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ProfessorMarc Bloch
Marc Bloch
Born	(1886-07-06)6 July 1886 Lyon, France
Died	16 June 1944(1944-06-16) (aged 57) Saint-Didier-de-Formans, Vichy France
Cause of death	Execution by firing squad
Resting place	Fougeres
Education	Lycée Louis-le-Grand
Alma mater	École Normale Supérieure
Occupation	Historian
Spouse	Simonne Vidal
Children	Alice and Étienne

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (/blɒk/; French: [maʁk blɔk]; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian who co-founded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair. He studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure; in 1908–9 he studied at Berlin and Leipzig. He fought in the trenches of the Western Front for four years. In 1919 he became Lecturer in Medieval history at Strasbourg University, after the German professors were all expelled; he was called to the University of Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. He is best known for his pioneering studies French Rural History and Feudal Society and his posthumously-published unfinished meditation on the writing of history, The Historian's Craft. A French soldier in both World Wars, he was captured and shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France for his work in the French Resistance.

Youth and upbringing

Marc Bloch was born in Lyon on 6 July 1886, one of two children to Gustave and Sarah Bloch. née Ebstein. Bloch's family were Alsatian Jews: secular, liberal and loyal to the French Republic: They "struck a balance", says Carole Fink, both between "fierce Jacobin patriotism and the antinationalism of the left". His family had lived in Alsace for five generations under French rule, and in 1871 France was forced to cede the region to Germany following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The year after Bloch's birth, Gustave Bloch was appointed Professor of Roman History at the Sorbonne, and the family moved to Paris—"the glittering capital of the Third Republic". Bloch was educated in Parisian lycees, the ENS, and studied for his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Marc had a brother, Louis Constant Alexandre, seven years' his senior. The two were close, although Bloch later described Louis as being occasionally somewhat intimidating. The Bloch family lived at 72, Rue d'Alésia, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. It was an academic, rather than a religious, household. Gustave began teaching Marc history while he was still a boy, with a secular, rather than Jewish education intended to prepare Marc for a career in professional French society. Bloch's later close collaborator, Lucien Febvre, visited the Bloch family at home in 1902.

Bloch's biographer Karen Stirling has ascribed some significance to the era in which Bloch was born: the middle of the French Third Republic, "after those who had founded it and before the generation that would aggressively challenge it", such as the Boulangists and the Panama scandals in the last decade of the nineteenth century. When Bloch was nine-years' old, the Dreyfus affair broke out in France: the first major display of political antisemitism in Europe, it was probably a formative event of Bloch's youth, along with, more generally, the atmosphere of fin de siècle Paris. Bloch was 11 when Émile Zola published his indictment of the French establishment's antisemitism and corruption, J'Accuse…! French society was split over whether Dreyfus has sold French military secrets to Germany. Bloch was much affected personally by the Dreyfus Affair, but even more affected was nineteenth-century France generally and the ENS particularly, where existing divides in French society were reinforced in every debate. Gustave Bloch was closely involved in the Dreyfusard movement and his son agreed with the cause.

Boch was educated at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand for three years, where he was consistently head of his class and won prizes in French, history, Latin and natural history. He passed his baccalauréat—in Letters and Philosophy—in July 1903, being graded trés bien (very good). The following year, Marc received a scholarship undertook postgraduate study there for the the École normale supérieure (where his father had been appointed maitre de conferences in 1887). His father had been nicknamed le Méga by his students at the ENS; almost inevitably, the moniker Microméga was bestowed upon Bloch. Here he was taught history by Christian Pfister and Charles Seignobos, who led a relatively new school of historical thought which saw history as broad themes punctuated by tumultuous events. Another important influence on Bloch from this period was his father's contemporary, Émile Durkheim, a sociologist who pre-empted Bloch's own later emphasis on cross-disciplinary research. The same year, Bloch visited England; although the Entente Cordiale had recently been announced, Bloch later recalled being more struck by the sheer number of homeless that he saw on the Victoria Embankment than the new relationship between the two countries.

The Dreyfus affair had soured Bloch's views of the French army, and he considered it laden with "snobbery, anti-semitism and anti-republicanism". However, national service had been made compulsory for all French adult males in 1905, with enlistment terms of two years. Bloch joined the 46th Infantry Regiment based at Pithiviers from 1905 to 1906.

By this time, changes were taking place in French academia. In Bloch's own specialism of history, attempts were being made at instilling a more scientific methodology. In other, newer departments such a sociology, efforts were made at establishing an independent identity. Bloch graduated in 1908 with degrees in both geography and history (Davies notes, given Bloch's later divergent interests, the significance of the two qualifications). He highly respected the then-French specialism of historical geography as practiced by Vidal de la Blache—by whom he had been taught, and whose Tableau de la géographie Bloch had studied at the ÉNS—and Lucien Gallois. Bloch applied for a fellowship at the Fondation Thiers. This was unsuccessful, and as a result, he travelled to Germany in 1909 where he studied demography under Karl Bücher in Leipzig and religion under Adolf Harnack in Berlin; he did not, however, particularly socialise with fellow students while in Germany. He returned to France the following year and again applied to the Fondation, this time successfully. Bloch researched the medieval Île-de-France in preparation for his thesis. This research was Bloch's first focus on rural history. His parents had moved house and now resided at the Avenue d'Orleans, not far from Bloch's quarters.

Bloch's research at the Fondation—especially his research into the Capetian kings—laid the groundwork for his career. He began by creating maps of the Paris area illustrating where serfdom had thrived and where it had not, as well as investigating the nature of serfdom, the culture of which, he discovered, was founded almost completely on custom and practice. His studies of this period formed Bloch into a mature scholar and first brought him into contact with other disciplines whose relevance he was to emphasise for most of his career. Serfdom as a topic was so broad that he touched on commerce, currency, popular religion, the nobility, as well as art, architecture and literature. His doctoral thesis—a solid study of serfdom 10th-century France—was titled Rois et Serfs, un Chapitre d'Histoire Capétienne. Although it helped mould Bloch's ideas for the future, it did not, says Bryce Loyn, give any indication of the originality of thought that Bloch would later be known for, and was not vastly different to what others had written on the subject. Following his graduation, he taught at two lycées, first in Montpelier, a minor university town of 66,000 inhabitants. Working over 16 hours a week on his classes, there was little time for Bloch to work on hs thesis. He also taught at the University of Amiens. While at Amiens, he wrote a review of Febvre's first book, Histoire de Franche-Comté. Bloch intended to turn his thesis into a book, but the First World War intervened.

First World War

Both Marc and Louis Bloch volunteered for service in the French Army. Bloch was one one of over 800 ENS students who joined up; 239 were to be killed in action. On 2 August 1914 he was assigned to the 272nd Reserve Regiment. Within eight days he was stationed on the Belgian border where he took part in the Battle of the Meuse later that month. His regiment took part in the general retreat on the 25th, and the following day they were in Barricourt, in the Argonne. The march westward continued towards the Marne—with a temporary recuperative halt in Termes, where Bloch took advantage of the stop to swim in the river—which they reached in early September. During the subsequent offensive, Bloch's troop was responsible for the assault and capture of Florent—which Bloch viewed as a rustic delight—before advancing on La Gruerie. Bloch led his troop with shouts of "Forward the 18th!" They received heavy casualties: 89 men were either missing or known to be dead. During this period Bloch grew a beard; this, and the bravery he had shown under fire—at his section of the line, the French and German trenches were sometimes little more than twelve meters apart—earned him the moniker "The hairy". Bloch enjoyed the early days of the war; like most of his generation, he had expected a short, but glorious conflict. Gustave Bloch remained in France, wishing to remain close to his sons at the front.

Except for two months in hospital followed by another three recuperating, he spent the whole of the war in the infantry; he joined as a sergeant and rose to become the head of his section Bloch kept a war diary from his enlistment. Very detailed in the first few months, it rapidly became more general in its observations. However, says Daniel Hochedez, Bloch was aware of his role as both a "witness and narrator" to events and wanted as detailed a basis for his historiographical understanding as possible. Rees Davies notes that although Bloch clearly served in the war with "considerable distinction", the four year period of war had come at the worst possible time both for Bloch's intellectual development and his study of medieval society.

For the first time in his life, Bloch later wrote, he worked and lived alongside people he had never had close contact with before, such as shop workers and labourers, and with whom he developed a great camaraderie. It was a completely different world to the one he was used to, says Loyn, being "a world where differences were settled not by words but by bullets". His experiences made him rethink his views on history, and, indeed, influenced his subsequent approach to the world in general. He was particularly moved by the collective psychology he witnessed in the trenches, later declaring he knew of no better men than "the men of the Nord and the Pas de Calais" with whom he had spent four years in close quarters. His few references to the French Generals, on the other hand, were not only sparse but on the rare occasions that he mentioned them, sardonic.

Apart from the Marne, Bloch fought at the Battles of the Marne, the Somme and Argonne, and the final German assault on Paris. He survived the war, which he later described as having been an "honour" to have served through. He had, however, lost many friends and colleagues: among the closest of them, all killed in action, were Maxime David (died 1914), Antoine-Jules Bianconi (died 1915) and Ernest Babut (died 1916). Bloch himself was wounded twice and decorated for courage, receiving the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'Honneur. He had joined as a non-commissioned officer, received a officer's commission after the Marne, and had been promoted to Warrant Officer and finally a captain (in the fuel service, or Service des essences) before the war ended. He was clearly, says Loyn, both a good and a brave soldier; he later wrote, "I know only one way to persuade a troop to brave danger: brave it yourself."

