Fernand Braudel Brazil and The Empire of

Fernand Braudel, Brazil,
and the Empire

of French Social Science
Newly Translated Sources from the 1930s
IAN MERKEL
abstract These previously untranslated essays by Fernand Braudel are invaluable sources
for understanding the social sciences in a formative moment, as well as the relationship
between French intellectuals and the colonial world. Published in Portuguese at the Univer-
sity of São Paulo during Braudel’s tenure there between 1935 and 1938, they are translated
into English here to make them more widely available to historians of France. “The Concept
of a New Country” compares and contrasts the semicolonial relationship of Brazil and
Algeria to Europe, and “The Teaching of History and Its Guidelines” sheds light onto Brau-
del’s specific interdisciplinary interventions and how Brazil was part of a restructuring of the
field of history in France. As a preface to the essays, I contextualize Braudel’s tenure in Brazil
and develop certain arguments of the essays so that readers less familiar with Brazil and the
French university missions can grasp their full implications.
keywords Brazil, historiography, social sciences, Algeria, translation
Braudel and the French Missions to the University of São Paulo
F ew places in the world have been more important for the French social
sciences than Brazil. Two of France’s intellectual giants of the twentieth
century, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel, began their university ten-
ure in 1935 at the newly founded University of São Paulo (USP), leaving behind
a France in economic crisis and with limited career possibilities for profes-
sors. They, like many others known for their work on geography, sociol-
ogy, and economics, found unprecedented financial support in Brazil, new
objects of study, and a propitious intellectual milieu in which to conduct their
scholarship.
French Historical Studies Vol. 40, No. 1 (February 2017) doi 10.1215/00161071-3686080
Copyright 2017 by Society for French Historical Studies 129
The relationship between the French and Brazilian social sciences is a bur-
geoning field of study.1 However, outside of the Lusophone world and, to be
more specific, outside of Brazil, this scholarship is relatively unknown. While
USP and its historical archives, the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros and the Cen-
tro de Apoio à Pesquisa em História, are actively engaged in efforts to make
sources regarding the tenure of French social scientists in São Paulo more widely
available, the language barrier of Portuguese for a variety of scholars makes
these sources inaccessible and therefore underutilized. Our hope is that a trans-
lation of two essays by Braudel into English might help to reduce that barrier for
historians of France, whether in the United States or in France itself.
These essays, “The Concept of a New Country” and “The Teaching of His-
tory and Its Guidelines,” were published in São Paulo in 1936 and 1937, respec-
tively.2 Braudel was teaching history at the time at the newly founded USP, Brazil’s
first fully functioning university. He, like his colleagues Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Mon-
beig, and François Perroux, and the more senior scholars who preceded them,
were part of French university missions, organized through the Service des
Oeuvres Françaises à l’Etranger of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.3 As part of a
broader project of cultural diplomacy, missions such as these sought to increase
French soft power abroad.4 According to an agreement with the Brazilian govern-
ment, the French ministry paid for its young scholars to travel to and from Brazil,
and the state of São Paulo covered their salaries and expenses in country. There the
French scholars were responsible for the majority of the social science curriculum.
Braudel was thirty-two when he arrived in Brazil in 1935 for his first semes-
ter as a history professor. After having studied at the Sorbonne (1920–23) and
having passed the agrégation in his final year, Braudel spent ten years in Algeria
and another three in Paris as a high school teacher, employed by the French
state. Recommended by eminent historian Henri Hauser, who taught history in
Rio de Janeiro during the same period, Braudel was contacted through the Min-
istry of Foreign Affairs to see if he was interested in teaching in Brazil. Such
a prospect was a risk for the young Braudel, indeed a deviation from the
1. For several poignant examples, see Peixoto, “Franceses e norte-americanos nas ciências sociais
brasileiras”; Peixoto, Diálogos brasileiros; Petitjean, “As missões universitárias francesas”; Rogélio Suppo, La
politique culturelle française au Brésil; Silva Roiz and Santos, As transferências culturais na historiografia brasi-
leira; Rodrigues, “Armadilha à francesa”; Martinière, Aspects de la coopération franco-brésilienne; Capelato
and Prado, “A l’origine de la collaboration universitaire franco-brésilienne”; and Valentini, Um laboratório
de antropologia.
2. First published as “Conceito do país novo” and “O ensino da história e suas diretrizes,” these
essays were republished as “Conceito de país novo” and “Cátedra de história da civilização: O ensino de his-
tória e suas diretrizes” in a special edition of the Revista de história in 2002. Henceforth, cites will refer to the
English translations given here as “Concept of a New Country,” and “Teaching of History.”
3. Lefebvre, “Les professeurs français.”
4. For a general understanding of intensification of international activity in the French academy, see
Charle, “Ambassadeurs ou chercheurs?”
130 French Historical Studies 40:1

traditional route to attaining professorship in France. However, when offered a
first-class round-trip ticket to Brazil, an increase in pay, and the understanding
that he would have time to conduct his research, Braudel accepted.
Braudel followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Emile Coornaert, soon
to be appointed to the Collège de France, in the chair of the History of Civiliza-
tion. It was Braudel’s “first professional experience,” to use the words of Hauser.5
He taught for three years in the fifth subsection of the Faculty of Arts and Letters
(Geography and History) alongside Monbeig and Brazilian Afonso d’Escra-
gnolle Taunay before returning to teach at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
in 1938.6
The essays that he left behind from those Brazilian years are invaluable
sources for understanding the social sciences in a formative moment, as well as
the relationship between French intellectuals and the colonial world. Unpolished
and relatively uncensored, “The Concept of a New Country” and “The Teaching
of History” provide insight into how Braudel understood the non-European
world and his role as a historian. They are based more on assertion than on the
empirical rigor for which Braudel became known in his later work. With this in
mind, I present them not as intellectual oeuvres to be dissected but as a testa-
ment to a certain era in French intellectual life and as new sources for under-
standing a generation of French scholars of which Braudel was part.
“The Concept of a New Country” is a comparison between Brazil and
Algeria—semicolonial spaces with their distinct extra-European histories that,
according to Braudel, now found themselves part of Western civilization. Brau-
del wrote this piece, at the request of his students, for the new USP student jour-
nal Filosofia, ciências e letras. Although Braudel presumably wrote the original in
French, Braudel’s assistant, Eurípides Simões de Paula, translated the essay into
Portuguese.7
5. Henri Hauser to Fernand Braudel, Apr. 7, 1935, Archive Fernand Braudel, Institut de France, Paris.
6. Although hired by the latter in 1937, Braudel painstakingly negotiated his return to São Paulo for
one more year—or at least so he claimed. Braudel to Simões, Paris, Feb. 4, 1937, box 28, doc. 16 2416, p. 1,
Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa em História, São Paulo (hereafter CAPH). Braudel’s experience in Brazil cer-
tainly helped him get the job at the Ecole Pratique. The president of the Fourth Section of the Ecole Pratique,
in an undated letter dealing with Braudel’s nomination, highlighted his knowledge of “Iberian expansion in
America.” Archives de l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Fonds Braudel, Paris.
7. This was part of the work that Simões de Paula took upon himself as a kind of teaching assistant and
disseminator of Braudel’s work in Brazil, particularly at USP. Unfortunately no trace of the original texts trans-
lated for French Historical Studies exists in either Braudel’s or Simões de Paula’s private archives, but Simões de
Paula’s frequent translations of Braudel are both meticulous and faithful to the latter’s meaning. Countless texts
written by Braudel in French and translated by Simões de Paula into Portuguese were printed side by side in the
course packs, available for consultation at CAPH. CAPH, Arquivo Eurípides Simões de Paula, “Apostilas da
Cadeira de História da Civilização dos anos 1935 a 1937.” Simões de Paula studied law prior to enrolling in his-
tory at USP, and his dry, rigid, and even juridical language certainly reduces the freer, literary quality of Brau-
del’s style in French. As I translated Simões de Paula’s Portuguese into English, certain aspects the Portuguese
language, such as a sentence structure that inverts subject and verb, or leaves out subjects altogether, make the
merkel • Braudel, Brazil, and the Empire of French Social Science 131
“The Teaching of History and Its Guidelines,” addressed to the univer-
sity administration, students, and the general public interested in USP, was
published in the university’s course book (Anuário) as a way of organizing the
discipline of history.8 Here Braudel conceptualized the field of history and its
relationship to the social sciences, referring to a “coalition” between the dis-
ciplines of sociology, ethnography, political economy, and, most important,
geography—with history at its head. The relationship between geography and
history was strong in Brazil, providing fertile ground for Braudel in particular,
both as an intellectual tradition and as a professional network.9
“The Teaching of History” attests to the special relationship between these
disciplines, anticipating his lectures in Lübeck, Germany, and his famous doc-
toral thesis, published as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Era of Philip II.10 It also provides insight into how Braudel inherited the early
Annales’ legacy of mentalités but also built upon it in new ways, fortifying his-
tory’s relationship to geography and more quantitative methods, thereby con-
solidating the centrality of history in the social sciences.11
While readers will undoubtedly find different uses for these essays,
together they offer a firsthand account of the relationship of French intellectu-
als to empire in the interwar period and insight into the broader shifts within
academic training and knowledge production in France in the early to mid-
twentieth century.12 Historians of French colonialism will find “The Concept of
translated texts a bit awkward. Conscious of the maxim that to translate is to betray, I am nonetheless convinced
that the content of Braudel’s writing and his grandstanding tone remain true to the original texts.
8. Simões de Paula also likely translated this essay from French into Portuguese. A more frequently
cited conference on education was published originally in Arquivos do Instituto de Educação and republished
as “Pedagogia de História.” This text can also be found in French as “La pédagogie de l’histoire.”
9. Angela de Castro Gomes in História e historiadores writes at length about how the sheer immen-
sity of Brazil as a political unit, the erudite culture of geographical description, and the institutional legacy
of Capistrano de Abreu and the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro contributed to the proximity of
these disciplines. For Braudel, this was reinforced by his participation in the Associação Brasileira de Geográ-
fia and likely by culture of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo. Iumatti, Seabra, and Heide-
mann, Caio Prado Jr. My goal is not to claim that these two fields lacked overlap in France but to relativize
the claim that the interdependence between geography and history emerged from French or German schol-
arship. For a convincing interpretation of Braudel’s readings of French authors such as Paul Vidal de La
Blache, see Lira, “Fernand Braudel e Vidal de La Blache.”
10. Braudel’s lectures in a prison camp for French officers in Lübeck, Germany, are considered as the
first drafts of his thesis: Braudel, “L’histoire, mesure du monde.” The geographical references in these lec-
tures are indicative of his Brazilian experience, where he taught alongside Emmanuel de Martonne and
Monbeig, both of whom he cites in “Teaching of History.” Braudel claims that his thesis on the Mediterra-
nean was part of his refuge from the war and that by imagining himself in long historical periods while
imprisoned he could quiet his despair at the rise of Nazi Germany. Braudel, “Ma formation d’historien,” 17.
11. Revel, “Histoire et sciences sociales.” Braudel refers to this “imperialism” of history in the social
sciences in his own analysis of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and the early Annales. Braudel, “Ma formation
d’historien,” 21.
12. Giulani Gemelli carefully analyzes these trends and Braudel’s trajectory within them in her biog-
raphy Fernand Braudel. Important for my argument is her emphasis on Braudel’s uncritical view toward
French colonialism, particularly in Algeria (40, 45), as well as the strategies for articulating French academic

