ITINERARIO v o l .

V (1981) 2 37

'MATERIAL CIVILISATION1 IN THE WORK OF FERNAND BRAUDEL

Braudel's study of the material basis of economic life is now some twenty
years old.1 The first volume of Civilisation aaterielle et capitalisms (as the
book was then entitled), appeared in 1967, but Braudel had already given a
course of lectures on 'la vie materielle du I6e au 18e siecle' in 1960-62. In-
deed, the original idea of the study goes back to a suggestion made by Lucien
Febvre around 1950. The plan was that Febvre and Braudel should between them
write a total history of Europe from 1400 to 1800 in two volumes, Febvre taking
'Western thought and belief and leaving Braudel with material life.2
This first volume remains an exciting and original introduction to the eco-
nomic history of the early modern period. Exciting, because it liberates the
reader from traditional approaches to economic history, which were yielding di-
minishing returns and could be shown to be too narrow thematically, geographi-
cally, and chronologically. Concerned as it is with an economic 'old regime'
lasting four hundred years, the volume exemplifies Braudel's interest in la lon-
grue duree, a feature of his work too well known to need discussion here.
Braudel is also famous for his 'global' vision. When his subject was the
Mediterranean in the age of Philip II, vast enough in itself to drown most his-
torians, he felt the need to extend his frontiers to the Atlantic and the Saha-
ra. In civilisation materielle, originally planned as a study of Europe, he in
fact takes on the whole world. One of the central arguments in the volume con-
cerns the impossibility of explaining major changes in other than global terms,
since population movements, for example, were in step in Europe and Asia from
the sixteenth century (if not before), to the eighteenth, and a world-wide phe-
nomenon requires an explanation on the same scale.3
In subject-matter, as in chronology and geography, Braudel's volume of 1967
bursts through the barriers of conventional economic history. It sweeps away the
traditional categories of 'agriculture1, 'trade1, and 'industry', and looks in-
stead at 'daily life': at population, food, clothes, shelter, money and towns.
The introduction presents economic history as a three-storey house. On the
'ground-floor' - the metaphor is not so far removed from Marx's 'base' - is cir
viiisation materielle, defined as 'repeated actions, empirical processes, old
methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial.' On the middle level,

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 38 ITINERARIO vol. V (1981) 2

there is vie economique, 'calculated, articulated, emerging as a system of rules

and almost natural necessities.' At the top - not to say 'superstructure' there
is the 'capitalist mechanism', most sophisticated of all. 4
There is an obvious parallel between the structure of the three volumes of
Civilisation materielle, economic et capitalisme (as the work is now called),
and the structure of Braudel's Mediterranean, also divided into three parts.
Marx is a binary thinker; Braudel prefers to think in threes, la the case of
both his major works, the first and most original part deals with history in ex-
tremely slow motion.
It may be useful to look a little more closely at the basic concept employ-
ed in the 1967 volume, civilisation materielle, and to ask what Braudel means by
it, before discussing in rather more detail the novelty of his enterprise and
the question of where we go from here. 'Civilisation' and its close relative
'culture' are extremely ambiguous terms. 5 Two American anthropologists, Kroeber
and Kluckhohn, once collected no fewer than 161 definitions of 'culture'. In
German, it was traditional to distinguish Zivilisation, material life, from Kul-
tur, the life of the mind. Oswald Spengler, however, made a somewhat different
distinction. In his celebrated work, Kultur stands for creativity, or, as he
characteristically put it, for 'youth' and 'life1, in contrast to mechanical re-
petition, 'old age', 'death', civilisation.6
Braudel's concept of civilisation materielle covers both these distinc-
tions. He concerns himself with matter rather than mind, or at least with food,
clothes and houses rather than with culture in the Burckhardtian sense. Braudel
likes to have his feet on the ground. He has criticised Burckhardt's. Kultur der
Renaissance in Italien as 'up in the air', (ae'rienne, suspendue).7 According to
the original division of labour between Febvre and Braudel, the history of men-
talities fell to Febvre. This suited Braudel, for despite his declared admira-
tion for Febvre's study of outiiJage mental in the age of Rabelais, he is more
suspicious of the history of attitudes and values than either Febvre or Bloch
were. His Mediterranean, which contains so much else, virually omits this sub-
ject, although anthropologists have had a good deal to say about the values of
honour and shame and masculinity dominant in the Mediterranean region.8
Braudel also likes Spengler's distinction between the realm of creativity
and the realm of routine, and makes it his own. Hence the new title of the vol-
ume, 'Les structures du quotidien'. According to Jacques Le Goff, the history of
mental habits is precisely the history of mentalities.9 However, Braudel does
not approach the problem of habit in this way. His approach to civilisation is