While on front-line service, Bloch contracted severe arthritis which required him to retire regularly to the thermal baths of Aix-les-Bains for treatment. He later remembered very little of the historical events he found himself in, writing only that his memories were

A discontinuous series of images, vivid in themselves, but badly arranged, like a reel of motion picture film containing some large gaps and some reversals of certain scenes.

— Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–15

Bloch later described the war, in a detached style, as having been a "gigantic social experience, of unbelievable richness”, for example, he had a habit of noting the different coloured smoke that different shells made (for example, percussion bombs had black smoke, timed bombs were brown). He also remembered both the "friends killed at our side...of the intoxication which had taken hold of us when we saw the enemy in flight". He also considered it to have been "four years of fighting idleness". Following the Armistice in November 1918, Bloch was demobilized on 13 March 1919.

Career

"Must I say historical or indeed sociological? Let us more simply say, in order to avoid any discussion of method, human studies. Durkheim was no longer there, but the team he had grouped around him survived him...and the spirit which animates it remains the same".

The war was clearly fundamental in re-arranging Bloch's approach to history, although he never acknowledged it as a turning point himself. In the years following the war, Bloch, disillusioned, rejected the ideas and the traditions that had formed his scholarly training. He rejected the political and biographical history which up until that point was the norm, along with what George Huppert has described as a "laborious cult of facts" that accompanied it. In 1920, with the opening of the University of Strasbourg, Bloch was appointed chargé de cours of medieval history. Alsace had been returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles; it was thus a contentious political issue in Strasbourg, its capital. Bloch, however, refused to take either side in the debate; indeed, he appears to avoided politics entirely. Under Wilhelmine Germany, Strasbourg had rivalled Berlin as a centre for intellectual advancement, and the University of Strasbourg possessed the largest academic library in the world. Thus, says Epstein, "Bloch’s unrivalled knowledge of the European Middle Ages was...built on and around the French University of Strasbourg’s inherited German treasures". Bloch also taught at the Centre d'Études Germaniques in the University of Mainz during the Occupation of the Rhineland, where he taught French to the few German students who were still there. He ignored the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr.

Bloch began working energetically, and later said that the most productive years of his life were spent at Strasbourg. In his teaching, his delivery was halting. His approach sometimes appeared cold and distant—caustic enough to be upsetting—but conversely, he could be also both charismatic and forceful. Durkheim had died in 1917, but the movement he had begun against the "smugness" that pervaded French intellectual thinking continued. Bloch had been greatly influenced by him, as Durkheim also considered the connections between historians and sociologists to be greater than their differences. Not only did Bloch openly acknowledge Durkheim's influence, but, says R. C. Rhodes, "Bloch repeatedly seized any opportunity to reiterate" it.

At Strasbourg, he met Febvre again, who was now a leading historian of the 16th century. Modern- and medieval-seminars were adjacent to each other at Strasbourg, and attendance often overlapped. Their meeting has been called a "germinal event for 20th-century historiography", and they were to work closely together for the rest of Bloch's life. Febvre was some years older than Bloch and was probably a great influence on him. They lived in the same area of Strasbourg and became kindred spirits, often going on walking trips across the Vosges and other excursions.

His fundamental views on the nature and purpose of the study of history were established by 1920; the same year he defended and subsequently published, his thesis, which, due to the war, was not as an extensive work as had been originally intended. This was because there was a provision in French further education for doctoral candidates for whom the war had interrupted their research to submit only a small portion of the full-length thesis usually required. It sufficed, however, to demonstrate his credentials as a medievalist in the eyes of his contemporaries. He began publishing articles in Henri Berr's Revue de Synthèse Historique. Bloch also published his first major work, Les Rois Thaumaturges, which he later described as "ce gros enfant". In 1928, Bloch was invited to lecture at the Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in Oslo. Here he first publicly expounded his theories on total, comparative history:

It was a compelling plea for breaking out of national barriers that circumscribed historical research, for jumping out of geographical frameworks, for escaping from a world of artificiality, for making both horizontal and vertical comparisons of societies, and for enlisting the assistance of other disciplines.

— Bryce Loyn, Marc Bloch: Historian

Isolated, each will understand only by halves, even within his own field of study, for the only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history'.

His Oslo lecture, called Towards a Comparative History of Europe, formed the basis of his next book, Les Caractères Originaux de l'Histoire Rurale Française, and the same year, with Febvre he founded the Annales historical journal. One of its aims was to counteract the administrative school of history, which had, says Davies, "committed the arch error of emptying history of human element". It was, as Bloch saw it, his duty to correct that tendency. Both Bloch and Febvre were keen to refocus French historical scholarship on social rather than political history and to promote the use of sociological techniques. The journal avoided narrative history almost completely. The inaugural issue of the Annales stated the editors' basic aims: to counteract the arbitrary and artificial division of history into periods, to re-unite history and social science as a single body of thought, and to promote the acceptance of all other schools of thought into historiography. As a result, the Annales often contained commentary on contemporary, rather than exclusively historical, events. Editing the journal led to Bloch forming close professional relationships with scholars in different fields across Europe. The Annales then the only academic journal to—deliberately—have a perspective. Neither Bloch nor Febvre wanted to present a neutral facade during the decade it published: it maintained a staunchly left-wing position. Closely supporting the new journal was Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian who wrote comparative history who before the war had acted in an unofficial capacity as a conduit between French and German schools of historiography. Braudel later described the management of the journal as being a Chief Executive Officer—Bloch—with a Minster of Foreign Affairs—Lefebvre.

The comparative method allowed Bloch to discover instances of uniqueness within individual aspects of society, and he advocated it as a new kind of history. Braudel and Bloch asked Pirenne to become editor-in-chief of Annales—but "promising to perform all the burdensome tasks" themselves, says Bryce Lyon—although to no avail; Pirenne did, however, remain a strong supporter in the background, and had an article published in the first volume in 1929; he became close friends with both Bloch and Febvre. Pirenne was particularly influential on Bloch, who later said that Pirenne's approach should be the model for historians and that "at the time his country was fighting beside mine for justice and civilisation, wrote in captivity a history of Europe". The three men kept up a regular correspondence until Pirenne's death in 1935. In 1923 Bloch attended the inaugural meeting of the ICHS in Brussels which was opened by Pirenne. Bloch was a prolific reviewer for Annales, and during the 1920s and 1930s he contributed over 700 reviews. These were both criticisms of specific works, but more generally, represented Bloch's own fluid thinking during this period. The reviews demonstrate the extent to which he shifted his thinking on particular subjects.

In 1930, both keen to make the move to Paris, Febvre and Bloch applied to the École pratique des hautes études for a position: both failed. Three years later Febvre was elected to the Collège de France, and moved to Paris—in doing so, says Fink, becoming all the more aloof—which placed a strain on Bloch's and his relations, although they communicated regularly by letter and much of their correspondence has been preserved. In 1934, Bloch was invited to speak at the London School of Economics. There he met Eileen Power, R. H. Tawney and Michael Postan, among others. While in London, he was asked to write a section of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe; at the same time, he also attempted to foster interest in the Annales among the British historians. In some ways, he later told Febvre, he felt he had a closer affinity with academic life in England than he did with that of France. For example, in comparing the Bibliothèque Nationale with the British Museum, he said that

A few hours work in the British inspire the irresistible desire to build in the Square Louvois a vast pyre of all the B.N.'s regulations and to burn on it, in splendid auto-de-fé, Julian Cain , his librarians and his staff... also a few malodorous readers, if you like, and no doubt also the architect..after which we could work and invite the foreigners to come and work".

During this period he supported the Popular Front politically, and signed Alain's—Émile Chartier's pseudonym—petition against Paul Boncour's militarization laws in 1935—although he did not believe it woudl do any good. And while he was opposed to the growth European fascism, he also objected to "deamagigic appeals to the masses" to fight it, as the Communist Party was doing. Braudel and Bloch were both firmly on the left, although with different emphases. Febvre, for example, was more militantly Marxist than Bloch, while the latter criticised both the pacifist left and corporate trade unionism.

In 1934 Étienne Gilson sponsored Bloch's candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France. The College, says Eugen Weber, was Bloch's "dream" appointment—although one never to be realised—as it was one of the few (possibly the only) institutions in France where personal research was central to lecturing. Camille Jullian had died the previous year and his position was now available. Julian, while he had lived, had wished for his Chair to go to one of his students, Albert Grenier, and after his death, Julian's colleague's generally agreed with him. However, Gilson proposed that not only should Bloch be appointed, but that the position be redesignated the study of comparative history. Bloch, says Weber, enjoyed and welcomed new schools of thought and ideas, but mistakenly believed the College to do so also. The College did not. The contest between Bloch and Grenier, then, was not just the struggle for one post between two historians, but the path that historiography within the College would take for the next generation. To complicate the situation further, the country was in both political and economic crises, and the College had its budget slashed by 10%. This made another new Chair—whomsoever filled it—financially unviable. By the end of the year, and with further retirements, the College had lost four professors: it could replace only one of them, and Bloch was not appointed. Bloch personally suspected his failure was due to anti-Semitism and jewish quotas. At the time, Febvre blamed it on distrust of Bloch's approach to scholarship by the academic establishment, although this cannot have been an over-riding fear as Bloch's next appointment indicated.