a New Country” particularly interesting insofar as it pertains to Algeria, but they
will also recognize a kind of paternalist language that runs throughout both
essays; indeed, Braudel’s tendency to make grand statements and his insistence
upon the gravity of him doing so suggest a kind of empire of French cultural
life in Latin America.13 French influence in Latin America in the 1930s had cer-
tainly waned since its heyday during the belle epoque.14 Yet the fact that French
professors were contracted with the goal of elevating Brazilian culture and train-
ing its intellectuals demonstrates the persistence of such a dependent relation-
ship well into the interwar period.15
While Brazilians depended on European intellectuals for culture, the latter
saw Brazil, and the Americas more generally, as a source of youth and of
hope.16 Braudel’s portrayal of Brazil in these essays maintains a kind of civiliza-
tional progression from childhood to adulthood. Yet it also puts forth a view of
an exhausted Europe, plagued by war, social tensions, and cultural decadence as
seen in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918).17 For Braudel, who had
spent ten years teaching in Algeria prior to his stint at USP, Brazil also provided
a striking contrast to the inflexibility of French colonial efforts. Braudel, for
example, called Algeria a failed Brazil (un Brésil raté) in an unpublished text.18
Braudel and his colleagues were impressed by the vertiginous development
of the city of São Paulo. The thirty-floor Martinelli Building was completed
prior to their arrival, and São Paulo’s vertical growth became a source of
life as global in scope but distinct from American and German social science. While Gemelli rightly focuses
on internationalization in the postwar conjuncture, Braudel’s awareness of it was already apparent in 1936
when he claimed that “today’s intellectual culture is an international culture” (“Teaching of History”).
13. Carlos Guilherme Mota insists upon the inequalities between French professors and Brazilian
historians in his essay “Ecos da historiografia francesa no Brasil.” He recounts a story by which Braudel
asked his class, “Have any of you read Proust?” When no one answered in the affirmative, he retorted,
“When will you stop being imbeciles!”
14. Daughton, “When Argentina Was ‘French’”; Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque; Compagnon, L’adieu
à l’Europe.
15. Far from passive receivers of French thought, Brazilians nonetheless provided European intellectu-
als with unprecedented authority in their intellectual endeavors. Júlio de Mesquita Filho, a major advocate for
the newly founded USP, conceived of it as a means of overcoming “the humiliating and subaltern condition
of an intellectual colony.” Quoted in Martinez, A dinâmica de um pensamento critica, 168. For more on the
long history of Franco-Brazilian intellectual exchange, relatively free of the racist, diffusionist assumptions
of Mesquita Filho, see Perrone-Moisés, Do positivismo à desconstrução. See also Carelli, Cultures croisées.
16. Patrícia Santos Hansen in “Sobre o conceito de ‘país novo’” analyzes some of the Brazilian
authors of the First Republic who preceded Braudel in his formulations of new and old and of youth and
maturity.
17. For a philosophical interpretation of the decadence of the idea of progress from the late nine-
teenth century into the interwar period, see Canguilhem, “La décadence de l’idée du progrès.” For a compre-
hensive view of the notion of decadence and its uses in the literary field during this period, see Sapiro, La
guerre des écrivains. Braudel’s own understanding of this decline would be intensified during the Vichy
years: “L’étape Europe a été brûlée voilà déjà quelques lunes.” Braudel, “L’histoire, mesure du monde,” 79.
18. Luís Corrêa Lima analyzes this text, which he received from Paule Braudel personally—a text
that is withheld from his archive—in Fernand Braudel e o Brasil, 192.
fascination for the young European scholars, not altogether different from cer-
tain German intellectuals in the United States a generation before.19 Despite the
effects of the Great Depression on the Brazilian economy, one house was built
in the city every hour on average.20 In France, meanwhile, deflationary mone-
tary policies seemed to bring growth to a halt.
In São Paulo, Braudel suffered few of these consequences: he had his first
car (a Chevrolet), a chauffeur, and domestic servants. But it was not only in
material terms that Braudel’s station in life improved. At an intellectual level,
Braudel was on fertile ground to start anew and to be a sort of philosopher of
history—a role that had taken a back seat in France due to university reforms,
the increasing scientific norms of the discipline of history, and the relative
decline of classical scholarship during the Third Republic.
He was provided, as a newly minted professor, with a unique opportu-
nity to define the discipline of history. For Braudel, history served as the core of
the social sciences, benefiting from its “secular heritage.” He claimed that this
heritage was at once derived from its status as the first social science, as old as
“intelligent reflection,” as well as from a particular set of historical circum-
stances that made the historical field possible, namely, “this empire, these colo-
nies, these riches that tend less toward action than toward the tranquility of old
powers.”21 Just as Lévi-Strauss would later distinguish between hot and cold civi-
lizations based on the written word, Braudel clearly saw Europe as more histori-
cal than the New World. This is not to say that he saw the Americas as outside
of history, but he did contend that its intellectuals lacked the “tranquility of
old powers” that leads to the accumulation, specialization, and maturation
of knowledge.
But Brazil was much more than a receptacle for Braudel and his academic
training; he learned a lot there, too. If on one hand his cohort of young French
scholars sought to bring European academic culture to the tropics wholesale,22
they also found in Brazil a laboratory for their own research. Whether for Amer-
indian anthropology, the human geography of the coffee economy in São Paulo,
or the study of African religions, Brazil provided French social scientists with
new objects of study and a new milieu of people with whom to conduct these
studies.23 Braudel, whose own research was not tied specifically to Brazil,
19. The most poignant example is Fritz Lang and his film Metropolis. Charle, La discordance des
temps, 337–57.
20. At least that is what Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed to hear upon his arrival. Lévi-Strauss, Loin du
Brésil, 16.
21. Braudel, “Teaching of History.”
22. Or, as a professor in São Paulo once ironically commented, to catechize the native peoples of
Brazil. Novais, “Braudel e a ‘Missão francesa.’”
23. For previous generations in the hard sciences, Brazil had allowed for “new biological objects
[to] be seen and described in situ,” revolutionizing fields such as epidemiology. Even in these fields of direct,

