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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 Lübeck. 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."