BOOKS
137
ing to the strand of voyeurism his hallmark theme (the flood of im–
migrants here to partake of American promise). But this comes too
late to redeem a willfully aimless journal that seems closer to the in–
consequential jottings of
Overdrive
than to the sinuous , mesmeric,
unsettling cadences of, for example,
Pitch Dark. Lives of the Poets
sug–
gests the work of a professional story-teller so eager to be something
more that he fashions a world without creating a vision.
PICO
IYER
ECONOMICS AS FATE
CIVILIZATION AND CAPITALISM: 15th-18th CENTURY. VOLUME III.
THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE WORLD. By Femand Braudel. Trans·
lated by Sian Reynolds.
Harper and Row. $35.00.
The French cultural scene oflate has been rather barren .
The major
maltres
a
penser
who dominated the thirties and the post–
war years are almost all gone , and they have had no successor.
There are no philosophers or novelists who can stand comparison
with their predecessors . I can think of only one area of exception to
this dismal picture: semiotics and historiography.
Fernand Braudel's concluding volume of his triology,
Civiliza–
tion and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century ,
can serve as a convenient peg
on which to hang some general reflections on the special place that
French historiography presently occupies.
The ascendancy of history on the cultural landscape has some
of its roots in the prewar period but has become more pronounced
since after the war.
It
may be said to have started in 1929 when two
eminent young historians, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, founded
the now famous
Annales d'histoire economique et sociale.
Given the cen–
tralization of intellectual life in Paris, it is noteworthy that both these
men taught in the provincial university of Strasbourg. But it was
surely not only their academic location that distinguished the editors
and contributors of the
Annales
from their colleagues. While tradi–
tional history , at the Sorbonne as elsewhere , concentrated on nar–
rative history providing chronologically ordered accounts of, say,
diplomatic history, the
Annales
writers shunned "event history" and
wanted to stress long-term trends
(longue dude)
or medium-term