nonetheless saw the country as a “laboratory.” Its students benefited from direct
observation in “economic and modern history, that the European student will
not possess as precisely or as completely.”24
While for the French professors this laboratory lacked the explicit colonial
and developmental components of their African empire,25 their Brazilian hosts
had more specific geopolitical and cultural goals for their educational project.
USP, from the beginning, was imagined as a means of achieving national preem-
inence for the state of São Paulo, particularly after setbacks at the national level
in 1932.26 USP’s students in the humanities may have come up short in the high-
minded vision of its founders, providing more secondary school teachers than
nationally important intellectuals and cultural elites.27 But if we consider the
kind of public that attended the French professors’ evening lectures—Armando
Sales de Oliveira, governor of São Paulo; Júlio de Mesquita Filho, director of
Brazil’s most widely circulating newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo;28 and Mar-
shall Cândido Rondon, a military officer known for his exploration of Mato
Grosso and the Amazonian Basin, just to name a few—the relationship between
knowledge and power becomes a bit clearer.
For Braudel, Brazil was the place in which his doctoral thesis, published as
The Mediterranean, took shape. Later, Braudel would often say that he became
“intelligent” in Brazil,29 and this quote has unsurprisingly generated scholarly
interest in both France and Brazil. Recent works by biographers and his histori-
ans have explored the role that Braudel’s tenure in Brazil played in his future
work, particularly in terms of understanding the importance of transatlantic
trade.30 Furthermore, other texts by Braudel written in or about Brazil have
been reprinted in French, notably in L’histoire au quotidien: Les écrits de Fernand
Braudel.31 Braudel’s reviews of Brazilians Caio Prado Jr. and Gilberto Freyre
printed in that collection have generated significant attention, especially the lat-
ter, as Freyre has been seen as a kind of Annales historian avant la lettre.32 It is
scientific observation, Brazilian scientists such as Carlos Chagas became all-important interlocutors.
Delaporte, Chagas Disease, 21.
24. Braudel, “Teaching of History.”
25. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory.
26. Cardoso, A universidade da comunhão paulista.
27. Monbeig, “Orientação didática,” 120.
28. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 91.
29. Ayala and Braudel, L’histoire au quotidien, 35.
30. Daix, Braudel; Gemelli, Fernand Braudel, 55–64; Paris, “L’époque brésiliene de Fernand Braudel”;
Aguirre Rojas, Los annales y la historiografia latinoamericana; Aguirre Rojas, Ensayos braudelianos; Lima, Fer-
nand Braudel e o Brasil. See also Skidmore, “Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, and Brazil,” 340–49.
31. See Ayala and Braudel, L’histoire au quotidien, 36–97.
32. Burke, “Gilberto Freyre e a nova história”; Pallares-Burke and Burke, Gilberto Freyre.
also worth noting that Braudel reviewed Freyre’s utopia of racial mixing at the
very moment that he was in a Nazi prison camp in Lübeck.33
For the purposes of this essay, however, the properly intellectual aspects of
Brazil for Braudel’s work—or the Annales more generally—are left as an open
question. Braudel’s essays published here, after all, are a strange corpus to com-
pare with his later work, his oeuvre, as it were. Yet as historical documents they
shed light not only upon the French university missions to USP but also upon
French intellectual life more generally in the interwar period. Braudel’s writings
attest to the inequalities implicit in the internationalization of the French acad-
emy, as well as the imperial imaginary so characteristic of metropolitan intellec-
tuals during the interwar years.
Being French in Brazil: Elite Sociability and Cultural Capital
Recent scholarship on the field of anthropology has gone a long way in explor-
ing the relationship of metropolitan scholars to the colonial state.34 For fields
such as history, however, where the exigencies of research depended less directly
on imperial formations, significant work remains. Such work would explore the
practical connections with the state necessary for the emergence of certain kinds
of intellectuals, as well as the hierarchies of knowledge production that provided
French scholars with prestige, or what Pierre Bourdieu would call cultural capi-
tal, in the international circulation of ideas.
The group surrounding the Annales and what would become the sixth sec-
tion of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, led by Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch,
and later, Braudel himself, not only helped move the field of history methodo-
logically away from the politics of Great Men but also opened it up to encom-
pass new regions of the world as objects and as sources for new collaborators.
Carole Reynaud Paligot’s article on the Annales’ relationship to the colonial
world explores the journal’s tension between rigorous, disinterested scholarship
and practical considerations for spanning new geographical spaces: the editors
allowed colonial administrators or travelers with few scientific credentials to
contribute to the journal with the hope of broadening its scope.35 Braudel’s
essays demonstrate such a tension at an individual level, as he comments on the
world as he saw it—particularly in defining “new” and “old” countries based on
individual experience.
33. The review was first published as Braudel, “A travers un continent d’histoire.” For more on this
specific moment, see Braudel, “L’histoire, mesure du monde.”
34. L’Estoile, Neiburg, and Sigaud, Empires, Nations, and Natives; Conklin, In the Museum of Man.
35. Reynaud Paligot, “Les Annales de Lucien Febvre à Fernand Braudel.”

The historical profession in the twentieth century may have enjoyed
greater autonomy from the state than the newer disciplines of anthropology or
geography. But even in its cosmopolitan form, freed from the political history of
the nation, the French historical field benefited from the construction that
Dipesh Chakrabarty has called “hyperreal Europe.” For much of the globe,
French intellectuals served as vanguards of both historical events and interpre-
tation: inhabiting “the center to which all historical imagination currently gravi-
tates,” they were therefore understood in universal terms.36 Auguste Comte, the
most prominent example, was understood in Brazil not as a Frenchman dealing
with the particularities of postrevolutionary society in France but instead as a
figure of universal import.37
Admittedly, the French Revolution was part and parcel of a long-term
restructuring of the Americas; the Portuguese court fled Bonaparte-occupied
Europe, transferring the sovereignty of the Portuguese Empire to Rio de Janeiro.
This unleashed social and economic transformation, not the least of which was
a new dependency on the British economy. But it was not just the French Revo-
lution as a historical event that served as a potent reminder of the importance of
French history for Latin America; the retroactive understanding of France as the
epitome of historical formations such as the nation-state or even liberalism
made France the modular form to which many Latin American elites aspired,
Brazilians not least among them.38
Whereas Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan exalted the French nation in the
nineteenth century, new kinds of cosmopolitan thinkers less attached to the
French state in terms of their scholarship nonetheless depended on the accumu-
lated prestige of the nation to further their individual intellectual projects. Pas-
cale Casanova called Paris in this period the “Greenwich Meridian” of literary
time, serving as the marker of vanguards in style and form that were seen as uni-
versal as opposed to the national or parochial.39 French intellectual history must
be considered within the context of the international circulation of ideas not
only for the valuable theoretical and methodological interventions that make
French thinkers worth studying but also as an important case for understanding
how symbolic capital works across national borders.40
36. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 45.

37. Comte’s positivist legacy is stitched into the Brazilian flag as Ordem e Progresso (Order and Prog-
ress). For an introduction to positivism in Brazil, see Bosi, “O positivismo no Brasil.”
38. This is reminiscent in many ways of postcolonial India and its relationship with England and
Western Europe more generally. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments.
39. Casanova, World Republic of Letters.
40. Recent scholarship has contributed to considering French intellectual history outside a national
framework. For two prominent examples, see Surkis, “Sex, Sovereignty, and Transnational Intimacies”; and
Shepard, “Algeria, France, Mexico, UNESCO.” For an understanding of how cultural capital travels across
international borders, see Bourdieu, “Les conditions sociales.”
Laurent Jeanpierre’s pioneering study of exiled French intellectuals during
World War II demonstrates how New York contributed to the restructuring of
the social sciences in France, both as an intellectual milieu and as a kind of cre-
dential.41 Such an approach suggests how to understand what Braudel brought
back to France, both in the genesis of his thinking and in his accumulated sym-
bolic capital as an academic with international recognition. When Braudel
writes, “How many times we have heard phrases such as this: ‘Here we are in a
new country, where . . . in contrast to the old countries everything is to be
hoped for,’” or, better yet, “How many times I have heard that the best observers
of Paulista life say: ‘Among us there is no social question,’”42 we can see clearly
the role played by Brazilian intellectuals in shaping Braudel’s questions and
worldview.
Braudel’s Paulista friends mediated his understanding of the Americas and
historical processes more generally. While in São Paulo, Braudel made frequent
use of the private library of philosopher João Cruz Costa, for the likes of which
“great sacrifices are taken.”43 He also became familiar with Roberto Simonsen,
whose courses on Brazilian economic history he may have attended at the neigh-
boring Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política, and whose work he was certainly
familiar with once published.44 Perhaps most important, as students he had
budding historians such as Prado.45
Prado was already developing new understandings of geography and tem-
porality when he studied under Braudel, having published on Brazilian political
and economic history before the course began.46 Evolução político do Brasil and,
even more important, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, published in 1942 and
later reviewed by Braudel, demonstrate a clear understanding of multiple tem-
poralities: geographic, economic, and political.47 Prado’s analysis of the struc-
tural inequalities between Europe and the tropical world from which it drew
41. Jeanpierre, “Des hommes entre plusieurs mondes.”

