(4 of 4)
"Ecoutez, chère 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."