French Historian Fernand Braudel Dies : He Ignored Elite, Recorded How the People Spent Their Lives

Fernand Braudel, who wrote of history as it might have been seen through the eyes of those who lived it, died Thursday in Paris.

Braudel, considered among the most prodigious historians of this century, was 83 and, although retired, was working on a three-volume French history at his death.

Braudel, with Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, was at the forefront of “the new historians.” They are a group that postulates that a general sense of the past can best be captured by recording how most people of those eras spent their lives, rather than writing of elite leaders who had dominated earlier histories.

Thus he argued in his monumental trilogy, “Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century” that the potato’s arrival in England in 1588 was of more overall importance in the Western world than the English defeat of the Spanish armada that same year.

In a critique of “Civilization” published in the Los Angeles Times last year, historian Robert Dawidoff wrote that Braudel “wants to teach us that what we always thought was history was only the light playing on the surface of the sea. . . . He wants us to look below the surface. . . .”

Braudel’s first and other highly acclaimed work was “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.” He began that work as a young man teaching in Algeria, where he lived from the late 1920s to the late ‘30s.

He had begun it as a possible thesis in 1923, but as he wandered North Africa he lost interest in the world of the Spanish king.

Braudel was a French Army officer at the outbreak of World War II. He was captured and sent to a prison camp in Germany. There--without notes--he managed to write a draft “Mediterranean” from memory and had it smuggled out to Febvre.

It was published in 1949, two years after he was granted his doctoral degree by the Sorbonne, the first of his nearly 20 honorary doctorates from universities around the world.

Braudel was born to what he described as peasant stock--he was the son of a teacher--in the small village of Luneville in the Lorraine region of France. He held several teaching and research posts in France and Brazil before going to North Africa.

He was named to the prestigious French Academy in 1983, the same year he won the Los Angeles Times 1983 Book Prize for history.

Times judges said that “Braudel redefines the very nature of the past while describing it with enthusiasm and erudition. . . .”