42. Braudel, “Concept of a New Country.”
43. For more on Braudel’s relationship with João Cruz Costa, see Rodrigues, “A produção social do
marxismo universitário em São Paulo,” 265; and Venâncio de Oliveira, Fantasmas da tradição.
44. Braudel cites Roberto C. Simonsen’s História econômica do Brasil in “A travers un continent
d’histoire,” 6.
45. According to Braudel, São Paulo was a “paradise for work and reflection.” He remembers having
had students who challenged him for his views (contestataires), certainly for political reasons and likely for
methodological ones, too. Braudel, “Ma formation d’historien,” 16. For more on Prado’s training and the
teaching of history at USP, see Martinez, A dinâmica de um pensamento critica, 193–203.
46. Prado, Evolução político do Brasil.
47. Prado, Colonial Background of Modern Brazil. The parallels between Prado’s theorization of his-
torical time and Braudel’s three-pronged temporality consisting of the event, the moyenne durée, and the
courte durée are analyzed in Iumatti, “Pontos de partida.”

goods for consumption and industrial production—of the “vast system” extend-
ing to global proportions48—preceded Braudel’s Mediterranean by seven years.
Braudel’s research may have been about the Mediterranean, but the milieu
in which that research was articulated was as much Brazilian as Mediterranean.
The research material that he brought from Europe to Brazil was considerable,
forcing him to take on an additional room in São Paulo.49 But Braudel was not
alone in his endeavor: his assistants, colleagues, students, and friends in São
Paulo oriented his thinking not just about Brazil but about the theoretical claims
of his work. Because of his status as a French intellectual, he not only had access
to this world but also was validated by it, provided with different horizons than
he would have had if he had stayed in France. These horizons were much more
than geographical or anthropological, made manifest to Braudel through his
travels in São Paulo and in Bahia. They were instead made possible by the very
Brazilians who brought Braudel into their social and intellectual world.
Algeria, Brazil, and the Concept of a New Country
“The Concept of a New Country” asks the question, how should one go about
defining new in terms of historical experience? Braudel asserts that a new coun-
try is characterized by a spirit of youthfulness, that it is geared toward produc-
tion rather than distribution, and that the fluidity of classes mitigates the “social
question.” Ultimately he concludes that only Brazil and Argentina would fit this
description, contrasting them not only to Algeria but also to the offshoots of the
British Empire such as the United States and Canada.
Braudel’s notion of Brazil as new, a country of great forward progress that
is somehow set free from overly rigid European social structures, was shared by
many of his contemporaries. If on one hand such a notion appears to be a con-
tinuation of Tocquevillian tropes surrounding the dynamism of the American
Republic, Brazil was a particular case. To many European intellectuals, Brazil
provided a powerful counterexample to the racial problems of an anti-Semitic
Europe and a segregated United States.50 For Braudel, who had just come
from Algeria, where the legal code (l’indigénat) distinguished European Alge-
rians from their Muslim counterparts, Brazil’s “social mass” seemed incredibly
flexible—even, at times, “too malleable.”51
48. Prado, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, 124.

49. Maugüé, Les dents agacées, 17.
50. See Zweig, Brazil: Land of the Future. For a subtle analysis of Stefan Zweig’s portrayal of Brazi-
lians, see Garcia, “Les souvenirs d’un Européen.”
51. All quotes in this section are to “Concept of a New Country” unless indicated otherwise.
Braudel’s colleagues were more favorable to the Popular Front than Brau-
del was. Lévi-Strauss and philosopher Jean Maugüé, for example, were active
supporters. Braudel’s idealization of politics in a “new country,” on the other
hand, makes his more centrist position clear. Brazilian politics, Braudel thought,
were relatively free from the need to reconcile economic expansion with com-
peting social interests, and Brazil’s economic growth was a function of this. This
essay, written before Getúlio Vargas’s corporatist Estado Novo (New State),
demonstrates Braudel’s fascination with São Paulo’s version of a liberal econ-
omy, or at least his vision of it.
Braudel’s insistence on the youthfulness of Brazil, however, has to do not
only with its growing economy but also with a hierarchy of cultures with France
at its center. In the first paragraph of the essay, Braudel stakes out his role as a
senior scholar, writing but a “few reflections” for the students of the newly
founded Faculty of Sciences and Letters. While recognizing in some cases that
he is still younger than his students, Braudel nonetheless reminds his readers: “It
is through youth and the expression of the youth that we look for the future of
Brazil.”
Contrasting his experience as a Frenchman with that of new countries,
Braudel expresses both a fascination with and paternalistic attitude toward Bra-
zilian society, which he saw as constantly in flux. Whereas in the old world,
Braudel saw the liberal professions as rigidly defined with little mobility between
them, in Brazil he noted “strange horizontal currents [that] pull the doctor
toward the professorship, the professor toward politics, and politics toward cof-
fee plantations or toward cotton cultures . . . Our existences move forward in a
definite line, while those of men from new countries are always under the
empire of zigzag, of the imprecision of youth.” São Paulo, with its rapidly diver-
sifying economy, certainly contrasted with the colonial Algeria that Braudel left
behind. Yet while Braudel expresses fascination with the dynamism of this new
country, particularly among the liberal classes, he also looks condescendingly
upon the “empire of zigzag, of the imprecision of youth.”
Although Braudel ultimately concludes that Brazil and Algeria are differ-
ent kinds of entities, one new and the other resting on “the old world of indige-
nous societies,” he nonetheless finds the “new man” of Algeria very similar to
Brazilians. Braudel saw in Algeria a desirable mix of “human elements coming
from all parts of the Western Mediterranean.” For Braudel, these European colo-
nizers were the French equivalent of the bandeirantes of Brazil, a mixture of
whites and indigenous peoples that expanded Brazil’s borders into the interior,
defying the Treaty of Tordesillas that had previously delimited Spanish and

Portuguese territory in the Americas.52 In many ways, they resembled the new
men imagined by the military generals Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey dur-
ing France’s colonial expansion.53
Beyond the specious parallels made by Braudel concerning the processes
of racial mixing and colonization, however, is an even stranger parallel in terms
of intellectual development. Just as the Brazilians, whose youth pulled them in
different directions, geared more toward action than reflection, “the Algerian
farmer takes pleasure in risk and has taste for adventure . . . much more than for
philosophical culture; a je ne sais quoi with the flavor of America.” Braudel
would later insist in “The Teaching of History” that philosophy is the arrange-
ment for historical thinking, the kind of centerpiece of general culture essential
for Brazilian education.
In “The Concept of a New Country,” Braudel demonstrates his attachment
to French Empire and his frustration with the local populations that seemed to
impede French progress and undermine the interwar policies of mise en valeur.
Giulani Gemelli mentions Braudel’s participation in the centennial of Algerian
conquest in the 1930s,54 but “The Concept of a New Country” makes Braudel’s
conceptualization of Algeria much clearer. For Braudel, the European settlers of
Algeria, the “new men,” had the trait of adventure that characterized American
settlers (and I mean American in the broadest sense of the word); unfortunately,
they did not have the same kind of tabula rasa or free land upon which to
implant a new society. “Algerian progress occurs principally in the coastal plains
that are empty or nearly empty of people. . . . In other regions, however, the
indigenous society impedes the production of the American phenomenon.”
Braudel’s analysis of Algeria evokes a common trope in French colonial
discourse: the tension between assimilation and difference. For Braudel, “the
indigenous shepherd is uneducable.” As an impediment to the rationalization of
agriculture, he is an essential obstacle to the universalizing mission of the French
Republic. In other words, it would be better if he ceased to exist. The shepherd
is imagined irremediably as the Other, yet at the same time his destiny is intri-
cately tied to France. Arab and Berber “societies, far from disappearing, prosper
to a large extent, proliferate because of the French peace.”55
52. In “Pedagogia de História,” Braudel speaks of the bandeirantes and Brazilian historian Afonso
d’Escragnolle Taunay (8–9). In the early twentieth century, the bandeirantes were mythologized to explain
São Paulo’s distinct economic and racial development. A school of historians known as bandeirologists led
by José de Alcântara Machado helped justify the supremacy of the state of São Paulo in the Brazilian nation,
contrasting it with other regions with less favorable racial mixing, particularly African. For more on the ban-
deirologists, see Weinstein, Color of Modernity, 32–46; and Ferreira, A epopéia bandeirante.
53. Rabinow, French Modern, 164.
54. Gemelli, Fernand Braudel, 45.
55. This kind of logic was important throughout the Algerian War of Independence, in which
metropolitan intellectuals and statesmen maintained that radical Islam was a threat to the mosaic of cultures
protected by the French occupation.
Braudel’s romanticization of Brazil and less indigenous parts of the Amer-
icas as new—that is, where the indigenous populations had either been dis-
placed or massacred—reveal both his frustration with Algeria and his particular
experience in São Paulo. When considering possible candidates for a new coun-
try, Braudel eliminates not only Egypt, Japan, and India but also Mexico, Boli-
via, and Peru.56 His affirmation of yes applies only to “Argentina and Brazil of
the Paulista type.”57 Clearly Braudel did not regard all parts of Brazil as equally
worthy of the designation new, yet Braudel had enough faith in the “Paulista
type” that it would serve as a model for a new kind of Brazil.58
Brazil, after all, was not always new according to Braudel; it became so
only in 1890 when immigrants started to arrive by steamship and, I might add,
when the federal government managed to squash uprisings such as in the village
of Canudos in the interior. Only then could inland Brazilian states really begin
to develop the interior as if it were a tabula rasa, prepared to be colonized by the
new men who would create a new kind of civilization. For Braudel, this would
basically be a young European civilization, albeit a mixed one, free from eco-
nomic and social constraints, at least until it reached a level of the United States
or Canada. In this way, Brazil, unimpeded by diverse populations and the legal
problem of inequality, was a very different place than the Algeria that he had left
behind.
The History of Civilization and Its Study

