. Instead, the Annalistes were fascinated by the warp and weft of everyday life, a vocation famously defined by Bloch: “The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.” Just as Braudel acknowledged the pivotal role both of these scholars played in his formative years as a historian, so too must subsequent generations of historians acknowledge Braudel for the vistas he opened and methods he crafted.

I am among those who owe an intellectual debt to Braudel and his colleagues in the Annales school. I was galvanized by their critique of traditional approaches to understanding the past and electrified by the sheer excitement they conveyed in their writings. It was as if they not only wrote about the past but also lived in it. My master’s thesis was on Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a student of Braudel’s and author of Montaillou, a vivid recreation of a medieval Occitan village alive with residents whose characters are sometimes lamentable, sometimes admirable, and always recognizable as fully human. This was followed by a dissertation on one small corner of the Mediterranean, the département of the Gard, where I tried to apply Braudel’s longue durée to the history of religious conflict. (Looking back, I am afraid my dissertation, which inevitably morphed into a monograph, made for a très longue read.)

As I near the end of my academic career, I find a different kind of comfort in Braudel’s person and his work. In his autobiography, Braudel recalls his reaction, while imprisoned in the POW camp, to the unfolding political and military events recounted in the German papers and over a clandestine radio. Stoically, he sought to distance himself from the sound and fury of current events. “Down with occurrences, especially vexing ones!” Braudel writes in a remarkable passage.

Of course, I am not imprisoned in a German stalag, but as I take in our own stream of “vexing” current events, I begin to appreciate in a way I never had before the deepest source of appeal in Braudel’s work. It is so tempting to turn away from the shallows of this soon-to-be histoire événementielle toward the depths of the past, to glimpse a world that seemed to perdure in majestic immobility.

Does this attitude lead to a kind of quietism? Is it a way of avoiding the present by escaping into the past? I am not sure. Braudel described his perspective as a “direct existential response to the tragic times” he was living through. There were other existentialists (Albert Camus comes to mind) as well as other Annalistes (most famously, Marc Bloch) who responded to these tragic times by rebelling directly against them. Braudel’s way is not the only way. But in times as tragic as our own, it has its attractions.