Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France entitled ‘The situation of history in 1950’, which Fernand Braudel delivered just five years after the end of the Second World War and a year after the publication of The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, he reflected on the traumatic experi-ences of the previous decades, which had ‘thrown us violently back into our deepest selves, and thence into a consideration of the whole destiny of mankind – that is to say into the crucial problems of history’. The age he and his audience were living in was ‘too rich in catastrophes and revolu-tions, dramas and surprises. The social reality, the fundamental reality of man has been revealed to us in an entirely new light, and whether we would or not, our old profession of historian is endlessly burgeoning and blos-soming in our hands’. This statement makes clear first that Braudel is not immune to a ‘cata-strophist ’ vision of history, which recognizes and privileges such moments, and second that his call for a fresh approach to the study of history, a ne