“The Teaching of History and Its Guidelines” is a much more task-oriented
essay intended to define the discipline of history for the university authorities,
the general public, and above all his students in São Paulo. Yet while Braudel
considers practical issues regarding his courses, he also makes much more gen-
eral statements about the field of history as if it were an American Historical
Association presidential address. Braudel, as a scholar two years into his univer-
sity career, found himself defining what history was. Prior to writing The Medi-
terranean, Braudel suggests some of the interventions for which he would later
become so well known.
56. This distinction reflects a commonly held belief by Brazilians and foreigners alike of an uncivi-
lized, childlike Brazilian native: “In this way it is not an encounter between an exuberant culture of maturity
with another, already adolescent, that we see here; the European colonization was surprised in this part of
America, almost by a band of big children; an unripe and incipient culture still in its first teething. Without
the bones or the development of resistance of the great American civilizations.” Freyre, Casa-grande e sen-
zala, 125.
57. Ibid., 42.
58. This new Brazil proposed by the Paulistas was based on a politics of whitening and the expansion
of the productive zones into the interior. See also Skidmore, Black into White; and Monbeig, Pionniers et
planteurs.

The goal of this introductory section, however, is not to tease out the spe-
cific strains of thought that influenced Braudel in this moment, whether those
of European historians such as Henri Pirenne, Bloch, and Febvre, geographers
such as Paul Vidal de La Blache and Emmanuel de Martonne, or Brazilian schol-
ars such as Prado and Freyre. Instead, it is to situate the occasion on which such
thought was made possible—namely, a young French professor of history ele-
vated to the title of chair and responsible for an entire curriculum. In Brazil,
Braudel benefited from a freedom to define the discipline differently than domi-
nant institutions in metropolitan France. Furthermore, he had the authority as
a French historian abroad to justify making statements about the field at large
that would serve him upon his return to France.
Braudel opens his essay with reflection upon his approach. While he
claims to have considered limiting the essay “strictly to its useful and technical
conclusions,” he ultimately decides upon a much longer approach. This, he says,
is “because here, in a young country, where the future expands without pause
and regularly surpasses the promises of the present, our actions take on a grav-
ity, an intensity, that comes from their importance.”59 Braudel’s notion of a
young country, crystallized in “Concept of a New Country,” determined not
only his paternalistic tone but also his course of action in “The Teaching of His-
tory.”
His Brazilian audience, he thought, deserved much more than his practical
conclusions; they needed in fact to be elevated to his cultural level. At the very
least that is the tacit recommendation that he decided to take:
The title of this chair—the History of Civilization—is in and of itself an educa-
tional program. . . . The title gave its chair a dominion without limits, and the
entire annals of humanity, in time and in space, were entrusted to his study.
This attitude was perhaps a tacit recommendation for us to elevate ourselves as
much as possible, above that which is related exclusively to erudition, that
which can be said about the competition for bibliographical armaments and
about institutionalized collectors.
Braudel’s essay offers a kind of philosophy of history, shedding light on the

increasing spatial and temporal dimensions of his own work. His chair in São
Paulo had a “dominion without limits,” indeed “the entire annals of humanity.”
Braudel makes it clear in this essay, moreover, that his role as historian in
Brazil is much more than a scientific one. The historian, “this master of time
travel,” has an imagination and an audacity that distinguish him from the scien-
tist; unlike the learned men that “compare themselves to chemists that have
59. All quotes in this section are to “Teaching of History” unless indicated otherwise.
reunited all of the elements of an experience but who will never resolve to carry
them out,” Braudel claims a distinct interpretive role for the historian. Making
history come alive, the historian is much more than an antiquarian.
In fact, history for Braudel, at least in this early stage of his career, appears
to fall halfway between literature and science. “Much like a novelist,” Braudel
writes, “the historian creates life.” Evoking Michelet and his ability to resurrect
the past, Braudel serves as a poignant example of what several authors have
noted already: history and the social sciences in France more generally have
“long been dominated by the literary field.”60
Braudel uses the metaphor of the past as a mirror shattered into a thou-
sand pieces. While claiming that “the intact mirror exists”—indeed that there is
an objective thing that is the past—Braudel admits that it is “much beyond our
ability to see.” Only by bringing together the fragments of the broken mirror,
studied in isolation by political economists, statisticians, geographers, jurists,
sociologists, and ethnologists, can the historian begin to see the mirror as a
whole. Because, Braudel claims, historians in training lack “their own specific
scientific vocabulary,” they “would do well to see everything, without limiting
the field of observation.” Here, as in other moments throughout Braudel’s early
essays, it is impossible to specify what Braudel himself meant. These texts are
unpolished and even incomplete. For intellectual historians, they may comple-
ment Braudel’s oeuvre and help trace the impact of Braudel’s Brazilian years in
The Mediterranean or on the subsequent trajectory of the Annales.
The ambiguities in these early essays, however, are not simply theoretical
or methodological; they are social and political. Braudel was profoundly
attached to empire, like so many intellectuals of his generation, either because
of their personal experience or because their respective sciences depended upon
colonial expansion. In the social sciences, anthropology is the most poignant
example of this, having depended on the state for access to the very populations
it proposed to study.
For the field of history, the research laboratory was less explicitly colonial,
but its approach was at times even more so. Whereas cultural relativism in
anthropology provided anthropologists with a language with which to decenter
Western Europe following World War I, historians such as Braudel insisted on
the specific role that France would have as a civilizational model and as the cen-
ter of intellectual life. As French scholars such as Braudel, whom many consider
today to be the first global historian, sought to expand the reaches of their fields
60. Bourdieu, Homo academicus, 113. Vincent Debaene, for example, in L’adieu au voyage demon-
strates how consecration in the literary field for anthropologists ultimately validated their scientific achieve-
ments.

outside of Europe, they met the highly literate cultures of the Near East and
Latin America on unequal terms. Elevated as experts, they were provided with
the capital, both economic and social, to conduct their research and the freedom
to innovate. They, as the French scholars, as the professional intellectuals in
their transnational social world, would be remembered for their brilliance even
when their work was indeed a much more collective production.
Fernand Braudel, “The Concept of a New Country,” 1937

A precise study is necessary to comprehend, define, and delimit the notion of a
new country. We will proceed carefully to analyze this expression, so as to avoid
watering down its abundant content and dynamism, owing to its characteristic
imprecision and the abuses that are committed by its habitual usage. How many
times we have heard phrases such as this: “Here we are in a new country, where
all is recent . . . of great future wealth . . . where in contrast to the old countries
everything is to be hoped for . . . etc.”! How difficult it is to discover the truths
that are hidden in these constantly repeated official formulas! To succeed in per-
ceiving them it is necessary to appeal to almost all of the social sciences and
even history. We do not have, however, this intention. In this journal, under the
banner of youth, we do not want to occupy the space that, unfortunately, no
longer belongs to us. To the students that requested our collaboration in Filoso-
fia, ciências e letras, of which they justly took pride, we wanted to respond: “Is it
really worth it? First speak to us, above all, about yourselves. It is through youth
and the expression of the youth that we look for the future of Brazil, great and
uneasy at once, and it will be exactly, mathematically, yours.” We therefore will
occupy—and we consider this essential for the journal—only a few pages.
Beyond this, in this space, we intend to expose but a few reflections, without
exploring them completely, tracing, above all, considerations that come from
direct experience.
There are, however, cases in which I am quite young, and even younger
than some of my students: it is in these cases that history and current events are
mixed together, the past and the present of Brazil. It is Giraudoux, if I remem-
ber correctly, who in an excerpt of Siegfried et le limousin shows one of his char-
acters riding horseback through the fog of the early morning on a road that is
now a highway in Germany. With the town still sleeping, he sits down, in a
given moment, brought from dreams to reality by the sensation of traversing
the Germany of Gustavo Adolfo.
Here [in Brazil] excessive precaution is not necessary to see the past again.
Upon returning from an everyday trip one might stumble upon the mysterious
impressions of the Amerindian era, situated beyond the colonial past that was
only yesterday. Here the past and present pull us with an insistence that is a con-
tinuous lesson.
It is necessary, whatever the consequences are, to retouch our ideas, our
ideas of Europe, behind which, whether we like it or not, there are forests that
are parks and beaten fields, gardens and orchards in perfect order . . . Moreover,
to feel what a new country is, is not living there the best way?61
...
I lived quite a while—ten years—in another country considered new—Algeria,

without doubt the most solid and serious creation of French expansion since
the very vigorous Laurentian Canada broke loose from us almost from the start.
It [Algeria] is, certainly, the most solid and serious creation, even if less cele-
brated in appearance. It is less of a new country than Morocco, even if more
important. The physiognomy of Algeria shows innumerable classical features of
a new country: the rapid growth of cities, the decisive development of ports, of
markets of production. Algiers and its surroundings concentrate more than
three hundred thousand inhabitants, and Algiers is possibly, after Paris, the
most beautiful, the most attractive of French cities—even if still marked by its
ugly old constructions, in the style of Louis Philippe. Algeria is the primary con-
sumer and primary supplier of France.
It is in the race of strong men, audacious, energetic, that is signaled in the
most visible manner the features of a new country. The peasant who settled
there fifty or seventy-five years ago, the Algerian farmer takes pleasure in risk
and has taste for adventure . . . much more than for philosophical culture; a je
ne sais quoi with the flavor of America.
It was Claude Farrère who wrote about the “new men” of Morocco. How-
ever, it must be admitted that it was Algeria that impelled us to conquer the bar-
barous62 neighboring shores and it was Algeria that colonized them, giving
them new men, giving them their own “bandeirantes”; and she who still desires
the mouth of the Niger, the direction in which she must send forth her children,
her captains, and the French government, despite the unmaking of the dreams
of the great plantation of cotton.63
...
61. The frequent ellipses in these essays are the author’s own.
62. Braudel may have written Barbary, a term used to describe Berber lands. This is unlikely to be a
term that Simões de Paula would have understood.
63. Braudel is referring here to the Office du Niger in French Sudan (present-day Mali).