We sometimes clashed...so close to each other and yet so different. We threw our ‘bad character' in each other‘s faces, after which we found ourselves more united than ever in our common hatred of bad history, of bad historians—and of bad Frenchmen who were also bad Europeans.

In 1936, Henri Hauser retired from the Sorbonne, and thus his chair in economic history was up for appointment. Bloch—"distancing himself from the encroaching threat of Nazi Germany"—applied for, and was approved for, his position. This was a more demanding position than that he had applied for at the College and Eugen Weber has suggested that Bloch was appointed on account of how—unlike at the College—Bloch had not come into conflict with many faculty members. Weber researched the archives of the College in 1991, and discovered that Bloch had indicated an interest in working there as early as 1928, even though that would have meant him being appointed to the Chair in Numismatics rather than history. In a letter to the recruitment board written the same year, Bloch indicated that although he was not officially applying, he felt that "this kind of work (which he claimed to be alone in doing) 'deserves to have its place one day in our great foundation of free scientific research'". Says H. Stuart Hughes of Bloch's Sorbonne appointment:"In another country, it might have occasioned surprise that a medievalist like Bloch should have been named to such a chair with so little previous preparation. In France it was only to be expected: no one else was better qualified." His first lecture there was on the theme of history never ending, that it was a process, a never to be finished thing. His years at the Sorbonne, says Davies, were to be "the most fruitful" of Bloch's career, and he was by now the most significant French historian of his age. In 1936, says Friedman, he considered using Marx in his teachings, with the intention of bringing "some fresh air" into the Sorbonne.

The same year, Bloch and his family visited Venice, where they were chaperoned by Gino Luzzatto. During this period they were living in the Sèvres – Babylone area of Paris, next to the Hôtel Lutetia.

By now, Annales was being published six times a year in order to keep on top of current affairs. However, says Huppert, "the outlook was gloomy". In 1938 the publishers withdrew support, and, experiencing financial hardship, the journal moved to cheaper offices, raised its prices and returned to publishing quarterly. Bloch was increasingly opposed to Febvre over the direction the latter wished to take the journal in. The latter wanted it to be a "journal of ideas", whereas Bloch saw it as a vehicle for the exchange of information to different areas of scholarship.

By early 1939, war was known to be imminent, and Bloch, in spite of his age—which automatically exempted him—had a reserve commission for the army with a captain's rank. He had already been mobilized twice in false alarms. In August 1939 he and Simonne were intending to travel to the International Congress on Historical Studies in Bucharest. In autumn 1939, just before the outbreak of war, Bloch published the first volume of Feudal Society.

Second World War

Torn from normal behaviour and from normal expectations, suspended from history and from commonsense responses, members of a huge French army became separated for an indefinite period from their work and their loved ones. Sixty-seven divisions, lacking strong leadership, public support, and solid allies, waited almost three quarters of a year to be attacked by a ruthless, stronger force.

On 24 August 1939, at the age of 53—making him the eldest reserve officer the French army had—Bloch was mobilized for the third time as a fuel supply officer. He was responsible for the French Army's massive motorized units being able to mobilize and involved him having to undertake such a detailed assessment of the French fuel supply that he later wrote that he was able to "count petrol tins and ration every drop" of fuel he obtained. During the first few months of the war—called the Phoney War he was stationed in Alsace. He possessed none of the eager patriotism with which he had approached the first war. Instead, says Carole Fink, as a result of the discrimination he believed that he had recently faced, he had "begun to distance himself intellectually and emotionally from his comrades and leaders". Back in Strasbourg, his main duty was the evacuation of civilians to behind the Maginot Line. Further transfers occurred, and Bloch was re-stationed to Molsheim, saverne, and eventually to 1st Army headquarters in Picardy, where he joined the Intelligence Department, in liaison with the British. Much of the period 1939–May 1940 saw Bloch frankly bored in his post, as he often had little to do. To pass the time and occupy himself, he decided to begin writing a history of France. To this end purchased notebooks and began to work out a structure for the work. Although never completed, the pages he managed to write—"in his cold, poorly lit rooms"—eventually became the kernel of The Historian's Craft. At one point he expected to be invited to neutral Belgium to deliver a series of lectures in Liège. These never took place, however, disappointing Bloch very much; he had planned on speaking on Belgian neutralality. He also turned down the opportunity to travel to Oslo as an attaché to the French Military Mission there. He was considered an excellent candidate for the position due to his fluency in Norweigan and knowledge of the country. Bloch considered it, and came close to accepting; ultimately, though, it was too far from his family, whom he rarely saw enough, in any case. Some academics had escaped France for the The New School in New York City, and the School invited Bloch too. He refused, although this may well have been on account of the difficulties he had in obtaining the necessary visas: the US government would not grant visas to every member of his family.

[[File:Strasbourg-Plaque Marc Bloch.jpg|alt=street sign in Strasbourg|left|thumb|upright=1.5|Plaque commemorating Bloch in the Marc Bloch University, Strasbourg, now part of the refounded University of Strasbourg In May 1940 the German army outflanked the French, who were forced to withdraw further. Facing capture in Rennes, Bloch disguised himself in civilian clothes and lived under Geman occupation for a fortnight there before returning to his family in Fougères, where they had a country home. He fought at the Battle of Dunkirk in May–June 1940 and was evacuated to Britain with the remaining BEF on the steamer Royal-Daffodil, which he later described as taking place "under golden skies coloured by the black and fawn smoke". Before the evacuation, Bloch ordered the immediate burning of what remained of the French military's fuel supplies. Although he could have remained In Britain with the Free French, he chose to return to France the day he arrived—on account of his family still being there—and re-enlist, He felt, though, that the army that he was once again part of lacked the esprit de corps—what he called a " fervent fraternity"—of the army of the first war, and saw the French Generals of 1940 as following, blindly, in the same way as Joffre had in the first war. He did not, however, believe that the earlier war was an indication of how the next would progress: "no two successive wars", he wrote in 1940, "are ever the same war".

Bloch saw France's collapse as the overrunning of the best qualities mankind possessed—character and intelligence, while pinpointing the cause of that occurrence as France's own sluggish and intractable" attitude since World War I. He was horrified by the defeat, which, Carole Fink has suggested, he saw as being worse—for both France and the world—than her previous defeats at Waterloo and Sedan. Bloch understood the reasons for France's sudden defeat: not in the rumours of British betrayal, communist fifth columns or fascist plots, but in France's failure to motorize, and perhaps more importantly, to also fail to understand what motorization meant. He understood that it was the latter that allowed the French army to get bogged down in Belgium and that this had been compounded by the French army's slow retreat; a fast—motorized—retreat might have saved the army, he wrote in Strange Defeat.

Two-thirds of France was occupied by Germany. Bloch, who had been one of the only elderly academics to volunteer, was demobilised soon after Philippe Pétain's government signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940 forming Vichy France in the remaining southern-third of the country. Bloch moved south, where in January 1941 he applied for and received, one of only ten exemptions to the ban on employing Jewish academics the Vichy government only ever made. This was probably due to the unknown and pre-eminence in his field which Bloch was known for. He was allowed to work at the "University of Strasbourg-in-exile", the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand and Montpellier. The latter, being further south was beneficial to his wife's health, which was by then in decline. The dean of faculty at Montpellier was Augustin Fliche, an ecclesiastical historian of the middle ages, who, according to Weber "made no secret of his antisemitism" and further disliked Bloch for having once given Fliche a poor review. Fliche not only opposed Bloch's transfer to Montpellier but made his life uncomfortable when he was there. The Vichy government was attempting to promote itself as a return to traditional French values. Bloch condemned this as propaganda; the rural idyll that Vichy said it would return France to was impossible, he said, "because the idyllic, docile peasant life of the French right had never existed".

It was during these bitter years of defeat, of personal recrimination, of insecurity that he wrote both the uncompromisingly condemnatory pages of Strange Defeat and the beautifully serene passages of The Historian’s Craft.

Bloch's professional relationship with Febvre was also under strain. The Nazis wanted French editorial boards to be stripped of Jews in accordance with German racial policies; Bloch advocated disobedience, while Lefebvre was passionate about the survival of Annales at any cost. He believed that it was worth making concessions in order to keep the journal afloat, and, more importantly, not allow France's intellectual life ended. Bloch, on the other hand, rejected out of hand any suggestion that he should—in his words—"fall into line". Febvre also asked Bloch to resign as joint-editor of the journal. Febvre feared that Bloch's involvement—as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France—would hinder the journal's distribution. Bloch, forced to accede, turned the Annales over to the sole editorship of Febvre, who then changed the journal's name to Mélanges d’Histoire Sociale. Bloch was forced to write for it under the pseudonym Marc Fougéres. The journal's bank account was also in Bloch's name; this too had to go. Henri Hauser supported Febvre's position, and Bloch was offended when Febvre intimated that Hauser had more to lose than both Febvre and Bloch. This was because, whereas Bloch had been allowed to retain his research position, Hauser had not. Bloch interpreted Febvre's comment as implying that Bloch was not a victim; to which, Bloch—alluding to his ethnicity—replied that the difference between Bloch and Febvre was that, whereas Bloch feared for his children because of their Jewishness, Febvre's children were in no more danger than any other man in the country. Fundamentally, suggests André Burguière, Febvre did not understand the position Bloch—or any French Jew—was in. Already damaged by this disagreement, Bloch's and Febvre's relationship declined further when, following his move to Vichy, Bloch had been forced to leave his library and papers in his Paris apartment. He had attempted to have them transported to his Creuse residence, but the Nazis—who had made their headquarters in the hotel next to Bloch's apartment—looted his rooms and confiscated his library in 1942. Bloch held Febvre responsible for the loss, believing he could have done far more to have prevented it.