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 ITINERARIO vol. V (1981) 2 39

essentially that of a geographer, in the style of (say) Maximilien Sorre, who

was interested in ecologie humaine, the adaptation of man to his environment.10
For Braudel, a civilisation is essentially an aire culturello. Between one area
and others, exchanges of 'cultural goods' (biens cuitureis) take place. Some-
times exchanges do not take place. Avoiding a facile diffusionism, Braudel in-
sists that cultural 'refusals' or 'resistances' (refus) are as important as bor-
rowings for what they reveal about the societies concerned. Spanish resistance
to Protestantism is one of the examples he cites in his discussion of this ques-
tion in the Mediterranean; Japanese resistance to the use of the chair is an ex-
ample from his Civilisation materielle.xx
How new is his approach? In the new introduction to the 1967 volume, Brau-
del declares that the aim of his book' is nothing less than '1'introduction de la
vie quotidienne dans la domains de I 'histoire' . 12 He was not, of course, the
first person to attempt this. One thinks of the 'vie quotidienne' series pu-
blished by Hachette; some of the volumes are of little merit, others are de-
scriptive rather than analytic, but some are concerned with changes in daily
life over time. An Englishman may be allowed to point out that Braudel seems un-
familiar with the work of W.G. Hoskins and his pupils, concerned with the rela-
tionship between social change and changes in the physical environment (land-
scape, housing). 13 Further back, there is the fourteen-volume study of daily
life in Denmark and Norway in the sixteenth century by the great Danish histo-
rian Troels-Lund, with seperate books devoted to food, clothes and housing; and
Karl Lamprecht's economic history of the Moselle region in the Middle Ages, con-
ceived in terms of 'the development of material culture' {die Entwicklung der
materiellen Kultur), and the interaction of population and environment.14
In short, the history of everyday life and everyday things, of material ci-
vilisation, is not new; not even what Lucien Febvre would have called its 'his-
torical history', as opposed to an antiquarian approach. In the recent develop-
ment of that history, however, Braudel's global vision and concern with the
long-term ensure him an important place.
Of course, material civilisation is not the concern of historians alone.
The concept is rather like a flag flying over a semi-explored region which is
not so much 'the territory of the historian' as a border zone claimed by geo-
graphers and economists, archaeologists and anthropologists. The originality of
Braudel's historical approach derives in part from what he absorbed from the
geographers and economists. The work of the archaeologists and anthropologists,
on the other hand, may suggest the direction in which the history of material

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 40 ITINERARIO vol. V (1981) 2

civilisation, or material culture, will travel in the future.

