153 Facts About Marc Bloch

Marc Bloch was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history.

Marc Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycees and the, and from an early age was affected by the antisemitism of the Dreyfus affair.

Marc Bloch was a modernist in his historiographical approach, and repeatedly emphasised the importance of a multidisciplinary engagement towards history, particularly blending his research with that on geography, sociology and economics, which was his subject when he was offered a post at the University of Paris in 1936.

Marc Bloch had to leave Paris, and complained that the Nazi German authorities looted his apartment and stole his books; he was persuaded by Febvre to relinquish his position on the editorial board of Annales.

Marc Bloch worked in Montpellier until November 1942 when Germany invaded Vichy France.

Marc Bloch then joined the non-Communist section of the French Resistance and went on to play a leading role in its unified regional structures in Lyon.

Marc Bloch was born in Lyon on 6 July 1886, one of two children to Gustave and Sarah Bloch, nee Ebstein.

Marc Bloch's family were Alsatian Jews: secular, liberal and loyal to the French Republic.

Marc Bloch's family had lived in Alsace for five generations under French rule.

Marc Bloch had a brother, Louis Constant Alexandre, seven years his senior.

The Marc Bloch family lived at 72, Rue d'Alesia, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Marc Bloch's biographer Katherine Stirling ascribed significance to the era in which Marc Bloch was born: the middle of the French Third Republic, so "after those who had founded it and before the generation that would aggressively challenge it".

When Marc Bloch was nine-years-old, the Dreyfus affair broke out in France.

Marc Bloch was greatly affected by the Dreyfus affair, but even more affected was nineteenth-century France generally, and his father's employer, the Ecole Normale Superieure, saw existing divides in French society reinforced in every debate.

Gustave Marc Bloch was closely involved in the Dreyfusard movement and his son agreed with the cause.

Marc Bloch was educated at the prestigious Lycee Louis-le-Grand for three years, where he was consistently head of his class and won prizes in French, history, Latin, and natural history.

Marc Bloch passed his baccalaureat, in Letters and Philosophy, in July 1903, being graded tres bien.

Marc Bloch's father had been nicknamed le Mega by his students at the ENS and the moniker Micromega was bestowed upon Bloch.

Marc Bloch joined the 46th Infantry Regiment based at Pithiviers from 1905 to 1906.

Marc Bloch graduated in 1908 with degrees in both geography and history.

Marc Bloch had a high respect for historical geography, then a speciality of French historiography, as practised by his tutor Vidal de la Blache whose Tableau de la geographie Bloch had studied at the ENS, and Lucien Gallois.

Marc Bloch applied unsuccessfully for a fellowship at the Fondation Thiers.

Marc Bloch returned to France the following year and again applied to the Fondation, this time successfully.

Marc Bloch researched the medieval Ile-de-France in preparation for his thesis.

Marc Bloch's parents had moved house and now resided at the Avenue d'Orleans, not far from Bloch's quarters.

Marc Bloch began by creating maps of the Paris area illustrating where serfdom had thrived and where it had not.

Marc Bloch investigated the nature of serfdom, the culture of which, he discovered, was founded almost completely on custom and practice.

Marc Bloch intended to turn his thesis into a book, but the First World War intervened.

Marc Bloch was one of over 800 ENS students who enlisted; 239 were to be killed in action.

Marc Bloch's regiment took part in the general retreat on the 25th, and the following day they were in Barricourt, in the Argonne.

Marc Bloch enjoyed the early days of the war; like most of his generation, he had expected a short but glorious conflict.

Gustave Marc Bloch remained in France, wishing to be close to his sons at the front.

However, says the historian Daniel Hochedez, Marc Bloch was aware of his role as both a "witness and narrator" to events and wanted as detailed a basis for his historiographical understanding as possible.

The historian Rees Davies notes that although Marc Bloch served in the war with "considerable distinction", it had come at the worst possible time both for his intellectual development and his study of medieval society.

Marc Bloch's experiences made him rethink his views on history, and influenced his subsequent approach to the world in general.

Marc Bloch was particularly moved by the collective psychology he witnessed in the trenches.

Marc Bloch later declared he knew of no better men than "the men of the Nord and the Pas de Calais" with whom he had spent four years in close quarters.

Apart from the Marne, Marc Bloch fought at the battles of the Somme, the Argonne, and the final German assault on Paris.

Marc Bloch survived the war, which he later described as having been an "honour" to have served through.

Marc Bloch himself was wounded twice and decorated for courage, receiving the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d'Honneur.

Marc Bloch had joined as a non-commissioned officer, received an officer's commission after the Marne, and had been promoted to warrant officer and finally a captain in the fuel service, before the war ended.

