Fernand Braudel

1556 – 1598)). From 1932 to 1935 he taught in the Paris lycées (secondary schools) of Pasteur, Condorcet and Henri-IV.

By 1900, the French had solidified their cultural influence in Brazil by the establishment of the Brazilian Academy of Fine Arts.

Fernand Braudel (24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and leader of the Annales School.

His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean (1923–49, then 1949–66), Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79), and the unfinished Identity of France (1970–85).

While teaching at the University of Algiers between 1923 and 1932, he became fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea and wrote several papers on the Spanish presence in Algeria in the 16th century.

During that time, Braudel began his doctoral thesis on the foreign policy of King Philip II of Spain ((r.

São Paulo still lacked a university, however, and in 1934, the francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited both the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel to help develop one.

The result was the establishment of the new University of São Paulo on 25 January 1934.

Braudel later said that the time in Brazil had been the "greatest period of his life".

In 1937, Braudel returned to Paris from Brazil.

On his way, he met Lucien Febvre, who was the co-founder of the influential Annales journal.

Both had booked passage on the same ship.

Braudel had started archival research on his doctorate on the Mediterranean when he fell under the influence of the Annales School around 1938.

Also around that time he entered the École pratique des hautes études as an instructor in history.

He worked with Febvre, who would later read the early versions of Braudel's magnum opus and provide him with editorial advice.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was called up for military service and in 1940 was taken prisoner by the Germans.

He was held at a prisoner-of-war camp in Mainz from 1940 to 1942 before he was transferred to another camp near Lübeck, where he remained for the rest of the war.

Braudel drafted his great work La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II.

(The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) without access to his books or notes and relied only on his prodigious memory and on a local library.

Braudel was born in Luméville-en-Ornois (as of 1943, it merged with and became part of Gondrecourt-le-Château), in the département of the Meuse, France.

At the age of seven he moved to Paris with his family.

His father, a natural mathematician, aided him in his studies.

Braudel studied a good deal of Latin and a little Greek.

He was educated at the Lycée Voltaire and the Sorbonne, where, at the age of 20, he was awarded an agrégé in history.

Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945.

In 1947, with Febvre and Charles Morazé, Braudel obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and founded the noted Sixième Section for "Economic and social sciences" at the École pratique des hautes études.

He was a member of the Annales School of French historiography and social history in the 1950s and 1960s.

He was a student of Henri Hauser.

Braudel emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history.

He can also be considered one of the precursors of world-systems theory.

He received an additional $1 million from the Ford Foundation in 1960.

In 1962, he and Gaston Berger used the Ford Foundation grant and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 to his death.

It was housed in the building called "Maison des Sciences de l'Homme".

FMSH focused its activities on international networking in order to disseminate the Annales approach to the rest of Europe and to the world.

In 1962 Braudel wrote A History of Civilizations as the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French Ministry of Education, which in turn rejected it.

A feature of Braudel's work was his compassion for the suffering of marginal people.

He articulated the view that most surviving historical sources come from the literate wealthy classes.

He emphasised the importance of the ephemeral lives of slaves, serfs, peasants and the urban poor, and demonstrated their contributions to the wealth and power of their respective masters and societies.

His work was often illustrated with contemporary depictions of daily life and rarely with pictures of noblemen or kings.

In 1972 Braudel gave up all editorial responsibility on the Annales journal, but his name remained on the masthead.