McNeill, W. Fernand Braudel, Historian

8/22/2019 McNeill, W. Fernand Braudel, Historian

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Fernand Braudel, HistorianAuthor(s): William H. McNeillReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 73, No. 1 (March 2001), pp. 133-146Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/319882 .

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[The Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001): 133146] 2001 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2001/7301-0006$02.00All rights reserved.

Review Article

Fernand Braudel, Historian

William H. McNeillUniversity of Chicago

When he died in 1985, Fernand Braudel was undoubtedly the worlds most influ-ential academic historian. His reputation was founded on a magnificent eleven-hundred-page book published in 1949 entitled La Mediterranee et le monde med-iterraneen a lepoque de Philippe II. His eminence was subsequently consolidatedby editorship (195668) of an influential journal, entitled Annales: Economies,societ es, civilisations, and by his presidency (195672) of the Sixieme Section ofthe Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where a vigorous group of younghistorians gathered around him to form a distinctive Annales school.

Despite accumulating administrative duties, Braudel found time for substantialrevision of his famous book. Accordingly, a second edition of The Mediterraneancame out in 1966, significantly reshaped by new queries and hypotheses andadorned by maps, charts, and illustrations that had been absent from the first print-ing. Simultaneously, he worked toward a world history, published in preliminary

form in 1967 as Civilisation materielle et capitalisme, XVeXVIIIe siecle. Then inhis old age Braudel launched, but failed to complete, another lengthy history, thistime of France. Its first sections appeared posthumously in 1986 as LIdentite dela France, in three stout volumes.

Braudel also wrote a textbook for French secondary schools, entitled Grammairedes civilisations (1963). It surveyed the world, civilization by civilization, and wasdesigned to broaden and modernize the teaching of history in French schools. Thisreform, officially undertaken very largely in response to Braudels personal initia-tive, provoked vigorous opposition from teachers and was swiftly abandoned. Asa result, his textbook died aborning and can safely be disregarded in trying toassess his achievement as a historian. He also wrote numerous articles and leftother miscellaneous writings when he died, but the two massive works he carriedto completion, which I will refer to as The Mediterranean and Civilization andCapitalism, for short, were what most mattered. Let me therefore concentratemainly on them.

Oddly, when he already appeared to outsiders as the dominant figure amongFrench historians, in his own opinion Braudel remained marginal, excluded fromfull participation in the University of Paris by old-fashioned historians who em-phasized political events and personalities and felt that much of what Braudelinvestigatedwhat he referred to as la longue dureewas human geographyrather than history. I, too, was excluded from the Sorbonne in 1947, he wrote in


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1976. When I defended my thesis that year, one of the judges suavely said to me:You are a geographer: let me be the historian.1

His long-standing grievance against the historical establishment of the Sorbonnepresumably pricked him on to work harder and prove how wrong they were. But,ironically, after the student uprising of 1968, when Braudel did at long last becomefully incorporated into the degree-granting university establishment of Paris, heimmediately became a target for younger historians. Many of them were trained

in the Annales tradition, but, perhaps for that very reason, they speedily set out,in their turn, to assert their own intellectual autonomy by rejecting all or part ofBraudels style of history.

Generational friction among historians and other professional academics mayhave been unusually acute in France, but the phenomenon is universal. What wasunusual about Braudels career as a historian was the way the detailed attentionhe lavished on the longue duree recorded and reflected the transformation thatFrance itself went through during his lifetime, changing from an imperial nationwith a majority of citizens still living as tradition-bound peasants into a peoplewhose outlook was thoroughly urbanized (no matter where they resided) andwhose national identity and sovereign destiny was confused and challenged by anemerging European community and by a swarm of immigrants from North Africaand other parts of the former empire, who fitted awkwardly into French society.

Braudel experienced this transformation vividly and in person. He later declared

that his mature approach to history had been profoundly affected by childhoodrecollections from the village of Lumeville, located in the department of Meusenot far from Verdun in northeastern France. He was born there in 1902, and, eventhough his father was teaching at a secondary school in Paris, the young Fernandspent his first seven years (and vacations until the age of twenty) in Lumevillewith his maternal grandmother, living there in much the same fashion as his peasantancestors had done for centuries.

