When Fernand Braudel died in 1985, The Times of London called him “the greatest of Europe’s historians.” In spite of Braudel’s great merits, many would question this accolade. Indeed, he may be assigned a place among those contemporary historians who justify, by their oeuvre, the sociological school, and who therefore have “betrayed” the historian’s true vocation. If, in many of our universities, history has become a subclass of the social sciences, men like Braudel are to some extent responsible.

Not that the writing of history must forever remain on the tracks built by Herodotus and Thucydides; history, like other disciplines, does change course according to cultural fashion. Leopold von Ranke and his school insisted on “factual statements,” and revisionists in this half-century took up hermeneutics in order to analyze the “real” motives of groups and classes. Then there is, of course, Marxist historiography with its appdictic class-bias.

The Annales school of which Braudel was for a long time the uncrowned head has respectable ancestors—Lucien Febre, for example, and Marc Bloch before the Second World War. But these men were still convinced that history should not break its association with literature—in other words, that history is a story, only a true one. Its style used to be literary. The second recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature (1902) was Theodor Mommsen, imperial Germany’s most acclaimed historian of Rome.

Braudel was by no means a litterateur; his virtues as a historian were elsewhere, something he demonstrates in the present volume (first of a projected series of four, of which he only managed to finish the second). He begins the volume with the endearing statement: “Let me start by saying once and for all that I love France with the same demanding and complicated passion as did Michelet.” For an eighty-year-old scholar to say this is to show a historian’s virtue: the love of his subject. In this case the love transcends scholarship, since it is addressed to a nation—a fine lesson for the objective chroniclers, whose objectivity begins with statistics and usually ends in ideological allegiance. In the next few years European historians will be singing the praises of the new and ephemeral Utopia, the Common Market. But Braudel’s declaration of love excludes such a shift of loyalties; Michelet rhapsodized over the French Revolution not out of Jacobin sympathies but from his commitment to the little people of France.

When Braudel puts the word “identity” in his title, he sends a message that in spite of the vast ensembles usually treated by the Annales school, the building blocks of history remain smaller units: nations. As both Bergson and Maurras agreed, humanity is a pleasant but empty notion. The nation, Bergson wrote, is the natural unit (or tribe, clan, family, etc.) to which ordinary people may become attached. The frontiers of mankind are not within their horizon.

Such vast ensembles were, nevertheless, Braudel’s fields of investigation; for example, the Mediterranean world from archaic man to Philip II of Spain, capitalism (which he brilliantly divided into the many small “capitalisms” of the pre-Renaissance), and the accumulation of capital in later centuries.

The Identity of France establishes as its main thesis that that country was built on a contradiction. It was for thousands of years the end-station of various peoples and tribes who came from the East and could not push beyond their quest for land and security. Iberia, with the Pyrénées, and the British Isles protected by the English Channel, had natural obstacles (except for Visigoths, Vandals, and Normans) against large-scale invasions. There remained France, ideally situated to receive ever new waves. Yet—and here is the paradox—France has become the most tightly-knit nation of Europe.

Another historian, Robert Latouche, argued in 1956 that in spite of the loss of a link with the Roman empire and in spite of Arab and other invasions, the French peasant remained the backbone of the economy; not even the large feudal domains could change this basic structure of ownership and production. This continuity soon found its institutional expression with the monarchy; the impression is so strong even in France’s present decadent situation that the foundations hold. The state is still a solid superstructure, keeping the country “tightly knit.”

Braudel himself tries to combine two kinds of scholarship. On the one hand, he meticulously scrutinizes such details as the frequency of telephone calls between Dijon and Besangon, attributing importance to the fact that there are more calls in one direction than the other. On the other hand, he describes how in France’s history the Roman and the Germanic coalesced, while the Loire River has maintained to this day two different languages spoken north and south of it, both nonetheless being genuine French. Another of his illustrations of opposites combined or fused is the original family structure that the institution of the monarchy imitated in the elaboration of national unity. Marc Bloch, one of Braudel’s mentors, devoted a bulky volume to the belief that the kings of France were able to administer miraculous cures, and even during 1789 the takers of the Bastille shouted slogans in favor of the “King, our father!” In other words, always the patchwork, but also always the pulling together of individual or regional threads.

Notwithstanding Braudel’s significant tide, his sociological method certainly has its limits. My own introduction as a youngster to history was through classes upon classes of chronologically organized events, with a fair share devoted to vast movements, great individuals, culturally productive groups. I still believe that this is the best pedagogical method to develop in the young: a sense of time and proportion as things grow, reach their zenith, and weaken, until routine ossifies them. Braudel’s approach is, at least, a questionable method of teaching history. I even suggest that it is confusing—unless the reader has benefited from a chronological history that clearly indicates the oudines beforehand. France’s latest historians—and these post-Braudelians form a brilliant cluster—recommend a return to more traditional ways, because they have found that youth taught à la Braudel has learned nothing and, in addition, has lost precisely the sense of identification with the nation. The curriculum is now undergoing a reevaluation. Curiously, it is more strongly opposed by the so-called conservative right than by the socialist left. While the former puts its hopes in the continent-wide supermarket, the latter, by celebrating 1789, volens-nolens rehabilitates history.

At any rate, Fernand Braudel’s book may be an eye-opener, in two directions. First, that history as a discipline is not at all dead; in fact, it has been alive and well since the first historian, Herodotus. And second, that history is a passionate enterprise through which one may learn to love one’s own nation, one’s land one’s institutions. A few years ago one academic slogan “was” that the West is a cancerous growth on mankind’s annals (vide Stanford); reading Fernand Braudel is a cure for such reverse fanaticism.

[The Identity of France, Vol. I, by Fernand Braudel (New York: Harper & Row) 432 pp., $25.00]