He was born in the département of the Meuse. In 1923 he went to Algeria, then a French colony, to teach history. Returning to France in 1932, he worked as a high school teacher and met Lucien Febvre, who was to have a great influence on his work. In 1939, he joined the army but was captured in 1940 and became a prisoner of war in Germany, in a camp near Lübeck, where, working from memory, he put together his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II. After the war he worked with Febvre in a new college, founded separately from the Sorbonne, dedicated to social and economic history.
In 1962 he wrote A History of Civilizations to be the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, who rejected it.
His most famous work is the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, which first appeared in 1979. It is a broad-brush history of the pre-industrial modern world, focusing on how people made economies work.
Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of those modern historians who have emphasised the role of large scale socio-economic factors in the making and telling of history.
SUNY Binghamton in New York has a "Fernand Braudel Center", and there is a Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in Sao Paulo.
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