Fernand Braudel

Braudel was born in Luméville-en-Ornois in the département of the Meuse, France. He grew up in a pre-industrial rural setting with his grandmother until at the age of seven he joined his father in Paris. His father, a mathematics teacher, aided him in his studies. His maternal grandfather had been a Communard, and Braudel was reluctant to mention this side of his family.

Braudel was educated at the Lycée Voltaire (1913-1920), where he studied Latin and Greek, and at the Sorbonne, where he was taught by Henri Hauser and gained an agrégation in history in 1923. He taught at a lycée in Constantine in French Algeria in 1923/24, where he met his future second wife, Paule Pradel, and then at the University of Algiers until 1932, with a break for military service in the French Army of the Rhine in 1925/26.

While in Algeria, he became fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea and wrote a paper on the Spanish presence in the country during the 16th century. He also began there his doctoral thesis on the foreign policy of King Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–1598), with archival research at the General Archive of Simancas in the summer of 1927. He visited several archives around the Mediterranean, including at Venice, Valencia and finally Dubrovnik in 1936/37, and microfilmed documents with the help of his wife. From 1932 to 1935 he taught in the Paris lycées (secondary schools) of Pasteur, Condorcet and Henri-IV. During this period he first met Lucien Febvre, the co-founder of the Annales journal (1929).

By 1900, the French had solidified their cultural influence in Brazil by the establishment of the Brazilian Academy of Fine Arts. São Paulo still lacked a university, however, and in 1934, the francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel to help develop one. The result was the establishment of the new University of São Paulo on 25 January 1934. Braudel left for Brazil in March 1935, after the birth of his daughter, and took up the post vacated by Émile Coornaert. He worked within the state-promoted ideological framework of Pan-Latinism, part of the French civilizing mission, and helped the São Paulo elites in their project of achieving social and national hegemony. His colleagues included João Cruz Costa, Roberto Simonsen and Caio Prado Júnior. The evening lectures of French professors were attended by the city governor Armando de Sales Oliveira and Marshal Cândido Rondon.

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". Braudel was fascinated with São 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. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, he did not actively support the Communist-backed National Liberation Alliance, but took a more centrist position. He compared Brazil favourably – on account of its "social malleability" and tabula rasa development as a "young European civilization" – to Algeria and even to the United States in his 1937 The Concept of a New Country. He would later call Algeria, with its "uneducable" population, "a failed Brazil".

In 1937, Braudel returned to Paris from Brazil. He spent the twenty-day sea journey in the company of Febvre and his family as both had booked passage on the same ship. Braudel thus fell under the influence of the Annales School. In 1938 he entered the École pratique des hautes études as an instructor in history. He worked with Febvre, who would later read the early versions of Braudel's magnum opus and provide him with editorial advice. He started writing his book on Philip II's Mediterranean at Febvre's house in the Juras. He only took a stance on current politics when expressing condemnation of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was called up for military service and on 29 June 1940 taken prisoner as lieutenant in the 156th Infantry Regiment by the Germans in the Vosges. He was initially held at a prisoner-of-war camp in Neuf-Brisach and then in the Oflag XII-B in the citadel of Mainz. In Mainz, he became the rector of the camp university, which gained him respectful treatment (per Magnifizenz) from the camp authorities and the right to borrow books and journals from the well-provisioned municipal library for his research. Under the Geneva Convention he received his pay, which he used to buy German books (e.g. the works of Werner Sombart and Max Weber), and was able to order material from France, including the full collection of the Annales.

In June 1942, suspected of "Gaullist" (i.e. French Resistance) involvement, he was transferred to a camp for special category prisoners (Oflag X-C) near Lübeck, where he remained for the rest of the war. In the camp, he befriended some Catholic clerics and the historian Henri Brunschwig. 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 personal collection of books and notes, which forced him to rely in that regard on his prodigious memory. According to his own account, the long-time perspective he took was in part a "direct existential" reaction to the troubling war news. By "choosing the position of God the Father himself as a refuge" he sought to assert the "perdurability and majestic immobility" of the Mediterranean against the "fleeting occurrence" of political events which he associated with the "daily misery" of the camp. He 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. He occasionally dispatched books to Febvre as well. He 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. He cut portions from the copy books and re-arranged the text with new insertions, then destroyed the manuscripts – only a fragment gifted to Febvre has survived. During the war, his wife and children lived in Algeria.

Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945. He defended his thesis at the University of Paris in 1947. In that year, with Febvre and Charles Morazé, he obtained funding from the French government and the Rockefeller Foundation (which had previously supported the wartime exile École libre des hautes études in New York) to set up the Sixième section for economic and social sciences at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), which then became the funnel for all historical research in France. In 1948, the Centre de recherches historiques was established there, with Braudel as its director. In 1949 he was elected by the professors of the Collège de France as one of their number upon Febvre's retirement. He co-founded the academic journal Revue économique, in 1950. He became the head of the Sixième section at EPHE after the death of Febvre in 1956 and attracted scholars such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan to join its activities. He 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. 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 to 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 the rest of Europe and to the world. In 1972 Braudel gave up all editorial responsibility on the Annales journal, but his name remained on the masthead.

In 1962 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.

He retired in 1968. In 1975, the Sixième section was transformed into School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, a public institution of higher education in its own right. In 1984 he was elected to the Académie française and his introduction speech was given by Maurice Druon.