Material civilisation, material culture; the terms overlap, rather more
closely than Zivilisation and Kultur, but they do not quite coincide. The dif-
ference lies in the fact that scholars who use the term 'material culture1 tend
to be Marxists, or archaeologists, or both, and to place greater emphasis than
Braudel does on the materialist interpretation of history, and to concentrate on
the physical remains of the past at the expense of the literary sources which he
(in the main) relies on. This archaeological tradition is now itself of respect-
able antiquity. The Russian Academy of the History of Material Culture goes back
to 1919, and one of the most influential journals in the field, the Polish 'His-
tory of Material Culture Quarterly' (Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej)
was founded in 1953. Practitioners of this approach have on occasion criticised
Braudel for not defining his terms rigorously enough, and of course for being an
eclectic individualist rather than a Marxist. 15 Since archaeologists have done
much less work on early modern Europe than, on the Middle Ages and the epoch of
early industrialisation, it is difficult to see how they will redraw Braudel's
map. However, they are worth watching.
Another direction in which the history of material civilisation or daily
life might move, and the one which seems to me to hold out the most exciting
possibilities, is towards anthropology. A young French historian has called Ci-
vilisation materielle, un livra d'anthropologie hisfcorique.16 I must admit that
1 do not agree. 1 think it would be both useful and possible to deal with the
subjects discussed in that volume in a much more anthropological way. This is
not a criticism of the 1967 volume which does not claim to be anthropology and
is in any case a masterpiece as it stands; it is simply a remark about where we
go from there. On these ethnohistorical prospects, a few comments.
'Material culture' is a concept which has long been part of the outillage
mental of anthropologists. Malinowksi, for example, distinguished material from
immaterial culture in his celebrated entry on 'Culture' in the old Encyclopaedia
of the Social Sciences. Since his day (and especially since Braudel's volume
was first published), anthropologists have opened up some interesting approaches
to food, clothes, and shelter, and in particular to their symbolic or ideologic-
al functions. From the days of Thorstein Veblen, if not before, we have been
told about the importan.ce of status symbols, and the lesson has been well learn-
ed by some social historians such as Lawrence Stone, writing on the English
aristocracy, their houses and their funerals, and Lauro Martines, writing on the
patricians of Renaissance Italy. 17 More recently, however, the semiologists have

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 ITINERARIO vol. V (1981) 2 .41

been studying food, clothes, houses and other artifacts as messages, as systems
of signs. 18 Their approach is in the course of assimilation by social anthropo-
logists, and has been put to use in a number of recent studies. 19
Historians too might find something of value in this approach. For example,
an ethnohistorian might like to supplement Braudel's fascinating account of
'carnivorous Europe' with some discussion of the symbolism and functions of such
'noble' foods as venison and pheasant, which were associated with the aristocra-
tic pastime of hunting and played an important part in gift exchange. In eigh-
teenth-century England, Edward Thompson has noted, 'the gift of game was one of
the more delicate means by which the gentry expressed influence and solicited
favour. Venison was the most expressive of all such gifts.' 20
As for clothes, one could make a case for their increasing importance as
indicators of status in early modern Europe, as towns grew larger and people
ceased to be able to place one another socially in any other way, thus creating
opportunities which some would-be social climbers were quick to seize and ex-
ploit. The Spanish literature of the picaresque is full of references to adven-
turers who try to pass for noble on the basis of their clothes. Again, the 'am-
phibious' hero of Antoine Furetiere's Roman bourgeois (1666), a lawyer in the
morning and a courtier in the evening, changes his clothes as he changes his
role. Clothes, in short, were becoming a more and more important adjunct to the
'presentation of self in everyday life'. 21
The house, too, probably became more of a status symbol in early modern Eu-
rope as the nobility moved more and more into towns. There are also points to be
made about variations in the symbolism and functions of the house in different
regions. There is an obvious contrast between Mediterranean Europe, a region of
magnificent facades, whatever the interior poverty, discomfort or dirt, and nor-
thern Europe, the Netherlands for instance, where exteriors have long been plain
and unassertive but all is rich, sparkling and spotless within. A book could be
written on the possible significance of this contrast, and its explanation in
terms of aristocratic versus bourgeois values, male versus female space, or cli-
mate, not to mention the Protestant ethic. But why stop at Europe? As in the
case of honour and shame, the Catholic Mediterranean seems at one with the world
of Islam.
There is no question of reproaching Braudel for his relative neglect of
topics like these. One has to stop somewhere. The ground floor of his house

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 42 ITINERARIO vol. V (1981) 2

rests on sure foundations. But there might be a case for building an extra room
o r two.

