The Master of the Mediterranean

White-haired Fernand Braudel fingers a 13th century Florentine coin, its bronze surface green with age, as he muses on the grand passion of his life: the Mediterranean. "Everything about the Mediterranean has pleased me--the sea, the people, the food. It is a passion that burns you up. And nowadays, for me, the Mediterranean is too strong, too burning. It's all over."

But it is not yet over. Last weekend an international gathering of 150 historians and social scientists assembled at the State University of New York at Binghamton to pay homage to Braudel and his enduring love. English Scholars Peter Burke and Eric Hobsbawm arrived to offer tribute. Historians from Canada, The Netherlands and France sang Braudel's praises. The occasion: the inaugural conference of SUNY'S new Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations. It was the first major American recognition of French Historian Braudel--perhaps the most influential historian now at work and the author of the magnificent 1,375-page book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

Internecine Warfare. The Mediterranean is like no other history. It opens not with Philip II (1527-1598) --whose royal entrance is delayed for several hundred pages--but high in the mountains that fringe the sea. It analyzes the shepherds' trails over the Pyrenees, it considers the early use of glacial ice to make ice cream, and it ponders the fate of the Jews, driven from city after city as the population exceeded the available food supply. Only after the fundamentals are established does Braudel turn to the traditional history of political events. Even then, the celebrated King Philip of Spain is only a small figure in the vast struggle between the Spanish and Turkish empires for the domination of the Mediterranean--at the very moment when the sea was about to lose its importance.

Braudel's sweeping view is particularly influential just now, for American historiography and historical teaching have been torn by internecine warfare in recent years. Against the traditional view that history should be based on documentary evidence--and artistically inspired by the Muse Clio--the innovators known as Cliometricians argue that truth can best be found in computer analyses of population movements, interest rates and other social data. Still others explain old riddles by invoking the theories of sociology and psychoanalysis. New voices insist that it should serve the purposes of racial justice or economic reform. In contrast to all these divisions, Braudel offers historians a new kind of synthesis. Oxford Historian H.R. Trevor-Roper has written of the Braudelian method that it "is a kind of history which crosses all frontiers and uses all techniques. The achievement is to have drawn geography, sociology, law, ideas into the broad stream of history and thereby to have refreshed that stream, which previously had been running dangerously dry."

Braudel's work did not emerge all at once, or by itself. Its origin dates back to 1929, when Historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded a scholarly review in Paris called the Annales (Annals). Its tone was combative, its fervor evangelical. Its purpose: to debunk the chronicling of politics and biographies of great men that had obsessed historians since the 19th century. Let there be new approaches, Febvre exhorted, ranging from aerial photography to the study of climates.

One of the magazine's readers was young Fernand Braudel, then a fledgling schoolteacher in Algiers. "I am someone without ambition," Braudel remarked to TIME'S Ellie McGrath. "My father was a mathematician and wanted me to be a mathematician, so studying history was an adolescent revolt against my father." Looking out across the Mediterranean and wondering what to work on for his doctoral dissertation, Braudel decided on King Philip. But "little by little," recalls Braudel, "Philip II attracted me less and less, and the Mediterranean more and more." There was also the influence of Febvre, who had himself done work on Spain. "Philip II and the Mediterranean, a good subject," he wrote Braudel. "But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II? A subject far greater still."

Then, the war. Captured by the Germans in 1940, Braudel chafed in a prisoner of war camp at Luebeck. He sustained himself by teaching other inmates (and occasionally playing pranks, like painting a pigeon's wings with the red. white and blue tricolor and then setting it loose, provoking a vain fusillade from German guards). He sustained himself too by a great feat of memory--writing The Mediterranean, filling up and mailing out one schoolboy copybook after another. "I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level," recalls Braudel of those years. "So it was that I consciously set forth in search of a historical language in order to present unchanging, or at least very slowly changing conditions which stubbornly assert themselves over and over again."

Striking Insights. Three great waves of events course through the pages of The Mediterranean: the longue duree of geographic and physical time; the shorter time span of cities and societies; the history of political events, "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs." Striking insights emerge. Europe is not an entity; it is the physical sea that gives the region unity. Reversing the 19th century preoccupation with northern Europe, Braudel turns the globe upside down. Africa immediately looms large, overshadowing tiny Europe. The central struggle and axis in the Mediterranean is not north and south but east and west--the Spanish and Ottoman empires caught in endless "cultural conflict." At the end, there is an affirmation of the Annalistes' guiding philosophy: not history tending toward abstraction but "toward the very sources of life in its most concrete, everyday, indestructible and anonymously human expression."

