Mediterranean studies - Civilization and Capitalism
He was born in August 1902 into a family of peasant backgound in Lorraine, Northeastern France. He was sickly as a child and, because of this, was raised during his early years in the contryside at his grandmother's small farm. The family moved to Paris in 1908 where his father had obtained a teaching post in mathematics. After completing his history education at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was particularly attracted to economic and social history and to the study of ancient Greece. Braudel spent 10 years after 1923 teaching in high schools in Algeria, then a French colony.
His true intellectual formation began in Algeria where he decided that wished to enter upon an academic career in history - this required that he work to obtain a Doctoral qualification. He turned from studying the past of Lorraine, (which he came to consider to be too full of political problems that would grate upon his fiery French nationalism), to that of Spain, and he began to contemplate a traditional historical thesis on the Mediterranean policy of Philip II between 1559 and 1574; by 1927 he was publishing reviews of books on Spanish history.
Braudel, by this time, had been greatly impressed by the new approach to history of Lucien Febvre, based on the science of human geography, as exemplified in a book written in 1913 but not published until 1922, La Terre et l'évolution humaine, translated as A Geographical Introduction to History (London, 1932). Braudel read the book in 1924. As usual his approach was cautious: it was three years before he began to write to Febvre, and their close personal friendship did not begin for another ten years. Meanwhile, in his first reply to Braudel, Febvre had planted a serious doubt about Braudel's subject of research:
Philip II and the Mediterranean, a good
subject. But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II? A much
larger subject. For between these two protagonists, Philip and
the middle sea, the division is not equal.
In 1929 Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who were then professors
based at Strasbourg, established a journal called "Annals of
economic and social history" (Annales d'histoire
économique et sociale). As a Journal Annales was intended
to promote a new and more open approach to history in a
provocatively colloquial style, an approach defined mostly by its
search for "a larger and a more human history", by its denial of
all historical barriers and by its rejection of the traditional
history of politics and government in favour of a deeper analysis
of social and economic forces with the goal of departing from
traditional political and military history to explore economic
and social history, and to focus more on a long term
perspective.Braudel had become a successful schoolteacher and was recognised as an expert in his chosen area. In 1932 he returned to Paris and was nominated to a series of more and more prestigious lycées; in 1933 he married one of his earliest pupils from Algiers. In 1935 he made a decision that was to change his life: he accepted the offer of a five-year secondment to the new university being established with French help at São Paulo, Brazil. In the winter Braudel returned to Europe and worked in the archives of the great Mediterranean trading cities, such as Venice and Dubrovnik (Ragusa). He was an innovative researcher in two respects, conceptual and practical. He made the move from government archives to commercial archives, and by chance he invented the 'microfilming' of documentation, which he used in order to copy two or three thousand documents a day, to be read during the university year in Brazil.
Braudel afterwards said that it was whilst in Brazil that he became "intelligent" - it is possible that inherent challenges to his own background and cultural heritage posed by living in a non European society changed his outlook in important ways.
In 1937 he was offered, and he accepted, a post with a much lower salary at the main research centre in Paris, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in one of the two nonscientific sections, the IVe Section (historical and philological sciences).
Lucien Febvre, who was now employed a professor of history at Collège de France, visited South America in 1937. He gave a series of lectures in Buenos Aires and, arising out of the earlier contacts between himself and Braudel, arrangements were made by Braudel for Febvre to also spend some time in Bahia, Rio de Janiero and São Paulo in Brazil. During this visit and the subsequent two-week voyage where Braudel and his wife travelled home from Brazil - with Lucien Febvre being a fellow passenger - the two historians became close friends.
Febvre became something of an intellectual adviser and confidant to Braudel, who, in his new work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études attempted to depart from traditional event-based historiography to focus more on economic and social history in a long-term perspective.
Braudel enrolled in the French army in 1939 and, following the defeat of his country, was captured by the Germans in 1940. He took advantage of his captivity to attempt to write what would become his masterwork The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. During several years, as a prisoner in Germany, he wrote on schoolboy booklets with only a very few books to which he could make some reference, (even these few books were denied him when his place captivity was changed from Mainz to near Lübeck in 1942!). Braudel shared his captivity with some twenty other prisoners and often had only a corner of a table, or even just a plank, to lean his work upon.
Despite these circumstances he constructed a work that combined a vast chronological and historical sweep with a mass of minute details, covering the entire Mediterranean world from the Renaissance to the sixteenth century. He managed this extraordinary feat by tapping into the vast knowledge he had accumulated over years of research. He sent the filled booklets to Lucien Febvre after one another. By the end of the war the work was substantiually finished as a first draft, it was rewritten, with critical advice supplied by Febvre, until it was finally presented in 1947 as a thesis of over one thousand pages.
