On June 23, choirs of French schoolchildren and a large crowd of dignitaries gathered around the Pantheon in central Paris during a heat wave. President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the special courage that had earned the Sorbonne professor Marc Bloch a place in the nation's most prestigious tomb. Bloch and his wife Simonne were inducted to the sound of the Marseillaise, making him the first historian to receive the honor.
Historians have often created heroes, but few have themselves become them. Born in 1886 to secular Jewish scholars from Alsace, Bloch studied at the École Normale Supérieure, fought as an infantry officer in the trenches of the First World War, and founded a journal that engendered an entire tradition of historical research. He became an expert on feudalism and medieval agrarian history, wrote a sharp indictment of the French elite's fecklessness in the face of Nazi aggression, and joined the Resistance until he was captured and executed by the Gestapo in June 1944.
Bloch's career was short but prolific. Over barely two decades as a professor at Strasbourg, Paris and Montpellier, he published seven books, including The Royal Touch, French Rural History and Feudal Society, along with more than sixty articles. His intellectual project revolved around three innovations: shifting history away from individual leaders and nations toward collective worldviews, or mentalités; co-founding the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale; and reformulating the concept of feudalism.
Today Bloch is invoked across the political spectrum, from socialists opposing the far right to conservatives appealing to French identity. Peter Schöttler's intellectual biography, the most complete record of the thinking and travails of the Third Republic's greatest historian, offers a clearer picture of the man behind the myth.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing