In 1929, when Annales was founded, Fernand Braudel was twenty-seven years old.1 He had studied history at the Sorbonne, he was teaching in a school in Algeria and he was working on his thesis. This thesis, supervised by the political historian Georges Pagès, seems to have begun as a fairly conventional – if ambitious – piece of diplomatic history. It was planned as a study of Philip II and the Mediterranean, suggesting that it would provide an analysis of the king's foreign policy. In 1927, however, Braudel wrote to Lucien Febvre, whom he had never met, asking for advice. In reply Febvre wrote that although ‘Philip II and the Mediterranean’ was a good subject, ‘The Mediterranean and Philip II’ would be still better. A letter written by Braudel in 1929 to apply for funding suggests that he had taken this advice to heart.2
During its long period of gestation, the thesis became increasingly broad in scope. It was for a long time normal for French academic historians to teach in schools while they wrote up their massive theses for the doctorate. Lucien Febvre, for example, taught briefly in Besançon. In similar fashion, Braudel spent the ten years 1923–32 teaching in Algeria, and the experience seems to have widened his horizons, encouraging him to read histories of North Africa by scholars such as Émile-Félix Gautier (whom he later described as ‘the greatest of the historians and geographers writing in French on the eve of the last war’), and so to view the sea from the south as well as from the north.3
At all events, Braudel's first important article, published in 1928, dealt with the Spaniards in North Africa in the sixteenth century. This study, which is actually the size of a small book, deserves to be rescued from an undeserved neglect. It was at once a critique of his predecessors in the field for their over-emphasis on battles and great men, a discussion of the ‘daily life’ of the Spanish garrisons, and a demonstration of the close (if inverse) relation between African and European history. When war broke out in Europe, the African campaigns were halted, and vice versa.4
Much of the fundamental research for Braudel's thesis was carried out between 1928 and 1930 in Simancas, where the Spanish state papers are kept, and also in the archives of the leading cities of the Christian Mediterranean – Genoa, Florence, Palermo, Venice, Marseilles and Dubrovnik, where Braudel saved time by filming the documents (when permitted) with an American cine-camera.5
This research was interrupted by a spell of two years' teaching at the new University of São Paulo (1935–7), later described by Braudel as the happiest time of his life.6 Like Strasbourg after 1919, the university was dominated by young professors, especially expatriates from France. At thirty-three, Braudel was one of the senior members of the group, which included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (aged twenty-six). As in the case of his years in Algeria, his Brazilian phase allowed Braudel to view his chosen topic from a distance, helping him to see the Mediterranean world as a whole.7 It was at this time that he discovered the work of the Brazilian historian and sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whom he would later review with enthusiasm in Annales.8 It was on the voyage back from Brazil in 1937 that Braudel made the acquaintance of Lucien Febvre, who adopted him as an intellectual son (un enfant de la maison). From 1938 onwards, Braudel would be part of the Annales network.9
The Making of The Mediterranean. It was, ironically enough, the Second World War that gave Braudel the opportunity to write his thesis. He spent most of the war years in two prisoner-of-war camps. In the first camp, near Mainz, where he was ‘rector’ of the prisoners, he had access to the local university library and read what he later described as ‘an extraordinary mass of German books’.10 In the second, near Lübeck, he was dependent on the books that Febvre sent him regularly. Braudel's prodigious memory compensated to some extent for his difficult working conditions, and he was able to write a first draft of The Mediterranean in longhand in exercise books that he posted to Febvre, to reclaim after the war. All but two of these booklets have disappeared, so that it is impossible to say what relation they bore to the thesis that Braudel defended in 1947 and published in 1949 (dedicated to Febvre ‘with the affection of a son’).11 However, the development of Braudel's interpretation of Mediterranean history can be followed partly from his letters to Febvre and partly from the texts of some lectures that he delivered to fellow-prisoners in both camps.12
The Mediterranean is a massive book, even by the standards of the traditional French doctoral thesis. In its original edition, it already contained some 600,000 words, making it six times the length of an ordinary book. The study is divided into three parts, each of which – as the preface points out – exemplifies a different approach to the past. In the first place, there is the ‘almost timeless’ history of the relationship between ‘man’ and the ‘environment’, then the gradually changing history of economic, social and political structures, and finally the fast-moving history of events. It may be illuminating to discuss these three parts in reverse order.13
The third part, which is the most traditional, probably corresponds to Braudel's original idea of a thesis on Philip II's foreign policy. Braudel offers his readers a highly professional piece of political and military history. He provides brief but incisive character-sketches of the leading characters on the historical stage, from the ‘narrow-minded and politically short-sighted’ Duke of Alba, ce faux grand homme, to his master, Philip II, slow, ‘solitary and secretive’, cautious, hard-working, a man who ‘saw his task as an unending succession of small details’, but lacked a vision of the larger whole. The battle of Lepanto, the siege and relief of Malta and the peace negotiations of the late 1570s are all described at considerable length.
However, this narrative of events is further removed from traditional ‘drum and trumpet’ history than it may appear at first sight. Time after time, the author goes out of his way to emphasize the insignificance of events and the limitations on the freedom of action of even the most important individuals. In 1565, for example, Don Garcia de Toledo, the Spanish naval commander in the Mediterranean, was slow to relieve Malta from its siege by the Turks. ‘Historians have blamed Don Garcia for his delay’, writes Braudel, ‘but have they always examined thoroughly the conditions under which he had to operate?’14
Again, Braudel insists that Philip II's well-known and oft-condemned slowness to react to events is not to be explained entirely in terms of his temperament, but has to be viewed in relation to Spain's financial exhaustion and to the problems of communication over such a vast empire.15
In similar fashion, Braudel refuses to explain in personal terms the success of Don Juan (Don John of Austria) at Lepanto. Don Juan was merely ‘the instrument of destiny’ in the sense that his victory depended on factors of which he was not even aware.16 In any case, according to Braudel, Lepanto was only a naval victory, which ‘could not destroy Turkey's roots, which went deep into the continental interior’. It was only an event. Again, Don Juan's capture of Tunis is described as ‘another victory which led nowhere’.17
Braudel is concerned to place individuals and events in context, in their milieu, but he makes them intelligible at the price of revealing their fundamental unimportance. The history of events, he suggests, although ‘the richest in human interest’, is also the most superficial. ‘I remember a night near Bahia’, he wrote in a famous passage, repeated in several of his works, ‘when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.’18 Braudel's work is rich in metaphors, from music, for instance, and from geology. No wonder then that an Italian film director once described Braudel as ‘a historian who thinks in images’.
Turning from fire to water, Braudel described events as ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs’. ‘We must learn to distrust them’. To understand the past it is necessary to dive beneath the waves.19
The stiller waters that run deeper are the subject of the second part of The Mediterranean, entitled ‘Collective Destinies and General Trends’ (Destins collectifs et mouvements d'ensemble), and concerned with the history of structures – economic systems, states, societies, civilizations and the changing forms of war. This history moves at a slower pace than that of events. It moves in generations or even centuries, so that contemporaries are scarcely aware of it. All the same, they are carried along with the current. In one of his most famous pieces of analysis, Braudel examines Philip II's empire as a ‘colossal enterprise of land and sea transport’ which was ‘exhausted by its own size’, necessarily so in an age when ‘the Mediterranean crossing from North to South could be expected to take one or two weeks’, while the crossing from East to West took ‘two or three months’.20 Anglophone readers my be reminded of Edward Gibbon's verdict on the Roman Empire as crushed by its own weight, and of his remarks on geography and communications in the first chapter of his Decline and Fall.
