L'histoire, mesure du monde
On the 40th anniversary of Fernand Braudel's death, Éditions de la MSH is publishing a new edition of a pivotal text based on the lectures delivered by Fernand Braudel during his captivity in World War II. To be published in November 2025 in the "54" collection, L'histoire, mesure du monde lays the first foundations of Braudelian thought and global history.
The book will be featured in a special session of the "Livres en dialogue" series, organized as the closing event of the first day of the international conference "Les mondes de Fernand Braudel", which will be held on November 27-28, 2025, at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
The discussion will bring together Christian Grataloup (Université Paris Cité) and Maurice Aymard (EHESS, former administrator of the FMSH).
Xavier Mauduit, producer on France Culture for Le Cours de l'histoire and contributor on Arte for the show 28', will moderate this discussion.
La Méditerranée by Fernand Braudel was written in captivity during the Second World War, on school notebooks, in pencil. And perhaps because he was pushing back the walls of his prison—first in Mainz, then in Lübeck—the work acquired its distinctive tone, evoking with striking power the “wind of the sea and the sand it carries.”
This episode is familiar to almost all readers of La Méditerranée. What is less well known is that, at the same time, Fernand Braudel was delivering a series of lectures on history to his fellow prisoners. Developing methodological questions, he emphasized the weight of "big history"—that of the "longue durée"—contrasting it with event-based history. Advocating interdisciplinarity with the social sciences, economics, and geography, he proposed studying the interactions between human societies and their geographical environment through "geohistory".
L'histoire, mesure du monde was written by Fernand Braudel based on notes taken by his audience, but it was only published in a collected edition after his death, thanks to the work of Paule Braudel. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his passing, the Editions de la MSH have chosen to republish this text, which lays the first foundations of Braudelian thought and global history, enriched with a foreword by international specialist in connected history Sanjay Subrahmanyam and an afterword by geographer and leading figure of geohistory Christian Grataloup.
Christian Grataloup is Professor Emeritus of Geography at Université Paris Cité, following a long career as both teacher and researcher in various academic institutions. He holds the agrégation, a doctorate, and a habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in geography, along with degrees in history and anthropology. From 1998 to 2014, he was Professor at Paris-Diderot University and a member of the research unit UMR Géographie-cités.
Since 2014, he has focused on creating historical atlases, published notably by Les Arènes and Tallandier. His most recent book, Géohistoire, offers a reinterpretation of the human journey on Earth.
Maurice Aymard is a historian specializing in early modern economic and social history. He is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), former administrator of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and former director of the Modern and Contemporary History Section of the École française de Rome (1972–1976). He is the author of numerous works on the Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on Italy. He co-edited a history of Sicily after Italian unification, as well as two major histories of Europe—one in five volumes published by Einaudi (Storia d’Europa), and another in French, co-edited with Hélène Ahrweiler, titled Les Européens (Herman).
Xavier Mauduit is a agrégé and holds a PhD in history. He is a laureate and member of the jury of the Prix Mérimée. He has been a co-author and columnist on France Inter before becoming a producer on France Culture for the program "Le Cours de l’histoire" and a columnist on Arte for the show "28 Minutes."
Rencontre
Thuesday november 27, 2025
6.30 PM
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FMSH - Le Comptoir
1st floor
54 boulevard Raspail
Paris 6
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