ABSTRACT
During the first half of the twentieth century, many historians were seduced by the idea of constructing an impersonal history. The campaign against a biographical and chronological approach, launched by Karl Lamprecht and François Simiand at the end of the preceding century, was quickly taken up by numerous social historians, traditionally more attentive to the collective dimension of the historical experience.1 There is no doubt that the work of Fernand Braudel played a major role in this depersonalisation of the past. In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, he argued for the superiority of the history of structures and the history of spaces, both founded on what is the most anonymously human, over biographical history.2 Thus, according to Braudel, Charles V was simply the product of an impersonal historical trend (an accident calculated, prepared and desired by Spain), and not the author of an imperial project: ‘Europe was moving of its own accord towards the construction of a vast state’.3
