One Braudel or Several

Fernand Braudel has been, as has happened to many important authors, the victim of his readers. Whe we think of him, our first step is usually to identify him with The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Braudel, 1949/1966). We rewrite more or less unconsciously his life as if he had written only one (main) booka book that he presented in 1947 as his doctoral thesis at the âge of 45, published two years later, and of which he feit the necessity to write a second version, completed in 1966. Even if he decided after this date to resist the temptation of writing a third version, a period 43 years long, going from his arrivai in Algiers in 1923 to the publication of the revised version in 1966, may seem quite enough for one man's life. This point of view is reinforced by the success story of the book, and by its impact on the life of Braudel himself . On the one hand a two-fold story: abroad, the translations, from the first ones in Italian and Spanish (1952-54) to the English one (1972-73) that opened to him the American academie market, and to the German one (1990), that was published after the translation of the trilogy on capitalism (1985); in France, the TV series of 1976 (twelve films of 50 minutes each) that transformed a scholarly book into a best-seller, read by a large public, and was followed by another book, a collective one under the direction of Braudel, La Mediterranee. 1, L'Espace et l'histoire. 2, Les Hommes et l'heritage (1977-78). On the other hand, the Professional career of Braudel was shaped and determined by the national and international prestige and authority that the success of his book gave him. It legitimized the increasingly dominant academie position that he had for more than twenty years and that lasted even after his officiai retirement in 1972. He had scholarly prestige. From 1957, after the death of Lucien Febvre, to 1968, when he entrusted his editorial responsibility to a