Bloch's mother had recently died, and his wife was ill; furthermore, although he was permitted to work and live, he faced daily harassment. On 18 March 1941, Bloch made his will in Clermont-Ferrand; in some ways, suggests Bronisław Geremek, in this document Bloch foresaw his death, stating that nobody had the right to avoid fighting for one's country. In March 1942 Bloch and other French academics such as Georges Friedmann and Émile Benveniste, refused to join or condone the establishment of the Union Générele des Israelites des France by the Vichy government, a which was intended to include all Jews in France, both of birth and immigration.

In November 1942, the German Army crossed the demarcation line and removed the Vichy government.

French resistance

The was the catalyst for Bloch's decision to join the French Resistance sometime between late 1342 and March 1943. Bloch was careful not to join simply on account of either his ethnicity or the laws that were passed against it; as Burguière has pointed out—and Bloch would have known—taking such a position would effectively "indict all Jews who did not join". Burguière has pinpointed Bloch's motive for joining the Resistance in his characteristic refusal to mince his words, or, this context, to play half a role: he had already written that, in his view, "there can be no salvation where there is not some sacrifice". He sent his family away, and returned to Lyon to join the underground. Although he knew some of the Francs-Tireurs around Lyon, Bloch still found it difficult to join them on account of his age. Although the Resistance recruited heavily among University lecturers—and indeed, Bloch's alma mater, the Ecole Normale Superieur, provided the Resistance with many members—he commented in exasperation to Simonne that he "didn't know it is so difficult to offer one's life". François Dosse quotes a member of the Franc-Tireurs active with Bloch as later describing how "that eminent professor came to put himself at our command simply and modestly". Bloch utilised his professional and military skills on their behalf, writing propaganda for them and organising their supplies and materiel, becoming a regional organiser. Bloch also joined the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (Unified Resistance Movement, or MUR), section R1, and edited the underground newsletter, Cahiers Politique. He went under various pseudonyms: Arpajon, Chevreuse, Narbonne. Often on the move, Bloch used archival research as his excuse for travelling. Georges Altman later told how Bloch, as Resistance fighter, had been "a man, made for the creative silence of gentle study, with a cabinet full of books" but was now "running from street to street, deciphering secret letters in some Lyonaisse Resistance garret"; all Bloch's notes were kept in code.

For the first time, suggests Lyon, Bloch was forced to consider the role of the individual in history, rather than the collective; perhaps even realising—by then—that he should have done so earlier.

Death

Bloch was arrested at the Place de Pont, Lyon, during a major roundup by the Vichy milice on 8 March 1944, and handed over to Klaus Barbie of the Lyon Gestapo. Bloch was using the pseudonym of Maurice Blanchard, and in appearance was "an ageing gentleman, rather short, grey-haired, bespectacled, neatly dressed, holding a briefcase in one hand and a cane in the other". Bloch was renting a room above a dressmakers on the rue des Quatre Chapeau; the Gestapo raided the place the following day. It is possible that Bloch had been denounced by a woman working in the shop. In any case, they found a radio transmitter and many papers. Bloch was imprisoned in Montluc prison while imprisoned, his wife died. Here he was tortured with, for example, ice-cold baths which knocked him out, ribs and a wrist broken, and led to his being returned to his cell unconscious; he eventually caught bronchopneumonia.and also fell seriously ill. It was subsequently claimed that he gave away no information to his interrogators, and that, while incarcerated, he taught French history to other inmates.

In the mean time, the allies had invaded in Normandy on 6 June 1944. IAs a result of this, the Nazi regime wanted to keen to evacuate following the invasion and wanted to "liquidate their holdings" in France; this meant disposing of as many prisoners of their as they could. Between May and June 1944 around 700 prisoners were shot in scattered locations so as to avoid the risk of them becoming common knowledge and inviting Resistance reprisals around southern France. Among those killed was Marc Bloch, one of a group of 26 Resistance prisoners picked out in Montluc and driven along the Saône towards Trévoux on the night of 16 June 1944. Driven to a field near Saint-Didier-de-Formans, and shot by the Gestapo in groups of four. According to Lyon, Bloch spent his last moments comforting a 16-year-old alongside him who was worried that the bullets might hurt. Bloch fell first, reputedly shouting "Vive la France" before being shot. A coup de grâce was delivered. One man managed to escape, crawling away to subsequently providing a detailed report of events; the bodies were discovered on 26 June. For some time Bloch's death was merely a "dark rumour" until it was confirmed to Febvre.

At his burial, his own words were read at the graveside, in which Bloch simultaneously proudly acknowledged his Jewish ancestry while denying religion in favour of his being foremost a Frenchman. He described himself as being "a stranger to any formal religious belief as well as any supposed racial solidarity, I have felt myself to be, quite simply French before anything else". According to his instructions, no orthodox prayers were said over his grave, and on it was to be carved his epitaph dilexi veritatem ("I have loved the truth"). In 1977, his ashes were transferred from St-Didier etc to Fougeres: the gravestone was inscribed a memorial he had chosen himself, dilexit veritatem.

Fevbre had not approved of Bloch's decision to join the Resistance; he believed it to be a waste of the latter's brain and talents, although, as Davies points out, "such a fate befell many other French intellectuals". Fevbre continued publishing Annales ("if in a considerably modified form", comments Beatrice Gottlieb), dividing his time between his country château in the Franche-Comté and working at the École Normale in Paris. This caused outrage, and, after liberation, when classes were returning to a degree of normality, he was booed by his own students at the Sorbonne.

Major works

Bloch's first book was L’Ile de France, published in 1913. Although a small book. It was "light, readable and far from trivial," said Loyn, and showing a strong influence from H. J. Fleure in its discussion of soil, language and archaeological remains. It was translated into English in 1971. 1920's Roi et Serfs—Kings and Serfs in English—is, says Davies, rather a "long and rather meandering essay", although it had the potential to be Bloch's definitive monograph upon the single topic that "might have evoked his genius at his fullest", the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. Loyn also describes it as a "loose-knit monograph", and rather a program to move forward with rather than a full-length academic text. Bloch's most important work to date (translated as The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England in 1973) and based on his doctoral dissertation, was published in 1924 as Rois et Thaumaturges. Here he examined medieval belief in the royal touch, and the degree to which kings used such a belief for propaganda purposes. It was also the first example of Bloch's inter-disciplinary approach, as he utilised research from the fields of anthropology, medicine, psychology and iconography. It has been described as Bloch's first masterwork. It was a 500-page descriptive analysis of the medieval view of royalty possessing effectively supernatural powers. Verging on the antiquarian in his microscopic approach, and much influenced by the work of Raymond Crawfurd—who saw it as a "dubious if exotic"aspect of medicine rather than history—Bloch made diverse use of evidence from different disciplines and even different periods, assessing the King's Evil as far forward as the 19th century. The book had originally been inspired by discussions Bloch had had with Louis, who acted as a medical consultant while his brother worked on it. Bloch concluded that the royal touch involved a degree of mass delusion among those who witnessed it.

1931 saw the publication of Les Caractéres originaux de l'histoire rurale Francaise. This—what Bloch called "mon petit livre"—took a more general historical approach and was also considered his best work to date. He used both the traditional techniques of historiographical analysis—scrutenising documents, manuscripts, accounts and rolls—and his newer, multi-faceted approach, with a heavy emphasis on maps as evidence. Bloch did not allow the new approach to detract from the former: he knew, says Chirot, that the traditional methods of historical research were "the bread and butter of historical work. One had to do it well to be a minimally accepted historian". The first of "two classic works", says Hughes—and possibly his finest—studied the relationship between physical geographical location and the development of political institutions. Loyn has called Bloch's assessment of medieval French rural law great, but with the addendum that "he is not so good at describing ordinary human beings. He is no Eileen Power, and his peasants do not come to life as hers do". In this study, says Chirot, Bloch "entirely abandoned the concept of linear history, and wrote, instead, from the present or near past into the distant past, and back towards the present". Febvre wrote the introduction to the book for publishing, and described the technique as "reading the past from the present", or what Bloch saw as stating with the known and moving into the unknown.

La Société Féodale was published in two volumes (The Growth of Ties of Dependence, and Social Classes and Political Organisation) 1939, and was translated into English as Feudal Society in 1961. It was described by Bloch as something of a sketch, although a modern biographer has called it his "most enduring work...still a cornerstone of medieval curricula" of 2007, and representative of Bloch at the peak of his career. In Feudal Society he utilised research from the broadest range of disciplines to date to examine feudalism in the broadest possible way—most notably including a study of feudal Japan. He also made comparisons with areas in which feudalism was imposed, rather than organically developed (such as England after the Norman conquest) and where it was never established (such as Scotland and Scandinavia). Bloch defined feudal society as—"from the peasants' point of view"—politically fragmentary, in which they are ruled by an aristocratic upper-class.

These three works—The Royal Touch, French Rural History and Feudal Society, which concentrate on the French middle ages have been described by Daniel Chirot as Bloch's most significant. His last two works that Bloch was to write—The Historian's Craft and Strange Defeat—have been described as unrepresentative of Bloch's historical approach (in that they discuss contemporary events in which Bloch was both personally involved and without access to sources to work from). The latter was uncompleted at the time of his death, and both were published posthumously, in 1949. Davies has described The Historian's Craft as "beautifully sensitive and profound"; the book was written in response to his son, Étienne, asking his father, "what is history?" In his introduction, Bloch wrote to Lebvre.