He could thus affirm: I was at the beginning and I remain now an historian ofpeasant stock. I could name the plants and trees of this village of eastern France:I knew each of its inhabitants: I watched them at work: the blacksmith, the cart-wright, the occasional woodcutters, the bouquillons. I observed the yearly rota-tion of crops on the village lands which today produce nothing but grass for grazingherds. I watched the turning wheel on the old mill, which was, I believe, built longago for the local lord by an ancestor of mine. And because all this countryside of

eastern France is full of military recollections, I was, through my family, a childat Napoleons side at Austerlitz, at the Berezina.2

He dedicated his last book, LIdentite de la France, to his grandmother andbegins it with the proud words: I say once and for all: I love France with thesame passion, demanding and complicated, as Jules Michelet.3 The France Brau-

1 Fernand Braudel, foreword to French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, by TraianStoianovich (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), p. 15.

2 Fernand Braudel, Personal Testimony, Journal of Modern History 44 (December 1972):44849.

3 Fernand Braudel, LIdentite de la France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1986), my translation. Jules Michelet(17981874) wrote a multivolume History of France, whose literary power and anticlerical, na-tionalistic fervor did much to shape French republicanism between 1871 and 1914.


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Fernand Braudel, Historian 135

del loved was the France of his childhood: a pastiche of villages and small townswhere habitual routines conformed to dictates of soil and climate, where face-to-face dealings were honest in the sense that both parties knew the customary priceto be paid for goods and services, and everyone knew what to expect from him-or herself as well. It was a world almost totally comprehensible and wholly rightin the eyes of an alert boy of six or seven, who, under his grandmothers lovingcare, watched the seasons pass and came to understand how and why his elders

adjusted their activities accordingly.Fond recollections of Lumeville undoubtedly provided the inspiration for the

longue duree that Braudel investigated so lovingly and lengthily in The Mediter-ranean and in The Structures of Everyday Life, which constituted the first volumeof the final version of Civilization and Capitalism. Lumeville, in short, provokedBraudels most successful innovation in the writing of history: his insistence onthe basic importance of geographically variegated everyday custom and almostunconscious routines, which, he claimed, set limits to all deliberate effort, whetherin matters economic, political, or military. And just because the variety of localcustom was disappearing so rapidly from rural France between the two world wars,the French reading public was prepared to relish Braudels detailed descriptionsand emphasis on the past importance of this vanishing world.

But the future historian did not remain a simple villager beyond his seventhyear, and Braudels mature way of writing history, which paid more attention to

towns, trade, and finance than to agriculture, reflected his urban upbringing. Hisurban life began in 1909, when he started formal schooling, residing with hisparents in Paris. In primary school he encountered a superb teacher, a man whowas intelligent, considerate, authoritarian, and who recited the history of Franceas though he were celebrating Mass. Subsequently, he lived through World WarI as a student at the Lycee Voltaire (1913 20), where he studied Latin and Greek,adored history, wrote too much poetry, and, he later declared, got a very goodeducation. On graduation, I wanted to be a doctor, but my father opposed thisinsufficiently motivated career, and I found myself disoriented in that year 1920,which was for me a sad one. In the end I entered the Sorbonne as a student ofhistory. I graduated without difficulty, but also without much real enjoyment. I hadthe feeling I was frittering away my life, having chosen the easy way out. Myvocation as an historian did not come to me until later. 4

In 1923 he began teaching history in Algeria, first at a lycee in Constantine and

then, after a year, in Algiers itself. He continued to teach there until 1932, exceptfor a period of military service, 192526, which he spent in the German Rhinelandas part of the French army of occupation. The history he taught was what theFrench state required: a sort of history he later disparaged because it dealt onlywith superficial political and military events. Yet he was conscientious in doinghis duty and indeed claims to have emerged from the Sorbonne with thoroughlyconventional views, having focused his attention, like all leftist students of thetime, on the French Revolution of 1789.

Although he was not enthused nor deeply committed to history, as thus con-

4 Braudel, Personal Testimony, p. 449.


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ceived, he was ambitious enough to wish for a university career. This required himto write a thesis on the basis of primary sources and on a scale that would qualifyhim for a doctorate. After considering and then deciding that his overly Frenchsentiments made investigating German history unwise, he turned instead toFrances older rival, proposing to write on Philip II, Spain, and the Mediterranean.His teachers approved readily enough, and Braudel accordingly began work inSpanish archives at Simancas during his summer vacation in 1927.

For an intensely patriotic Frenchman to choose Spanish history was itself sur-prising. Residing, as he did, in Algiers, on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean,Braudel had begun to contemplate France from a distance, and his thesis soonturned into an act of audacity, provoking him to explore far wider horizons thanthose set by the national frame within which historians usually confined them-selves. Indeed, an omnivorous curiosity was one of Braudels enduring traits. Inthe end, nothing short of the whole wide world satisfied him.