Peter Burke,
Emmanuel College,
Cambridge.

NOTES

1 References to Braudel's work are given as follows:

- Braudel (1966), ta Hediterranee, second edition, Paris
- Braudel (1967), Civilisation mate'rielie et capitaiisme, Paris.
- Braudel (1969), Ecrits sur l'histoire, Paris.
- Braudel (1977), Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation, Baltimore and Lon-
don.
- Braudel (1980), £es Structures du guotidien, Paris, the second edition of
Braudel (1967), with new introduction.
2 Braudel (1977), p. 3, says Febvre made his suggestion in 1.950; Braudel
(1980), p. 7, gives the date as 1952.
3 Braudel (1967), chapter 1.
4 Braudel (1967), introduction.
5 Braudel (1969), 255-314, an essay on 'l'histoire des civilisations' first pu-
blished in 1959.
6 0. Spengler, Dar Untergang des Abendlandes, 1, Munich 1919, 43f. On him,
Braudel (1969), 269f.

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 ITINERARIO vol. V (1981) 2 43

7 Braudel (1969), p. 262.

8 J.G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame, London, 1965, contains good examples
of this work.
9 J. Le Goff and P. Nora, Faire de l'histoire, 3, Paris 1974, 76-90.
10 On Sorre, Braudel (1969), 155-74.
11 Braudel (1966), part 2, chapter 6, section 1; Braudel (1967), chapter 4, sec-
tion 2; for general reflections on the question, Braudel (1969), 292-4. On
the question of 'refusal', c.f. H.K. Schneider, 'Pakot resistance to change',
in Continuity and Change in African Cultures, ed. W. Bascom and M.J. Hersko-
vits, Chicago, 1959, 144-67
12 Braudel (1980), p. 13.
13 W.G. Hoskins, 'The Rebuilding of Rural England', Past and Present, 4, 1953;
M.W. Barley, The English Farmhouse, London 1961; W.G. Hoskins, The Making of
the English Landscape, London 1955.
14 T.F. Troels-Lund, Dagligt Liv i Norden, 14 vols, Copenhagen-Christiania,
1879-1901; K. Lamprecht, Deutscnesffirtschaftsleibenim Mittelalter, 2 vols,
Leipzig 1885-86.
15 A. Wyrobisz, 'Storia della cUltura materiale in Polonia', Studi Storici 15,
1974, 164-73; J. Pazdur, 'Storia ed_etnqgrafia nell'esperienza della rivista
Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej' , guademi Storici 31, 1976, 38-53;
D. Moreno and M. Quaini, 'Per una storia della cultura materiale', ibid.
5-37; J.M. Pesez, 'Histoire de la culture materielle', in La nouvelle his-
toire, ed. J. Le Goff, Paris 1978, 98-130.
16 A. Burguiere in La nouvelie histoire, ed. Le Goff, p. 44.
17 L. Stone, The Crisis of the English Aristocracy, 1558-1641, Oxford, 1965; L.
Martines, Power and Imagination, New York, 1979.
18 A.pioneer work was P. Bogatyrev, Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slova-
kia, English trans., The Hague/Paris 1971 (first published 1937); cf. R Bar-
thes, Elements de Se'miologie (1964), Paris, 1968 ed., 98-100; and P. Bour-
dieu, 'The Berber House', in Melanges tevi-Strauss, The Hague 1971.
19 Useful anthologies of recent work on food, clothes and houses include Gastro-
nomy, ed. M.L. Arnott, The Hague 1975; The Fabric of Culture, ed. J.M. Cord-
well and R.A. Schwarz, The Hague 1979; and The Mutual Interaction of People
and their Built Environment, ed. A. Rapoport, The Hague 1976.
20 E.P. Thompson, Uhigs and Hunters, London 1975, p. 158.
21 E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York 1959. I hope
to explore these questions in a study of large towns in early modern Europe.

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