Long have we worked together For a wider and more human history. Today our common task is threatened. Not by our fault. We are vanquished, for a moment, by an unjust destiny. But the time will come, I feel sure, when our collaboration can again be made public, and again be free. Meanwhile, it is in these pages filled with your presence that, for my part, our joint work goes on.

— Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft

Likewise, Strange Defeat, in the words of R. R. Davies, is a "damning and even intolerant analysis" of the long- and short-term reasons France fell in 1940. Bloch affirmed that the book was more than a personal memoir; rather, he intended it as a deposition and a testament. It contains—"uncomfortably an honestly"—Bloch's own self-appraisal:

The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience. It is true that we emerged from the last war desperately tired, and that after four years not only of fighting but of mental laziness, we were only too anxious to get back to our proper employments...That is our excuse. But I have long ceased to believe that it can wash us clean of guilt.

— Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

Bloch emphasis failures in the French mindset: in the loss of morale of the soldiery, and a failed education of the officers. Effectively a failure of both character and intelligence on behalf of both. He condemned the "mania" for testing in education which, he felt, treated in the testing as being an end in itself and drained generations of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of originality and initiative or thirst for knowledge, and an "appreciation only of successful cheating and sheer luck". Strange Defeat has been called Bloch's autopsy over the France of the inter-war years.

A collection of essays was published in English in 1961 as Land and Work in Medieval Europe. The long essay was a favoured medium of Bloch's, including, says Davies, "the famous essay on the water mill and the much-challenged one on the problem of gold in medieval Europe". In the former, Bloch saw one of the most important technological advances of the era, in the latter, the effective creation of a European currency. Although one of his best essays, according to Davies—'Liberté et servitude personelles au Moyen Age, particulement en France'—was not published when it could have been; this, he remarked was "an unpardonable omission".

Historical method and approach

The microscope is a marvellous instrument for research; but a heap of microscopic slides does not constitute a work of art.

For Bloch history was a series of answers, albeit incomplete and open to revision, to a series of intelligently posed questions.

Bloch was, says Davies, "no mean disputant" in historiographical debate, often reducing an opponent's argument to its most basic weaknesses. His approach was a reaction against the prevailing ideas within French historiography of the day, which when he was young, were still very much based on that of the German School, pioneered by Leopold von Ranke. Within French historiography this led to a forensic focus on administrative history as expounded by historians such as Ernest Lavisse. While he acknowledged his and his generation of historian's debt to their predecessors, he considered that they treated historical research as being little more meaningful than detective work. Bloch later wrote how, in his view, "There is no waste more criminal’, he wrote in later life, ‘than that of erudition running...in neutral gear, nor any pride more vainly misplaced than that in a tool valued as an end in itself." He believed it was wrong for historians to focus on the evidence rather than the human condition of whatever period they were discussing. The administrative historians, he said, understood every element of a government department without understanding anything of those who worked in it. Bloch was very much influenced by Ferdinand Lot, who had already written comparative history, and by the work of Jules Michelet and Fustel de Coulanges with their emphasis on social history, Durkheim's sociological methodology, François Simiand's social economics, and Henri Bergson's philosophy of collectivism. Bloch's emphasis on using comparative history harked back to the Enlightenment, when writers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu decried the notion that history was a linear narrative of individuals and pushed for a greater use of philosophy in studying the past. Bloch condemned the—"German-dominated"—school of political economy, which he considered "analytically unsophisticated and riddled with distortions", says Fink. Equally condemned were then-fashionable ideas on racial theories of national identity. Bloch believed that political history on its own could not explain deeper socioeconomics trends and influences.

Bloch did not see social history as being a separate field within historical research. Rather, he saw all aspects of history to be inherently a part of social history; that, by definition, all history was social history, an approach he and Febvre termed histoire totale. A focus on points of fact such as dates of battles reigns and changes of leaders and ministries, and a general confinement by the historian to what he can identify and verify. Boch, on the other hand, believed, as he wrote to Pirenne, that the historian's most important quality was the ability to be surprised by what he found—"I am more and more convinced of this", he said; "damn those of us who believe everything is normal!"

Bloch identified two types of historical era: the generational era and the era of civilisation: these were defined by the speed with which they underwent change and development. In the latter type of period, which changed gradually, Bloch included physical, structural and psychological aspects of society, while the generational era—which could experience fundamental change over a relatively few generations. Bloch founded what modern French historians call the "regressive method" of historical scholarship. This method avoids the necessity of relying solely on historical documents as a source, by looking at the issues visible in later historical periods and drawing from them what they may have looked like centuries earlier. This was particularly useful in Bloch's study of village communities, says Davies, as "the strength of communal traditions often preserves earlier customs in a more or less fossilized state". Bloch studied peasant tools in museums, and also in action, and discussed their use with the people themselves. He believed that in observing a plough or an annual harvest one was observing history, as more often than not both the technology and the technique were much the same as they had been hundreds of years earlier. However, the individuals themselves were not his focus, which was on "the collectivity, the community, the society." He wrote about the peasantry, rather than the individual peasant; says Lyon, "he roamed the provinces to become familiar with French agriculture over the long term, with the contours of peasant villages, with agrarian routine, its sounds and smells Bloch claimed that both fighting alongside them in the war and his historical research into their history had shown him "the vigorous and unwearied quickness" of the peasant mind.

Bloch self-described his area of study as the comparative history of European society, and explained why he did not distinguish himself as a medievalist: "I refuse to do so. I have no interest in changing labels, nor in clever labels themselves, or those that are thought to be so". He did not leave a full study of his methodology, although it can be effectively reconstructed piecemeal. He believed that history was the "science of movement", but did not accept, for example, the aphorism that one could protect against the future by studying the past. His was not a revolutionary approach to historiography; rather, he wished to combine the schools of thinking that preceded him into a new broad approach to history, and as he wrote in 1926, to bring to history "ce murmure qui n’était pas de la mort", or, the whisper that was not death. He criticised what he called the "idol of the origins", in which historians concentrate overly hard on the formation of something to the detriment of studying the thing itself.

Bloch's comparative history led him to tie his researches in with those of many other schools: social sciences, linguistics, philology, comparative literature, folklore, geography, agronomy. Similarly, he did not restrict himself to French history: at various points in his writings Bloch commented on medieval Corsican, Finnish, Japanese, Norweigan and Welsh history. R. R. Davies has compared Bloch's intelligence with what he calls that of "the Maitland of the 1890s", in terms of his breadth of reading, use of language and multidisciplinary approach. Unlike Maitland, however, Bloch also wished to synthesise scientific history with narrative history, and, says Stirling, he managed to achieve "an imperfect and volatile imbalance" between them. Bloch did not believe that it was possible to understand or recreate the past the mere act of compiling facts from sources; rather, he saw sources as witnesses, "and like most witnesses", he wrote, "it rarely speaks until one begins to question it", and he likewise viewed historians as detectives who gathered evidence and testimony, as Juges d'instruction "charged with a vast enquiry of the past".

Areas of interest

If we embark upon our reexamination of Bloch by viewing him as a novel and restless synthesizer of traditions that had previously seemed incommensurable, a more nuanced image than the traditionally held one emerges. Examined through this lens as a quixotic idealist, Bloch is revealed as the undogmatic creator of a powerful – and perhaps ultimately unstable – method of historical innovation that can most accurately be described as quintessentially modern.

Bloch was not only interested in periods or aspects of history, but in the importance of history as a subject—regardless of the period—of intellectual exercise: "he was certainly not afraid of repeating himself; and, unlike most English historians, he felt it his duty to reflect on the aims and purposes of history", wrote Davies. Bloch considered it a mistake for the historian to confine himself to his own discipline overly rigidly. Much of his editorializing in Annales emphasised the important of parallel evidence to b be found in neighbouring fields of study, especially archaeology, ethnography, geography, literature, psychology, sociology,technology, air photography, ecology, pollen analysis and statistics. This provided, in Bloch's view, not just for a broader field of study, but a far more comprehensive understanding of the past than would be possible from relying solely on historical sources. Bloch's favourite metaphor for how technology impacts on society was the watermill. This can be summed up as illustrating how it was known but little used in the classical period; it became an economic necessity in the early medieval period; and finally, in the later middle ages it represented a scarce resource increasingly concentrated in the nobility's hands.

Bloch also emphasised the importance of geography in the study of history, and particularly in the study of rural history. He suggested that, fundamentally, they were the same subjects, although he criticised geographers for failing to take historical chronology or human agency into account. A farmer's field, he used as example, was "fundamentally, a human work, built from generation to generation". Bloch also condemned the view that rural life was immobile. He believed that the Gallic farmer of the Roman period was inherently different to those coming later, cultivating different plants, in a different way, to his 18th-century descendants. He saw England and France's agricultural history as developing in a similar fashion, and, indeed, discovered an Enclosure movement in France throughout the 15th-, 16th- and 17th-centuries on the basis that it had been occurring in England in similar circumstances. Bloch also took a deep interest in the field of linguistics and their use of the comparative method. He believed that using the method in historical research could prevent the historian from ignoring the broader context in the course of his detailed local researches: "a simple application of the comparative method exploded the ethnic theories of historical institutions, beloved of so many German historians", wrote Davies.