Accordingly, he did not long remain content with Simancas but proceeded insubsequent years to investigate other Mediterranean archives, even in places as farafield as Dubrovnik, on the Yugoslav coast. It was here, he remarks, where Otto-man and Christian frontiers abutted on one another, that in 1934 for the first timeI saw the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century in its everyday, mercantileaspect,revealed by detailed records of ships, bills of lading, trade goods, insurance rates,business deals.5

A thesis entirely at odds with the expectations of his Sorbonne professors thusbegan to take shape in Braudels mind and in the voluminous notes he accumulatedfrom the archives he consulted. But for a long time he remained unsure of wherehe was going. Energetic researches collected a myriad of details about the halfcentury of Mediterranean history when King Philips government in Spain strug-gled against the Ottoman sultans for domination of that sea, while transoceanicconquests and commerce began to shift the principal centers of European economicand political power from Mediterranean to Atlantic Europe. Little by little a vasthuman panorama emerged for Braudels inspection, and fundamental questionsabout the course of European and world history began to stir in his fertile imagi-nation. But the more he discovered, the more there was to inquire into in archivesyet untapped.

No wonder, then, that among my friends and colleagues it was reported that Iwould never finish this very ambitious workeven though he never ventured

into the vast Ottoman archives and only used west European languages. Nonethe-less, his appetite for detail was insatiable, and from the very beginning he discov-ered how to escape the limits of vacation-time research by using a secondhandmovie camera to photograph thousands of documents each day he was able tospend in the archives. I was, he says, undoubtedly the first user of true micro-films, which I developed myself and later read, through long days and nights, witha simple magic lantern.6

Not only he, for his wife, Paule, whom he first met as a student in one of hisAlgerian lycee classes, also became an assiduous and skillful reader of the endless

5 Ibid., p. 452. Quotations in the preceeding paragraphs also derive from this brief text.6 Ibid., pp. 45152.


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rolls of microfilm they accumulated. They worked together, each selecting archivalmaterials to be filmed. Afterward, during evenings and weekends of the schoolyear, one read aloud from the films while the other took notes. To reduce eyestrain, they shifted roles from time to time. Braudel then summarized their findingsin a hurried scrawl, and his wife typed the result. And in spare time, discussionback and forth helped to clarify Braudels emerging understanding of his subject.Their combined effort thus digested vast masses of material in a way a single

person could not possibly have done. Mme Braudel, however, kept herself verymuch in the background, and in later years tended her husbands fame and influ-ence more assiduously than he did himself. She, for example, was the person whopersuaded him to write the Personal Testimony from which I draw most of myinformation about his career, and after his death she continued to prepare volumesof his miscellaneous writings for publication.

In 1932, Braudel left Algiers for a teaching post at a lycee in Paris. This allowedhim to meet Lucien Febvre, who was destined to play a critical role in shaping hissubsequent career. Their encounters were only casual at first. Febvre (18781956)was a pugnacious, would-be reformer of French historiography. In particular, in1929, he and Marc Bloch co-founded and edited an innovative historical journal,

Annales dhistoire economiques, that sought to transcend mere war and politics byembracing all aspects of human experience in what Febvre eventually came to calltotal history. Bloch, who served in the French Resistance, was caught and killed

by the Nazis in 1944, whereas Febvre survived the war quietly in Paris. Then in1946, with the help of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, he reorganized thejournal and gave it a new title: Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations.

By proclaiming the importance of social and economic history and provokinginnumerable heated debates about how best to approach the past, Febvre and Blochinaugurated the Annales school in 1929. After the war, Febvre expanded theimperial claims of his style of total history, arguing that all the human scienceswere inescapably historical, so that only suitably trained historians could hope tounite them scientifically. Then, when Febvre died in 1956, Braudel inherited Feb-vres position as editor, and in the ensuing twelve years brought the Annales schoolto the peak of its influence.

From their initial encounters in the early 1930s, Febvre encouraged Braudel tobroaden the scope of his thesis researches, but the two men remained only distantacquaintances until 1937. By then Braudel had spent three memorable years teach-

ing a general course in the history of civilization at the newly established universityin Sao Paulo, Brazil, and was returning to France to take up a new appointmentat the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. By chance, he sailed on a ship that wasalso carrying Lucien Febvre home from lectures in Buenos Aires. Those twentydays of the ocean crossing were, for Lucien Febvre, my wife, and me, twenty daysof happy conversation and laughter. It was then that I became more than a com-panion to Lucien Febvrea little like a son: his house in the Juras at Sougetbecame my house, his children my children.7 And it was there, in Febvres housein the Juras, that Braudel wrote the first pages of his great book in the summer of

7 Ibid., p. 453.


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1939, only to be interrupted by call-up for service in the French army just beforeWorld War II broke out in September.