Marc Bloch was clearly, says Loyn, both a good and a brave soldier; he later wrote, "I know only one way to persuade a troop to brave danger: brave it yourself".

Marc Bloch later remembered very little of the historical events he found himself in, writing only that his memories were "a discontinuous series of images, vivid in themselves, but badly arranged, like a reel of motion picture film containing some large gaps and some reversals of certain scenes".

Marc Bloch later described the war, in a detached style, as having been a "gigantic social experience, of unbelievable richness".

Marc Bloch considered it to have been "four years of fighting idleness".

Marc Bloch rejected the political and biographical history which up until that point was the norm, along with what the historian George Huppert has described as a "laborious cult of facts" that accompanied it.

In 1920, with the opening of the University of Strasbourg, Marc Bloch was appointed charge de cours of medieval history.

Marc Bloch refused to take either side in the debate; indeed, he appears to have avoided politics entirely.

Marc Bloch taught French to the few German students who were still at the Centre d'Etudes Germaniques at the University of Mainz during the Occupation of the Rhineland.

Marc Bloch refrained from taking a public position when France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 over Germany's perceived failure to pay war reparations.

Marc Bloch began working energetically, and later said that the most productive years of his life were spent at Strasbourg.

Marc Bloch had been greatly influenced by him, as Durkheim considered the connections between historians and sociologists to be greater than their differences.

Not only did he openly acknowledge Durkheim's influence, but Bloch "repeatedly seized any opportunity to reiterate" it, according to R C Rhodes.

Febvre was some years older than Marc Bloch and was probably a great influence on him.

Marc Bloch began publishing articles in Henri Berr's Revue de Synthese Historique.

Marc Bloch published his first major work, Les Rois thaumaturges, which he later described as "ce gros enfant".

In 1928, Marc Bloch was invited to lecture at the Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in Oslo.

Marc Bloch became close friends with both Bloch and Febvre.

Marc Bloch was particularly influential on Bloch, who later said that Pirenne's approach should be the model for historians and that "at the time his country was fighting beside mine for justice and civilisation, wrote in captivity a history of Europe".

In 1923, Marc Bloch attended the inaugural meeting of the International Congress on Historical Studies in Brussels, which was opened by Pirenne.

Marc Bloch was a prolific reviewer for Annales, and during the 1920s and 1930s he contributed over 700 reviews.

In 1930, both keen to make a move to Paris, Febvre and Marc Bloch applied to the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes for a position: both failed.

Marc Bloch moved to Paris, and in doing so, says Fink, became all the more aloof.

In 1934, Marc Bloch was invited to speak at the London School of Economics.

Marc Bloch later told Febvre in some ways he felt he had a closer affinity with academic life in England than that of France.

Febvre and Marc Bloch were both firmly on the left, although with different emphases.

However, Gilson proposed that not only should Marc Bloch be appointed, but that the position be redesignated the study of comparative history.

Marc Bloch, says Weber, enjoyed and welcomed new schools of thought and ideas, but mistakenly believed the college should do so ; the college did not.

The contest between Marc Bloch and Grenier was not just the struggle for one post between two historians; it was a struggle to determine which path historiography within the college would take for the next generation.

Marc Bloch personally suspected his failure was due to antisemitism and Jewish quotas.

Weber has suggested Marc Bloch was appointed because unlike at the college, he had not come into conflict with many faculty members.

Weber researched the archives of the college in 1991 and discovered that Marc Bloch had indicated an interest in working there as early as 1928, even though that would have meant him being appointed to the chair in numismatics rather than history.

Febvre increasingly opposed the direction Marc Bloch wanted to take the journal.

Febvre wanted it to be a "journal of ideas", whereas Marc Bloch saw it as a vehicle for the exchange of information to different areas of scholarship.

Marc Bloch had already been mobilised twice in false alarms.

On 24 August 1939, at the age of 53, Marc Bloch was mobilised for a third time.

Marc Bloch was responsible for the mobilisation of the French Army's massive motorised units which involved him undertaking such a detailed assessment of the French fuel supply that he later wrote he was able to "count petrol tins and ration every drop" of fuel he obtained.

Marc Bloch evacuated civilians to behind the Maginot Line and for a while he worked with British Intelligence.

Marc Bloch began but did not complete writing a history of France.

Marc Bloch refused, possibly because of difficulties in obtaining visas: the US government would not grant visas to every member of his family.

Marc Bloch was demobilised soon after Philippe Petain's government signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940 forming Vichy France.

Marc Bloch worked again at the University of Strasbourg, now relocated to Clermont-Ferrand, for one academic year before moving to Montpellier.