Despite these problems, the sixteenth century seems to have been an environment that favoured large states, states like the opposing Spanish and Turkish empires which dominated the Mediterranean. ‘The course of history’, according to Braudel, ‘is by turns favourable and unfavourable to vast political hegemonies’, and the period of economic growth during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries created a situation consistently favourable to the large and very large state.21
Like their political structures, the social structures of the two great empires – opposed to each other in so many ways – came to resemble each other more and more. The main social trends in Anatolia and the Balkans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries parallel the trends in Spain and Italy (much of which was under Spanish rule at this time). The basic trend in both areas, according to Braudel, was one of economic and social polarization. The nobility prospered and migrated to the towns, while the poor grew poorer and were increasingly driven to piracy and banditry. As for the middle class, they disappeared or ‘defected’ to the nobility, a process described by Braudel as the ‘treason’ or the ‘bankruptcy’ of the bourgeoisie (trahison, faillite de la bourgeoisie).22
Braudel extended this comparison between the Christian and Muslim Mediterraneans from society to ‘civilization’, as he called it, in a chapter that concentrates on cultural frontiers and the gradual diffusion of ideas, objects or customs across these barriers. Avoiding any facile diffusionism, he also discussed resistance to these innovations, with special reference to the Spanish ‘refusal’ of Protestantism, the rejection of Christianity on the part of the Moors of Granada and the Jews' resistance to all other civilizations.23
We have still not reached the bottom. Beneath the social trends there lies yet another history, ‘a history whose passage is almost imperceptible … a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.’24 The true bedrock of the study is a history ‘of man in his relationship to the environment’, a kind of historical geography, or, as Braudel preferred to call it, ‘geohistory’. This geohistory or ‘deep history’ (histoire profonde) is the subject of Part One of The Mediterranean, which devotes some 300 pages to mountains and plains, coastlines and islands, climate, land-routes, and sea-routes.
This part of the book doubtless owes its existence to Braudel's love affair with the region, revealed in his very first sentence, beginning ‘I have loved the Mediterranean with passion, no doubt because I am a northerner’ (Braudel came from Lorraine). All the same, it has its place in the plan. The aim is to show that all these geographical features have their history, or rather, that they are part of history, and that neither the history of events nor the general trends can be understood without them. The section on mountains, for example, discusses the culture and society of the mountain regions; the cultural conservatism of the mountaineers, the social and cultural barriers between mountaineers and plainsmen, and the need for many of the young highlanders to emigrate and to become mercenary soldiers.25
Turning to the sea itself, Braudel contrasts the western Mediterranean, which was under Spanish domination in this period, with the eastern Mediterranean, which was subject to the Turk. ‘Politics merely followed the outline of an underlying reality. These two Mediterraneans, commanded by warring rulers, were physically, economically and culturally different from each other.’26 Yet the Mediterranean region remains a unity, more of a unity (according to Braudel) than Europe, thanks to the climate and to the wines and olives which flourish in it, as well as to the sea itself.
In 1966 a second edition of the Mediterranean appeared, this time in two volumes. It differed from the first edition in important ways. In the first place, building on the work of his juniors, Braudel incorporated statistics on prices and population, sometimes in the form of tables and maps. In the second place, the balance between the three sections changed. Part II became almost half as long again (463 pages instead of 309), while Part III was drastically cut (from 377 pages to 275).27
This remarkable volume caused an immediate sensation in the French historical world. Its reputation has spread in increasing ripples to other disciplines and other parts of the globe. There can be no doubt of its originality. All the same, as the author acknowledged in his bibliographical essay, his book does have a place in a tradition, or more exactly in several different traditions.
In the first place, of course, the tradition of Annales, a journal that was twenty years old when the book was published. ‘What I owe to the Annales, to their teaching and inspiration, constitutes the greatest of my debts.’28 The first part of the book, on the role of the environment, is heavily indebted to the French geographical school, from Vidal de la Blache himself, whose pages on the Mediterranean Braudel ‘read and reread’, to the regional monographs inspired by the master, such as Maximilien Sorre's Les Pyrénées méditerranéennes (1913) and Jules Sion's La France méditerranéenne (1934).
Lucien Febvre is also present in this part of The Mediterranean, since his Philip II and Franche-Comté (better described as ‘Franche-Comté and Philip II’) had begun with a geographical introduction of a similar kind, though on a far smaller scale.29 On the other hand, Febvre's book on historical geography is absent from Braudel's bibliography. If this was a slip, it was surely a Freudian one, linked to the difference of opinion between the two scholars about human freedom.
An equally palpable presence in The Mediterranean is the man Febvre loved to attack, the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, whose ideas on ‘political geography’ or geopolitics seem to have helped Braudel formulate his ideas on a number of themes, from empires to islands.30 Braudel also read and reread the work of another German geographer, Alfred Philippson's Das Mittelmeergebiet (1904). Sociologists and anthropologists are less visible in the book, but the chapter on Mediterranean civilization shows signs of the author's debt to the ideas of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss on what he called ‘aires de civilisation’, in other words ‘cultural regions’.31
Among earlier historians, Braudel probably owes most to the great Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne, whose famous Mahomed and Charlemagne (1937) argued that the rise of Charlemagne, the end of the classical tradition and the making of the Middle Ages could not be understood without going outside the history of Europe, or Christendom, and studying the Muslim Middle East. Pirenne's vision of two hostile empires confronting one another across the Mediterranean, some 800 years before Suleiman the Magnificent and Philip II, was surely an inspiration for Braudel, who had heard the author lecture on a visit to Algeria in 1930.32 Curiously enough, although this was Pirenne's last book, the idea for it had come to him in a prison during the First World War, while Braudel worked on his study in a prison camp in the Second.
Evaluations of The Mediterranean. Braudel complained in his second edition that he had been much praised and little criticized. There have been some general criticisms, however, some of them cogent, among others by two Americans, the young Bernard Bailyn and Jack Hexter.33 At the level of detail, a number of Braudel's arguments have been challenged by later researchers. His idea of the ‘bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie’, for example, does not satisfy historians of the Low Countries, where merchants continued to flourish. Again, Braudel's claim about the relative insignificance of the battle of Lepanto has been qualified, if not exactly rejected, by recent work.34
Another lacuna in The Mediterranean has attracted less attention, but it requires emphasis here. Despite his aspirations towards what he used, like Bloch, to call a ‘total history’, Braudel had remarkably little to say about attitudes, values or mentalités collectives, even in the chapter that he devoted to ‘Civilizations’. In this respect, despite his praise for The Problem of Unbelief, he differs greatly from Febvre.35
For example, Braudel had virtually no comment to make about honour, shame and masculinity, although (as a number of anthropologists have shown since) this system of values was (and indeed remains) of great importance in the Mediterranean world, Christian and Muslim alike.36 Although religious beliefs, Catholic and Muslim, obviously mattered in the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, Braudel did not discuss them at any length. Despite his interest in cultural frontiers, he had curiously little to say about the relation between Christianity and Islam in this period. This lack of concern contrasts with the interest in the interpenetration of Christianity and Islam shown by an earlier historian of Eastern Europe, who pointed out the existence of Muslim shrines which were frequented by Christians, or of Muslim mothers who baptized their children as a safeguard against leprosy or werewolves. Similar points about Spain were made by Américo Castro in a study that appeared in 1948, too late for Braudel to use.37
Other criticisms of The Mediterranean are still more radical. Bailyn, for instance, complained that Braudel had ‘mistaken a poetic response to the past for an historical problem’, so that his book lacked focus, and that the division of the book into three parts cut events off from the geographical and social factors that explain them.38 These criticisms deserve to be discussed in more detail.
The suggestion that the book fails to concern itself with a problem would be ironic indeed if it were well founded, since Febvre and Bloch had laid such emphasis on problem-oriented history and Braudel himself wrote elsewhere that ‘The region is not the framework of research. The framework of research is the problem.’39 Could he really have neglected his own advice? I put the question to Braudel in an interview with him in 1977, and there was no hesitation in his answer. ‘My great problem, the only problem I had to resolve, was to show that time moves at different speeds.’40 All the same, large parts of this massive study are not concerned with this problem, at least not directly.