Braudels war, like that of France as a whole, was brief and inglorious. He wascaptured by the victorious Nazis in 1940 and after two years of detention at Mainzfound himself assigned to a special camp for unruly captives located near Lubeck,on the bleak Baltic coast. He remained there from 1942 until 1945, yet it was underthese harsh conditions that Braudel resumed work on his projected thesis. As a

result, he actually wrote three successive drafts of The Mediterranean, immuredinitially within the citadel of Mainz and then on the shores of the Baltic. Here iswhat he had to say about this amazing feat:

It was in captivity that I wrote that enormous work, sending school copy book afterschool copy book to Lucien Febvre. Only my memory permitted this tour de force.Had it not been for my imprisonment, I would surely have written a much differentbook. . . . Yes, I contemplated the Mediterranean, tete a tete, for years on end,far thoughit was from me in space and time. And my vision of history took on its definitive formwithout my being entirely aware of it, partly as a direct intellectual response to aspectaclethe Mediterraneanwhich no traditional historical account seemed to mecapable of encompassing, and partly as a direct existential response to the tragic timesI was passing through. . . . All those occurrences which poured in upon us from theradio. . . . I had to out distance, reject, deny them. Down with occurrences, especiallyvexing ones! I had to believe that history, destiny was written at a much more profoundlevel. Choosing a long time scale to observe from was choosing the position of Godthe Father himself as a refuge. Far removed from our persons and daily misery, historywas being made, shifting slowly as the ancient life of the Mediterranean, whose per-durability and majestic immobility had often moved me. So it was that I consciouslyset forth in search of an historical languagethe most profound I could grasp orinventin order to present unchanging (or very slowly changing) conditions whichstubbornly assert themselves over and over again. And my book is organized on severaldifferent temporal scales, moving from the unchanging to the fleeting occurrence. Forme, even today, these are the lines that delimit and give form to every historical land-scape.8

These remarkable words describe an amazing achievement, even though theyglide over a long process of checking the text as it emerged from the POW campagainst the notes that the Braudels had accumulated before the war. Those notes

spent the war in the basement of their house in Paris, hidden in a metal containerto preserve them from bomb damage. After his release in 1945, therefore, he andhis wife spent almost two years editing the array of school copybooks LucienFebvre had received from the German prison camp until, in 1947, Braudel wasready to defend his thesis at the Sorbonne. Two more years passed before thethesis, in polished and perfected form, was finally published in 1949.

But it remains true that this vast and impressive work took form in a POW campunder Baltic skies. Very likely, without Braudels apparently crippling, but actually

8 Ibid., pp. 45354.


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liberating, separation from the tangled mass of his notes and supporting documen-tation, he might not have been able to write about the Mediterranean by, as hesays, choosing the position of God. In particular, his unique concept of differenttimescales for changeable human behavior, operating simultaneously within thesame geographical space, might never have emerged.

This odd and logically dubious organizing device became second only to hiswide-ranging curiosity as the distinctive characteristic of Braudels approach to

writing history. It was seldom imitated by others, and Braudel himself encounteredlogical difficulties, especially in dealing with an intermediate temporal rhythm,referred to as conjoncture in the second edition ofThe Mediterranean, but whichhad no name and no distinct presence in the first edition. Braudel says he borrowedthe term conjoncture and a closely associated word, structure, from French econ-omists, but he was never completely comfortable with the result, as he made clearwhen he introduced part 2, Collective Destinies and Trends, in the revisededitionof The Mediterranean as follows:

This second book has, in fact, to meet two contradictory purposes. It is concerned withsocial structures, that is with mechanisms that withstand the march of time; it is alsoconcerned with the development of those structures. It combines therefore what havecome to be known as structure and conjoncture, the permanent and the ephemeral, theslow moving and the fast. These two aspects of reality, as economists are well aware

indeed it is to them that we owe the original distinctionare always present in every-day life, which is a constant blend of what changes and what endures.

But it will not be easy to convey this complex spectacle in a single attempt. Thechapters that follow share the task among them, tackling in turn the problems relatingto economic systems, states, societies, civilizations, the indispensable instruments ofexchange, and lastly the different forms of war. But the reader should not be misled.They are all contributions towards a unique, comprehensive view of the subject, im-possible to achieve from any one vantage point. These subsequent subdivisions areboth convenient and necessary. They may not altogether satisfy the intellect, but anyschema is of value as long as it allows for the best possible explanation with a minimumof repetition.9

Thus Braudel split time, the historians indispensable guide, into a logic-defyingtrinitylongue duree, conjoncture, evenementto justify the sequence of themesdeveloped in successive parts of the book, even though it did not altogether sat-

isfy his own intellect nor fit smoothly into the fascinating variety of themes hischapters explored. After all, the book was based, initially, on a vast and miscel-laneous assemblage of notes. It was my original idea, in the first edition of thisbook, that the many dimensions of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth centuryshould be suggested through a series of examples, by selecting certain importantand indicative details. . . . But this would mean leaving enormous blank spacesbetween the specks of color; at best it would only give an impressionistic notion

9 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 1:353 54.


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of the distance that separates our world from that of the sixteenth century. Today[in 1966, when the second edition came out] on the other hand, I am more attractedtowards the language of what economists call national accounting.10

Braudel, in short, found himself torn between the generalizing language of eco-nomics, which he believed to be the most scientific of the sciences of man, 11 andthe confusing variety of everyday life as revealed in the archives he had consulted.Like his mentor, Lucien Febvre, Braudel was a convinced partisan of the notion

that history was a very imperfect science, but a science, even though historianshad to rely on language of an old craft that must be formed close down to earthand depended on details and more details.12 But is it not a good thing, he declaredwhen lecturing in the United States in 1976, for history to be first of all a de-scription, a plain observation, a classification without too many previously heldideas? To see and to show is half the historians task.13 The other half, presumably,was to be scientific and systematic, seeking to find enduring structures and bor-rowing economists terms or those of other human sciences whenever convenient.

Braudel always remained tentative in trying to reshape the amorphous multi-plicity of history into a generalizing science. But while revising The Mediterraneanbetween 1949 and 1966 he did convince himself that economists terms wereuniquely powerful, with the result that

nowadays we have two fairly well established chains to choose from, one built by

the research of the last twenty to thirty yearsthe chain of economic events and theirshort-term conjunctures; the other catalogued over the agesthe chain of politicalevents . . . which, to the eyes of contemporary observers, took precedence over anyother series of happenings . . .

For us there will always be two chainsnot one. So even in the realm of traditionalhistory it would be difficult to tread exactly in Rankes footsteps. In turn, we shouldbeware of assuming that these two chains preclude the existence of others, or in fallinginto the trap of naively assuming that one can explain the other, when even now wecan guess at further possible chains composed of data from social and cultural historyand even from collective psychology.14

Braudels approach to history thus remained open-ended, comprising an ever-broadening array of questions whose answers were tentative at best. This, in fact,was what made the Annales under Braudels editorship so attractive to ambitiousyoung historians. Anyone with a new question was welcome in the journals pages.New themes and widely discordant approaches to the past thus proliferated underBraudels benign editorial jurisdiction, reflecting his own limitless curiosity andopen-mindedness.

10 Ibid., 1:41920.11 Braudel, LIdentite de la France, 1:19.12 Ibid., p. 9. For the quotation regarding historians, see Braudel, foreword to Stoianovich (n.

1 above), p. 17.13 Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. Patricia M.

Ranum (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 2021.14 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 2:902.


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Yet the revision ofThe Mediterranean, and all his efforts to make history a moreperfect science (often by venturing into hypothetical quantification), fell short ofhis hopes and regularly provoked him to call for further research to test his guesses

and preliminary calculations. Braudel, in effect, found himself with a collection oflearned, delightful chapters on his hands, each fascinating in itself but only slen-derly connected with what went before or followed after.

His technique in the first edition had resembled that of the pointillist painters

of the nineteenth century who used innumerable separate dots of paint to depicteveryday scenes, relying on the eye of the beholder to blend them together into acomprehensible whole. And for innumerable readers, Braudels technique workedwonderfully well, conveying a vivid, convincing sense of what life in the lands ofthe Mediterranean had actually been like in the sixteenth century.

By comparison, the efforts he made to fit his magnificent, multicolored portraitof Mediterranean life in the sixteenth century into a scientific straitjacket, con-ceived along economistic lines, were disappointing. It was like trying to put asaddle on a cow, hoping to ride off into the sunset and discover scientific truth

about the past. Yet his quixotic attempt to reduce history to quantified economicsis also admirable in its own way, for it speaks to a deep human desire to makewhatever happens meaningful. Braudel himself was never sure that the conjonc-tures he explored told the truth, much less the whole truth. He saw himself as apioneer, whose hunches and tentative formulations would have to be corrected and

replaced by subsequent more detailed and precise quantifiers. And he never entirelyforgot that other lines of inquiry evolving mentalites, for example, which LucienFebvre had turned to in his later yearsmight be needed to supplement the merelyeconomic measurements on which he focused most of his own effort.