Personal life

]

Marc Bloch was not a tall man, being 5' 5" in height. An elegant dresser—although with "impossible" handwriting—he was described as having expressive blue eyes, which could be "mischievous, inquisitive, ironic and sharp", Febvre later told that when he first met Bloch in 1902, he found a slender young man with "a timid face". Bloch was proud of his family's history of defending France: he later wrote, "My great-grandfather was a serving soldier in 1793;. . .my father was one of the defenders of Strasbourg in 1870...I was brought up in the traditions of patriotism which found no more fervent champions than the Jews of the Alsatian exodus". Bloch was a committed supporter of the Third Republic and politically left-wing. He was not a marxist, although he was impressed by Marx himself, whom he thought was a great historian if possibly "an unbearable man" personally. He viewed contemporary politics as purely moral decisions to be made. He did not, however, let it enter into his work; indeed, he questioned the very idea of a historian studying politics. He believed that society should be governed by the young, and, although politically he was a moderate, he noted that revolutions generally promote the young over the old: "even the Nazis had done this, while the French had done the reverse, bringing to power a generation of the past". H was also capable of a "curious lack of empathy and comprehension for the horrors of modern warfare".

Although Bloch was very reserved—and later acknowledged that he had generally been old-fashioned and "timid" with women—he was good friends with Lucien Febvre and Christian Pfister, and in July 1919 he married Simonne Vidal, a "cultivated and discreet, timid and energetic" woman, at a Jewish wedding. Her father was the Inspecteur-Général de Ponts et Chaussées, and a very prosperous and influential man. Undoubtedly, says Friedman, his wife's family wealth allowed Bloch to focus on his research without having to depend on the income he made from it. Bloch was later to say he had found great happiness with her, and, further, that he believed her to have also with him. They had six children together, four sons and two daughters. The eldest two were a daughter Alice and a son, Étienne. As his father had done with him, Bloch took a great interest in his children's education, and regularly helped with their homework. He could, though, be "caustically critical" of his children, particularly Étienne, whom Bloch accused in one of his wartime letters of having poor manners, being lazy and stubborn, and of being possessed occasionally by "evil demons", and whom Bloch told, regarding the facts of life, that Etienne should attempt to always avoid "contaminated females".

Bloch certainly agnostic, if not atheist, in matters of religion. His son Étienne later said of his father, "'in his life as well as his writings not even the slightest trace of a supposed Jewish identity' can be found. 'Marc Bloch was simply French'". Some of his pupils believed him to be an orthodox jew, but, says Loyn, this is incorrect; while his Jewish roots were important to him, this was the result of the political tumult of the Dreyfuss years: that "it was only anti-semitism that made him want to affirm his Jewishness". On the other hand, John Lewis Gaddis has found Bloch's failure to condemn Stalinism in the 1930s "disturbing", saying that Bloch had ample evidence of Stalin's crimes and yet sought to shroud them in utilitarian calculations about the price of what he called 'progress'".

Bloch's brother Louis had become a doctor, and eventually the head of the Diphtheria section of the Hôpital des Enfants-Malades. Louis, though, had died prematurely, in 1922. His father died in March the following year. Following these deaths, Bloch took on responsibility for his ageing mother as well as his brother's widow and children. Eugen Weber has suggested that Bloch was probably a monomaniac who, in his own words, "abhorred falsehood". He also abhorred, as a result of both the Franco-Prussian war and more recently World War One, German nationalism. This extended to that country's culture and scholarship, and is probably the reason he never debated with German historians. Indeed, in Bloch's later career, he rarely mentioned even those German historians with whom he must, professionally, have felt an affinity, such as Karl Lamprecht. Lamprecht, says Lyon, had denounced what he saw as the German obsession with political history and had focused on art and comparative history, thus "infuriat the Rankianer". Bloch once commented, on English historians, that "en Angleterre, rien qu'en Angleterre" (in England, only England); he was not, though, particularly critical of English historiography, and indeed, respected the long tradition of rural history in that country as well as more materially the government funding that went into historical research there.

Legacy

It is possible that, had Bloch survived the war, he would have stood to be appointed Minister of Education in a post-war government and reformed the education system he had condemned for losing France the war in 1940. Instead, in 1948, his son Étienne offered the Archives Nationales his father's papers for repository, but they rejected the offer. As a result, the material was placed in the vaults of the École Normale Supérieur, "where it lay untouched for decades".

Intellectual historian Peter Burke named Bloch the leader of what Burke called the "French Historical Revolution", and he became an icon for the post-war generation of new historians. Although Bloch has been described as being to some extent a cult in both England and France—"one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century" by Stirling, and "the greatest historian of modern times" by John H. Plumb—this is a reputation mostly acquired postmortem. It is also, suggests Henry Loyn, one which would have amused and amazed Bloch. This posed a particular problem within French historiography, wrote Karen Stirling, when Bloch effectively had martyrdom bestowed upon him after the war, leading to much of his work being overshadowed by the last months of Bloch's life and led to "indiscriminate heaps of praise under which he is now almost hopelessly buried". This is partly at least the fault of historians themselves, who have not critically re-examined Bloch's work, but rather treat him as a fixed and immutable aspect of the historiographical background. At the turn of the millennium, wrote Karen Stirling, "there is a woeful lack of critical engagement with Marc Bloch’s writing in contemporary academic circles". His legacy has been further complicated by the fact that the second generation of Annalists led by Fernand Braudel has, says Stirling, "co-opted his memory", combining Bloch's academic work and Resistance involvement to create "a founding myth". The aspects of his life which made Bloch easy to beatify have been summed up by Henry Loyn as "Frenchman and Jew, scholar and soldier, staff officer and Resistance worker...articulate on the present as well as the past".

The first critical biography of Bloch did not appear until Carole Fink's Marc Bloch: A Life in History was published in 1989 work This, wrote S. R. Epstein, was the "professional, extensively researched and documented" story of Bloch's life, and, he commented, probably had to "overcome a strong sense of protectiveness among the guardians of Bloch’s and the Annales’ memory". Since then, continuing scholarship—such as that by Karen Stirling, who calls Bloch a visionary, although a "flawed" one—has been more critically objective of Bloch's recognisable weaknesses. For example, although he was a keen advocate for chronological precision and textual accuracy, his only major work in this area—a discussion of Osbert of Clare's Life of Edward the Confessor—was subsequently "seriously criticised" by later experts in the field such as R. W. Southern and Frank Barlow; Epstein later suggested Bloch was "a mediocre theoretician but an adept artisan of method". Colleagues who worked with him occasionally complaining that Bloch's manner could be "cold, distant, and both timid and hypocritical" due to the strong views he had held on the failure of the French education system. Bloch's reduction of the role of individuals, and their personal beliefs, in changing society or making history has been challenged, and even Febvre, reviewing Feudal Society on its post-war publication, suggested that Bloch had unnecessarily ignored the individual's role in societal development. Bloch also been accused of ignoring unanswered questions and presenting complete answers when they are perhaps not deserved, and of sometimes ignoring internal inconsistencies. Wallace-Hadrill has also criticised Bloch's division of the feudal period into two distinct times as artificial. Also, he says, Bloch's theory on the transformation of blood-ties into feudal bonds do not match either the chronological evidence or what is known of the nature of the early family unit. Bloch seems to have occasionally ignored—whether accidentally or deliberately—important contemporaries in his field. Lefebvre des Nouettes, for example, who founded the history of technology as a new discipline, built new harnesses from medieval illustrations, and drew histographical conclusions. Bloch, though, does not seem to have acknowledged the similarities between his and Lefebvre's approaches to physical research, even though he cited much earlier historians. Davies argued that there was a sociological aspect to Bloch's work which often neutralised the precision of his historical writing; as a result, he says, those of Bloch's works with a sociological conception, such as Feudal Society, have not always, in Davies' opinion, "stood the test of time".

Comparative history, too, still proved controversial many years after Bloch's death, and Bryce Lyon has posited that, had Bloch survived the war, it is very likely that his views on history—already changing in the early years of the second war, just as they had done in the aftermath of the first—would have re-adjusted themselves against the very school he had founded. What distinguished Bloch from his predecessors, suggests Stirling, was that he effectively became a new kind of historian, who "strove primarily for transparency of methodology where his predecessors had striven for transparency of data" while continuously critiquing himself at the same time. His legacy, suggested Davies, lies not so much in the body of work he left behind him—which is not always as definitive as it has been made out to be—but the influence he had on "a whole generation of French historical scholarship". Bloch's emphasis on how rural and village society has been neglected by historians in favour of the lords and manorial courts that ruled them influenced later historians such as R. H. Hilton in the study of the economics of peasant society, and Bloch's combination of economics, history and sociology was "forty years before it became fashionable", argues Daniel Chirot. which could make Bloch, he said, a founding father of post-war sociology scholarship.

The English-language journal Past & Present, from Oxford, was a direct successor to the Annales, suggested Loyn, while Michel Foucault said of the Annales School, "what Bloch, Lefebvre and Braudel have shown for history, we can show, I believe, for the history of ideas". Bloch's influence spread beyond historiography after his death. In the 2007 French presidential election, Bloch was quoted many times. For example, candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen both cited Bloch's lines from Strange Defeat: "there are two categories of Frenchmen who will never really grasp the significance of French history: those who refuse to be thrilled by the Consecration of our Kings at Reims, and those who can read unmoved the account of the Festival of Federation". In 1977, Bloch received a state reburial; streets schools and universities have been named after him, and the centennial of Bloch's birth was celebrated at a conference held in Paris in June 1986. It was attended academics of various disciplines, particularly historians and anthropologists.