The dean of faculty at Montpellier was an antisemite, who disliked Marc Bloch for having once given him a poor review.

Marc Bloch rejected the Vichy propaganda notion of returning to traditional French values, arguing that "the idyllic, docile peasant life of the French right had never existed".

Marc Bloch knew the sociologist and Communist Resistance member Georges Friedmann and the philosopher of mathematics Jean Cavailles, a key Resistance figure who co-founded the left-wing Liberation-sud in Clermont-Ferrand in December 1940, was arrested in Narbonne in September 1942 and escaped from Montpellier prison in December 1942.

Marc Bloch initially refused what he called "an abdication" and proposed to move the journal to the unoccupied zone.

Marc Bloch, forced to accede, turned the Annales over to the sole editorship of Febvre, who then changed the journal's name to Melanges d'Histoire Sociale.

Marc Bloch held Febvre responsible, believing he could have done more to prevent it.

Marc Bloch had refused to donate the library to the University of Montpellier at the advice of the Vichy education minister, his friend Jerome Carcopino, and later protested the loss to the newly appointed minister Abel Bonnard.

Marc Bloch's mother had recently died, and his wife was ill; he faced daily harassment.

On 18 March 1941, Bloch made his will in Clermont-Ferrand.

Marc Bloch had previously expressed the view that "there can be no salvation where there is not some sacrifice".

Marc Bloch sent his family away to Fougeres and moved to Lyon to join the underground, although he found this difficult because of his age.

Marc Bloch used his professional and military skills for the movement, writing propaganda and organising supplies and materiel in the region.

Marc Bloch wrote for the underground FT magazines Franc-Tireur, La Revue libre and Le Pere Duchesne, and by 1944 oversaw the distribution of the first title.

Marc Bloch was a member of FT's steering committee and since July 1943 represented it in the regional directory of the MUR.

Marc Bloch's arrest was touted in the Nazi and collaborationist press as a major success in the breaking up of a "Communist-terrorist" group financed from London and Moscow, led by a "Jew who had taken the pseudonym of a French southern city".

Marc Bloch was among the twenty-eight men shot in the back with submachine guns in groups of four by Sicherheitsdienst in a meadow at Les Roussilles near Saint-Didier-de-Formans on the night of 16 June 1944.

For some time Marc Bloch's death was merely a "dark rumour".

The autobiographical speech read at Marc Bloch's burial acknowledged his Jewish ancestry while affirming a French identity.

Davies says Marc Bloch was "no mean disputant" in historiographical debate, often reducing an opponent's argument to its most basic weaknesses.

Marc Bloch's approach was a reaction against the prevailing ideas within French historiography of the day which, when he was young, were still very much based on that of the German School, pioneered by Leopold von Ranke.

Marc Bloch believed it was wrong for historians to focus on the evidence rather than the human condition of whatever period they were discussing.

Marc Bloch was very much influenced by Ferdinand Lot, who had already written comparative history, and by the work of Jules Michelet and Fustel de Coulanges with their emphasis on social history, Durkheim's sociological methodology, Francois Simiand's social economics, and Henri Bergson's philosophy of collectivism.

Marc Bloch's emphasis on using comparative history harked back to the Enlightenment, when writers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu decried the notion that history was a linear narrative of individuals and pushed for greater use of philosophy in studying the past.

Marc Bloch condemned the "German-dominated" school of political economy, which he considered "analytically unsophisticated and riddled with distortions".

Marc Bloch believed that political history on its own could not explain deeper socioeconomics trends and influences.

Marc Bloch did not see social history as being a separate field within historical research.

For Marc Bloch history was a series of answers, albeit incomplete and open to revision, to a series of intelligently posed questions.

Marc Bloch identified two types of historical eras: the generational era and the era of civilisation: these were defined by the speed with which they underwent change and development.

Marc Bloch founded what modern French historians call the "regressive method" of historical scholarship.

Marc Bloch studied peasant tools in museums, observed their use in work, and discussed the objects with the people who used them.

Marc Bloch believed that in observing a plough or an annual harvest one was observing history, as more often than not both the technology and the technique were much the same as they had been hundreds of years earlier.

Marc Bloch claimed that both fighting alongside the peasantry in the war and his historical research into their history had shown him "the vigorous and unwearied quickness" of their minds.

Marc Bloch believed that history was the "science of movement", but did not accept, for example, the aphorism that one could protect against the future by studying the past.

Marc Bloch's work did not use a revolutionary approach to historiography; rather, he wished to combine the schools of thinking that preceded him into a new broad approach to history and, as he wrote in 1926, to bring to history "ce murmure qui n'etait pas de la mort",.

