Marc Bloch

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (July 6, 1886, Lyon - June 16, 1944, Saint-Didier-de-Formans) was a French historian specializing in medieval France and founder of the Annales School. He is one of the most prominent French intellectuals of the first half of the XX century. During World War II he joined the French resistance, being arrested by the Gestapo on March 8, 1944. Ten days after the Normandy landings he was shot along with 29 other resisters. In his posthumous work The Strange Defeat he wrote: “I affirm, then, if necessary, in the face of an anti-Semite, that I am a Jew. [...] I miss all confessional formalism as well as all allegedly racial solidarity, I have felt, throughout my life, first and foremost and simply French... I die, as I have lived, a good Frenchman».

Biography

Born into a Jewish family in Alsace, he was the son of ancient history professor Gustav Bloch and Sarah Ebstein. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure and the Thiers Foundation in Paris, as well as in Berlin and Leipzig. He was mobilized at the beginning of World War I with the rank of sergeant, serving in the infantry. He reached the rank of captain and was awarded the national order of the Legion of Honor.

After this war, he taught at the University of Strasbourg and, later, from 1936 he succeeded Henri Hauser as professor of economic history at the Sorbonne.

In 1929 he founded, together with Lucien Febvre, the famous publication Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (since 1945 called Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations), name used to designate the new historiographical current embodied by Bloch and Febvre, which will be known as the Annales School.

He had great influence on the field of historiography through the Annales and his unfinished manuscript Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien (edited by his friend Lucien Febvre, which was translated as Introduction to History, or Apology for History), which he was working on when he was assassinated by the Nazis. The book is one of the most notable historiography of the XX century and presents a New story —based on the social, economic and psychological aspects— with a new way of approaching the sources, in contrast to what was done by his teacher Charles Seignobos.

In October 1940, the Vichy government, in application of racist laws, excluded him from public service because of his family origins. He died by firing squad, after being tortured for several hours by the Gestapo, for having participated in the French Resistance, on June 16, 1944, in a field in Saint-Didier-de-Formans, near Lyon. His last words were: "Vive la France".

In those last years, he had written two fundamental texts: the aforementioned Introduction to history, a reflection on method that has become a reference for social historians, and The strange Defeat, about the time of France's fall into German hands, at the start of World War II.

One of the branches into which the University of Strasbourg was distributed after May 1968, the Strasbourg University of Human Sciences, was renamed in 1998 Marc Bloch University, in his honor.

Major works by Marc Bloch

• Taumatur kings1924.
• The original characters of French rural history1931.
• feudal society1939-1940 The Evolution of Humanity, volumes 52 and 53), in 2 volumes: Training of dependency links and The classes and governments of men
• The strange defeatwritten in 1940 and published in 1946.
• Introduction to History (original in French Apologie pour l'histoire ou métier d'historien), written in 1941 and published in 1949.
• "The building of historical science."

Other works by the author

• Les forms de la break de l’hommage dans l’ancien droit féodale, written in 1912 and presented (with some aggregates) as complementary doctoral thesis in 1920.
• Souvenirs de guerre, 1914-1915.
• Rois et serfs: A chapitre d'histoire capétienne, main doctoral thesis presented in 1920.
• Esquisse d'une histoire monétaire de l'Europe1954.
• La France sous les derniers Capétiens1958.
• Seigneurie française et manoir anglaise1960.
• Melanges historiques1963.

Works about Marc Bloch

• Aguirre Rojas, Carlos Antonio. "Marc Bloch's intellectual itinerary and commitment to his own present."

• Aguirre Rojas, Carlos Antonio. "Marc Bloch: In Memoriam."

• Dumoulin, Oliver (2003). Marc Bloch, or the historian's commitment. University of Granada.

• Fink, Carole (2004). Marc Bloch: a life for history. University of Valencia. ISBN 978-84-370-5934-1.

• González García, Francisco Javier (1999). History and historians. Akal. ISBN 978-84-460-1037-1.

• Mastrogregori, Massimo (1998). Marc Bloch's interrupted manuscript. Apology for the History or Office of the Historian. Economic Culture Fund. ISBN 968-16-5302-5.

• López R., G. Alberto (2006). Discovering Marc Bloch's prints. A Approach to the Life and Work of a History Thinker. Shekina News Media.

• Pérez Brignoli, Héctor (1976). Perspectives of contemporary historiography. Setentas. ISBN 978-84-338-2963-4.

Literature

• Carole Fink. Marc Bloch. A Life in History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989, ISBN 0-521-37300-X
• Ulrich Raulff. Ein Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert: Marc Bloch. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-10-062909-4
• Peter Schöttler (ed.) Marc Bloch. Historiker und Widerstandskämpfer. Campus, Frankfurt am Main/New York 1999, ISBN 3-5933-6333-X
• Peter Schöttler. Marc Bloch. In: Lutz Raphael (ed.) Von Edward Gibbon bis Marc Bloch. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-54118-6Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft 1)
• Peter Schöttler, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.) Marc Bloch et les crises du savoir. Berlin 2011 (MPI für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, preprint 418). http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P418.PDF