In The Mediterranean, Braudel did seek to master an unprecedentedly broad span of human experience, ranging from the geological longue durée through the medium-term ebb and flow of economic cycles down to the political courte durée of political history in the reign of Spain's Philip II. In the process, he marvellously captured the relationship between human beings, their physical environment, and the movement of money and goods. His work helped usher in a golden age of historical geography (a subject in which he, and many of his students, had received formal training), and also of quantitative economic history. But in keeping with Simiand's creed, he downplayed the importance of events, and almost entirely ignored the worlds of culture and ideas. The great wave of Annales social history of the 1940s and 1950s followed his example. Typical of the spirit of the time was the great economic historian Ernest Labrousse, who showed how the price of grain in Paris reached a record high immediately before the fall of the Bastille in 1789, and triumphantly declared of the French economy: “tout dérive de la courbe” (everything follows from the curve of prices)