In these times Braudel hoped for a professoral position at the University of Paris but was unsuccessful. He was, however, awarded a Doctorate on the basis of this thesis.
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, was first published in 1949 under its French title La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II; with a second revised and reorganised edition being published in 1966, in preparation for the American edition of 1973. It made Braudel an international reputation. The rising generation of historical scholars were brought up to believe in the words of its preface: the old history of events was indeed dead, "the action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and powerful march of history . . . those statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors." In their place Braudel offered not "the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to so little purpose at the beginning of so many books, with its description of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the seasons," but a whole new way of looking at the past, in which the historian re-created a lost reality through a feat of historical imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter, and the weaver, the skills of the vintage and the olive press, the milling of corn, the keeping of records of bills of lading, tides and winds. It began to seem as important for a historian to be able to ride a horse or sail a ship as to sit in a library. Only the third section of Braudel's book returned to the history of events, "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs." Braudel taught us to see that historical time was divided into three forms of movement--geographical time, social time, and individual time--but that beyond all this the past was a unity and a reality. All these movements belonged together - "history can do more than study walled gardens" - this was the ultimate expression of the intellectual ambitions of the Annales school.
Civilization and Capitalism
Braudel's picture invites us to consider the Mediterranean in its broadest geographical context, inclusive of the great civilisations of Iraq and Egypt, the steppes of Russia, the forests of Germany, and the deserts of the Sahara. For him Mediterranean history is an aspect of world history. Within the context of human history he emphasises two themes - Technology and Exchange. Human history is a history of technological mastery and the development of the skills basic to ancient civilisation: fire and water technology, pottery, weaving, metalworking, seafaring and finally writing. This emphasis on the physical realities of early civilisations brings out the actual quality of life with a vividness that no amount of reading other books can achieve. As to the importance of exchange, especially long-distance exchange: "Our sea was from the very dawn of its protohistory a witness to those imbalances productive of exchange which would set the rhythm of its entire life." It is imbalance that creates exchange and therefore leads to progress. These two ideas, first formulated in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II and subsequently explored in depth in for the preindustrial world in Civilization and Capitalism, are applied in the Memory and the Mediterranean to the ancient Mediterranean with magnificent effect.Memory and the Mediterranean begins with the history of the Mediterranean seabed itself-the layers of clay, sand, and limestone from which the Egyptians carved their ancient tombs and with which the megalithic temples in Malta were built. What follows is the epic story of how the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Greeks and Romans, and the great river civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt struggled and thrived in this demanding but gloriously beautiful world bordered and shaped by the Mediterranean.
Lucien Febvre died in 1956, and Braudel inherited the direction of both the "VIe section de l'Ecole pratique des hautes études" and the journal Annales. In the first institution he created and fostered one of the most extraordinary collections of talent in the twentieth century through his appointments: to mention only the most famous of his colleagues, they included the historians Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Maurice Aymard; the philosophers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault; the psychologists Jacques Lacan and Georges Devereux; the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; and the classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Braudel worked hard to create a separate institution or building where all his colleagues could work together, and where a succession of foreign visitors could be invited as associate professors; this idea, begun about 1958, did not achieve physical shape until the opening of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in 1970.
The new history of the sixties turned away from the factual certainties of economic and descriptive social history, and explored the "history of mentalities." It held that the historical world was created out of perceptions, not out of events, and we needed to recognise that the whole of history was a construct of human impressions.
Braudel's reply to this development was long in coming and remains incomplete; it was his last great projected work, The Identity of France. Three volumes were published before his death, comprising the first two parts on geography and demography and economy: these were for him traditional territory. With the third and fourth he would be entering new territory by writing about the state, culture, and society, and in the fourth about "France outside France."
In these volumes Braudel took the view that the peasant was the key to the history of France, and a true history of mentalities could only be written in the longue durée and from a long perspective.
In 1968 Braudel was giving a lecture series in Chicago when he was recalled to face--at the age of sixty-two--the revolutionary student movement. Like many radical professors he was sympathetic but uncomprehending of the anarchic streak in youthful protest; his interventions were paternalistic and not well received, and later he condemned the revolution because it made people less rather than more happy.
More dangerous still for Braudel was the reaction, which brought the conservatives under Pompidou to power, and which placed the blame, not on their own resistance to change, but on those who had tried to encourage change. Had not the "events" of 1968 proved the importance of the history of events? Where now was the long perspective? Conservatives claimed that either the new history (whatever it was) was responsible for the "events," or it was disproved by them. The claim was successful in blocking Braudel's access to government circles almost for the first time in his career.
