Fernand Braudel was born on August 24, 1902, in Luméville-en-Ornois, France. In his childhood and encouraged by his father, a mathematician, he studied classical languages and humanities. At first he wanted to be a doctor but his father prevented him and he opted for history. Before World War II he taught high school history classes in Algeria from 1923 to 1932, and in Paris from 1932 to 1935, where he met Lucien Febvre. He also taught at the University of Sao Paulo from 1935 to 1938. His continuous travels around the world allowed him to become aware of the global vision of history that he would later capture in his writings.
Once the war started he was called up. In 1940 he was taken prisoner by the Germans who transferred him to a prison camp where he would spend the rest of the war. Although it is surprising, during these years, imprisoned and with little access to books, he wrote his doctoral thesis dedicated to the Mediterranean from memory. At the end of the contest and after being rejected at the Sorbonne, he entered in 1949 as a professor at the Collège de France. Later he will be appointed president of the sixth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études and will found the Maison de Sciences de l'Homme.
His entire conception of history is highly influenced by the Annales school, initiated at the beginning of the century by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. He himself is considered a pre-eminent figure of the second current of this school and in 1956 he became editor of the magazine Annales . He was a doctor honoris causa in more than twenty universities. Two years before his death he entered the French Academy. He passed away on November 27, 1985.
Despite the enormous influence that Braudel exerted on contemporary historiography and on the rest of the social sciences, his bibliography is reduced to two great works and a multitude of articles and writings ( most of them subsequently collected in various monographs). His two key works are The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world at the time of Felipe II and Material civilization, economy and capitalism, and both condense all his historical mentality. A third work, History of France, with which he sought to trace the path of French identity throughout the ages, it was his last great project that he left unfinished because he died before being able to complete it.
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world at the time of Felipe II it was published for the first time in 1949 and later reissued and expanded in 1963, although its essence remains intact. At first it was going to deal only with the foreign policy of the Spanish monarch Felipe II but, advised by Lucien Febvre, Braudel expanded the framework of study to be the first to cover such an immense physical and temporal space.
His objective is not limited to capturing an instant of the Mediterranean environment and tries, on the contrary, to extend his study enough to understand the mechanics that operate in the movements observable historical phenomena. To achieve this goal, he divides his work into three large superimposed layers, whose impulses are generated from the bottom up. The first corresponds to the geographical time and the phenomena of long duration . At this level, everything proceeds more slowly, made up of insistent returns, of cycles that continually begin again and that define fragile balances between men and the environment. To this stratum belong the movements of the mountains, transhumance, the sedentarization of one or another cattle herds, fallow, the climate and the solutions established in the framework of civilizations.
The second layer corresponds to social time or to phenomena of medium duration , closer and more mobile, which encompasses the dynamics and the conflictive relationship between States, societies or economies. Finally, the third, the individual time or of phenomena of short duration, reflects the events, the events that occurred in the period studied.
Historiography must, in his opinion, study the three strata although it considers that there is a gradation between them, and must decide what is fundamental and what is accessory. For Braudel the essential factor of history is the long duration , which decisively affects the other two. He explains it in detail in an article published in 1958 (which is called the Longue durée ) where he affirms that the historian must focus especially on the study of the deep phenomena that mark the evolution of man and his environment and, therefore, must not be carried away by the visible but superficial agitation of the actions of men.
In his second major work, Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism , (published in 1979) Braudel extrapolates these same concepts to the economy of pre-industrial societies, with respect to which he again establishes a tripartite division. The first step is made up of material life, made up of repeated uses, empirical processes, very old recipes, solutions from the mists of time such as currency or the division of cities and fields. It is an elementary life, neither imposed nor immoral. The second step corresponds to economic life, which constitutes a privileged superior level of daily life and a much broader radius. It is born from exchange, transport or the differentiated structures of the market. It constitutes a system in itself. Finally, the third step corresponds to capitalism that penetrates all forms of life, whether economic or material.
This conception of Braudel's history broke with the tradition maintained from Herodotus to Von Ranke, who gave prominence to the facts, and focused the study on what allowed the underlying structures to be revealed. of history To achieve this goal, it was necessary for history to contribute to the desirable and urgent renewal of the social sciences as a whole. The wide spectrum of subjects that the study of long-term phenomena entails forces the convergence of the different social sciences in a common effort in which each one is auxiliary to the others and all simultaneously advance as a single body.