I saw Algeria again in the plenitude of its obfuscating light, after my first stay on
Brazilian soil that I would leave precisely in the moment when the clouds of
summer started to dim the color of the sky . . . Is Algeria a new country? I never
believed seriously that it was, and now I do not believe it at all. It is clear that I
do so by way of my arbitrary idea, which you can accept or reject, but it has its
value, even if beyond the definitions and circle in which I desire to delimit my
thinking. Let’s be clear. The idea of a new country is inseparable from the char-
acteristic of youth. As a city, São Paulo is a rather old urban center, but as a
large city it is of yesterday and therefore new. Algeria, too, in its new phase,
appears to date one hundred years—the conquest of Algeria was accomplished
in 1830—but in fact it is only in the twentieth century that its great economic
development occurred. At the beginning of the century, its great vineyards were
formed, enriching, for an instant, its production of wheat and its exploitation of
phosphates and iron ore. Algeria, too, has a promising future and, without a
doubt, has yet to reach the maximum of its expansion, craving money, luxury,
and intelligence that come to it from the metropole, with whom it is closely
linked with an ardent heart and the rapidity of communications.
The basis, however, for its social roots—and it is this point upon which
we insist—rests upon the old world of indigenous societies—a millenarian
world of the Berber mountains, of the Numidians of classical times—and upon
the secular world of the Arab shepherd who fixed himself in the steppes of the
plateau starting in the seventh and eighth centuries, principally after the Hilalian
invasion of the tenth century. Because these societies, far from disappearing,
prosper to a large extent, proliferate because of the French peace. In 1830 two
million indigenous peoples lived in Algeria; today there exist nearly six million.
Above this mass is the “new man,” European, lord of the command posts,
whose control is difficult to maintain. History confirms this, with vehemence.
Before the uneasy mass, the “new men” are less than a million. Of these, many
more are still necessary, because that mass is lacking above all in plasticity. In
the economic domain the mass is an obstacle to be fought against. “Where there
are no European microbes,” says Emílio Gautier, “the economic life of Algeria
stays put.” Take, for example, the “squatter” in the immensity of land where
plants are rare, in Australia; similarly the mediocrity of the raising of sheep, in
the high plateaus of Algeria. The reason is that the indigenous shepherd is uned-
ucable. Algerian progress occurs principally in the coastal plains that are empty
or nearly empty of people, where the French occupation operates, that region of
stagnant water, of savage animals, and where malaria camps out. There, the
French experience realizes itself upon a tabula rasa. To construct, it mixes
human elements coming from all parts of the Western Mediterranean, Italians
from Mezzogiorno, Corsicans from the coast and the mountains, meridional
French who left their vineyards and even immigrants from the North, from
Alsace, Spanish from the Levant. . . . In this way takes form, in the vast Algeria,
three or four chunks of America. In other regions, however, the indigenous soci-
ety impedes the production of the American phenomenon. In Morocco, in
Tunisia, the French experience reached a considerably lesser degree in 1883 for
Tunisia and in 1912 for Morocco. In these North African regions, above all in
Morocco, the French attempt, taking advantage of the lessons learned in Algeria,
develops with a dreamlike rapidity. However, these obvious successes should
not hide the embarrassments behind them. In Morocco, as in Tunisia, the
respective indigenous societies are in reality more impermeable and their pene-
tration even more difficult than in Algeria. There they support themselves in cit-
ies with intellectual and indigenous bourgeoisies: Tunisia, on one hand, and
Fez, the mysterious city, on the other. Algeria, through which France forced
open the ports of North Africa, on the contrary, has always been a backward
zone between brilliant regions: Morocco and Ifriqiya or Tunisia. In conclusion,
it can be said that, if the French tentative were to have developed in general and
not exceptionally on a blank slate, the economic results would be today much
greater than they are, and the country would enter into the category of new
countries, not in part but in whole. Far from me is the intention to criticize.
French colonization will find, precisely in this growth of the indigenous North
African society, its moral justification. This is not, however, a question that
occupies us.
...
Are not new countries, however, those whose economic development is

restrained by the stiffness64 or rigidity of their social elements? Let’s look at
France: its society is essentially gifted with a coherence, a discipline, and an exi-
gency that do not always contribute to its highest return, exigencies such as
these that are even in contradiction with logical propensities, if not economic
mores . . . To produce is the voice command of new societies; to distribute, that
of the old worlds. In France, with each step, the economic problems intertwine
themselves with necessities or, better, with social demands. The destiny of poli-
tics, its role, is to reconcile the economic with the social, which does not always
bode well for the economy. In Brazil, I am not saying that politics does not
encounter the same situation, but without a doubt, in its social constitution, at
least in São Paulo and in the South, there is a certain mobility of characteristics
that cannot be found in Europe. I have heard the best observers of Paulista life
say so many times: “Among us there is no social question.” It is clear that this is
64. Literally ankylosis.

not more than a boutade65 and simply means that, if there exist social questions,
they do not present themselves, let’s say, as they do in France . . . It is, in sum, a
way of saying that here there is no society with divisions separated by stone
paths as in a garden. Brazilian society is doted with an extreme flexibility. Its ele-
ments are not coalesced, ordered in rigid squares, fulfilling a certain order. The
most reactionary person is always equal to a Whig and a quite liberal Whig.
There is an incredible malleability of the social mass, mobile, always predisposed
to remodeling itself from the beginning to the end of the scale, under whatever
economic conditions, perhaps too malleable, with tempests that other societies
could not bear, delivered by the gust of ideas at full sail, and progress with all
kinds of innovation. In French society, at all times, a continuous movement—
the Etape by Bourget—makes the most inferior elements rise to the highest lay-
ers of society, but only in what is necessary to restore and conserve the heights
of the edifice, constantly renovated but always the same.
...
Here the vertical movements have the force of torrents but are directed as much
toward ascension as toward shipwreck. Beyond this, strange horizontal currents
pull the doctor toward the professorship, the professor toward politics, and pol-
itics toward coffee plantations or toward cotton cultures . . . Our existences
move forward in a definite line, while those of men from new countries are
always under the empire of zigzag, of the imprecision of youth. This social mal-
leability, however, is not fundamentally the essential element of a new country,
nor the only, but without a doubt the most important. It can be taken as a crite-
rion to classify or not a given country as a new country. It is not Egypt. Neither
India nor Japan. Nor Abyssinia on the eve of its Roman existence. Nor the
American states with old landscapes of ancient civilizations and, so, neither
Mexico, nor Bolivia, nor Peru . . . Not even South Africa with its indigenous
societies. But yes Argentina and Brazil of the Paulista type. On the contrary, we
express reservations regarding Canada and the United States, where it can be
judged that society progressively becomes solidified. Neither still Australia or
New Zealand; at least considering them new countries requires much caution.
These new countries are entirely English, too subservient to the standards and
the order of the metropole.
...
The end result is strange for an analysis that intended to be brief. As a prelimi-
nary attempt of making more precise a widespread notion, the analysis remains
65. A witticism or clever phrase. Left in French in original text.
empty of content! All of the countries with the title of new country were elimi-
nated, with the exception of Brazil and Argentina! While we excuse ourselves,
we justify our conclusions. Any other criteria that might have been adopted
would lead to the same elimination. We suppose that it may have been prefera-
ble to consider the economic aspect, and that we would say that a new country
is that which imports men, capital, manufactured goods and that it is suffi-
ciently wealthy with possibilities to assume this triple overload. This criterion
accepted, whatever might be the new countries that should be admitted and
which should be rejected as new countries? In truth, before all else, life is too
complex for us to be able to contain it within a simple formula and, above all,
the youth of countries, which are collective beings, not because their youth is
longer than ours, stops being momentary as well. One of my friends insists in
seeing the future of the city of São Paulo through the image of Chicago. When
this image becomes reality, will Brazil be young? Will not its society have lost
the mobility that is the cause of many of its miseries but also the cause of its
attraction and force over nature? Societies, even the most fluid, evolve toward a
certain order. Once that order is established, there is no sign of eternity. There
exists a cycle that goes from order to dispersal, and from dispersal to order. It
completes itself more or less quickly. Brazil, at least in what concerns its social
reality, when navigation by sail disappeared from the Atlantic, and when naviga-
tion by steam brought its mass of immigrants here around 1890, stopped being a
young country. It is under the pressure of circumstances, bombarded by the
armies of new arrivals, the old society jolted, packing its bags and saving from
its primitive order all that it can—its language, its religion—that Brazil will
become a new country.
...
In a brilliant lecture, one of my students spoke of England in 1850, in an era in

which its social organization was ruined so as to cede way to a new order. In a
few words, the situation was summarized: “England was the first American
country in the world.” The expression could serve as a conclusion. It puts into
relief, very well, the possibilities of the return to youthfulness.
I will add just one recommendation to the young: “In a country that will
fill in its tableaus before the activity that you are undertaking is finished and
that will endure for your actions consequences whose extent you do not antici-
pate, it is advisable to think and reflect maturely before acting.” To produce and
to distribute, we said, referring earlier to old and new countries. It could even be
said that, on one hand, there is a tendency to conserve, and the other, to create.
And you must be capable of creating the Brazil of tomorrow and making it even
better!

