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Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel:Fernand Braudel
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Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel (August 24 1902–November 27 1985) was a French historian. He revolutionized the 20th century study of his discipline by considering the effects of such outside disciplines as economics, anthropology, and geography on global history. He was a prominent member of the Annales School of historiography, who concentrated on meticulous historical analysis in the social sciences.


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Biography

He was born in Gondrecourt-le-Château, in the département of the Meuse. Not only was he born there to the peril of his parent's summer vacation, but he also lived with his paternal Grandmother for a long time. He studied at the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po). His father who was a natural mathematician aided him in his studies. Braudel also studied a lot of Latin and a little Greek. He loved History and wrote poetry. Braudel wanted to be a doctor but his father opposed this idea. In 1923 he went to Algeria, then a French colony, to teach history. Returning to France in 1932, he worked as a high school teacher and met Lucien Febvre, the co-founder of the influential Annales journal, who was to have a great influence on his work. In 1939, he joined the army but was captured in 1940 and became a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck in Germany, where, working from memory, he put together his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II). Part of his motivation for writing the book, he said, was that, as a "Northerner," he had come to love the Mediterranean. After the war he worked with Febvre in a new college, founded separately from the Sorbonne, dedicated to social and economic history.

In 1962 he wrote A History of Civilizations to be the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, which rejected it.

Besides La Méditerranée, his most famous work is the three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe (Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800), which first appeared in 1979. It is a broad-scaled history of the pre-industrial modern world, presented in the minute detail demanded by the school called cliometrics focusing on how people made economies work.

Braudel claims that there are long-term cycles in the capitalist economy which developed in Europe in the 12th century. Cities and later nation-states follow each other subsequently as centers of these cycles. Venice in 13th to 15th century (1250–1510), Antwerpen in 16th (1500–1569), Amsterdam in 16th to 18th (1570–1733), London and England in 18th and 19th (1733–1896).

Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of those modern historians who have emphasised the role of large scale socio-economic factors in the making and telling of history. He can also be considered as one of the precursors of World Systems Theory.

SUNY Binghamton in New York has a Fernand Braudel Center, and there is an Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil.

Works

* La part du milieu (vol. 1) ISBN 2-253-06168-9
* Destins collectifs et mouvements d'ensemble (vol. 2) ISBN 2-253-06169-7
* Les événements, la politique et les hommes (vol. 3) ISBN 2-253-06170-0
* Les structures du quotidien (vol. 1) ISBN 2-253-06455-6
* Les jeux de l'échange (vol. 2) ISBN 2-253-06456-4
* Le temps du monde (vol. 3) ISBN 2-253-06457-2

References

Preceded by:
André Chamson		Seat 15
Académie française
1984-1985		Succeeded by:
Jacques Laurent

Categories


1902 births | 1985 deaths | Natives of Lorraine | French historians | Historians of France | Economic historians | Theories of history | Members of the Académie française | Alumni of Sciences Po

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