Longue durée

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Longue durée ( German  long duration ) describes a historical scientific term that puts history on a new, structuralist basis. This term was coined by Fernand Braudel from the Annales School . In his three-volume thèse d'Etat The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Epoch of Philip II from 1949, he characterizes the space in relation to the passage of time in an innovative model. Braudel differentiates between three time levels in history and has therefore assigned one volume to each time level:

  • The long duration ( longue durée ) characterizes the slowest development of historical processes. The corresponding first volume accordingly deals with social, manorial and economic structural changes as well as with the effects of geographical conditions on these change processes. As a result, Braudel intended, beyond the narrow frame of reference of his research subject, to understand history no longer as a sequence of individual data, but as a coherent whole. One example is the unchanging coastal location of Barcelona, ​​without which "the maritime upswing of the Catalan coastal region can hardly be understood". Other examples include the rule of the pharaohs over Egypt, which lasted around 3,300 years, as well as feudal rule in medieval Europe. In contrast to earlier historical studies, the level longue durée is seen as the decisive one, since it both sets the conditions for the other levels and provides the key to understanding them.
  • In contrast to structures, the mean duration, moyenne durée , focuses on economic cycles , i.e. primarily deals with economic processes. Developments at the time level usually take place in a shorter change than the spatial requirements that determine them. The Golden Age of Spain, the Great Depression and the Great Depression are examples of economic cycles, which took place in a time frame of several years or decades. The Kondratiev cycles on the history of industrialized societies have a longer rhythm .
  • The événement (German event) mostly describes phases of political upheaval that are only characterized by a limited duration and local charisma. This level is also called courte durée , “short duration”. This includes above all unanticipated events of a day such as law amendments or changes of rulers, which usually only take hours or days, but at most weeks, to develop. The point is "that we ask ourselves, like the most reflective traditional historical science, whether a valid history, a certain history of people can be traced by stringing together these flashes of light or individual messages". This histoire événementielle was recorded as an event history before Braudel . He himself and after him other representatives of the Annales School, however, problematize the "history of events, although of all the most passionate, humanly richest", since it moves on the surface of the events.

literature

  • Fernand Braudel: History and Social Sciences. The longue durée . In: Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Lucien Febvre: Scripture and matter of history. Suggestions for a systematic acquisition of historical processes . Edited by Claudia Honegger , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-518-00814-5 (edition suhrkamp 814), pp. 47-85.
  • Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Epoch of Philip II . 3 volumes, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-58056-6 .
  • Peter Burke : Open story. The school of the Annales. Berlin 1991.
  • Georg G. Iggers : History of the 20th Century. A critical overview in an international context . 2nd edition, Göttingen 1996 (Kleine Vandenhoeck series 1565).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lutz Raphael (ed.): Classics of the science of history. Vol. 2. From Fernand Braudel to Natalie Z. Davis . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-54104-6 .
  2. ↑ Braudel: The Mediterranean . tape 1 , 1992, ISBN 3-7632-3972-3 , pp. 209 .
  3. ↑ Braudel: The Mediterranean . tape 3 , 1992, ISBN 3-7632-3972-3 , pp. 13 .
  4. ↑ Burke: Open History . Berlin 1991, p. 39 .