An obviousand deliberatedeficiency of The Mediterranean was the ratherperfunctory treatment of political affairs in the final part of the book. This was,for Braudel, a way of proclaiming how superficial, even trivial, were the preoc-cupations of his academic rivals. Yet in his eagerness to make the shortcomingsof merely political historians apparent, Braudel introduced a larger and damaging

structural incoherence into his book. For the conjonctures and structures of eco-nomic life, set forth in the middle sections of the revised edition, dangle entirelyunconnected to the political structures and changes of part 3, and both of thesechains of happenings remained unrelated to the (ostensibly unchanging) geo-

graphical longue duree so skillfully set forth in the first 350 pages.As a result, the first edition of The Mediterranean was, I believe, a greater

literary masterpiece than the second, but the intellectual foundations of both edi-tions were seriously flawed. For in addition to the problem of how to understand

the interactions of structure and process on three different timescales, Braudelchose to neglect dimensions of his subject that most historians regard as essential.In particular, he had almost nothing to say about religion or about other intellectualideas or currents of opinion. Yet the age of Philip II (reigned 155698) was whenthe clash of Protestants and Catholics assumed a new intensity throughout Europe,

competing with and often outweighing the long-standing clash between Christians

and Muslims in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe. Were the longue duree,


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economic conjoncture, and the decisions and acts of the Ottoman and Spanishgovernments unaffected by the religious controversies of the age? It seems un-likely, but this is what Braudels pages imply without saying so explicitly.

Braudel was not explicitly anticlerical, as Lucien Febvre and many other French-men of an older generation had been. His father was an unbeliever, so Braudel hadbeen brought up without any direct exposure to Catholicism or any other sort ofreligion. Then during his imprisonment in Germany he had occasion to discuss

religion with some of his fellow captives, including a few Catholic clerics whobecame his friends. But he found himself incapable of sharing (or, perhaps, achiev-ing) any sort of personal religious experience and subsequently decided that, beingtone deaf to religion and religiosity, he had best say nothing about it, no matterhow prominent such controversies had been at the time.

He was fascinated instead by routines of everyday work and economic ex-changes. Bringing these back to life in all their concreteness was what matteredmost to him. That was where human reality was to be found. Abstract ideas,political plans, and religious aspirations all were superficial by comparison. Hisgoal was to discover the firm, material foundation of human society, letting othersexplore the more transitory and trivial dimensions of the past if they so wished.

Thus, when revising The Mediterranean, Braudel considered omitting politicsand the person of Philip II entirely, but in the end he decided, rather reluctantly,to retain the political narrative that had been required of him by the expectations

of the professors who approved his thesis. But, amazingly, Braudel only got roundto mentioning the individuality and mind of Philip II on the very last page of hisnarrative and did so only to dismiss him because he was not a man of vision: hesaw his task as an unending succession of small details. . . . Never do we findgeneral notions or grand strategies under his pen.15 The religious anxieties andbeliefs that shaped a great deal of King Philips daily life and conscious behaviordo not appear at all.

Braudel was aware of the oddity of such a vision of the past and added a briefconclusion in 1965 to justify how he had shaped his book. Here, then, are the verylast words of the second edition: So when I think of the individual, I am alwaysinclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand.. . . In historical analysis as I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long run always winsin the end. . . . I am by temperament a structuralist, little tempted by the event,or even by the short run conjuncture. But the historians structuralism . . . does

not tend to mathematical abstraction . . . but instead towards the very sources oflife in its most concrete, everyday, indestructible and anonymously human ex-pression.16

Braudel did indeed portray concrete, everyday, and anonymous human life inMediterranean landscapes as no one had done before him, and this remains thelasting, distinctive achievement of his greatest book. By comparison, when heturned away from the Mediterranean landscape he knew so well and addressed

15 Ibid., 2:1236.16 Ibid., 2:1244.


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himself to the wider world, some of the sureness of touch that made his pointillisttechnique so effective deserted him. Consequently, although Civilization and Capi-talism introduced a new tripartite principle for historical analysis and containsmany instructive and convincing passages, especially those dealing with Europe,it remains inferior to its predecessor. Regrettably, Braudel knew too little aboutChinese and other non-European peoples to pick out key details unerringly, as hehad done in The Mediterranean, and since he relied entirely on European sources,

the rich grounding in local archives that had sustained his earlier book was alsomissing.