The criticism of the book's three-part organization was anticipated – but not answered – by Braudel in his preface. ‘If I am criticized for the method in which the book has been assembled, I hope the component parts will be found workmanlike.’ A way of meeting the criticism might have been to begin with the history of events (as I have just done in summarizing the book), and to show that it is unintelligible without the history of structures, which is in turn unintelligible without the history of the environment. However, to begin with what he regarded as the ‘superficial’ history of events would have been intolerable for Braudel. In the circumstances in which he drafted his study, in captivity, it was psychologically necessary for him to look beyond the short term and adopt an Olympian view, which he once described as ‘the point of view of God the Father’.41
A related criticism of The Mediterranean concerns Braudel's determinism, the exact opposite of the voluntarism of Lucien Febvre, though less strongly expressed in the second edition of the book. It is surely revealing that Braudel used the metaphor of a prison more than once in his writings, describing man as ‘prisoner’ not only of his physical environment, but also of his mentality (‘mental frameworks too can form prisons of the longue durée’).42 Unlike Febvre, Braudel did not see structures as enabling as well as constraining. ‘When I think of the individual’, he once wrote, ‘I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny (enfermé dans un destin) in which he himself has little hand.’43
These views naturally attracted criticism. ‘Braudel's Mediterranean’, wrote one British reviewer, John Elliott, on the publication of the English translation, ‘is a world unresponsive to human control.’ More recently, the British historian David Abulafia called his own book on the Mediterranean a ‘human history’, suggesting ‘the opposite’ of two of Braudel's main propositions, that all change is slow and that humanity is imprisoned in a destiny.44
It is only fair to add, however, that Braudel's determinism was not simplistic – he always insisted on the need for a plurality of explanations – and also that his reviewers generally rejected this determinist view of history in principle without offering precise or constructive criticisms. The debate over the limits of freedom and determinism is one that is likely to last as long as history is written. In this debate, whatever philosophers may say, it is extremely difficult for historians to go beyond a simple assertion of their own position.
Some critics have gone still further in their criticisms of Braudel and spoken of ‘a history without humans’. To see that this accusation is exaggerated, it is only necessary to turn to the perceptive portrayals of individual character in Part Three. Yet it is surely fair to say that the price of Braudel's Olympian view of human affairs over vast spaces and long periods is indeed a tendency to diminish human beings, to treat them as ‘human insects’, a revealing phrase from the discussion of the sixteenth-century poor.45
A more constructive criticism of Part One of The Mediterranean might be to suggest that although the author admits that his geohistory is not totally immobile, he fails to show it in motion. Despite his admiration for Maximilien Sorre, a French geographer who was already concerned in the early 1940s with what he called ‘human ecology’, the process of interaction between humankind and the environment, Braudel fails to show us what might be called the ‘making of the Mediterranean landscape’, most obviously the damage done to the environment over the long term by cutting down the tree cover.46
It is time to turn to the more positive features of a book that even its critics generally describe as a historical masterpiece. The main point to emphasize is that Braudel has done more to change our notions of both space and time than any other historian of the twentieth century.
The Mediterranean makes its readers conscious of the importance of space in history as few if any books had done before. Braudel achieved this effect by making the sea itself the hero of his epic, rather than a political unit such as the Spanish Empire, let alone an individual such as Philip II – and also by his repeated reminders of the importance, indeed the tyranny, of distance, of communications.47 Most effectively of all, Braudel helps his readers see the Mediterranean as a whole by moving outside it. The sea is vast enough in itself to drown most historians, but Braudel felt the need to extend his frontiers well beyond its shores, to the Atlantic and the Sahara. ‘If we did not consider this extended zone of influence’, he wrote, ‘it would often be difficult to grasp the history of the sea.’48 This section on the ‘Greater Mediterranean’, as he calls it, is a dramatic example of Braudel's conception of ‘global’ history, of what has been called his ‘vast appetite for extending the boundaries of his undertaking’, or, as he put it himself, his ‘desire and need to see on a grand scale’ (mon désir et mon besoin de voir grand).49 Unlike Philip II, the man obsessed with details, Braudel always had a vision of the whole.
Even more significant for historians is Braudel's original treatment of time, his attempt ‘to divide historical time into geographical time, social time and individual time’, and to stress the importance of what has become known (since the publication of his famous article on the subject), as la longue durée.50 Braudel's long term may be short by geologists' standards, or those of the new American ‘Big History’, but his emphasis on ‘geographical time’ in particular opened the eyes of many historians.51
The distinction between the short term and the long term had of course been common enough in the historian's vocabulary, as in ordinary language, before 1949. Indeed, studies of particular topics over several centuries were not uncommon in economic history, particularly in price history. An obvious example, well known to Braudel, is Earl J. Hamilton's American Treasure and the Price Revolution 1501–1650 (1934). Another is Marc Bloch's study of rural history.
As Braudel was also aware, historians of art and literature had sometimes investigated long-term changes in culture, notably Aby Warburg, Ernst Robert Curtius and their followers in their studies of the survival and transformation of the classical tradition.52 However, it remains Braudel's personal achievement to have combined the study of la longue durée with that of the complex interaction between the environment, the economy, society, politics, culture and events.
It is the consciousness that all ‘structures’ are subject to change (however slow) that is, according to Braudel, the historian's special contribution to the social sciences.53 He had little patience with frontiers, whether they separate regions or disciplines. He always wanted to see things whole, to integrate the economic, the social, the political and the cultural into a ‘total’ history. ‘A historian faithful to the teaching of Lucien Febvre and Marcel Mauss will always want to see the whole, the totality of the social.’
Few historians will want to imitate The Mediterranean and still fewer are capable of doing so. All the same, this study, like Tolstoy's War and Peace (which it resembles not only in scale but also in its acute awareness of space and its sense of the futility of human action), has permanently enlarged the possibilities of the genre in which it was written.
Braudel's big book has left the work of his contemporaries in the shade, but other members of his generation also made important contributions to the collective achievement of Annales: Ernest Labrousse, for example, and Alphonse Dupront, both of whom will be discussed below. Charles Morazé, who knew both Bloch and Febvre, proposed the new title for the journal (Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations), helped establish the Sixth Section and worked with UNESCO, but is probably best known for his study of the nineteenth century, The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie (1957).54 Another major figure was Maurice Lombard, an economic historian of the Middle Ages, who died relatively young in 1965 but whose books, published posthumously, discussed medieval money, textile networks and the early Islamic world.
Braudel in Power. For some thirty years, from Lucien Febvre's death in 1956 to his own death in 1985, Braudel was not only the leading French historian but also the most powerful one, indeed a charismatic figure whose experience of leadership went back to his days in the camp at Mainz. He was elected professor at the prestigious Collège de France in 1949, the year his thesis was published, thanks in part to the warm support of the Hispanist Marcel Bataillon.55 He joined Febvre as director of the Centre des Recherches Historiques at the Hautes Études and he also became president of the jury for the agrégation in history, a competitive examination to qualify for academic posts, allowing him to influence the syllabus and also to spot talent, an opportunity of which he made good use.56 He was described as having ‘an unequalled gift for recruiting talent’ by one of the most distinguished of his recruits, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.57
From this phase date three important series of publications by the Sixth Section (of which the Centre formed part), all of them launched in 1951–2. The first series was entitled ‘Ports-Routes-Trade’ (Ports-Routes-Trafics, beginning with a volume on the port of Livorno written by Braudel himself together with the Italian historian Ruggiero Romano); the second, ‘Business and Businessmen’ (Affaires et Gens d'Affaires), publishing the letters and journals of early modern merchants; and the third, ‘Coinage-Prices-Trends’ (Monnaie-Prix-Conjoncture). Given this strong emphasis on economic history, it is reasonable to assume that the initiative was not Febvre's, but Braudel's.
The money for this and other projects came in considerable part from the Rockefeller Foundation and later the Ford Foundation, thanks to the Austrian-American Clemens Heller, who became an assistant to Febvre and later Braudel. In the later 1950s, when some powerful individuals in the USA thought that setting up interdisciplinary centres of ‘area studies’ (for Russia, China, the Middle East and so on) was a way of combating Communism, Rockefeller money went into the establishment of the study of ‘aires culturelles’ at the Hautes Études, with Heller in charge. The Americans objected to one sinologist on the grounds that he was interested in the twelfth century, and to another that he was too sympathetic to Marxism. All the same, these scholars retained their posts in the programme.58
Collaboration with scholars outside France was pursued in systematic fashion. Contributions to the series Affaires et gens d'affaires, for example, included Ugo Tucci from Italy; José Gentil da Silva from Portugal; and Jean-François Bergier from Switzerland. For an example of Heller at work, one might choose his building of a relationship with the German Jewish scholar Shelomo Goitein, a specialist on the economic history of the medieval Mediterranean. Having read an article by Goitein, Heller immediately got in touch with him, invited him to contribute to the Sixth Section's programme on comparative economic history and offered a subsidy. The two men exchanged 111 letters and remained in touch for ten years, although Goitein's major study, A Mediterranean Society (1965–85) was eventually published in the United States.59
After Febvre's death in 1956, Braudel succeeded him as president of the Sixth Section of the École and as the effective director of Annales. The relations between Febvre's two ‘sons’, Braudel and Mandrou (whom Braudel had recommended to Febvre), became less and less fraternal, and more and more of a case of sibling rivalry. Mandrou was dismissed from his position as organizing secretary of Annales in 1962, after he had published a critique (in an Italian journal) of what he called ‘the quantitative obsession’.60 He was replaced by Marc Ferro, a historian of the twentieth century.
