Lhe name of the historian Marc Bloch is engraved on the monument “to the martyrs of the Resistance” of Saint-Didier-de-Formans (Ain) among those of the “thirty patriots cowardly murdered by the Germans” on June 16, 1944. By a reversal of the intellectual and memorial situation, the medievalist is above all celebrated as the author of a work of immediate history, The Strange Defeat (1940), and for his courage as a fighter and resistance fighter.
From the 1980s, historians who renewed the history of Vichy and the Resistance found the Marc Bloch of The Strange Defeat. And those who invented a new way of understanding the Great War rediscovered the analyzes of ” soldier “ from 14-18, as he liked to present himself, who was even more interested in his men than in medieval churches, celebrated the strength of the arts, photography and cinema. If the author of Feudal Society (1939) was not a scholar cut off from the realities of his time, it is because his method of historical anthropology made him start from the present time to better understand the past.
The historian then acquired an iconic stature. The review of Annales which he had founded with Lucien Febvre in 1928 had early capitalized on his legacy as a hero of the Resistance, but it was later that he emerged not only as a moral and intellectual authority but also as a French citizen par excellence.
His entry into the Pantheon was almost decided in 2006, when potential competition with Alfred Dreyfus postponed it; paradoxical for a man of his generation whom the Affair accompanied his entire life. The veteran would undoubtedly have liked to appear alongside his comrades in arms from the Great War accompanying Maurice Genevoix in 2020 in the temple of the Republic.
Also read the column (2020) | Article reserved for our subscribers Panthéon: “It is on the side of life that Maurice Genevoix placed his energy, his sensitivity and his creativity”
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In 2024, the personal pantheonization of Marc Bloch finally recorded has something dizzying at a time when many countries in Europe are choosing to rely on parties from the old nationalist, anti-intellectual, anti-socialist, anti-foreigner, anti-Semitic background. , and now anti-Muslim. Everything that Marc Bloch had spoken out against throughout his life.
“Love of truth”
The Strange Defeat (or Testimony written in 1940its original title) was written from July to September, during the first collaboration with the strangely victorious enemy. Bloch uses the vocabulary of an investigation to authorize himself to write a ” minutes “ which begins with the “Presentation of the witness”, “is”in three capacities: historian, soldier and Jew.
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