Civilization and Capitalism was initially conceived in 1950 as part of a series,Destins du monde, edited by Lucien Febvre. It was designed to serve as a com-panion piece to a book by Febvre himself, tentatively entitled Western Thoughtand Belief, 14001800. But Febvre died in 1956 without leaving a publishablemanuscript, thus compelling Braudels deliberately lopsided work to stand alone.This invited Braudel to indulge his interest in details of everyday material life andhis predilection for economic history afresh, and it excused, more plausibly thanbefore, his indifference to art, science, and religionor politics.

The initial version, published in 1967, was designed for general readers andlacked footnotes. This did not satisfy Braudel for very long. A wider vision of thehuman condition in modern times had begun to dawn on him, so he proceeded torevise and expand his study of the global economy between 1400 and 1800, re-

issuing the publication of 1967 in 1979 as the first volume of three, with a newtitle and a set of laboriously reconstituted footnotes based on elliptical notationshe had made when preparing the first version. He dedicated that volume to PauleBraudel, who has dedicated herself to this book. Presumably it was she who wasmainly responsible for reconstituting the footnotes, and it was she with whom hetalked over all his emerging ideas and hypotheses, testing them out in what shesubsequently described as a kind of intellectual game.17

Braudels new master idea for organizing Civilization and Capitalism dependedon drawing a sharp distinction between capitalism and what he called marketeconomies. He was aware of how unfamiliar such a dichotomy was in the UnitedStates, and took the occasion of lectures at Johns Hopkins University in 1976 toformulate his argument concisely, declaring that markets are found everywhere,even in the most elementary societies, and that even more complicated anddeveloped societies are literally riddled with small markets.18 But, according to

Braudel, European capitalism brought a different, predatory sort of economic sys-tem to the fore, featuring unequal exchanges in which competitionthe basiclaw of the market economyhad little place and in which the dealer had twotrump cards: he had broken off relations between producer and the person whoeventually received the merchandise (only the dealer knew the market conditionsat both ends of the chain and hence the profits to be expected), and he had readycash which served as his chief ally. . . . Now the longer these chains became, the

17 Paule Braudel, personal communication, April 1999.18 Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, p. 30.


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more successful they are at freeing themselves from the usual regulations andcontrols and the more clearly the capitalistic process emerges. His argument con-tinues: These men knew a thousand ways of rigging the odds in their favor. . . .They possessed superior knowledge, intelligence and culture. And around themthey grabbed up everything worth takingland, real estate, rents. Who can doubtthat these capitalists had monopolies at their disposal, or that they simply hadpower to eliminate competition nine times out of ten? And he concludes: Let

me summarize: There are two types of exchange; one is down to earth, is basedon competition, and is almost transparent; the other, a higher form, is sophisticatedand domineering.19

Braudels words, as quoted above, reveal strong personal feelings. He liked andadmired the market economy almost as much as he delighted in portraying theeveryday routines of material life. Here was his down-to-earth human reality. Noless emphatically, he disliked capitalists for taking unfair advantage of ordinarypeople, thanks to their monopoly of ready cash and information about prices andcredit in distant places. And as a French patriot he also felt that his country hadbeen left behind, first by Italian and then by Dutch and English capitalists. As aresult, the rural and small-town France where he had spent his early childhood hadbeen seized, remodeled, reduced to inferiority by the capitalist economy thatestablished itself in Europe after the sixteenth century.20

Yet Braudels distinction between capitalism and market economies remains

unconvincing to me. After all, competition often exists among capitalists too, andlocal markets are not always transparent and competitive, either. In describingmarket economies Braudel was surely thinking of the style of life he had knownas a child in Lumeville, where buyers and sellers usually met on very even terms.But that sort of local society was not universal. In Polish and Russian villages, forexample, when Braudel was growing up, no such equality of buyers and sellersprevailed. Instead, a local tavern keeper, licensed as often as not by a great landlord,commonly enjoyed effective local monopoly. In other frontier societies, whetherin the Americas or Australia, local monopolies also prevailed, simply becausetransportation and communication networks were too slender to permit effectivelocal competition.

Braudels predatory capitalism therefore seems to me to be a transitory phenom-enon, depending on monopolies that disappear when transport and communicationcatch up with market demand, only to reappear when new technologies introduce

new, evanescent monopolies. As a case in point, consider the advantages enjoyedby Bill Gates and his like arising out of the computer revolution of our time,whereas the industrial monopolies of eighteenth-century England, featuring ma-chine-made textiles, have long since given way to cutthroat competition in theproduction of cotton and other kinds of cloth.