In 1963 Braudel founded another organization devoted to interdisciplinary research, the Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme, assisted by Clemens Heller and financed in part by the Ford Foundation. In his day the Section, the Centre and the Maison all moved into new quarters on 54 Boulevard Raspail, on the site of a former military prison. In their new home (which they had to abandon in 2011), the proximity of sociologists and anthropologists of the calibre of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu, available for conversation over coffee as well as for joint seminars, long kept the Annales historians in touch with new developments and new ideas in neighbouring disciplines.
A man of dignified and commanding presence, sometimes described as a ‘prince’ or a ‘monarch’, Braudel remained extremely influential even after his retirement in 1972.61 As for his years in office, his control over appointments, publications and funds for research gave him considerable power, which he used to promote the ideal of a ‘common market’ of the social sciences, with history as the dominant partner.62 His pupils and followers occupied some of the most important chairs in history – Le Roy Ladurie at the Collège de France, Pierre Goubert at the Sorbonne and so on. The scholarships awarded to young historians from other countries, such as Poland, to study in Paris helped to spread the French style of history abroad. Braudel also made sure that historians working on the early modern period, 1500–1800, were given at least their fair share of resources, if not more. If his empire was not as vast as Philip II's, it had a considerably more decisive ruler.
Braudel's influence over generations of research students must also be taken into account. Pierre Chaunu, for example, has described how Braudel's lectures on the history of Latin America, delivered soon after his return to France after the war, gave him such an intellectual ‘shock’ that they determined his historical career. ‘From the first ten minutes I was conquered, subjugated.’63
Chaunu was not the only historian to owe to Braudel a concern with the early modern Mediterranean world, as well as with particular problems, such as communication across wide spaces. For example, the authors of studies of a family of sixteenth-century Spanish merchants and of Brazil and the Atlantic owed their choice of topics to Braudel's suggestion, while monographs on Rome and Valladolid were inspired by his approach.64
Many other historians have recorded what they owed to Braudel's advice and encouragement in the days in which they were writing their theses. Pierre Goubert, for example, acknowledged Braudel's ‘warm dynamism’ and his encouragement of young historians.65 The outstanding figure in the third generation of Annales, at least so far as the early modern period is concerned, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who wrote his thesis on the peasants of Mediterranean France, did so under Braudel's direction. Known for a time as ‘the Dauphin’, Le Roy Ladurie was to succeed Braudel at the Collège de France just as Braudel had succeeded Febvre.
The History of Material Culture. During his years of activity as an organizer, entrepreneur and animateur, Braudel was also working on a second ambitious study. After the long years of research and writing needed to produce the massive doctoral thesis that was once necessary for a successful academic career, many French historians opted for a comparatively quiet life, producing nothing but articles or textbooks. Not so Braudel. Not long after the publication of The Mediterranean, Lucien Febvre had invited him to collaborate on another grand project, for the famous series directed by Henri Berr. The idea was that the two men should write a two-volume history of Europe from 1400 to 1800, Febvre taking thought and belief as his share, while Braudel would concern himself with the history of material life. Febvre's part had not been written when he died in 1956; Braudel produced his in three volumes between 1967 and 1979, under the title Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme.
Braudel's three volumes are more or less concerned with the economists' categories of consumption, distribution and production, in that order, but he preferred to characterize them in a different way. His introduction to the first volume describes economic history as a three-storey house. On the ground floor – the metaphor is not far from Marx's ‘base’ – is material civilization (civilisation matérielle), defined as ‘repeated actions, empirical processes, old methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial’. On the middle level, there is economic life (vie économique), ‘calculated, articulated, emerging as a system of rules and almost natural necessities’. At the top – not to say ‘superstructure’ – there is the ‘capitalist mechanism’, the most sophisticated of all.
There are obvious parallels between the tripartite structures of The Mediterranean and of Civilization and Capitalism (as the trilogy is entitled in English). In each case the first part deals with an almost immobile history, the second part with slowly changing institutional structures, and the third part with more rapid change – with events in one book, and with trends in the other.
The first volume deals with the bottom level. Concerned as it is with an economic ‘old regime’ lasting some 400 years, this book, now known in English as The Structures of Everyday Life, exemplifies Braudel's long-standing interest in the long term. It also illustrates his global approach. Originally planned as a study of Europe, the book has a little to say about Africa and a good deal about Asia and America. One of its central arguments concerns the impossibility of explaining major changes in other than global terms. Following the German economist and demographer Ernst Wagemann, Braudel noted that population movements in China and India followed a similar pattern to those of Europe: expansion in the sixteenth century, stability in the seventeenth century and renewed expansion in the eighteenth.66 A world-wide phenomenon obviously needs an explanation on the same scale.
While his followers were studying population trends at the level of the province, or on occasion that of the village, Braudel, characteristically, was attempting to see the whole. He teased Pierre Goubert, for instance, for concentrating on a ‘little corner’ of France, the countryside around Beauvais.67 While Goubert and Jean Meuvret were analysing subsistence crises in Europe, Braudel was comparing the advantages and disadvantages of wheat and other grains with those of rice in the Far East and maize in America, noting, for example, that the rice-fields ‘brought high populations and strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered’, while maize, ‘a crop that demands little effort’, left the Indians ‘free’ (if that is the word) to labour on ‘the giant Mayan or Aztec pyramids’ or ‘the cyclopean walls of Cuzco’.
The effect of these apparent divagations is to define Europe by contrast to the rest of the world, as a continent of grain-eaters, relatively well-equipped with furniture, a region whose density of population made transport problems less acute than elsewhere, but one where labour was relatively expensive – a stimulus to the employment of inanimate sources of energy associated with the Industrial Revolution.
In subject-matter, as in geography, Braudel burst through the barriers of conventional economic history. He swept away the traditional categories of ‘agriculture’, ‘trade’ and ‘industry’, and looked instead at people and things, ‘everything mankind makes or uses’: food, clothes, housing, tools, money, towns and so on. Two basic concepts underlie this first volume. The first is that of ‘everyday life’; the second is that of ‘material civilization’.
In the introduction to the second edition, Braudel declared that the aim of his book was nothing less than the historicization of everyday life (l'introduction de la vie quotidienne dans la domaine del'histoire). He was not, of course, the first person to attempt this. La civilisation quotidienne was the title of one volume of Lucien Febvre's Encyclopédie française, a volume to which Bloch contributed an essay on the history of food. A series of histories of daily life in different places and times was published by Hachette from 1938 onwards, beginning with a study of the French Renaissance by Abel Lefranc (the man whose view of Rabelais had so irritated Lucien Febvre). Earlier still, an important study of daily life in Denmark and Norway in the sixteenth century was made by the great Danish historian T. F. Troels-Lund, with separate volumes devoted to food, clothes and housing.68 All the same, Braudel's work is important for its synthesis between what might be called the ‘little history’ of daily life, which can easily become purely descriptive, anecdotal or antiquarian, and the history of the great economic and social trends of the time.
Braudel's concept of civilisation matérielle also deserves closer analysis. The idea of a realm of routine (Zivilisation), as opposed to a realm of creativity (Kultur), was dear to Oswald Spengler, a historian with whom Braudel has more in common than is generally admitted.69 Braudel does not concern himself with mental routines, with what Febvre called outillage mental. As we have seen, he never showed much interest in the history of mentalities, and in any case he was supposed to leave thought and belief to Febvre's parallel volume. On the other hand, he had much to say about other forms of habit.
