REVIEW OF BOOKS
Richard Luckett on the rewriting of history
The Englishing of Professor Braudel proceeds apace: with the publication of this second volume the translation of his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the age of Philip II is now complete; it was as short a time ago as May that I discussed in these pages the first volume of his Capitalism and Material Life. The syncopations of this literary dance are curiously appropriate in the case of a historian whose works have been received with such unreserved acclaim; indeed, the chorus of approval has been so great that there might seem li,ttle left for a critic to do but to jump on the band-wagon. Yet there were special circumstances attendant on the publication of the first volume of The Mediterranean, and on its reception, which deserve. consideration. Braudel, the legitimate heir of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, brought out La M6diterranee et le Monde Mediterranean, in 1949. In France it was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. But it was only some twenty years later that it began to appear in English, though the English version gained by the fact that Braudel had had time to produce ,a second, revised edition of the wbrk. Most reviewers of the English translation were professional historians who already knew the work iii French;. their response was to the work as a whole, rather than the .first volume (which was all they had in front of them) and their purpose was not only to celebrate Braudel as a historian, but also to do something to consolidate the position of the kind of history that Braudel writes, in which conventional narrative, the quasi-biographical approach and analysis of men and motives are subordinated to an examination of broader movements, of, the physical conditions of life, of trade, technology, communications and population.
It should be obvious from this that Braudel has a particular interest for the professional historian, who has been increasingly hampered by narrow specialisations that make nonsense of the larger claims of the subject. Here is 'a man who c,ombines impeccable archival research with bold incursions into areas, such as the Ottoman Empire, which he can only approach through the use of secondary sources, On another level, here is, a man who by reading history can rewrite history; he can use the work of another historian to suggest an interpretation that that historian had not seen. Thus references to his colleagues are not restricted to the notes, but occur with considerable frequency in the main' text; he is as much involved with the his-' toriography as with the actual events of period. This is an essential part of his approach, since his admitted concern is with the 'long run.' which he sees as " annihilating innumerable events "; the task of the true
' The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel, Vol. II (Collins, £6.00).
man of action ' in the age of Philip 11 was to calculate the factors conditioning his situation and to exert pressure in the direction that they indicated; the task of the historian is to make a similar assessment of the run of events, to isolate and describe their causes — to use Braudel's own metaphor, the historian is concerned with the currents in the historical ocean, rather than with the individual pieces of flotsam that mark its drift. It is as much out of other's observations of the drift that he makes his chart, as out of any limited, personal reckoning of the advance, recession or diversion of driftwood, weed, jellyfish and beer-cans.
The result of this approach, as Professor Trevor-Roper observed on the publication of the first volume, is an exhilarating liveliness; Braudel's curiosity is insatiable; he is as interested in the design of ships as in theories purporting to account for the decline of empires. His methods make for variety and controversy, whilst the movement of his book remains epic. I do not use this word lightly; it is a characteristic of epic that the story fulfils a prophecy, and the culminative effect and grandeur of the whole is achieved through a sense that we are enabled, in a privileged way, to see the working-out of destiny. If we wish to argue for War and Peace as an epic, rather 'Ilan a conventional novel, then it is to this quality that we must constantly refer. In War and Peace the element of prophecy is of course absent, and has been replaced by a theory of history that minimises individual human endeavour and places a corresponding emphasis on processes and movements far more broadly based. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between Don John of Austria, the 'hero of Lepanto,. (which is the narrative climax of Braudel's second volume) and General Kutuzov; at the same time it would be foolish to ignore the relationship between Tolstoy's view of history and that to which M. Braudel subscribes. They are not at all dissimilar — and this is also true of their attendant problems.
If this argument seems excessively literary, then it is because there is a sense in which the claims of M. Braudel's book are literary. As a historian, in a mechanical aspect, he is obviously excellent, but not above criticism, For instance, an astonishing allusion to " the aristocracy which was to govern England down to the present day, the Russells, Cavendishes and Cecils," is supported by a reference to Lytton Strachey's Elizalreth and 'Essex. Quite what status as a work of historical scholarship M. Braudel imagines this to have it is hard to guess; what is certain is that Strachey's contention is that "it is difficult to imagine an England without them, even today "; he certainly does not imply that they still hold the reins of office or prove, on examination, to be the power behind the throne. In another place Braudel writes of petty piracy in the Aegean, a trade which could be begun by three or four men in an open boat. He goes on to remark that "from such humble beginnings too came the Caribbean buccaneers." But the, equation is a dangerous one. The leading buccaneers. Lolonois and Morgan. began their careers with definite advantages: Lolonois had been given a command by the governor of Tortuga. whilst Morgan had a relative who occupied an important post in Jamaica. The men thy enlisted might well have done small time piracy of the kind Braudel describes, but the leaders could command ships and money. In any case the particular territorial and dietary circumstances that encouraged Caribbean piracy did not exist in the Aegean; the comparison is not, on examination, an illuminating one. Experts in any field could no doubi multiply examples of this kind of anomaly. though I doubt that they could fault him on shipping and warfare within the Mediterranean, or on the political life of some of the seaboard cities. But, finally, it is his attempt at a total vision, and his style, that ate the basis of his claim to be. a great historian. Sian Reynolds, the translator, has done a splendid job. There are one or two small faults in this volume (a few footnotes not keyed in. for instance) but they are fundamentally printing errors; the translation flows on, page after page. lucid, subtle and continuously readable. Nevertheless there are places when the rhetoric of the book comes oddly in English, not because the English is in any way fault. but because the sentiments and tone do not altogether accord with what we expect of a historian of M. Braudel's stature. A sentence — if it is a sentence — such as " In the East the Ottomans; in the West the Hapsburgs,' seems to have escaped from a film script. Nor am I greatly impressed by: "Change was inevitable and change was on the way" — which is hardly surprising, if it was inevitable. With a little persistence a large number of such sentences can be culled, many of them relating to the concept of inevitability and to broad movements in the historical panorama. The concept, when allied to a plausible rhetoric, means that the historian never loses. whoever else may. Thus Braude] writes: "The achievement of the Catholic Kings, which I have no intention of belittling, had the times and the desires of men in its favour." But, in M. Braudel's book, achievements count as achievements precisely because of that, whilst failed endeavours become the "casualties of history."
The Medikrranean is a magnificent book which, in its account of the diversity of ventures within that sea, contributes to our sense of the human experience as a whole. It Is one of the finest works of historical scholarship to have appeared for a long time. For all that, it seems to me to be a limited work, and its limitation is caused by the fact that M. Braudel exploits the theme of destinY. even though his theme is also in part its strength. He is, he says in a postcript, a structuralist. This word can now mean almost anything, but I take it that the good structuralist endeavours to separate the ordering of things from the ordering of language and to attempt that 'philosophical declension' of words which was long ago postulated bY Lichtenberg. In a measure M. Braudel succeeds in this; at his best he does reach towards what he terms "the very sources of life in its most concrete, everyday' indestructible and anonymously human expression." At his worst he fails, because he succumbs to the rhetoric of inevitability. If ever a Word required philosophical declension, then 'inevitable' would qualify. A proper sense of its complexity must surely restrict its use. ButM. Braudel is unabashed; he deploys as the road-metal of his narrative the knowledge which, in real epic, is possessed by the gods .alone. No one can take his achievement from him, but that aspect of his work, at least, maY prove in time to be hubristic.
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