On the sidelines of the commemorations of the liberation of Strasbourg, Emmanuel Macron announced the upcoming pantheonization of Marc Bloch, who taught in Montpellier, where an elementary school bears his name.
Emmanuel Macron announced on Saturday in Strasbourg that the historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch, “the man of Enlightenment in the army of shadows”assassinated by the Gestapo in 1944, would enter the Pantheon.
“For his work, his teaching and his courage, we decide that Marc Bloch will enter the Pantheon”declared the Head of State on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Strasbourg, on November 23, 1944.
Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has already pantheonized the writer Maurice Genevoix, the French and European political figure Simone Veil, the music hall star Joséphine Baker and the communist resistance fighter of Armenian origin Missak Manouchian.
He also announced that of Robert Badinter, the father of the abolition of the death penalty who died on February 9, who will enter the Pantheon before Marc Bloch in 2025, it was specified in the presidential entourage.
The family of Marc Bloch welcomed his pantheonization, 80 years after his death, for which political leaders and historians had long called. “It’s a great emotion and pride. He gave himself body and soul for freedom and against Nazism”declared his granddaughter Suzette Bloch to AFP.
Middle Ages history teacher
Professor of Middle Ages history at the University of Strasbourg from 1919 to 1936, Marc Bloch profoundly renewed the field of historical research by extending it to sociology, geography, psychology and economics.
In 1929, he notably founded with Lucien Febvre the journal “Annals of Economic and Social History”, with worldwide academic resonance.
Captain and Croix de Guerre in 1914-1918, mobilized again in 1939, Marc Bloch relentlessly analyzed in “The Strange Defeat” the French debacle in the face of the German offensive in May-June 1940.
A story “for generations to come”underlined Emmanuel Macron, evoking the “French will blunted by conservatism, asleep by conformism, softened by bureaucracy, so neglected by a part of its elites”. “Stinging lucidity which still strikes us today”he added.
The opposition of the dean of the Faculty of Letters of Montpellier
A high school teacher in Montpellier in 1912, Marc Bloch returned to Languedoc thirty years later, in 1941-42, as a lecturer at the University of Montpellier, despite the opposition of Augustin Fliche, the dean of the faculty of letters. In “Marc Bloc: a life in the service of history”, Carole Fink relates that the dean, “Catholic and marshalist, anti-Semitic and conservative, will try to prevent his nomination.”
He notably warns his superiors “that a public lecture by Marc Bloch could provoke hostile demonstrations, for which he does not want to be held responsible”. Thus, Marc Bloch, “lecturer on the economic and monetary history of France and modern Europe, can only work in very imperfect conditions, having no access to his library”.
Today, an elementary school bears his name.
Remaining in France despite the repression which fell on the Jews, Marc Bloch joined the Resistance in 1943, of which he became one of the leaders for the Lyon region.
“Marc Bloch never despaired of the responsibility of our people, certain that courage is not a matter of career or caste”summarized Emmanuel Macron.
He was arrested on March 8, 1944 in Lyon, imprisoned and tortured in Montluc prison, and shot on June 16 with 29 of his comrades.
In a letter to the President of the Republic, of which AFP obtained a copy, the family requests, in view of its commitment, that “the extreme right, in all its forms, be excluded from any participation in the ceremony” entrance to the Pantheon.
“The work of this convinced patriot is profoundly anti-nationalist, constructed against the national novel and the reduction of French history to national borders”write his granddaughter Suzette Bloch and his great-grandson Matis Bloch, on behalf of the beneficiaries.
On February 19, the presence of Marine Le Pen at the pantheonization of Missak Manouchian, against the advice of her descendants and the president, caused controversy. A few days earlier, however, she had given up on going to the national tribute to Robert Badinter.
The family also wishes that the tribute be “purely civil”, as Marc Bloch requested in his will.
