Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel was a French historian and leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean (1923–49, then 1949–66), Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79), and the unfinished Identity of France (1970–85). He was a member of the Annales School of French historiography and social history in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a student of Henri Hauser.

Braudel emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history. He can also be considered one of the precursors of world-systems theory. Braudel was born in Luméville-en-Ornois (as of 1943, merged with and part of Gondrecourt-le-Château), in the département of the Meuse, France. At the age of 7, his family moved to Paris. 

His father, who was a natural mathematician, aided him in his studies. Braudel also studied a good deal of Latin and a little Greek. Braudel was educated at the Lycée Voltaire and the Sorbonne, where at the age of 20, he was awarded an agrégé in history. While teaching at the University of Algiers between 1923 and 1932, he became fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea and wrote several papers on the Spanish presence in Algeria in the 16th century. 

During this time, Braudel began his doctoral thesis on the foreign policy of King Philip II of Spain. From 1932 to 1935, he taught in the Paris lycées (secondary schools or high schools) of Pasteur, Condorcet, and Henri-IV. By 1900, the French solidified their cultural influence in Brazil through the establishment of the Brazilian Academy of Fine Arts. São Paulo still lacked a university, and in 1934 francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel to help establish one. 

The result was the formation of the new University of São Paulo. Braudel later said that the time in Brazil was the "greatest period of his life." In 1937, Braudel returned to Paris from Brazil. However, the journey was as significant as arriving at his destination; on his way, he met Lucien Febvre, who was the co-founder of the influential Annales journal. The two had booked passage on the same ship. 

Braudel had started archival research on his doctorate on the Mediterranean when he fell under the influence of the Annales School around 1938. Also, around this time, he entered the École pratique des hautes études as an instructor in history. He worked with Lucien Febvre, who would later read the early versions of Braudel's magnum opus and provide him with editorial advice.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was called up for military service and, in 1940, was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was held at a POW camp in Mainz from 1940 to 1942 before being transferred to a POW camp near Lübeck, where he remained for the rest of the war. While in that camp, Braudel drafted his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) without access to his books or notes and relying only on his prodigious memory and a local library.

Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945. In 1947, with Febvre and Charles Morazé, Braudel obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and founded the noted Sixième Section for "Economic and social sciences" at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He 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 (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. It was housed in the building called "Maison des Sciences de l'Homme." FMSH focused its activities on international networking in order to disseminate the Annales approach to Europe and the world. 

In 1972 he gave up all editorial responsibility on the journal, although his name remained on the masthead. In 1962, he wrote A History of Civilizations as the basis for a history course. Still, its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, which in turn rejected it.

A feature of Braudel's work was his compassion for the suffering of marginal people. He articulated that most surviving historical sources come from the literate wealthy classes. He emphasized the importance of the ephemeral lives of slaves, serfs, peasants, and the urban poor, demonstrating their contributions to the wealth and power of their respective masters and societies. His work was often illustrated with contemporary depictions of daily life, rarely with pictures of noblemen or kings.

In 1949, Braudel was elected to the Collège de France upon Febvre's retirement. He co-founded the academic journal Revue économique, in 1950. He retired in 1968. In 1983, he was elected to the Académie française.