France and the Early Modern Mediterranean

Abstract

Fernand Braudel loved the Mediterranean because he was not of the Mediterranean, or so he famously claimed in 1949, calling himself ‘a northerner like so many others in whose footsteps I have followed’.1 While the people and places around the Inner Sea shared a ‘common destiny’, the historian and his homeland stood apart. France, even its southern shore, hardly features in the Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II.2 When its ships make a brief appearance, they are invasive species that overrun a fragile ecosystem.3 In Braudel’s implicit formulation, the Mediterranean world followed fixed rhythms, but the kingdom of France moved along an Atlantic trajectory to modernity as a nation and as a colonial power.4 From the book’s first edition and its English translation in 1972, numerous scholars have criticized Braudel’s thalassology thesis as ahistorical, deterministic and imperialist.5 Several have noted the relative absence of France in the Méditerranée,6 or taken issue with its representation of France as a consistently unified power. Some have also noted the irony of the book’s inception in French Algeria where Braudel held his first post, at a time when France did straddle the Mediterranean.7 Yet despite a significant literature about regional engagements in non-Atlantic maritime affairs,8 and diplomatic agreements with the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (western North Africa),9 only in the past two decades have historians begun to question the assumption that the Mediterranean—whether as a body of water or a social construct—had little to do with the economic, political or cultural formation of metropolitan, if not colonial, France.10