As in his Mediterranean, Braudel's approach to civilization in this book is essentially that of a geographer, or geohistorian, interested in culture-areas (aires culturelles), between which exchanges of goods take place – or fail to take place. One of his most fascinating examples is that of the chair, which arrived in China, probably from Europe, in the second or third century AD, and was in widespread use by the thirteenth century. This acquisition required new kinds of furniture (such as higher tables), and new postures – in short, a new way of life. The Japanese, on the other hand, resisted the chair, just as the Moors of Granada, discussed in the Mediterranean, resisted Christianity.70
If anything important is lacking in this brilliant study of ‘material culture’, as it has become customary to call it in English, it is surely the realm of symbols.71 The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen devoted an important part of his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to a discussion of status symbols. Some historians were moving in the same direction; Lawrence Stone, for example, in a book published two years before Braudel's, discussed the houses and the funerals of the English aristocracy from this point of view.72 Since that time, historians and anthropologists alike have been devoting considerable attention to the meanings of material culture.73
A historical anthropologist or anthropological historian might want to supplement Braudel's fascinating account of ‘carnivorous Europe’, for example, with a discussion of the symbolism of such ‘noble’ foods as venison and pheasant, which were associated with the aristocratic pastime of hunting and played an important part in the rituals of gift exchange. Similar points might be made about the uses of clothes for what the sociologist Erving Goffman has called the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’, and also about the symbolism of houses, their facades and their interior arrangements.74
All the same, it is important not to exaggerate Braudel's lack of interest in culture. The textbook on the contemporary world that he produced in 1963 had much to say about ‘civilizations’ in different areas, while the major study first published in 1967 focused on early modern ‘material civilization’.75 Returning to the Mediterranean world, Braudel wrote a long essay on ‘Italy outside Italy’, concerned with the impact of Italian art, especially architecture, abroad.76
Braudel on Capitalism. The Wheels of Commerce opens with an evocation of the bustle and confusion of the noisy, animated, polyglot, multicoloured world of the traditional market, and continues with descriptions of fairs, pedlars and great merchants. Many of these merchants were as exotic as the goods they bought and sold, for international trade was often in the hands of outsiders – Protestants in France, Jews in Central Europe, Old Believers in Russia, Copts in Egypt, Parsees in India, Armenians in Turkey, Portuguese in Spanish America and so on.
Here as elsewhere, Braudel kept a fine balance between the abstract and the concrete, the general and the particular. He interrupted his panorama from time to time to focus on case studies, including an agricultural ‘factory’, as he calls it, in the eighteenth-century Veneto, and also the Amsterdam Bourse, that ‘confusion of confusions’, as a seventeenth-century participant described it, already inhabited by bulls and bears. Braudel always had an eye for the vivid detail. During the fair of Medina del Campo in Castile, so he tells us, Mass used to be celebrated on the balcony of the cathedral so that ‘buyers and sellers could follow the service without having to stop business.’
These colourful descriptions are complemented by a fascinating analysis in which Braudel displayed to the full his remarkable gift for appropriating ideas from other disciplines and making them his own. He had read Max Weber's famous essay on The Protestant Ethic in the prison camp in Mainz in 1941, but he described himself as ‘allergic’ to the author's ideas. Where Weber viewed the capitalist as a worldly ascetic, Braudel saw the capitalist as essentially a gambler (Tout capitaliste est joueur).77
On the other hand, in The Wheels of Commerce, Braudel drew on the ‘central-place theory’ of the German geographer Walter Christaller to discuss the distribution of markets in China. He drew on the sociology of Georges Gurvitch to analyse what he called ‘the pluralism of societies’, the contradictions in their social structures. He drew on the theories of Simon Kuznets, an economist ‘convinced of the explanatory value of the long term in economics … a development after my own heart’, to characterize pre-industrial societies by the lack of fixed, durable capital.78 He drew on that remarkable polymath Karl Polanyi, who was studying economic anthropology in the 1940s, but argued against him that the market economy coexisted with the non-market economy in the early modern world, rather than emerging suddenly in what Polanyi called the ‘great transformation’ of the nineteenth century.79
Braudel drew most of all from Werner Sombart's famous study of modern capitalism, despite criticizing him, as he criticized Weber, for overemphasizing what Sombart called the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and Weber, the ‘Protestant Ethic’, in other words, what some Annalistes describe as collective mentalities.
In this account of the mechanisms of distribution and exchange, Braudel characteristically offered explanations that were at once structural and multilateral. Discussing the role of religious minorities like the Huguenots and the Parsees in international trade, he concluded that ‘it is surely the social machinery itself which reserves to outsiders such unpleasant but socially essential tasks … if they had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them’.80 He had no time for explanations in terms of individuals.
On the other hand, Braudel remained opposed to explanations in terms of a single factor. ‘Capitalism cannot have emerged from a single confined source’, he remarked, sweeping away both Marx and Weber with a single flick of the wrist. ‘Economics played a part, politics played a part, society played a part, and culture and civilization played a part. So too did history, which often decides in the last analysis who will win a trial of strength.’81 This is a characteristic passage of Braudel, combining open-mindedness with a lack of analytical rigour, and admitting in principle the importance of factors that receive little serious discussion elsewhere in the book.
It is also a reminder that he found it necessary to preserve a certain intellectual distance from Marx and even more from Marxism, to avoid being trapped inside an intellectual framework that he regarded as too rigid. ‘Marx's genius, the secret of his long sway’, wrote Braudel, ‘lies in the fact that he was the first to construct true social models, on the basis of a historical longue durée. These models have been frozen in all their simplicity by being given the status of laws.’82
The third volume of the trilogy, the Perspective of the World, shifted attention from structure to process – the process of the rise of capitalism. In this final volume, in which it was necessary to be conclusive, Braudel underplayed his usual eclectic approach. Instead, he drew heavily on the ideas of a single scholar, Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein is almost as difficult to classify as Polanyi. Trained as a sociologist, he carried out research in Africa. Convinced that he could not understand Africa without analysing capitalism, he turned to economics. Discovering that he could not understand capitalism without going back to its origins, he decided to become an economic historian. His history of the ‘world economy’ since 1500 is in its turn indebted to Braudel (to whom the second volume is dedicated).83
However, Wallerstein's analysis of the history of capitalism also drew on the work of development economists such as André Gunder Frank, notably on their concepts of economic ‘cores’ and ‘peripheries’ and their argument that the development of the West and the underdevelopment of the rest of the world are opposite sides of the same coin.84 Wallerstein discussed what he called the ‘international division of labour’ and the successive hegemonies of the Dutch, the British and of the United States. He stands in a Marxist tradition, and it was something of a surprise for many readers to see the elderly Braudel, who had always kept his distance from Marx, finally accepting something like a Marxist framework in his discussion of world systems.
The Perspective of the World is also concerned with the sequence of preponderant powers, but it begins, as one might have expected the author to begin, with the Mediterranean, rather than with the Dutch, like Wallerstein. According to Braudel, it was fifteenth-century Venice that first achieved hegemony over an ‘economic world’ (économie-monde). Venice was followed by Antwerp and Antwerp by Genoa, whose bankers controlled the economic destinies of Europe (and, through Spain, of America) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ‘the age of the Genoese’. Fourth in sequence comes the Dutch Republic, or, more exactly, Amsterdam, which Braudel sees as the last of the economically dominant cities. Finally, with a characteristically skilful twist, the author turned the problem inside out and discussed the failure of other parts of the world (including France and India) to achieve a similar dominant position, ending his story with Britain and the Industrial Revolution.
It is not difficult to find inaccuracies or lacunae in these volumes, particularly when the author moved away from the Mediterranean world which he knew and loved best. Such inaccuracies were virtually inevitable in a work of such breathtaking scope. A more serious criticism, analogous to the one of The Mediterranean offered above, is that Braudel remained, in one of his favourite metaphors, a ‘prisoner’ of his original division of labour with Febvre (if not of his own outillage mental). He continued to the end to be ‘allergic’, as he put it, to Max Weber, and to have little to say about capitalist values – industry, thrift, discipline, enterprise and so on. Yet the contrast between what might be called ‘pro-enterprise cultures’, such as the Dutch Republic and Japan, and ‘anti-enterprise cultures’, such as early modern Spain, is a striking one, and these differences in values are surely relevant to these countries' economic histories.
