The FMSH Pays Tribute to Fernand Braudel

27–28 November 2025 | International Conference and Book Presentation

Forty years after the passing of Fernand Braudel, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme pays tribute to its founder with two days of reflection. An international conference will bring together scholars to explore his work, and a book presentation will mark the reissue of a foundational text, drawn from lectures he gave while in captivity.

International Conference: Les mondes de Fernand Braudel

The international conference Les mondes de Fernand Braudel. Histoire globale, histoire connectée (The Worlds of Fernand Braudel. Global History, Connected History), to be held on 27 and 28 November 2025 at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, will offer a critical examination of several key aspects of his work.

Talks will explore his conceptions of time and space, his use of analytical scales, and the dynamics of connection, domination and transformation between major global regions. The conference will also consider the relevance of his ideas in a rapidly changing world, highlighting their continuities, limitations and contemporary reformulations.

The two-day event will be structured around four thematic sessions:

Durations, Spaces, Events
The Mediterranean: Past and Present
The Ocean and Its Connections
What Is Global History?

It will conclude with a round table discussion entitled Forty Years Later.

The conference will take place at the FMSH, founded by Fernand Braudel in 1963, and is held under the auspices of an international academic committee chaired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles).

→ View the full programme and list of speakers

Les mondes de Fernand Braudel

International Conference

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Publication: L'histoire, mesure du monde by Fernand Braudel

To mark the anniversary, Éditions de la MSH is releasing a new edition of a pivotal text, drawn from the lectures given by Fernand Braudel during his captivity in the Second World War.

La Méditerranée, Braudel’s seminal work, was written during the Second World War on school notebooks within the walls of the Mainz and Lübeck prisons. While many readers of La Méditerranée know this story, it is less well known that during the same period, Braudel also delivered a series of lectures on history to his fellow prisoners. In these talks, he developed methodological reflections, emphasising the weight of “long duration” history as opposed to 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 what he called “geo-history”. A foundational work of Braudelian thought and global history, now available once again.

Fernand Braudel – “54 poche” collection, Éditions de la MSH

L’histoire, mesure du monde. Conférences de la captivité — © Éditions de la MSH

The book will be presented at the close of the first day of the conference as part of a special edition of the “Livres en dialogue” series, featuring Christian Grataloup (Université Paris Cité) and Maurice Aymard (EHESS, former Director of the FMSH).

→ More information

Fernand Braudel: The Long View of an Exceptional Scholar

A major historian of the 20th century and founder of the FMSH, Fernand Braudel profoundly reshaped the humanities and social sciences. His thinking—centred on the long durée, the analysis of multiple temporalities and interdisciplinarity—resonates strongly today in relation to the challenges of capitalism, globalisation and ecology.

His landmark work La Méditerranée (1949), followed by Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (1979), transformed historical writing. As an institutional builder, he played a key role in the creation of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in 1963, conceived as a space for innovation and the exchange of knowledge.

→ Learn more about Fernand Braudel