Recognition

In the 1950s, his name was given to a street in Saint-Etienne at the initiative of Henri Falque15, one of his deputies at Franc-Tireur.

The Strasbourg University of Human Sciences (USHS), created in 1971, bears its name from 1998 to 200916.

In 1995, a promotion of the fourth battalion of the Special Military School of Saint-Cyr bears his name.

In 1996, a promotion from the Staff Staff Reserve Staff College (ESORSEM) was named after him.

In 1997, a promotion of the ENA bears his name; the same year, the place Marc-Bloch in the 20th arrondissement of Paris is inaugurated.

In June 2006, several historians ask, in the literary Figaro, the transfer of his ashes to the Pantheon17.

Many French schools (colleges and high schools) bear his name, such as the Lycée Marc Bloch Sérignan (Hérault) or the College Marc Bloch of Cournon-d'Auvergne (Puy-de-Dôme), formerly College Le Stade, renowned in July 2013

Notes

1. Gustave Bloc, author of La Gaule Romaine, was a noted historian in his own right, and, suggests R. R. Davies, his son's "intellectual mentor; was doubtless from him that Marc Bloch derived his interest in rural history and in the problem of from the Roman world".
2. Gustave Bloch personally took part in the defence of Strasbourg in September 1870.
3. In The Historian's Craft, Bloch described himself as one of "the last of the generation of the Dreyfus Affair"
4. His father's nickname was a reference to the skeleton of a megatharium which was housed in the ENS.
5. This was nicknamed the Nouvelle Sorbonne by contemporaries, and has been described by Friedman as "a residence for a very select group of doctoral students"; with an intake of only five students annually, residency lasted three years. During Bloch's tenure, the director of Fondation Thiers was the philosopher Emile Boutroux.
6. This road is now the Avenue de Maréchal Leclerc.
7. Bloc did, however, continually refer back to this research throughout the rest of his career, and Guy Fourquin's 1963 monograph Les campagnes de la rdgion parisienne li la fin du moyen age effectively completed the study.
8. Bloch later recalled that he had seen only one exception to this collective spirit, and that that was a by "'scab', by which I mean a non-unionist employed as a strike-breaker".
9. The transfer of Strasbourg University from German to French ownership provided the opportunity to recruit—as H. Stuart Hughes put it—"de novo a faculty of distinction". Colleagues of Bloch at Strasbourg included with archaeologists, psychologists and sociologists such as Maurice Halbwachs, Charles Blondel, Gabriel le Bras and Albert Grenier; together they took apart in a "remarkable interdisciplinary seminar". Bloch himself was a believer in the assimilation of Alsace and the encouragement of "anti-German cultural revanchism".
10. Bloch's ideas on comparative history were particularly popular in Scandinavia, and he regularly returned to them on his subsequent lectures there.
11. This appeared in 1941. Bloch's chapter was The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seignorial Institutions in the first volume.
12. Known as the drôle de guerre in French.
13. Notwithstanding his respect for Brtish historians, says Lyon, Bloch, like many of his compatriots, was anglophobic; he described British soldiers as naturally "a looter and a lecher: that is to say, the two vices which the French peasant finds it hard to forgive when both are satisfied to the detriment of his farmyard and his daughters", and the officers as being imbued with an "old crusted Tory tradition".
14. Carole Fink describes the meetings Bloch had with his family: "In February 1940 he made two trips to Paris—which displayed signs of 'fatigue'—where he saw his wife, visited relatives and friends, and savored the joys of civilian life: a sandwich in a café, a concert, and several good films.
15. Bloch's pseudonyms tended to hark back to his life living on Paris' Left Bank in the 1930s. Arpajon was a train that travelled between the Boulevard St Michel and Les Halles and Chevreuse referred to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse station on the Ligne de Sceaux.
16. Bloch questioned the lack of a collective French spirit between the wars in Strange Defeat: "We were all of us either specialists in the social sciences or workers in scientific laboratories, and maybe the very disciplines of those employments kept us, by a sort of fatalism, from embarking on individual action".
17. Today this road is the route nationale 433.
18. Davies suggests that the speech he self-described with at his funeral may be unpleasant hearing to some historians in the words' stridency and emotion. However, he also notes the necessity of remembering the context, that "they are the words of a Jew by birth writing in the darkest hour of France’s history and that Bloch never confused patriotism with a narrow, exclusive nationalism". In Strange Defeat, Bloch had written that the only time he had ever emphasised his ethnicity was "in the face of an antisemite".
19. Others included Jaques BIngen, Pierre Brisselette, Jean Cavaillès and Jean Moulin. "The bourgeoisie rose to the challenge", wrote Olivier Wieviorka, and "they would have continued promising careers after the war had they not decided to become engaged at the risk of their lives". François Mauriac noted that he "would no longer write that only the working class has remained faithful to desecrated France. What an injustice to the host of boys from the bourgeoisie who sacrificed themselves and are still sacrificing themselves".
20. For example, by using 18th- and 19thcentury maps to indicate what the agricultural and physical terrain was like hundreds of years earlier, as this would not have changed much in the meantime.
21. Specifically, Bloch wanted to know what France and Florence were the first two European nations to issue gold coinage. The traditional theory was that they simply had greater treasuries and so required a means of storing it in cash. Bloch, however, showed that Florence was as wealthy as these two states, yet did not issue gold for many more years; the reason was because France and Florence, at that time, traded with the east, whose traders commonly paid in gold; Florence, on the other hand, generally paid in silver, and so that city-state failed to accumulate gold.
22. Von Ranke summed up his philosophy of history in the dictum: "the strict presentation of the facts, contingent and unattractive though they may be, is undoubtedly the supreme law".
23. *More on watermill*
24. They did not do this with the intention of suppressing discussion on Bloch's ideas, wrote Karen Stirling, but "it is easy for contemporary scholars to confuse Bloch’s own individualistic work as a historian with that of his structuralist successors". In other words, to apply to Bloch's views those who followed him with, in some cases, rather different interpretations of those views.
25. The context in which Bloch wrote this passage was slightly different to that given it by the two candidates, who were both on the right of the political centre. But, says Peter Schöttler, Bloch "had already coined this aphorism during the First World War and given it a significant heading: 'On the history of France and why I am not a conservative'".