This unwillingness to allow autonomy to culture, to ideas, is clearly illustrated in one of Braudel's late essays. Discussing the problem of the rejection of the Reformation in France (as he had once discussed the rejection of the Reformation in Spain), he offered a crudely reductionist geographical explanation. He confined himself to noting that the Rhine and the Danube were the frontiers of Catholicism, just as they had been the frontiers of the Roman Empire, without taking the trouble to analyse the possible relation between these frontiers and the events and ideas of the Reformation.85
All the same, the positive features of Braudel's trilogy far outweigh their defects. Together, the three volumes make a magnificent synthesis of the economic history of early modern Europe – in a wide sense of the term ‘economic’ – and they place this history in a comparative context. They confirmed the author's right to the world heavyweight title in history. One can only be grateful for this demonstration that it was still possible in the late twentieth century to resist the pressures towards specialization. One can only admire the tenacity with which Braudel carried out two large-scale projects over a period of more than fifty years.
What is more, he had not finished. In his old age, Leopold von Ranke turned to world history. For once more modest in his ambitions, Braudel embarked in his late seventies on a total history of his own nation. Only the geographical, demographic and economic sections were in existence when the author died in 1985, half of what the author planned, but they have been published under the title The Identity of France.
This last book was in a sense predictable – it is not difficult to imagine what a Braudelian study of France might be like. It drew, like his earlier books, on the work of his favourite geographers, from Vidal de la Blache to Maximilien Sorre. Although Braudel took the opportunity to reply to the criticism that he was an extreme determinist, and had some good words to say for ‘possibilism’ in the manner of Febvre and Vidal de la Blache, he did not in fact budge from his position, reiterating his belief that we are ‘crushed’ by ‘the enormous weight of distant origins’.
All the same, the first volume of this study is another impressive demonstration of Braudel's capacity to incorporate space into history, to discuss distance and regional diversity on the one hand, communications and national cohesion on the other, and of course to offer his reflections on the changing frontiers of France over the very long term, from the year 843 to 1761. A second volume, on population and production, reproduced for France the structure of his work on capitalism, discussing the ‘peasant economy’ (which according to Braudel, lasted until the twentieth century), and then the ‘superstructures’ – towns, industry, trade and capitalism. The chapters he planned on ‘the state, culture, society’ were never written.86
One last theme in Braudel's work deserves discussion here: statistics. Braudel gave a warm welcome to the quantitative methods employed by his colleagues and pupils. He made use of statistics and tables on occasion, particularly in the second, enlarged edition of his Mediterranean, published in 1966. However, it would not be unfair to say that figures formed part of the decoration of his historical edifice, rather than part of its structure.87 In his own work he resisted quantitative methods just as he resisted most forms of cultural history, dismissing Burckhardt's famous Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy as ‘up in the air’ (airienne, suspendue).88 He was thus something of a stranger to two major developments within Annales history in his time: quantitative history (despite his support for it) and the history of mentalities. It is time to turn to these developments.
Despite his achievements and his charismatic leadership, the development of the Annales movement in Braudel's day cannot be explained solely in terms of his ideas, interests and influence. The ‘collective destinies and general trends’ of the movement also deserve examination. Of these trends, the most important, from 1950 or thereabouts to the 1970s or even later, was surely the rise of quantitative history. This ‘quantitative revolution’, as it has been called, was first visible in the economic field, especially the history of prices. From the economic sphere it spread to social history, especially the history of population. Finally, in the third generation, discussed in the next chapter, the new trend penetrated cultural history – the history of religion and the history of mentalities.89 The beliefs of the quantitative historians may be summed up in two phrases. The first is Ernest Labrousse's remark that ‘to be a historian, you need to know how to count’ (pour être historien, il faut savoir compter).90 The second is Le Roy Ladurie's claim that in the future ‘the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing’.91
The Importance of Labrousse. For economic historians to concern themselves with statistics was nothing new. A considerable amount of research on the history of prices had been carried out in the nineteenth century.92 The early 1930s witnessed an explosion of interest in the subject, doubtless connected with such phenomena of the day as the German hyperinflation of the 1920s and the Great Crash of 1929. Two important studies of prices appeared in French in the years 1932–3. The first, which Lucien Febvre described as a book that historians needed at their bedside, was called Researches on the General Movement of Prices.93 It was the work of the economist François Simiand, the man who had published a resounding attack on traditional history thirty years earlier. The Researches discussed the alternation in history of periods of economic expansion, for which Simiand coined the terms ‘A-phases’, and periods of contraction, or ‘B-phases’. This terminology was followed by Simiand's friend Marc Bloch before becoming common currency in the second generation.94
The second important study, modestly entitled Sketch of the Movement of Prices and Revenues in 18th-Century France, was the work of a younger historian, Ernest Labrousse.95 Labrousse, who was two years older than Braudel, was extremely influential on historical writing in France for more than fifty years. If Braudel often suggested the topics of dissertations, it was usually Labrousse who supervised them. Over the years more than seventy research students climbed the five flights of stairs to his study, to be given sound advice and inspired suggestions.96
Since he taught at the Sorbonne, was a Marxist socialist who had once acted as secretary to Jaurès, and wrote about the French Revolution (the event par excellence, at least for the French), Labrousse was hardly a typical member of the Annales group.97 On the other hand, given his influence on younger historians in the group, he may be said to have been absolutely central to it.98
As we have seen, neither Febvre nor Bloch took a great interest in the ideas of Karl Marx. Despite his socialism and his admiration for Jaurès, Febvre was too much of a voluntarist to find Marx illuminating. As for Bloch, despite his enthusiasm for economic history, he was separated from Marx by his Durkheimian approach. Braudel, as we have seen, owed more to Marx, but only in his later work.
It was with Labrousse that Marxism began to penetrate the Annales group. So did statistical methods, for Labrousse was inspired by the economists Albert Aftalion and François Simiand to undertake a rigorously quantitative study of the economy of eighteenth-century France, published in two parts, the Sketch (1933), dealing with price movements from 1701 to 1817, and the Crisis (1944), dealing with the end of the old regime. These books, which are packed with tables and graphs, are concerned both with long-term trends (le moment de longue durée) and with short-term cycles, ‘cyclical crises’ and ‘intercycles’. Labrousse, who showed great ingenuity in finding ways to measure economic trends, made use of the concepts, methods and theories of economists such as Clément Juglar and Nikolai Kondratieff, concerned respectively with short and long economic cycles, and his own teacher Albert Aftalion, who had written on economic crises.
Labrousse argued that in eighteenth-century France a bad harvest would have a ‘knock-on’ effect, leading to a decline in rural revenues and so a decline in the still largely rural market for industry. He also argued for the importance of the economic crisis of the late 1780s as a precondition for the French Revolution. His two monographs were pioneering studies of what the Annales historians would later call conjoncture (see Glossary). They have been criticized on occasion for forcing the data to fit the model, but they have been extremely influential.99
In his famous essay on ‘History and the Social Sciences’ (1958), which centred on the concept of longue durée, Braudel called Labrousse's Crisis ‘the greatest work of history to have appeared in France in the course of the last twenty-five years’. Similarly, Pierre Chaunu declared that ‘The whole movement towards quantitative history in France derives from two books which were the breviaries of my generation, the Sketch and the Crisis’, books that he considered to have been more influential than the Mediterranean itself.
These books were extremely technical, and Labrousse published relatively little thereafter. He may be described as a historian's historian. He was not a narrow specialist, however. His interests extended well beyond the economic history of the eighteenth century, to the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and to the social history of the European bourgeoisie from 1700 to 1850. What is more, he once declared that ‘there can be no study of society without a study of mentalities.’100
Thanks in particular to his supervision of graduate students, Labrousse deserves to be remembered as the ‘grey eminence’ of Annales, playing Father Joseph, the self-effacing but indispensable collaborator, to Braudel's Cardinal Richelieu. There are also grounds for suspecting Labrousse's influence on the second edition of Braudel's Mediterranean, published in 1966, which placed more emphasis on quantitative history as well as including the tables and graphs which the first edition lacked, especially in the discussion of trends in prices and population. It was also to include more tables and graphs than before that the journal Annales began to appear in enlarged format in 1969.