Hence, Braudels effort to structure economic affairs in Civilization and Capi-talism around (1) an almost unchanging material life, which underlay both (2)

19 Ibid., pp. 53, 57, 62.20 Braudel, LIdentite de la France, p. 20, my translation.


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local market economies, where conjoncture was the principal disturber of everydayroutines, and (3) an emergent, more global style of capitalist exploitation strikesme as intellectually unsatisfactorya defect quite as serious as his failure to ar-ticulate connections between the three levels of time he employed to organize The

Mediterranean. Yet he was never dogmatic, and he always recognized that hisorganizing ideas were tentative, since a work of history . . . can never claim tobe complete, to have told the truth for once and for all. 21

More generally, scientific, abstract generalizations were not his forte. Brau-dels great strength was always literary, and his attainments as a writer were fit-tingly recognized in 1984, just a year before he died, by his election to the Aca-demie Francaise making him, officially, an immortal. He certainly wrote elegant,sometimes informal, always discursive and vastly learned histories, enlivened bydetails and informed by a quizzical, endlessly curious mind, while persistentlyseeking structures to explain the past, even though he was always unable to con-vince himself that he had in fact found the truth.

This is a fine, time-tested recipe for writing history. For Braudels literary art,combining vast learning and sustained research with lively exposition of every-thing that interested him exactly replicates the classical inquiries of Herodotusfrom which the European historiographical tradition descends. Braudel was, in-deed, a far more faithful follower of Herodotus than any other historian of ourage.

Braudels truly exceptional literary skill was reinforced by two features of hisinquiries that seem likely to become landmarks of future historiography throughoutthe world. First is the emphasis he put on the overriding importance of circum-stances and processes of which contemporaries were quite unconscious. Thismeans that the most meticulous transcription of contemporary sources no longercan pretend to be an adequate account of times past, as the political historians,against whom Braudel revolted so vigorously in his youth, had tended to assume.Conscious purposes were not enough: processes longue duree, conjoncture, andwho knows what else?defeated even the most careful human plans. Of course,everyone has always noticed that intentions and experience never quite coincide.Traditional explanations attributed such discrepancies to powerful spirits, or toFortune, Chance, or Gods hidden purposes. Braudel was not content with suchanswers, even though the structures and conjonctures he offered as partial expla-nations never satisfied him either.

A large company of Braudels contemporaries among academic historians alsolooked behind conscious, recorded purposes in search of intellectually intelligibleprocesses shaping the past. No consensus has emerged, but the effort is unlikelyto be given up. Through his own books and as leader of the postWorld War IIgeneration of French historians of the Annales school, Braudel played a centralrole in shifting professional attention from what the dead had said and donedeliberately and consciouslyto unintended, collective processes that their be-

21 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, trans. Sian Reynolds, 3 vols. (Berkeley, Calif.,1992), 3:619.


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havior set in motion. This, it seems to me, is the central departure from older viewsthat affected the historical profession after World War II. Braudel played a con-spicuous role in forwarding this change, and his enduring influence will probablyrest on that simple fact.

A second feature of Braudels accomplishment was the worldwide vision of thepast that he embraced. His reach for far horizons was already evident in The

Mediterranean, where he explored the (quite literally) global rivalries of the Span-

ish and Ottoman governments, while seeing the Sahara less as a barrier than as anavigable sea of sand connecting Mediterreanean and African peoples. Braudelsglobalism became explicit in Civilization and Capitalism, even though he was farmore familiar with the European scene than with other parts of the earth and alwaysremained quintessentially French in taste and outlook.

World history, too, is a growing field of inquiry, though it has yet to achievefull respectability among academic historians, whether in France or elsewhere.Nonetheless, Braudels venture into global history ranks among the most impres-sive demonstrations yet conceived and carried through of how a single author cancreate an elegant, intelligible portrait of several centuries of the worlds history.

These achievements, together with the array of Annalistes that Braudel helpedto train, assure him of a leading place among historians of the twentieth century.Moreover, his literary skill and his energetic inquiry into how ordinary peoplelived seem likely to assure long-enduring interest in what he wrote. Braudel, in

short, was an authentic heir of Herodotus and deserves his reputation as the mostinfluential historian of his time, despite the defects of his (Thucydidean) efforts toreduce the multifarious variety of human affairs to the constraints of generalizingscience.

Documents

McNeill, W. Fernand Braudel, Historian