48 Facts About Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel's scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism, and the unfinished Identity of France.

Fernand Braudel was a member of the Annales School of French historiography and social history in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fernand Braudel was born in Lumeville-en-Ornois in the departement of the Meuse, France.

Fernand Braudel grew up in a pre-industrial rural setting with his grandmother until at the age of seven he joined his father in Paris.

Fernand Braudel was educated at the Lycee Voltaire, where he studied Latin and Greek, and at the Sorbonne, where he was taught by Henri Hauser and gained an agregation in history in 1923.

Fernand Braudel began there his doctoral thesis on the foreign policy of King Philip II of Spain, with archival research at the General Archive of Simancas in the summer of 1927.

Sao Paulo still lacked a university and in 1934, the francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel to help develop one.

Fernand Braudel left for Brazil in March 1935, after the birth of his daughter, and took up the post vacated by Emile Coornaert.

Fernand Braudel worked within the state-promoted ideological framework of Pan-Latinism, part of the French civilizing mission, and helped the Sao Paulo elites in their project of achieving social and national hegemony.

Fernand Braudel's colleagues included Joao Cruz Costa, Roberto Simonsen and Caio Prado Junior.

Fernand Braudel made use of his stay for intellectual experimentation and he later said that the time in Brazil had been the "greatest period of his life".

Fernand Braudel was fascinated with Sao Paulo's rapid vertical growth in the early Vargas Era and noted the Paulista academics' claims that "there is no social question" in the new world.

Fernand Braudel spent the twenty-day sea journey in the company of Febvre and his family as both had booked passage on the same ship.

Fernand Braudel thus fell under the influence of the Annales School.

Fernand Braudel worked with Febvre, who would later read the early versions of Braudel's magnum opus and provide him with editorial advice.

Fernand Braudel started writing his book on Philip II's Mediterranean at Febvre's house in the Juras.

Fernand Braudel only took a stance on current politics when expressing condemnation of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

Fernand Braudel was initially held at a prisoner-of-war camp in Neuf-Brisach and then in the Oflag XII-B in the citadel of Mainz.

Fernand Braudel drafted his great work without access to his personal collection of books and notes, which forced him to rely in that regard on his prodigious memory.

Fernand Braudel sent completed copy books to Febvre in Paris, first apparently through the International Red Cross, and after obtaining written authorisation from the OKW in November 1942 via the German embassy in Paris.

Fernand Braudel edited his work after his release in 1945 by checking it against the archival material that survived the war in a metal container in the basement of his Paris house.

Fernand Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945.

Fernand Braudel defended his thesis at the University of Paris in 1947.

Fernand Braudel became the head of the Sixieme section at EPHE after the death of Febvre in 1956 and attracted scholars such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan to join its activities.

Fernand Braudel became the editor-in-chief of the Annales in 1957, which completed his rise to unrivalled influence on the development of the historical studies in France in the post-war years.

Fernand Braudel received an additional $1 million from the Ford Foundation in 1960.

In 1962, he and Gaston Berger used the Ford Foundation grant and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, which Fernand Braudel directed from 1970 to his death.

In 1972 Fernand Braudel gave up all editorial responsibility on the Annales journal, but his name remained on the masthead.

In 1962 Fernand Braudel wrote A History of Civilizations as 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 in turn rejected it.

The second level of time comprises long-term social, economic, and cultural history, where Fernand Braudel discusses the Mediterranean economy, social groupings, empires and civilizations.

Fernand Braudel looks at two or three centuries to spot a particular pattern such as the rise and fall of various aristocracies.

That, for Fernand Braudel, is the time of surfaces and deceptive effects.

Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean is centered on the sea, but just as importantly, it is the desert and the mountains.

Fernand Braudel wrote the series as a way of explanation for the modern way and partly as a refutation of the Marxist view of history.

Fernand Braudel discussed the idea of long-term cycles in the capitalist economy that he saw developing in Europe in the 12th century.

Fernand Braudel used the word "structures" to denote a variety of social structures, such as organized behaviours, attitudes, and conventions, as well as physical structures and infrastructures.

Fernand Braudel argued that the structures established in Europe during the Middle Ages contributed to the successes of present-day European-based cultures.

Fernand Braudel attributed much of that to the long-standing independence of city-states, which, though later subjugated by larger geographic states, were not always completely suppressed, probably for reasons of utility.

Fernand Braudel argues that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets.

Fernand Braudel argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets, and he thus diverges from both liberal and Marxian interpretations.

Fernand Braudel asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side, as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.

Fernand Braudel argued that France is the product not of its politics or economics but rather of its geography and culture, a thesis that Fernand Braudel had explored in a wide-ranging book that saw the bourg and the patois: histoire totale integrated into a broad sweep of both the place and the time.

L'Identite de la France was much coloured by a romantic nostalgia, as Fernand Braudel argued for the existence of a France profonde, a "deep France" based upon the peasant mentalite, which despite all of the turmoil of French history and the Industrial Revolution, has survived intact right up to the present.

Fernand Braudel's followers admired his use of the longue duree approach to stress the slow and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.

Fernand Braudel articulated the view that most surviving historical sources come from the literate wealthy classes.

Fernand Braudel emphasised the importance of the ephemeral lives of slaves, serfs, peasants and the urban poor, and demonstrated their contributions to the wealth and power of their respective masters and societies.

Fernand Braudel's work was often illustrated with contemporary depictions of daily life and rarely with pictures of noblemen or kings.

Binghamton University in New York had a Fernand Braudel Center until 2020, and there is an Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in Sao Paulo, Brazil.