It is impossible to discuss in detail all the works of the 1950s and 1960s which bear the joint impress of Braudel and Labrousse, but equally impossible to leave out Chaunu's Seville and the Atlantic (1955–60), perhaps the longest historical thesis ever written (in 8 volumes, while volume 8, the interpretative part, has more than three thousand pages).101 Chaunu's study, written with the help of his wife Huguette, tried to imitate if not to surpass Braudel by taking as his region the Atlantic Ocean. He concentrated on what can be measured, the tonnage of goods transported between Spain and the New World from 1504 to 1650, widening out from this base to discuss more general fluctuations in the volume of trade, and finally the major economic trends of the period, notably the shift from expansion in the sixteenth century (an A-phase, as Simiand would say) to contraction in the seventeenth (a B-phase).
This massive study, which launched that famous pair of terms structure and conjoncture, was at once an application to transatlantic trade of a method and a model developed by Labrousse for eighteenth-century France, and a challenge to Braudel, studying an ocean, at least from an economic point of view, and taking a truly global view of his subject. The long section on the historical geography of Spanish America is also outstanding. As his later studies of the Pacific and the Americas also demonstrate, Chaunu was second only to Braudel in his awareness of the importance of space and of communication in history.102
Historical Demography and Demographic History. After the history of prices, the history of population was the second great conquest of the quantitative approach. The rise of demographic history took place in the 1950s, and it owes as much to contemporary awareness of a world population explosion as the price history of the 1930s owes to the Great Crash. The development of this field, in France at least, was the joint work of demographers and historians. Louis Henry, for example, who worked at the Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED), turned in the 1940s from the study of population in the present to the study of the past, and developed the method of ‘family reconstitution’, linking the records of births, marriages and deaths and investigating a region and a period through case studies of families in Geneva, Normandy and elsewhere.103 The journal of the INED, Population, which began publication in 1946, has always carried contributions by historians.
The first volume, for example, included a seminal article by the historian Jean Meuvret. Like Labrousse, Meuvret was a historian of much greater importance for the Annales movement in the 1940s and 1950s than his relatively meagre published work might suggest. This article developed the notion of ‘subsistence crisis’, arguing that in France in the age of Louis XIV, these crises were regular events. A rise in grain prices would soon be followed by a rise in the death rate and a drop in the birth rate. Then came a gradual recovery, followed by the next crisis.104 The ideas of this article underlie a number of later regional studies, from Goubert on the Beauvaisis onwards.
Historical demography was soon linked officially to social history. In 1960, the Sixth Section founded a new historical series, ‘Demography and Societies’, which published a number of important monographs on regional history. A leading historical demographer associated with Annales was Meuvret's collaborator, Jacques Dupâquier, who studied the area around Paris during the old regime.
The Importance of Regional and Serial History. One of the first publications in the series ‘Demography and Societies’ was Pierre Goubert's thesis on Beauvais and the Beauvaisis (1960).105 Like Chaunu, Goubert divided his study into two parts, entitled ‘Structure’ and ‘Conjoncture’. The second part is concerned with long-term and short-term fluctuations in prices, production and population over a ‘long’ seventeenth century running from 1600 to 1730. It offers a regional illustration of Simiand's B-phase, while Goubert's juxtaposition of price and population movements showed the human consequences of economic change.
The importance of the first part is that it integrated historical demography into the social history of a region. Goubert made a careful study of population trends in a number of villages in the Beauvaisis, such as Auneuil and Breteuil. He arrived at conclusions similar to Meuvret's about the persistence of an ‘old demographic regime’, marked by subsistence crises every thirty years or so, to the middle of the eighteenth century, and he noted how the villagers adjusted to hard times by marrying later, thus giving the wives fewer child-bearing years.
However, Goubert did more than demonstrate the relevance to the Beauvaisis of what were becoming the orthodox interpretations of economic recession and demographic crisis in the seventeenth century. He placed considerable emphasis on what he called ‘social demography’, on the fact that the chances of survival, for example, differed from one social group to another. He called his study a contribution to ‘social history’, a history concerned with everyone, not just the rich and the powerful, a point reiterated in a later work of Goubert's, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (1966).
The most interesting parts of the book, to my mind at least, are the chapters on urban and rural society, on the world of textile production in Beauvais, for example, or on the different kinds of peasant – rich, middling and poor. This careful study of social differentiation and social hierarchies, which Goubert later developed in an essay on the peasantry in the seventeenth century all over France, is an invaluable corrective to any simple view of old regime society as homogeneous.106
Rich as it is, Goubert's social analysis stopped short of total history. The problem of ‘bourgeois mentality’ received a brief discussion, but, as the author admitted at the start, religion and politics were left out. In similar fashion, most of the Annales-style regional monographs of the 1960s and 1970s, a remarkable collective achievement, were virtually restricted to economic and social history, together with geographical introductions on the Braudel model.107 One of the most remarkable was the study of Provence by René Baehrel, an aggressive critic of Meuvret and other colleagues who was ‘shouldered aside by the Labroussian establishment’ and ‘shut out of the discussion for twenty years’.108
Goubert dedicated his thesis to Labrousse, whose role behind the scenes is revealed by the acknowledgements prefixed to some of the most distinguished regional studies of the second and third generations of Annales, from Pierre Vilar's Catalonia to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Languedoc and Michel Vovelle's Provence.109 These studies, which are not so much copies from a model as individual variations on a group theme, were the most impressive achievement of the Annales School at the time. In this respect, they resemble the regional monographs of the French geographical school fifty years earlier – Albert Demangeon's Picardy, Jules Sion's Normandy and so on. These studies also reveal the re-establishment of Annales in the provinces, in universities such as Caen and Rennes, Lyon and Toulouse, decades after the move from Strasbourg to Paris. Generally speaking, the regional studies combined Braudelian structures, Labroussian conjoncture and the new historical demography.
The rural society of early modern France was studied at provincial level in Burgundy, in Provence, in Languedoc, in the Ile-de-France, in Savoy, in Lorraine. There was also a cluster of monographs on early modern cities, not only in France (Amiens, Lyon, Caen, Rouen, Bordeaux) but elsewhere in the Mediterranean world (Rome, Valladolid, Venice), some of them published by the Centre de Recherches Historiques in a new series, Civilisations et sociétés, beginning in 1965.110
These local studies, urban and rural, had considerable family resemblances. They tended to be divided into two parts, structures and conjoncture, and to rely heavily on sources that provide fairly homogeneous data of a kind that can be arranged in long time-series such as price trends or death rates. Hence the name ‘serial history’ (histoire sérielle) often given to this approach.111 Looking at these theses, one can see the point of Le Roy Ladurie's remark at the time that ‘the quantitative revolution has completely transformed the craft of the historian in France’.112
Most of these local studies were directed by Braudel or Labrousse, and most of them deal with the early modern period mainly in France but quite often in Italy (from Georgelin on Venice to Aymard on Sicily and Delille on Naples) or Spain (Lapeyre, Bennassar, etc). There are exceptions to both rules, however. The medievalist Georges Duby wrote one of the first of these regional monographs, concentrating on property, the social structure and the aristocratic family on the area around Macon in Burgundy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Duby's work was supervised by a former colleague of Bloch's, Charles Perrin, and it was inspired by historical geography.113 The nineteenth-century Limousin was also studied in the Annales manner, by Alain Corbin, in a volume beginning with the geography of the region, going on to describe ‘economic, social and mental structures’, and concluding with an analysis of political attitudes and an account of change over time.114
Even in the case of early modern studies, it would be misleading to present the Annales School or circle as if it were completely sealed off from other historians. For example, it was Gaston Zeller, a professor of international relations, who inspired Jean Delumeau's study of Rome and Richard Gascon's study of Lyon.
