Fernand Braudel

Fernand Braudel, 1902 - 1986 French historian Fernand Braudel was born in 1902. He studied under Lucien Febvre and was a founder of the Annales School of Historiography. He went to Brazil in 1935 as one of the young French scholars who founded the University of Sao Paulo. He was a German prisoner of war during World War II. After the war, he was a professor at the College de France in Paris from 1949-1972, editor of the journal Annales, a founder of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in 1963, and president of the VIth Section of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1952-1956. While Braudel was a prisoner of war, he wrote "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II" (1949). The book shows the environment in which the peoples of the Mediterranean Basin used to live, from the mountains and plains, the sea and rivers to the roads and towns. He combines the rhythm of "geographic time" with the rapid rhythm of "individual time" and the movement of the people and their ideas. The subject matter of history changes because the time frame of history changes. The short-lived dramatic moments are replaced by the lengthy rhythms of material life. Braudel studied the history of the development of capitalism, the flows of communication and the money it induces, the shift in borders it results in and even the changes in the structure of the State it determines. Braudel's other works are "Ecrits sur l'histoire" (Writings on History, 1969), "La Dynamique du capitalisme" (Dynamics of Capitalism, 1985), and "Identity of France" (1986). The Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics was created in 1987 by a group of economists, businessmen, journalists and civil servants that were concerned with the process of economic and social disintegration caused by decades of chronic inflation.