Fernand Braudel, “The Teaching of History and Its Guidelines,” 1937
This report is directed, at once, to the university authorities that solicited it and
to the public that is interested in the fate of the new Faculty of Philosophy,
Science, and Letters, and also—is it necessary to say so?—to the students. It is
for this reason that it is so long. We confess that, for a moment, we considered
abbreviating this examination of conscience, limiting it strictly to its useful and
technical conclusions. It may have sufficed to present in a few lines the solutions
that were in our view good and useful, in what concerns the history curriculum,
the teaching of courses, and the orientation of studies, so as to give this report
both direction and efficiency. If ultimately a longer approach was preferred, it
was certainly because here, in a young country, where the future expands with-
out pause and regularly surpasses the promises of the present, our actions take
on a gravity, an intensity, that comes from their importance. These actions
demand to be considered at a greater length and with more diligence than else-
where.
The title of this chair—the History of Civilization—is in and of itself an
educational program, and it was this, certainly, that the founders of the faculty
wanted. The title gave its chair a dominion without limits, and the entire annals
of humanity, in time and in space, were entrusted to his study. This attitude was
perhaps a tacit recommendation for us to elevate ourselves as much as possible,
above that which is related exclusively to erudition, that which can be said about
the competition for bibliographical armaments and about institutionalized col-
lectors.66 In North Africa and in Syria, numerous Roman ruins are disguised so
well that a simple observation at ground level does not reveal them. Conversely,
aerial surveys will allow either discovering them or better understanding them
in their ensemble. To elevate oneself is not, necessarily, to lose oneself in the
clouds …
The title of this chair indicates, indeed imposes, a choice. It requires, in
fact, a definition of history upon which we must elaborate. The historian does
not feel the necessity every day to define his discipline, his exact position in the
general field of intellectual life: others take charge of this, not always in good
faith, or—and it is one and the same thing—competently. Is it necessary, then,
to define a state of mind as old as the civilized world itself? Always, in a sponta-
neous manner, societies looked for their own temps perdu.67 History has existed,
in fact, ever since intelligent reflection emerged, ever since the first legends that
man sang . . . a dangerous privilege however! Only the social sciences, born
66. Collectors was the best word I could find for herbanários, literally “herb sellers.”
67. Temps perdu, like other French terms, is left intact despite the rest of the text being in Portu-
guese. Braudel was likely referring both to times past and to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
yesterday and those that will be born tomorrow, look to define themselves . . . in
their case, it is a spiritual justification of their birth; they yearn to live, and it is
necessary that they exclude others from their new possessions . . . These sciences
did not receive, as history did, the secular heritage, this empire, these colonies,
these riches that tend less toward action than toward the tranquility of old pow-
ers . . . Nonetheless, it would be simple to define the goal of history as affirmed
by the collection of hundreds of essential works that appeared principally over
the last thirty years: the works of Henri Pirenne, for example, if only to cite one
great professor who is no longer with us. History is the oldest of the social sci-
ences, but not the only one, as one might think. It is the powerlessness of
our intelligence and the difficulty of our object—which nonetheless has its
importance—that oblige us to fragment reality. To each social science belongs
only a fragment of a mirror broken into a thousand pieces. The intact mirror
exists, but much beyond our ability to see, in which society reflects the moving
image and the totality. This society is the object of our research: political econ-
omy studies it in the conditions of material life, statistics in the form of num-
bers, geography in space, law in the prism of contractual obligations, sociol-
ogy in its mechanism, ethnography and ethnology in their still incoherent68
forms . . . history, in reality, of yesteryear. . . . In this way, the historian adds to
his task, but with difficulty. Others work on what is living, or what is seen, what
can be measured; the historian, on what exists no longer . . . and there, even
when lacking data, it is the totality of social life that he looks for and recon-
structs, without having at his disposition, neither an object nor a mirror. The
former does not exist, and the latter does not belong to this world. From this
comparison we could deduce the difficulties of our métier.69 But who does not
know them? Are the sciences not but a continuous demonstration of the uncer-
tainty of knowledge? A double verification lightens these shadows. Does not
social life today have multiple points of similarity with societies that are no lon-
ger, and does not the present offer itself to us as a laboratory? Inverting the
habitual terms, could we not say that the light of the present illuminates the
past? Pirenne only claimed to have understood the vilas-novas of medieval Eu-
rope after having seen the boom cities of North America. Moreover, present liv-
ing material represents only a small part of the inventoried social facts. In this
way, all of the social sciences defined above, a bit hastily, use, nine out of ten
times, documents relative to dead societies. There is something comforting and
reassuring in this. If the historical fact is an indispensable intellectual element
for other sciences, it is not enough. This conviction itself justifies our work
68. Literally balbuciante, “stammering.”

69. Left italicized as métier in the original Portuguese.

because we are the ones who create and put into circulation historical facts.
However, it is for ourselves that we work to attain our goal: the reconstruction
of images from the past, the resurrection of societies of yore. Pirenne, whom we
will cite once again, said that Robinson’s island did not pertain to the domain of
history. There is only history in social groups, and it is these groups to which we
must give total history. If history is likely a science, it is not so because it estab-
lishes this or that fact, but because it leads us to general verifications of society,
noting similarities across particular incidents. It is in these rare occasions that it
appears to give us a certainty in reconstructing the mirror in its totality. The
landscape is entirely up for reconstructing. Whether it deals with diplomatic
verbiage, sometimes so serious, or political life, where the entire collectivity is
synthesized; whether it deals with the history of great men, victims and execu-
tioners of others, whether it has to do with the price of bread, or with changes
in income or of exchange—none of these minutiae can be isolated from the
social combination in which they related to one another. The historian in train-
ing would do well to see everything, without limiting the field of observation.
Reducing the past to what is simply economic is as absurd as reducing everything
to a series of political facts, as historians did previously. This first general aspect
taught us that our work must be about society as a whole. Beyond this, we must
resuscitate its life. Much like a novelist, the historian creates life. He recreates it
on the map of reality. This is its task, which is beautiful and noble. For those
who are not familiar with the resurrection of the past, of which Michelet speaks,
cannot comprehend the happiness of the historian’s secret, or the exact role of
the history professor—this master of time travel. There are historians that are so
only in name. They are learned men who compare themselves to chemists that
have reunited all of the elements of an experiment but who will never resolve to
carry it out, out of the fear of igniting the ovens or out of habit. …
...
Beyond these kinds of cases, it is worth saying something about the students of
history, establishing certain characteristics for them: the evident defects and
positive qualities. As for qualities, we emphasize the desire, the necessity, the
passion of seeing everything from above, even from a little bit too high . . . an
intelligent love for the Brazilian land, and especially the Paulista territory: it
is by way of its past, its economic cycles, its life—so open to the influences of
the outside world—and its ostentation, that the student organizes its historical
culture.
With this comes a form of direct observation, in certain domains of eco-
nomic and modern history, that the European student will not possess as pre-
cisely or as completely. The Brazilian point of view offers, in this way, a precious
illumination. Why not speak, too, of the fervor shown by some, almost all,
through study and, more specifically, through the construction of a private
library, for which such great sacrifices are undertaken? Many weaknesses can,
unfortunately, be indicated. Paulista students often lack a basis of general cul-
ture, without which it is difficult to make rapid progress. This is a problem of
secondary school, to which we will limit ourselves to a few words for those who
desire, and who may prove be able to remediate, this lack. Without desiring to
raise other considerations on the unsolvable and difficult problem of general
culture, may we permit ourselves to say that for those who intend to study his-
tory it is important to have, beyond historical notions, three essential disci-
plines: Portuguese, Latin, and a solid philosophical culture. Latin because it per-
mits the study of Portuguese in the majority of its roots, and because it is
necessary for the historian to perfectly understand his language. Unlike the phi-
losopher, the sociologist, the jurist, or the doctor, the historian does not possess
a vocabulary that is his own. Except for certain attempts made in this direction,
the historian gains much in using a vocabulary that is in contact with life
and its realities, enriched by that life and by its realities. Mommsen, Fustel de
Coulanges, Henri Pirenne, Maurice Holleaux were admirable writers. They are
worthy examples to be considered! . . . We have not yet referred to the other
advantages that Latin would bring in and of itself. It is easy to comprehend that
Rome loses its entire meaning for the historian that never so much as thought
about its decline. Now, philosophy. We understand as philosophical culture, in
this case, the arrangement of thinking.70 Our students, even the best ones—have
a strong tendency to philosophize without knowing. Once disciplined in this
domain, they would free their work from the vagueness of common notions. As
goes an old expression, it is necessary to think about one’s own thought.
There will be those that say that the above are very far from an adequate
list of requirements. Intellectual life demands, we know, a certain courage. To
satisfy our mission, our students have not only the years of their training but
also the years of their free activity that, for some of them, is soon to begin. We
must add a few more considerations. Today’s intellectual culture is an interna-
tional culture. For history, as in fact for all other activities of the mind, knowl-
edge of foreign languages is a necessity for anyone who wants to participate in
the concert of worldly voices. In regard to a linguistic knowledge at least at the
level that would permit reading a book or a journal article, the effort to acquire
this knowledge cannot be underestimated.
The social sciences form a block, a coalition. They are in solidarity. It will
always be useful for the historian to review his methods, his intelligence, and his
70. The original Portuguese text keeps mise en place in French.

