"History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all"
About this Quote
Braudel’s line is a quiet demolition of the history-as-fireworks mentality. By sorting the past into “three movements,” he smuggles in a provocation: most of what matters doesn’t announce itself as an event. Revolutions, wars, elections, assassinations - the stuff of headlines - are merely the “rapid” layer, loud enough to become the default story. Braudel’s real allegiance is to the slower tempos: demographic drift, trade routes, climate patterns, institutional habits, the stubborn geometry of geography. These forces don’t trend on a timeline; they tilt the entire playing field.
The subtext is methodological and political. Methodological, because he’s telling historians to stop mistaking narrative convenience for causality. If you only track what moves quickly, you’ll over-credit charismatic leaders and undercount constraints - why certain choices were possible in the first place. Political, because the “appears not to move at all” category exposes how power hides inside permanence: property regimes, social hierarchies, borders, gender roles. They feel natural precisely because they’re long-lived.
Context matters: Braudel, a pillar of the Annales School, wrote against event-driven history and for what he called the longue duree. The elegance of “appears” is doing heavy lifting. He admits perception is part of the problem; stasis can be motion too slow to register until it breaks. The sentence trains your eye to see history less as a parade of turning points than as overlapping currents - and to ask, every time the world “changes,” what actually changed, and what merely revealed its slow grind.
The subtext is methodological and political. Methodological, because he’s telling historians to stop mistaking narrative convenience for causality. If you only track what moves quickly, you’ll over-credit charismatic leaders and undercount constraints - why certain choices were possible in the first place. Political, because the “appears not to move at all” category exposes how power hides inside permanence: property regimes, social hierarchies, borders, gender roles. They feel natural precisely because they’re long-lived.
Context matters: Braudel, a pillar of the Annales School, wrote against event-driven history and for what he called the longue duree. The elegance of “appears” is doing heavy lifting. He admits perception is part of the problem; stasis can be motion too slow to register until it breaks. The sentence trains your eye to see history less as a parade of turning points than as overlapping currents - and to ask, every time the world “changes,” what actually changed, and what merely revealed its slow grind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
|---|---|
| Source | Fernand Braudel , attribution listed on Wikiquote (entry for Fernand Braudel: “History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all”). |
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