A polemic on temporal discontinuity: Fernand Braudel, Gaston Bachelard, Gaston Roupnel and Georges Gurvitch

Abstract

This study argues that Fernand Braudel’s theoretical ideas regarding temporality were developed in contradistinction to a few theories of temporal discontinuity that were available in the French philosophical landscape of the 1950s. Braudel mainly opposed Gaston Bachelard’s eulogy of the discontinuity, as conveyed in La Dialétique de la Durée (1936), but also criticized Georges Gurvitch’s notions of discontinuity. An author who will be behind the scenes of this short study is the historian Gaston Roupnel, who is quoted, in a laudatory way, both by Braudel and by Bachelard. At first sight, Braudel’s rejection of the notions of discontinuity seems to have resulted rather from his own political attitude than from a historiographical consensus on the issue.