results. Ethnography, sociology, and political economy merit his attention. If it
were possible to organize complementary courses for this purpose, we would
desire greatly that they be of a special nature, not conceived as a secondary, inde-
pendent aspect but serving as a contribution to historical culture. I am not
speaking here of the link with geography, which was very well thought out,
being an equally rigorous discipline, with each taking course over three years of
study. A more ample and flexible regime would be more suitable, permitting us
to better orient studies and organize them more closely along the lines of stu-
dents’ vocations.71
Chance—always beneficial—favored the section of history, giving it several
jurists as students. It is not surprising that, specialists in the strong disciplines of
law, these students have regularly and automatically placed themselves ahead of
their peers. This strong link, effective for the recruitment of students of value,
must not we protect from such a fortuitous rupture with its establishment?72
...
The cycle of studies is here, as in other departments, three years long: the first,
dedicated to antiquity; the second to the Middle Ages, and the third to modern
times. This is the curriculum that will function starting in 1936 and whose
responsibility is entirely that of the author of this report.
We deliberately limited ourselves in the study of modern history that, in
European universities, tends to become increasingly important. If we proceeded
in this way, it is because the study of modern times is achieved directly through
the teachings of the chairs of History of Brazil and History of America. Further-
more, our students already understand the general brushstrokes of history in
modern times. Therein lies the necessity for us to dedicate ourselves to distant
eras, completely unknown to them. There are many advantages in going
through the path that leads from the Orient to Greece, from Greece to Rome
and to Rome of today, passing through the medieval period, whose pungent
originality and value are known today. It also seemed important to us to have
the student relive these eras, so distant and different from our own—eras in
which one comes across obscurities that we do not find in others. They are use-
ful obstacles for the intelligence that is reflected in this world of such particular
coordinates, where what would be and what was Europe started, prior to the
separation of Brazil from Portugal.73 . . . It is in these classical lands that the
71. The meaning of vocações is ambiguous. It means both talents in terms of particular students and
making the history major more applicable to professions outside of academia.
72. Braudel is referring to USP’s autonomy vis-à-vis the law school of the Largo São Francisco in
São Paulo. He appeared to view the two as complementary rather than conflicting.
73. Literally, the text reads as if Portugal gave birth to Brazil.
apprentice of the historical profession is the most direct and most advanta-
geous. Almost all historians of global importance were specialists of ancient and
medieval history. Now the final argument in favor of this curriculum—and it is
the best one: the evident sympathy of students for serious questions. Perhaps in
this domain, in which vast perspectives remain unfragmented by the superabun-
dance of details, Brazilian intelligence, entirely Latin, feels more at ease, prefer-
ring this study to that of long civil wars, examining microscopically, the modern
history of Europe.
This program brings with it a general review of the foundations of histori-
cal knowledge, a slow review because it is constituted not by the memory of pre-
viously acquired notions but instead by continual discoveries. From this, we
conclude that this general task will logically take up our time and almost all of
our efforts. This review of fundamental notions will only constitute a primary
initiation. It is not only this that will be necessary.
The function of this chair is to train teachers for secondary school and for
historical research. Such an end, however, will not be reached if teaching is not
conducted in depth. Historical culture is not only acquired through textbooks
without canonical works. It is acquired in the field of history that is being cre-
ated, in the middle of difficult truths, in the pains and joys of research . . . To
direct the students to this advanced stage—that attempt, that very heavy
task! . . . To teach them the auxiliary disciplines of history, archaeology, epigra-
phy, paleology, and to orient them in the multiple sectors of our field, putting
them into contact with worthy researches of Brazilian erudition: all of this is to
recognize the necessity of specialization. We insisted previously upon general
culture. It is known, however, that culture is a means, and only this. To set the
spirit free, open it up to new horizons—yes—but to concentrate afterward on
all of the riches acquired, on all of the difficulty and efficiency in conducting
such a rigorous and individual task. If history is desired to be given its own
space, its students must study it closely. At present, there is no room in the cur-
riculum for specialization, already overloaded with material for three years.
What is more, our students are solicited for different work in neighboring disci-
ples, called upon even outside of the university. Thus it is not goodwill that they
lack, but only time. We applaud, moreover, the intelligent organization of the
doctoral course, modeled on that of the French faculties of letters. General cul-
ture imposes itself with time and specialization is a question of liberty and voca-
tion. It is only necessary to secure the material conditions of those that will be
the first doctors of our university.
It could be said that this training, which is crowned with the doctorate at
its highest level, is not advisable for the secondary teacher of history and geogra-
phy that this chair, in part, must train. The last words of this report will be

addressed to this question. For the secondary teacher, the acquisition of general
knowledge is imperative. The bachelor’s degree will secure this acquisition. But
there is not only the bare minimum . . . in the most remote cities of the state of
São Paulo, the teacher must continue to belong to the world of intellectuals, and
beyond his quotidian task is precisely that of not losing touch with this world.
We know here, as everywhere, the social danger represented by the teacher
that does not work, does not study. . . . Because it is only in his specialized area
that the professor can maintain his awakened intelligence. The intelligence of
the teacher—is not this the essential point? Without specialization, can intelli-
gence be exercised usefully? If the reader reflects upon and supports the solu-
tions that we presented, this article will not be, perhaps, completely useless in
what it says about the future Brazilian university student.
IAN MERKEL is a doctoral candidate in history and French studies at New York Univer-
sity. His dissertation analyzes the impact of Brazil both as a site of research and as a
scholarly network for French social scientists such as Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-
Strauss, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers of French Historical Studies, as well as Stefanos Ger-
oulanos and Herrick Chapman, whose suggestions sharpened the analysis and broadened the
scope of the article. He also thanks Mariella Pittari for her help with translating Braudel’s essays
and the Tinker Field Research Grant, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the New York Uni-
versity Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for their generous support. He thanks the Universi-
dade de São Paulo’s Revista de história and Paule Braudel for permission to translate Braudel’s
essays. Finally, he thanks the archives at the Institut de France, the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros,
and the Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa, as well as those who most directly helped him at each: Maurice
Aymard, Michèle Moulin, Elisabete Ribas, and Maria Aparecida Araújo Ferreira.
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Fernand Braudel, Brazil,

and the Empire

keywords Brazil, historiography, social sciences, Algeria, translation

Braudel and the French Missions to the University of São Paulo

130 French Historical Studies  40:1

132 French Historical Studies  40:1

134 French Historical Studies  40:1

Being French in Brazil: Elite Sociability and Cultural Capital

136 French Historical Studies  40:1

36. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 45.

41. Jeanpierre, “Des hommes entre plusieurs mondes.”

138 French Historical Studies  40:1

Algeria, Brazil, and the Concept of a New Country

48. Prado, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, 124.

140 French Historical Studies  40:1

The History of Civilization and Its Study

142 French Historical Studies  40:1

Braudel’s essay offers a kind of philosophy of history, shedding light on the

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Fernand Braudel, “The Concept of a New Country,” 1937

I lived quite a while—ten years—in another country considered new—Algeria,

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Are not new countries, however, those whose economic development is

64. Literally ankylosis.

148 French Historical Studies  40:1

65. A witticism or clever phrase. Left in French in original text.

In a brilliant lecture, one of my students spoke of England in 1850, in an era in

150 French Historical Studies  40:1

68. Literally balbuciante, “stammering.”

152 French Historical Studies  40:1

70. The original Portuguese text keeps mise en place in French.

154 French Historical Studies  40:1

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158 French Historical Studies  40:1

160 French Historical Studies  40:1

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