[5] Braudel was educated at the Lycée Voltaire (1913–20), where he studied Latin and Greek, and at the Sorbonne, where he was taught by Henri Hauser and gained an agrégation in history in 1923.

He visited several archives around the Mediterranean, including at Venice, Valencia [es] and finally Dubrovnik in 1936/37, and microfilmed documents with the help of his wife.

São Paulo still lacked a university, however, and in 1934, the francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel to help develop one.

He worked within the state-promoted ideological framework of Pan-Latinism, part of the French civilizing mission, and helped the São Paulo elites in their project of achieving social and national hegemony.

[11] The evening lectures of French professors were attended by the city governor Armando de Sales Oliveira and Marshal Cândido Rondon.

[13] Braudel was fascinated with Sao Paulo's rapid vertical growth in the early Vargas Era[14][a] and noted the Paulista academics' claims that "there is no social question" in the new world.

[16] He compared Brazil favourably – on account of its "social malleability" and tabula rasa development as a "young European civilization" – to Algeria and even to the United States in his 1937 The Concept of a New Country.

Under the Geneva Convention he received his pay, which he used to buy German books (e.g. the works of Werner Sombart and Max Weber), and was able to order material from France, including the full collection of the Annales.

[24] In June 1942, suspected of "Gaullist" (i.e. French Resistance) involvement, he was transferred to a camp for special category prisoners (Oflag X-C) near Lübeck, where he remained for the rest of the war.

By "choosing the position of God the Father himself as a refuge" he sought to assert the "perdurability and majestic immobility" of the Mediterranean against the "fleeting occurrence" of political events which he associated with the "daily misery" of the camp.

[30] He edited his work after his release in 1945 by checking it against the archival material that survived the war in a metal container in the basement of his Paris house.

[23] He cut portions from the copy books and re-arranged the text with new insertions, then destroyed the manuscripts – only a fragment gifted to Febvre has survived.

[33] In that year, with Febvre and Charles Morazé [fr], he[citation needed] obtained funding from the French government and the Rockefeller Foundation (which had previously supported the wartime exile École libre des hautes études in New York) to set up the Sixième section for economic and social sciences at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), which then became the funnel for all historical research in France.

[36][37] He became the head of the Sixième section at EPHE after the death of Febvre in 1956 and attracted scholars such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan to join its activities.

Life is conducted on the Mediterranean: people travel, fish, fight wars, and drown in its various contexts, and the sea articulates with the plains and islands.

Braudel's vast panoramic view used insights from other social sciences, employed the concept of the longue durée, and downplayed the importance of specific events.

[43] After La Méditerranée, Braudel's most famous work is Civilisation Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe ("Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century").

On a larger scale the agrarian structure is more dependent on the regional, social, cultural and historical factors than on the state's undertaken activities.

Reflecting his interest with the longue durée, Braudel's concern in L'Identité de la France was with the centuries and millennia, instead of the years and decades.

His followers admired his use of the longue durée approach to stress the slow and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.

[d] The Annales historians, after living through two world wars and massive political upheavals in France, were very uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history.

Upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history, they argued, lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries.

[48] A proponent of historical materialism himself, Braudel rejected Marxist dialectical, stressing the equal importance of infrastructure and superstructure, both of which reflected enduring social, economic, and cultural realities.

Braudel's structures, both mental and environmental, determine the long-term course of events by constraining actions on, and by, humans over a duration long enough that they are beyond the consciousness of the actors involved.

He emphasised the importance of the ephemeral lives of slaves, serfs, peasants and the urban poor, and demonstrated their contributions to the wealth and power of their respective masters and societies.

[50] This preference for objective explanations at the expense of human decisions could lead Braudel towards dubious conclusions, as when he asserted that overpopulation was the principal reason for the expulsion of Jews from Spain, Portugal and Sicily at the turn of the fifteenth century.