References

1. ^ Fink 1991, p. 8.
2. ^ Lyon 1985, p. 183.
3. ^ Friedman 1996, p. 7.
4. ^ Davies 1967, p. 267.
5. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 527.
6. Fink 1991, p. 16.
7. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 280.
8. ^ Fink 1998, p. 41.
9. ^ Lyon 1985, p. 184.
10. Fink 1995, p. 205.
11. Fink 1991, p. 17.
12. ^ Friedman 1996, p. 6.
13. Fink 1991, p. 19.
14. Bloch 1963, p. 154.
15. Hughes-Warrington 2015, p. 10.
16. ^ Fink 1991, p. 24.
17. ^ Friedman 1996, p. 4.
18. ^ Schöttler 2010, p. 415.
19. ^ Lyon 1987, p. 198.
20. Fink 1991, pp. 24–25.
21. ^ Fink 1991, p. 22.
22. Gat 1992, p. 93.
23. Friedman 1996, p. 3.
24. ^ Davies 1967, p. 275.
25. Baulig 1945, p. 5.
26. ^ Fink 1991, p. 40.
27. Friedman 1996, pp. 74–75.
28. ^ Hughes 2002, p. 127.
29. ^ Fink 1991, p. 43.
30. ^ Weber 1991, p. 245.
31. ^ Fink 1991, p. 44.
32. ^ Fink 1991, p. 46.
33. ^ Hughes-Warrington 2015, p. 12.
34. ^ Davies 1967, p. 269.
35. ^ Fink 1991, p. 11.
36. ^ Fink 1991, p. 26.
37. ^ Hochedez 2012, p. 62.
38. ^ Hochedez 2012, p. 64.
39. ^ Hochedez 2012, p. 61.
40. ^ Lyon 1987, p. 199.
41. ^ Lyon 1987, p. 200.
42. Burguière 2009, p. 38.
43. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 528.
44. Lyon 1985, p. 185.
45. ^ Fink 1998, p. 40.
46. Epstein 1993, p. 277.
47. ^ Sreedharan 2004, p. 259.
48. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 162.
49. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 164.
50. Hochedez 2012, p. 63.
51. ^ Bloch 1980, p. 14.
52. Epstein 1993, p. 276 277.
53. ^ Friedman 1996, p. 10.
54. Bloch 1927, p. 176.
55. ^ Lyon 1985, p. 181.
56. ^ Huppert 1982, p. 510.
57. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 529.
58. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 279.
59. Hughes 2002, p. 121.
60. ^ Friedman 1996, p. 11.
61. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 278.
62. Rhodes 1999, p. 111.
63. ^ Fink 1995, p. 207.
64. ^ Sreedharan 2004, p. 258.
65. Lyon 1987, p. 201.
66. ^ Lyon 1985, p. 182.
67. ^ Davies 1967, p. 270.
68. ^ Fink 1995, p. 209.
69. Lyon 1985, pp. 181–182.
70. ^ Davies 1967, p. 265.
71. Raftis 1999, p. 73 n.4.
72. Bloch 1963, p. 39.
73. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 275.
74. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 530.
75. ^ Davies 1967, p. 280.
76. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 274.
77. ^ Huppert 1982, p. 512.
78. ^ Lyon 1987, p. 202.
79. Fink 1991, p. 31.
80. Dosse 1994, p. 107.
81. Sewell 1967, p. 210.
82. ^ Davies 1967, p. 266.
83. ^ Friedman 1996, p. 12.
84. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 276.
85. ^ Burguière 2009, p. 39.
86. Lyon 1987, p. 204.
87. Fink 1998, pp. 44–45.
88. ^ Weber 1991, p. 249 n..
89. ^ Dosse 1994, p. 43.
90. Bianco 2013, p. 248.
91. ^ Burguière 2009, p. 47.
92. ^ Raftis 1999, p. 63.
93. ^ Weber 1991, p. 254.
94. Weber 1991, pp. 254–255.
95. Weber 1991, p. 255.
96. ^ Weber 1991, p. 256.
97. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 531.
98. ^ Weber 1991, p. 250.
99. Epstein 1993, pp. 274–275.
100. ^ Weber 1991, p. 249.
101. Huppert 1982, p. 514.
102. ^ Fink 1998, p. 42.
103. ^ Davies 1967, p. 268.
104. ^ Fink 1998, p. 45.
105. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 533.
106. ^ Lyon 1985, p. 188.
107. ^ Fink 1998, p. 43.
108. Fink 1998, p. 44.
109. Fink 1998, p. 48.
110. ^ Fink 1998, p. 49.
111. ^ Fink 1998, p. 50.
112. ^ Dosse 1994, p. 44.
113. ^ Fink 1995, p. 208.
114. ^ Burguière 2009, p. 48.
115. ^ Kaye 2001, p. 97.
116. Lyon 1985, p. 187.
117. Lyon 1985, p. 189.
118. ^ Davies 1967, p. 281.
119. ^ Fink 1998, p. 39.
120. Chirot 1984, p. 42.
121. ^ Hughes-Warrington 2015, p. 15.
122. ^ Birnbaum 2007, p. 251 n.92.
123. ^ Weber 1991, pp. 253–254.
124. Levine 2010, p. 15.
125. ^ Chirot 1984, p. 43.
126. ^ Burguière 2009, p. 43.
127. ^ Burguière 2009, p. 44.
128. ^ Burguière 2009, p. 45.
129. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 163.
130. Geremek 1986, p. 1103.
131. Geremek 1986, p. 1105.
132. ^ Birnbaum 2007, p. 248.
133. ^ Geremek 1986, p. 1104.
134. Smith 1982, p. 268.
135. ^ Wieviorka 2016, p. 102.
136. ^ Lyon 1985, p. 186.
137. Bloch 1980, pp. 172–173.
138. ^ Weber 1991, p. 244.
139. Freire 2015, p. 170 n.60.
140. ^ Davies 1967, p. 282.
141. Bloch 1949, p. 23.
142. Loyn 1999, p. 174.
143. Weber 1991, p. 258.
144. ^ Gottleib 1982, p. xv.
145. Wieviorka 2016, p. 390.
146. Wieviorka 2016, p. 103.
147. Wieviorka 2016, p. 389.
148. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 166.
149. Gay, Cavanaugh & Wexler 1972, p. 135.
150. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 167.
151. Davies 1967, p. 276.
152. Hughes-Warrington 2015, p. 13.
153. ^ Sturdy 1992, p. 171.
154. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 168.
155. ^ Chirot 1984, p. 31.
156. ^ Chirot 1984, p. 24.
157. ^ Hughes-Warrington 2015, p. 14.
158. Chirot 1984, p. 30.
159. Chirot 1984, pp. 30–31.
160. ^ Evergates 1993, p. xvii.
161. Chirot 1984, pp. 22–23.
162. ^ Hughes-Warrington 2015, p. 16.
163. Schöttler 2010, p. 417.
164. Stirling 2007, p. 534.
165. Bloch 1949, p. 171.
166. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 172.
167. ^ Weber 1991, p. 253.
168. Sewell 1967, p. 209.
169. Bloch 1932, p. 505.
170. Davies 1967, p. 273.
171. Blumenau 2002, p. 578.
172. ^ Davies 1967, p. 270 271.
173. Bloch 1963, p. 87.
174. ^ Fink 1991, p. 37.
175. Rhodes 1999, p. 133.
176. ^ Geremek 1986, p. 1102.
177. Rhodes 1999, p. 110.
178. Watelet 2004, p. 227.
179. ^ Davies 1967, p. 271.
180. Baulig 1945, p. 7.
181. Davies 1967, p. 277 278.
182. ^ Raftis 1999, p. 64.
183. Loyn 1999, p. 171.
184. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 526.
185. ^ Vaught 2011, p. 2.
186. ^ Loyn 1999, p. 165.
187. ^ Davies 1967, p. 274.
188. ^ Davies 1967, p. 272.
189. Loyn 1999, pp. 165–166.
190. Baulig 1945, p. 8.
191. Baulig 1945, p. 9.
192. Sewell 1967, p. 211.
193. ^ Davies 1967, p. 279.
194. Fink 1991, p. 1.
195. ^ Gaddis 2002, p. 128.
196. Burke 1990, p. 7.
197. ^ Stirling 2007, p. 525.
198. ^ Epstein 1993, p. 273.
199. Stirling 2007, p. 536 n.3.
200. Epstein 1993, p. 282.
201. Loyn 1999, pp. 162–163.
202. Epstein 1993, p. 281.
203. Rhodes 1999, p. 132.
204. Chirot 1984, p. 22.
205. Dosse 1997, p. 237.
206. Schöttler 2010, p. 417 n.60.
207. Bloch 1980, p. 165.

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• Geremek, B. (1986). "Marc Bloch, Historien et Résistant". Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 41: 1091–1105. OCLC 610582925. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Gottleib, B. (1982). "Introduction". The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. pp. xi–xxxii. ISBN 978-0-67470-826-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hochedez, D. (2012). "Un Historien au Front: Marc Bloch en Argonne (1914–1916)". Horizons d'Argonne (Centre d'Études Argonnais). 89: 61–66. OCLC 237313861. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hughes, H. S. (2002). The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation 1930–1960. London: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-35147-820-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hughes-Warrington, M. (2015). Fifty Key Thinkers on History (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-13448-253-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Huppert, G. (1982). "Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch: The Creation of the Annales". The French Review. 55: 510–513. OCLC 709958639. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kaye, H. J. (2001). Are We Good Citizens? Affairs Political, Literary, and Academic. New York: Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-0-80774-019-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Levine, A. J. M. (2010). Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France. New York, NY: Continuum. ISBN 978-1-44113-963-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Loyn, H. (1999). "Marc Bloch". In Clark, C. (ed.). Febvre, Bloch and other Annales Historians. The Annales School. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. pp. 162–176. ISBN 978-0-41520-237-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lyon, B. (1987). "Marc Bloch: Historian". French Historical Studies. 15: 195–207. OCLC 472958298. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lyon, B. (1985). "Marc Bloch: Did He Repudiate Annales History?". Journal of Medieval History. 11: 181–192. OCLC 1010358128. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Raftis, J. A. (1999). "Marc Bloch's Comparative Method and the Rural History of Medieval England". In Clark, C. (ed.). Febvre, Bloch and other Annales Historians. The Annales School. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. pp. 63–79. ISBN 978-0-41520-237-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Rhodes, R. C. (1999). "Emile Durkheim and the Historical Thought of Marc Bloch". In Clark, C. (ed.). Febvre, Bloch and other Annales Historians. The Annales School. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. pp. 63–79. ISBN 978-0-41520-237-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Schöttler, P. (2010). "After the Deulge: The Impacht of the Two World Wars on the Historical Works of Henri Pirenne and Marc Bloch". In Berger, S.; Lorenz, C. (eds.). Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 404–425. ISBN 978-0-23029-250-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Sewell, W. H. (1967). "Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History". History and Theory. 67: 208–218. OCLC 16913215. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Smith, R. J. (1982). The Ecole Normale Superieure and the Third Republic. New York, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-87395-541-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Sreedharan, E. (2004). A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000. London: Longman. ISBN 978-8-12502-657-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Stirling, K. (2007). "Rereading Marc Bloch: The Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist". History Compass. 5: 525–538. OCLC 423737359. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Sturdy, D. (1992). "The Royal Touch in England". In Duchhardt, H.; Jackson, R. A. (eds.). European Monarchy: Its Evolution and Practice from Roman Antiquity to Modern Times. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 171–184. ISBN 978-3-51506-233-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Vaught, D. (2011). "Abner Doubleday, Marc Bloch, and the Cultural Significance of Baseball in Rural America". Agricultural History. 85: 1–20. OCLC 464370464. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Watelet, H. (2004). McCrank, L. J.; Barros, C. (eds.). History Under Debate: International Reflection on the Discipline. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-13579-840-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Weber, E. (1991). My France: Politics, Culture, Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-67459-576-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wieviorka, O. (2016). The French Resistance. Translated by Todd, J. M. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-67473-122-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Images of documents held by the Archives Nationales relating to Bloch's war service.
• Centre Marc Bloch Template:Fr icon
• Université Marc Bloch Template:En icon
• www.marcbloch.fr Association Marc Bloch website no longer active Template:Fr icon
• History Heroes : Marc Bloch (Smithsonian Magazine) Template:En icon
• Episode on Marc Bloch from the Wittenberg to Westphalia podcast (in English).
• Description of Bloch's archives (in French)

• 1886 births
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