Modern Mind

instead, as Peter Burke confirms in his history of the
Annales
school, a general smear word. Febvre also explored time, showing for example that someone like Rabelais would not have known the year in which he was born, and that time was experienced not in a precise way, as measured by clocks, but rather by ‘the length of an Ave Maria’ or ‘the flight of the woodcocks.” 19 It was the ability of Bloch and Febvre to get ‘inside the heads’ of individuals remotely removed in time that readers found exciting. This
felt
much more like history than the mere train of events that many historians wrote about. And it applied even more to Braudel, for he took the
Annales
approach much further with his first book,
The Mediterranean,
which appeared in 1949 and created a bigger stir. 20
    This book was conceived and written in extremely unusual circumstances. It had begun as a diplomatic history in the early 1920s. Then in 1935–7 Braudel accepted an appointment to teach at the University of São Paolo, and on the voyage back he met Febvre, who ‘adopted him as
un enfant de la maison.’ 21
But Braudel didn’t get round to writing the book until he was a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck. He lacked notes, but he had a near-photographic memory, and he drafted
The Mediterranean
in longhand in exercise books, which he posted to Febvre.
    The Mediterranean
is 1,200 pages long and divided into three very different sections. In the first part, Braudel treats his readers to 300 pages on the geography of the Mediterranean – the mountains and rivers, the weather, the islands and the seas, the coastlines and the routes that traders and travellers would have taken in the past. This leads to a discussion of the various culturesin different geographical circumstances – mountain peoples, coastal dwellers, islanders. 22 Braudel’s aim here is to show the importance of what he called
la longue durée —
that the history of anywhere is, first and foremost, determined by where it is and how it is laid out. The second part of the book he called ‘Collective Destinies and General Trends,’ and here the focus of his attention was on states, economic systems, entire civilisations – less permanent than the physical geography, but still more durable than the lives and careers of individuals. 23 His gaze now centres on change that occurs over generations or centuries, shifts that individuals are barely aware of. Exploring the rise of both the Spanish and the Turkish Empires, for example, he shows how their growth was related to the size and shape of the Mediterranean (long from west to east, narrow from north to south); he also showed why they gradually came to resemble each other – because communications were long and arduous, because the land and the available technology supported similar population densities. 24 And finally, there is the level of events and characters on the historical stage. While Braudel acknowledges that people differ in character, he thinks those differences account for less than traditional historians claim. Instead, he argues that an understanding of how people in the past viewed their world can help explain a lot of their behaviour. One example he makes much of is Philip II’s notorious slowness in reacting to events. This was not just due to his personality, says Braudel. During Philip’s reign Spain was financially exhausted (thanks again to geographical factors), and communications were slow – it could take two months to travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Philip’s deliberation was born as much of Spain’s economic and geographic situation as anything. 25
    Whereas Bloch’s books, and Febvre’s, had created a sensation among historians,
The Mediterranean
broke out of its academic fold and became known well beyond France. He himself was very ambitious for this to happen. 26 People found the new type of information it contained every bit as fascinating as the doings of monarchs and prime ministers. For his part, Febvre invited his
enfant de la maison
(now turned fifty) to join him in an even more massive collaborative venture. This was a complete history of Europe, stretching over four hundred years, from 1400 to 1800, exploring how the mediaeval world became the modern world, and using the new techniques. Febvre said he would tackle ‘thought and belief,’ and Braudel could write about material life. The project hadn’t gone very far when Febvre died in 1956, but Braudel