Marc Bloch criticised what he called the "idol of the origins", where historians concentrate overly hard on the formation of something to the detriment of studying the thing itself.

At various points in his writings, Marc Bloch commented on medieval Corsican, Finnish, Japanese, Norwegian and Welsh history.

Unlike Maitland Marc Bloch wished to synthesise scientific history with narrative history.

Marc Bloch did not believe that it was possible to understand or recreate the past by the mere act of compiling facts from sources; rather, he described a source as a witness, "and like most witnesses", he wrote, "it rarely speaks until one begins to question it".

Marc Bloch was an early theorist in the field of the preservation of collective memory.

Marc Bloch was not only interested in periods or aspects of history but in the importance of history as a subject, regardless of the period, of intellectual exercise.

Marc Bloch considered it a mistake for the historian to confine himself overly rigidly to his own discipline.

Marc Bloch emphasised the importance of geography in the study of history, and particularly in the study of rural history.

Marc Bloch suggested that, fundamentally, they were the same subjects, although he criticised geographers for failing to take historical chronology or human agency into account.

Marc Bloch believed that the Gallic farmer of the Roman period was inherently different from his 18th-century descendants, cultivating different plants, in a different way.

Marc Bloch saw England and France's agricultural history as developing similarly, and, indeed, discovered an Enclosure Movement in France throughout the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries on the basis that it had been occurring in England in similar circumstances.

Marc Bloch took a deep interest in the field of linguistics and their use of the comparative method.

Marc Bloch believed that using the method in historical research could prevent the historian from ignoring the broader context in the course of his detailed local researches: "a simple application of the comparative method exploded the ethnic theories of historical institutions, beloved of so many German historians".

Marc Bloch dreamed of a borderless world, where the constraints of geography, time, and academic discipline could be dismantled and history could be addressed from a global perspective.

Marc Bloch had expressive blue eyes, which could be "mischievous, inquisitive, ironic and sharp".

Marc Bloch was a committed supporter of the Third Republic and politically left-wing.

Marc Bloch was not a Marxist, although he was impressed by Karl Marx himself, whom he thought was a great historian if possibly "an unbearable man" personally.

Marc Bloch viewed contemporary politics as purely moral decisions to be made.

Marc Bloch did not let it enter into his work; indeed, he questioned the very idea of a historian studying politics.

Marc Bloch believed that society should be governed by the young, and, although politically he was a moderate, he noted that revolutions generally promote the young over the old: "even the Nazis had done this, while the French had done the reverse, bringing to power a generation of the past".

Marc Bloch's father was the Inspecteur-General de Ponts et Chaussees, and a very prosperous and influential man.

Undoubtedly, says Friedman, his wife's family wealth allowed Marc Bloch to focus on his research without having to depend on the income he made from it.

Marc Bloch was later to say he had found great happiness with her, and that he believed her to have found it with him.

Marc Bloch accused him in one of his wartime letters of having poor manners, being lazy and stubborn, and of being possessed occasionally by "evil demons".

Marc Bloch was agnostic, if not atheist, in matters of religion.

Eugen Weber has suggested that Marc Bloch was probably a monomaniac who, in Marc Bloch's own words, "abhorred falsehood".

Marc Bloch abhorred, as a result of both the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, German nationalism.

Marc Bloch once commented, on English historians, that "en Angleterre, rien qu'en Angleterre".

Marc Bloch was not, though, particularly critical of English historiography, and respected the long tradition of rural history in that country as well as more materially the government funding that went into historical research there.

At the turn of the millennium "there is a woeful lack of critical engagement with Marc Bloch's writing in contemporary academic circles" according to Stirling.

Marc Bloch's legacy has been further complicated by the fact that the second generation of Annalists led by Fernand Braudel has "co-opted his memory", combining Bloch's academic work and Resistance involvement to create "a founding myth".

Southern and Frank Barlow; Epstein later suggested Marc Bloch was "a mediocre theoretician but an adept artisan of method".

Marc Bloch has been accused of ignoring unanswered questions and presenting complete answers when they are perhaps not deserved, and of sometimes ignoring internal inconsistencies.

Marc Bloch says Bloch's theory on the transformation of blood ties into feudal bonds does not correspond with either chronological evidence or what is known of the nature of the early family unit.

Marc Bloch seems to have occasionally ignored, whether accidentally or deliberately, important contemporaries in his field.

In 1977, Marc Bloch received a state reburial; streets schools and universities have been named after him, and the centennial of Marc Bloch's birth was celebrated at a conference held in Paris in June 1986.

In November 2024, on the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Strasbourg, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced Marc Bloch would be inducted into the Pantheon.