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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?