The most obvious outsider to mention here is Roland Mousnier, a scholar of Braudel's generation who was as influential a director of research on the early modern period as Braudel himself or Labrousse. Mousnier published his articles in the Revue Historique, not in Annales. He was professor at the Sorbonne, not the Hautes Études. He was persona non grata to Braudel. If the Annales circle is a club, Mousnier was certainly not a member. All the same, his intellectual interests overlapped with theirs to a considerable degree. No French historian since Bloch had taken the comparative approach to history so seriously, whether the comparisons were neighbourly or remote. Mousnier contrasted the political development of France and England, for example, and he studied seventeenth-century peasant revolts as far afield as Russia and even China. Like Braudel and Labrousse, Mousnier had extremely able disciples, organized collective enterprises and made considerable use of social theory, from Max Weber to Talcott Parsons and Bernard Barber (he had little time for Marxism).115
Although his political views were well to the right, Mousnier was able to collaborate on a study of the eighteenth century with Labrousse, whose heart was always on the left. They did not agree on methods of research, let alone conclusions, but the two men shared a strong interest in the analysis of the social structure of the old regime, its ‘orders’ and ‘classes’, a topic on which they organized rival conferences.116
Mousnier directed a considerable number of theses in social history, on topics ranging from the eighteenth-century French soldier to a computer-based quantitative analysis of changes in the social structure of a small French town over nearly three centuries.117 In the early 1960s, he launched a programme of collective research into peasant risings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partly to refute the Marxist interpretation of French peasant revolts of the seventeenth century put forward by the Soviet historian Boris Porshnev, whose work – published in Russian in the 1940s – was translated into French by Mousnier's rivals at the Sixth Section, with a preface by Robert Mandrou.118 The works of Mousnier and his pupils generally paid more attention to politics and less to economics than the regional studies supervised by Braudel and Labrousse. They also took legal criteria more seriously and economic criteria less seriously in their analyses of the social structure. However, some of these studies, especially the ones concerned with revolts, are scarcely distinguishable from those of the Annalistes.119
Le Roy Ladurie in Languedoc. There was one major exception to the heavy emphasis on economic and social structures and conjoncture, to be found in regional studies from the Annales circle at this time. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's doctoral thesis on The Peasants of Languedoc (1966) embarked, as the author put it, upon ‘the adventure of a total history’ over a period of more than 200 years.120
Le Roy Ladurie is regarded by common consent as the most brilliant of Braudel's pupils, resembling him in a number of respects – imaginative power, wide-ranging curiosity, a multidisciplinary approach, a concern with the longue durée and a certain ambivalence towards Marxism. Like Braudel, he is a northerner (a Norman in his case) in love with the south. His Peasants of Languedoc is built on the same scale as The Mediterranean, beginning, as one might expect, with an account of the geography of Languedoc, a typically Mediterranean countryside of rocks and scrub, of grain, vines and olives, of holm-oaks and chestnut trees.
Le Roy Ladurie shares with Braudel an intense interest in the physical environment, an interest that led him to produce a remarkable comparative study of the history of climate over the long term.121 American scientists had used the evidence of tree-rings (notably those of the giant sequoias of the far west, which sometimes live for 1,500 years) to establish long-term trends in the climate. A narrow ring means a year of drought, a wide ring a year of abundant rainfall. Le Roy Ladurie had the happy idea of juxtaposing these conclusions with those obtained from another example of ‘serial history’, a study of variations in the date of the wine harvests in parts of Europe. An early harvest means a warm year, a late harvest a cold one. He concluded that ‘the ancient vineyards of Germany, France and Switzerland echo, far-off but in harmony, the evidence of the thousand-year-old forests of Alaska and Arizona’.The parallel to Braudel's comparison of population movements in Europe and Asia is obvious enough.
On the other hand, Le Roy (as it is convenient to call him for short) found it necessary to keep his intellectual distance from Braudel, just as Braudel did from Marx. He abandoned the traditional organization of regional monographs into sections on structures and conjoncture. Instead he divided his book, which runs from 1500 to 1700, into three periods, three phases of what he called ‘a great agrarian cycle’, an enormous movement of ebb and flow, rise and fall.
The first period is an A-phase, a period of economic expansion fuelled by a dramatic rise in the population of the region, recovering at last from the ravages of plague in the later Middle Ages. As a contemporary put it, the people of sixteenth-century Languedoc were breeding ‘like mice in a barn’. Marginal land was taken back into cultivation, and the land was also exploited more intensively. The average peasant holding became smaller and smaller (because there were more children to divide the land among), and the rural wage labourers became poorer and poorer (because the growth of population created a buyers' market for labour). The group that profited from change was that of the landowners who managed their estates themselves.
Population continued to expand, at a slower rate, till 1650 or even l680 (some time after it had stopped rising in Goubert's Beauvaisis), and landowners continued to profit. Indeed, Le Roy calls the period 1600–50 that of the ‘rent offensive’. At this point, however, what Simiand would call a ‘B-phase’ of depression occurred and the whole enormous movement went into reverse. The fundamental reason for this reversal was the decline in the productivity of agriculture. The impoverished cultivators were unable to invest in their land, and in any case there was a limit to what could be squeezed out of this rocky Mediterranean soil. There was not enough food to go round, and so a subsistence crisis followed. Many people died, some emigrated, and (as in the Beauvaisis) couples tended to marry later than before. ‘It looks very much as if population was adjusting painfully to the conditions of a contracting economy.’122 On the other hand, the decline in population intensified the economic depression, which reached its bottom in the early eighteenth century, at the close of the reign of Louis XIV. The author concluded that ‘The Malthusian curse had fallen on Languedoc in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in the sense that the growth of population wiped out every increase in prosperity, just as Thomas Malthus said it would.123
What I have described above is a distinguished piece of geographical, economic and social history in the manner which was, in the 1960s, typical of the regional studies associated with Annales. It made considerable use of quantitative methods, to study not only fluctuations in prices and in the rates of birth, marriage and death, but also trends in the distribution of property, in agricultural productivity and so on.
In important respects, however, The Peasants of Languedoc broke with tradition. As we have seen, Le Roy adopted a chronological form of organization. Within each chronological section, he discussed cultural developments such as the rise of Protestantism and literacy, and he also described the reactions of the ordinary people of his region to the economic trends they experienced in their everyday lives.
In order to write this ‘history from below’, he drew heavily on the evidence of revolts. For example, in the course of a discussion of the polarization of rural society in the later sixteenth century into prosperous landowners and poor wage-workers, Le Roy introduced a mini-narrative of a single episode of social conflict, in the small town of Romans. During the Carnival of 1580, craftsmen and peasants took advantage of the masquerades to proclaim that ‘the rich of their town had grown wealthy at the expense of the poor’, and that before long ‘Christian flesh will be selling at sixpence the pound’.124
Again, in his section on the economic depression of the early eighteenth cenury, Le Roy told the story of the guerrilla war conducted by the Camisards, the Protestant highlanders of the Cévennes, against the king who had recently outlawed their religion. He noted that the leaders of the revolt, who included young girls, were frequently seized with fits of shaking, in which they had visions of heaven and hell and prophesied events to come. Showing, unlike Bloch and Febvre, an interest in psychoanalysis, Le Roy suggested that the seizures were hysterical, and he went on to relate the phenomenon to the general conjoncture of the period – the depression led to impoverishment, later marriage, sexual frustration, hysteria and finally to convulsions.
Le Roy's thesis was generally well received.125 Indeed, it made his reputation. Over the years, however, some substantial criticisms have emerged. His account of the prophets of the Cévennes, for example, has been criticized for treating them as pathological cases, rather than reading their spirit possession as an authentic form of body language.126 His economic analysis, according to one critic, ‘does not make sense’ because it ‘confuses rent with profit’.127
More fundamentally still, Le Roy's ‘demographic model’ of social change in Languedoc has been attacked by Marxists on the grounds that it is too simple, following Malthus too closely, and that ‘it is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-run trends in the distribution of income and economic growth, and not vice versa’. To this Le Roy has replied that his model is not simple but complex, ‘neo-Malthusian’, and that it incorporates the class structure.128 We are left with two rival models of social change: a demographic model that incorporates class, and a class model that incorporates demography. As in the case of the debate over freedom and determinism around Braudel's Mediterranean, there seems no way of deciding the question empirically.
Whether one accepts the author's explanatory model or not, The Peasants of Languedoc compels admiration for its successful and unusual combination of meticulous, quantitative economic and social history with brilliantly impressionistic political, religious and psychohistory. Looking back at this study nearly half a century after its publication, it has become clear that Le Roy was one of the first to see the limitations of the Braudelian paradigm, and to work out how it should be modified. These modifications, largely the work of the third generation of Annales, are the subject of the next chapter.