Of the founders of the Annales School, Bloch was killed by the Germans in 1944, and Febvre carried on the magazine until his death in 1956. Braudel then took over and ran it until 1968, when he decided the journal should be passed on to a younger man, Jacques Revel. At 74, Braudel is officially retired from his chair at the College de France, but he is still chief administrator of the Maison des Sciences de L'Homme, a foundation for research in history and the social sciences, housed in a modern nine-story building on Paris' Left Bank. As such, Braudel oversees massive research projects that range from the reconstruction of 80,000 Florentine families in the early 15th century to "surrealism and the culture of its time."

Slow Invasion. While the Annalistes have conquered France and Europe, the invasion of America has been slow. For one thing, the massive Mediterranean, which first appeared in Paris in 1949, was not translated into English until 1972, and Harper & Row's paperback appeared only last year. For another, American historians point out that much of U.S. history teaching has been dominated until recently by an optimistic, evolutionary approach. Braudel reflects the opposite view: a post-imperial belief that history is not necessarily heading toward some morally better future. Says Immanuel Wallerstein, sociologist and director of the Braudel Center at Binghamton: "It is no accident that Braudel became of interest in America at the end of the '60s, when people began questioning the intellectual premises of the social sciences."

Wallerstein hopes to continue the Braudelian tradition through the center's own version of the Annales, in seminars and in periodic conferences. Like its Parisian predecessor, the center --housed in a modernistic, angular building--will wed history and the social sciences by studying such topics as "Women's Work in Relation to Household Income" in 19th century America. But to Braudel himself, American skepticism about his school--the criticism that his statistics are flawed, his detail overbearing--is healthy. "The Annales was started in 1929 at a time of crisis," he says. "The hope of the Binghamton review is that it too starts at a time of crisis. What's easy isn't worth much."

The Braudelian global view will soon reappear, in Books II and III of a three-volume set on Capitalism and Material Life, 1400 to 1800. The final volumes of the ten-year project are currently in manuscript form, with Braudel rereading them aloud to his wife Paule for rhythm and style. In them, he traces the movement of the center of capitalism from Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam. And now? Has capitalism itself reached a stage of crisis?

"Ecoutez, chere amie," Braudel laughs. "Anything important in life is always in a state of crisis. Crisis is life. But in a sense there will always be capitalism because capital represents work that has already been finished, and you can live only by using this old work." Still, circumstances and details change. "In the world of exchange, there's always a central zone, an intermediary zone, and a peripheral zone. In 1929, the so-called Dark Year, the center of the world, which was London, passed to New York, peacefully. I don't really believe New York will lose the center. America still has room to make errors, whereas France has none."

Braudel has also planned yet another massive project, this one a three-volume history of France. He completed a preliminary version of the first volume, on France's identity. But the second (on

France's birth) and the third (on its destiny) are still to come. And Braudel, although robust, fears that he will never finish them. He is doubly sad at that prospect because people "flocked" to hear him lecture about France. "Instead of telling the story chronologically. I spoke about what is France, what is French society," reminisces Braudel. "What the French Revolution was; ah, what a subject that was. I could hear a butterfly fly when I spoke of that."

Now that The Mediterranean has become a classic, Braudel ponders how it might have been done differently. "1 don't think of society the way I did 40 years ago." he says. "There is no society without hierarchy. You have economic hierarchy--the rich and the poer: cultural hierarchy--the knowledgeable and the ignorant; political hierarchy --the rulers and the ruled. The hierarchies maintain themselves. The permanence of hierarchies--I didn't see this problem with enough depth."

To Braudel, a lover of history just as he is a lover of life, the past is truly alive. "I lived for 50 years with Philip II," he says. "I saw him so often--every day--that I understand him. If I understand him, I excuse him. Because I excuse him, I begin to like him. Since I like him, I begin to argue with him. For example, when he was young he used to put on masks and go down the street and behave badly. And if I were a psychoanalyst, I would have said, 'Philip, you're a masked man.' "

"A historian never judges," continues Braudel. "He is not God." But then the master pauses, unwilling in the end to circumscribe his glorious science. "The power the historian has is to make the dead live," he says finally. "It is a triumph over death."

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