Fernand Braudel kept researching his masterpiece from a German prison camp
Captured in 1940, Fernand Braudel became rector of his prison camp's university in Mainz, borrowed from the city library and spent his pay on Max Weber. Research for his vast study of the Mediterranean carried on behind the wire, and in 2011 History Today ranked him first among all historians active over the preceding six decades.
Braudel was born in 1902 in Luméville-en-Ornois in the Meuse and spent his early childhood in a pre-industrial village with his grandmother before joining his father, a maths teacher, in Paris at seven. A maternal grandfather had been a Communard, a fact he rarely mentioned. After the Lycée Voltaire and the Sorbonne, where Henri Hauser taught him, he qualified as a history teacher in 1923 and went to work in French Algeria, first at a lycée in Constantine and then at the University of Algiers until 1932.
Algeria gave him his great subject. Fascinated by the Mediterranean, he began a doctorate on the foreign policy of Philip II of Spain, researching at the Simancas archive from 1927 and later at Venice, Valencia and Dubrovnik, microfilming documents with his wife's help. In 1935 he went to Brazil to help build the new University of São Paulo alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss, and later called his time there the greatest period of his life.
Chance then steered him into the Annales School. Sailing home in 1937, he shared a twenty-day voyage with Lucien Febvre, co-founder of the Annales journal, who became his mentor and read early drafts of his magnum opus. Braudel began writing it at Febvre's house in the Jura. Called up in 1939, he was taken prisoner as a lieutenant in the Vosges on 29 June 1940 and held at Neuf-Brisach and then in a camp in Mainz's citadel, where he even ordered the full run of the Annales from France.
His work stressed large-scale social and economic forces rather than individual events. Three projects defined his career: The Mediterranean, worked on from 1923 to 1949 and revised until 1966; Civilization and Capitalism, from 1955 to 1979; and The Identity of France, left unfinished. He died on 27 November 1985.
Source: Fernand Braudel
