Marc Bloch

Marc Bloch (born July 6, 1886, Lyon, France—died June 16, 1944, near Lyon) was a French medieval historian, editor, and Resistance leader known for his innovative work in social and economic history.

Bloch, the son of a professor of ancient history, grandson of a school principal, and great-grandson of a combatant in the French Revolution, descended from a family of patriotic French Jews. Educated in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure (1904–08), Bloch began his career in the highly contentious field of medieval history, which at that time was divided into nationalist and ideological camps. He acquired exceptional proficiency in languages, literature, and the social and natural sciences along with a zest for critical inquiry and demythologization. Deeply influenced by the production of forgeries and the manipulation of popular hysteria during the Dreyfus Affair (the controversy over the trial of French army captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason), Bloch developed a lifelong fascination with the political repercussions of mass delusions.

Bloch served bravely at the front in World War I, rising from sergeant to captain, receiving four decorations, the Croix de Guerre, and admission to the Legion of Honour. At the newly liberated University of Strasbourg, where he taught from 1919 to 1936, he produced two pathbreaking works of political and social history. Les Rois Thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924; The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France) is a densely documented study of the production and dissemination of a long-lived, powerful political myth of monarchical healing power. The second, Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931; French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics), is a rich, evocative study of France’s diverse field patterns and its forms of agrarian civilization from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution, drawing on the disciplines of agronomy, cartography, economics, geography, philology, psychology, sociology, and folklore. In 1929 Bloch and his senior colleague, Lucien Febvre, founded the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, a journal dedicated to overcoming disciplinary and national boundaries and promoting a more human, accessible history. After a modest start in the tumultuous 1930s, the Annales achieved prominence after World War II and gave its name to an influential international school of historical research. During the Great Depression, when bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism threatened Europe, Bloch summoned historians to transcend racial and ideological formulas, engage in comparative, collaborative, and transnational projects, and use the tools of the social sciences to sharpen and expand their critical skills.

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In 1936, at the pinnacle of his career, Bloch was elected to the Sorbonne (now part of the Universities of Paris I–XIII). There, on the eve of World War II, he completed his masterful two-volume synthesis, La Société féodale (1939, 1940; Feudal Society). Drawing on a lifetime of research, Bloch analyzed medieval ideas and institutions within the context of the intricate feudal bond, which laid the groundwork for the modern conceptions of freedom and political responsibility. Although 53 and the father of six children, he reentered the army in 1939 and witnessed the fall of France in 1940 from the front lines. He wrote a searing critique of the military, political, and human debacle, L’Étrange Défaite: témoignage écrit en 1940 (1946; Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940), which was published posthumously.

Bloch’s extraordinary services gained him an exemption from the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic legislation, enabling him to teach for two more years in southern France and compose the unfinished statement of his personal and scholarly creed, Apologie pour l’histoire; ou, métier d’historien (1949; The Historian’s Craft). Bloch’s best-known and most accessible work, it is both a valuable guide to historical methodology and a stirring statement of a scholar’s civic responsibility. After the Nazis occupied all of France, he joined the French Resistance in 1943 and became a leader. Captured by the Vichy police in March 1944, Bloch was tortured by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and killed by a German firing squad.

Bloch’s life and work form a seamless whole. He adored his wife Simonne, who assisted in and inspired his work. A creative, prolific scholar who sought the human handprint behind grand but arid historical abstractions, Bloch entered history through his own personal commitment. His example inspired numerous disciples to become scholar-activists, combining research and teaching with a commitment to the defense of intellectual and human freedom. After World War II Bloch’s legacy was especially important to historians labouring under repressive regimes in eastern Europe and in the non-Western world, where he became a model of the courageous citizen who transcended intellectual and national frontiers.