Fernand Braudel retired in 1972 and, after more than ten years of retirement, died in November 1985 at Châteauvallon, on the Côte d'Azur, in Southern France.
Philosophy of History quotes
"Everything must be recaptured and
relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite
the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions,
we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of
life."
Braudel is famous for having declared that historical time falls into three categories: the long-term (longue durée), the medium-term (conjoncture),
and the short-term (événement).
The concept of the longue durée, or long-term perspective, is explicitly specified in La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II.
"Is it possible somehow to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes - and
that other, submerged, history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually
unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched
by the obstinate erosion of time?"
Ralph Waldo Emerson
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) was, in his time, the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. He remains widely influential to this day through his essays, lectures, poems, and philosophical writings.
In the later eighteen-twenties Ralph Waldo Emerson read, and was very significantly influenced by, a work by a French philosopher named Victor Cousin.
A key section of Cousin's work reads as follows:
"What is the business of history? What is the stuff of which it is made? Who is the personage of history? Man : evidently man and human nature.
There are many different elements in history. What are they? Evidently again, the elements of human nature. History is therefore the development of humanity,
and of humanity only; for nothing else but humanity develops itself, for nothing else than humanity is free. …
… Moreover, when we have all the elements, I mean all the essential elements, their mutual relations do, as it were, discover themselves. We draw from the nature of these different elements, if not all their possible relations, at least their general and fundamental relations."
Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1829)
… Moreover, when we have all the elements, I mean all the essential elements, their mutual relations do, as it were, discover themselves. We draw from the nature of these different elements, if not all their possible relations, at least their general and fundamental relations."
Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1829)
Even before he had first read Cousin, (in 1829), Emerson had expressed views in his private Journals which suggest that he accepted that Human Nature, and Human Beings, tend to display three identifiable aspects and orientations:
Imagine hope to be removed from the human breast & see how Society will sink, how the strong bands of order & improvement will be relaxed & what a deathlike stillness would take the place of the restless energies that now move the world. The scholar will extinguish his midnight lamp, the merchant will furl his white sails & bid them seek the deep no more. The anxious patriot who stood out for his country to the last & devised in the last beleagured citadel, profound schemes for its deliverance and aggrandizement, will sheathe his sword and blot his fame. Remove hope, & the world becomes a blank and rottenness.
(Journal entry made between October and December, 1823)
In all districts of all lands, in all the classes of communities thousands of minds are intently occupied, the merchant in his compting house, the mechanist over his plans, the statesman at his map, his treaty, & his tariff, the scholar in the skilful history & eloquence of antiquity, each stung to the quick with the desire of exalting himself to a hasty & yet unfound height above the level of his peers. Each is absorbed in the prospect of good accruing to himself but each is no less contributing to the utmost of his ability to fix & adorn human civilization. (Journal entry of December, 1824)
Our neighbours are occupied with employments of infinite diversity. Some are intent on commercial speculations; some engage warmly in political contention; some are found all day long at their books … (This dates from January - February, 1828)
In all districts of all lands, in all the classes of communities thousands of minds are intently occupied, the merchant in his compting house, the mechanist over his plans, the statesman at his map, his treaty, & his tariff, the scholar in the skilful history & eloquence of antiquity, each stung to the quick with the desire of exalting himself to a hasty & yet unfound height above the level of his peers. Each is absorbed in the prospect of good accruing to himself but each is no less contributing to the utmost of his ability to fix & adorn human civilization. (Journal entry of December, 1824)
Our neighbours are occupied with employments of infinite diversity. Some are intent on commercial speculations; some engage warmly in political contention; some are found all day long at their books … (This dates from January - February, 1828)
The quotes from Emerson are reminiscent of a line from another "leading voice of intellectual culture" - William Shakespeare.
There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee.
William Shakespeare: Henry IV (Pt 1), Act I, Scene II
William Shakespeare: Henry IV (Pt 1), Act I, Scene II
Plato, Socrates and Shakespeare endorse a 'Tripartite Soul' view of Human Nature. Platos' Republic
Popular European History pages
at Age-of-the-Sage
The European Revolutions of 1848 begin
The French Revolution of 1848
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and the Unification of Risorgimento Italy
Otto von Bismarck & The wars of German unification
The French Revolution of 1848
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and the Unification of Risorgimento Italy
Otto von Bismarck & The wars of German unification
The preparation of these pages was influenced to some degree by a particular "Philosophy of History" as suggested by this quote from the famous Essay "History" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:-
There is one mind common to all individual men...
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.