“If the Nobel Prize were given to historians, it would almost certainly have been awarded to Fernand Braudel.” Thus begins a recent article by a prominent American historian, Samuel Kinser, on the “Braudel phenomenon,” the methods, principles, and above all the claims made on behalf of the work of Fernand Braudel (born 1902), the French historian commonly viewed today as the grand master of twentieth-century historiography.[1] Another, more moderate admirer, J.H. Hexter, wrote in 1972 in an issue of the Journal of Modern History dedicated exclusively to Braudel and his influence that he and his followers were “the most productive and lively school of historians practicing their art today,” while in 1975 Braudel and his work received the supreme accolade of the ruling cultural forces of the Anglo-Saxon world when the New York Times called his twelve-hundred-page book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II “the most significant work of history of our time.” And, most recently, the well-known British historian, J.H. Plumb, reviewing Braudel’s recent Structures of Everyday Life, repeated Kinser&38217;s speculation about the Nobel Prize, adding praise of “the vigor, the éclat, the immense sense of gusto which permeates his style” and asserting that “Braudel writes an incomparable French… the vehicle for works planned and executed on a gigantic scale… His themes rival Gibbon’s.” Plumb concludes that Structures is “a book of great originality, a masterpiece.”[2]

These are strong claims indeed. To believe the scholars I have quoted