Long-Run Lamentations: Braudel on France

Abstract

Fernand Braudel treats the history of France incidentally in his celebrated La Mediterrane'e et le monde mediterraneen l'epoque de Philippe 11 and in his Civilisation materielle, economie et capitalisme and directly in his recent L'identite de la France, part of which appeared posthumously. He came to the latter project with both delectation and trepidation. His history of France was the first major enterprise that Braudel freely chose to undertake: the other works were commissions in one sense or another.1 Inspired by sense of civic duty and kind of filial piety, intensified by the guilt accruing from his half-century of intellectual expatriation,2 this project was the chance for him to demonstrate his love of France, a demanding and complicated that he compared to Michelet's. But this very passion provoked malaise in the historian. Passion was, to be sure, one mode of approach. The native son understands his history almost instinctively, the detours, the twists and turns, the originalities, the weaknesses.3 This visceral demarche was, however, replete with pitfalls: complaisance, superficiality, trivialization. Braudel aimed to write first as professional historian preoccupied with the exigencies of the craft and only afterward as citizen and patriot.4 Yet it is clear that he himself worried about sustaining the separationwitness his reiterated renunciations and antiseptic engagements (e.g., For I mean to speak of France as if it were another country), undercut repeatedly by his tendency to cast the world in binary terms: nous vis-a-vis the others, bit like the sportscaster of an international match unable to conceal in myriad small ways his predilection for his nation's team.S As professional historian celebrated for codifying the new history, Braudel had other reasons to fret about doing history of France. The very logic of his