Soldier of the First World War, staunch republican, innovative historian and resistance fighter. Shot by the Gestapo in 1944 at the age of 57, Marc Bloch, whom Emmanuel Macron hopes to soon enter the Pantheon, left a lasting mark on his time. His great work remains the creation in 1929, with Lucien Febvre, of the review of Annals of economic and social historyspearhead of the French historiographical school. Long considered the most prestigious history journal, it will influence many historians around the world.
Born July 6, 1886 in Lyon, Marc Bloch grew up in Paris where his father, also a historian, taught ancient history at the Sorbonne. His family is Jewish, non-practicing. “Marc Bloch only had faith in one idea, the Republic,” his granddaughter, Suzette Bloch, told AFP. He told him that he only claimed his Jewishness “in one case: in front of an anti-Semite”. A brilliant student, received at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he obtained the History-Geography aggregation and taught in high school.
A new way of thinking about history
Mobilized as an infantry sergeant during the First World War, he finished with the rank of captain and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. He then married Simone Vidal, daughter of a polytechnician, with whom he had six children. He then taught Middle Ages History at the University of Strasbourg, from 1919 to 1936, before being appointed to the Sorbonne.
“He is the founder of the history of mentalities, beliefs, ways of thinking,” summarizes historian Julien Théry for AFP. With in particular his master book The miracle-working kings (1924), he gives “history another object than the great names, the great events, the battles”. Its pioneering methods allow a new approach, with “a History that is interested in the depths of society” and captures man in all his aspects. “He prefigures Fernand Braudel” and his Identity of Franceadds Julien Théry.
From anti-fascist to resistance
“Passionate about the Republic” and a great patriot who signed in the 1930s the manifesto of the anti-fascist, Jewish atheist and Poilu intellectuals of the 1914-1918 war, Marc Bloch was mobilized again in 1939. At his request, when he is 53 years old, has six children and suffers from debilitating polyarthritis. “I am the oldest captain in the French army,” he said. He will draw from the debacle of 1940 an uncompromising work, The Strange Defeat. His best-known work, published posthumously after the war and recounting from the inside, in an implacable manner, “the most atrocious collapse of our history”.
In 1940, with the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy, he was excluded from teaching before being temporarily reinstated. It was over when the Germans invaded the free zone in November 1942. With his family, he took refuge in the family home in Creuse before once again choosing the France he loved so much. “France, some of which would conspire to expel me […] will remain, whatever happens, the homeland from which I cannot uproot my heart,” he wrote.
He joined the Resistance, plunged into clandestine life in Lyon, and joined the Franc-Tireur movement. Under the pseudonym “Chevreuse”, then “Arpajon” and “Narbonne”, he formed the Liberation Committees of the region. He was arrested on March 8, 1944, interned in Montluc prison and tortured for days. He was finally shot by the Gestapo on the evening of June 16, 1944 in a bushy field near Lyon. Executed with a machine gun in the back. With 29 other comrades, tortured in groups of four.
His ashes were transferred in 1977 to the family vault in the Bourg-d'Hem cemetery, in Creuse. With two simple words engraved as an epitaph, “Dilexit veritatem” (“I have cherished the truth”), the motto written in 1941 in his “Spiritual Testament”.
