Marc Bloch

For more information on Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch, visit Britannica.com.

The French historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944) was the leading French medievalist of the 20th century. He inspired two generations of historians through his teaching and writing.

Marc Bloch was born at Lyons on July 6, 1886, the son of Gustave Bloch, a professor of ancient history. Marc studied in Paris at the École Normale and the Fondation Thiers, in Berlin, and in Leipzig. During World War I he served in the infantry, winning four citations and the Legion of Honor. When the French University at Strasbourg was revived in 1919, Bloch went there to organize the seminar on medieval history. He remained until 1936, when he was called to the Sorbonne to succeed Henri Hauser in the chair of economic history.

In 1920 Bloch presented his thesis Kings and Serfs, in which he tried to discover what freedom and servitude meant in the Middle Ages. It was a question he pondered throughout his career, continuing his investigations in major articles of 1921, 1928, and 1933 and in the pages of his Feudal Society. The thesis was symptomatic of Bloch's interests and sympathies. He saw the problem of liberty and servitude as one involving economic structures and systems of belief as well as legal norms and institutional practices. From then until his death he continued to affirm that history must concern itself with the whole man, that the economic or legal historian must be first of all a historian of civilization.

Bloch's interest in men and their beliefs inspired his second major work, The Magic-working Kings (1924), a study of the supernatural character attributed to kings in the Middle Ages, in particular the belief in their miraculous powers of healing. His interest in men and their works inspired a series of articles on the spread of labor-saving inventions in the Middle Ages, medieval monetary problems, rural land distribution, and many other topics. In all of these, as in a series of lectures, The Original Characteristics of French Rural History (1931), he insisted that the economic and technical questions he was discussing were also questions of "collective psychology."

In 1929 Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale to provide a place for innovative historians to express their views. The two editors made themselves the champions of "history as one of the sciences of man" which the resources of sociology, psychology, economics, medicine, and all other disciplines that study man should be used to serve. Bloch also contributed to the Revue de synthése, whose objective was to overcome the barriers between academic disciplines. His last historical work was Feudal Society (2 vols., 1939-1940), in which he described the legal institutions of feudalism in their broad cultural setting.

In 1939 Bloch was called back to the army. Avoiding capture in the defeat, he found refuge at Guéret, where he wrote a memoir of his war experiences, The Strange Defeat (1946). In this time of forced repose he also set down his reflections on his vocation, The Historian's Craft. The anti-Semitic laws soon forced him to leave the University of Paris for Clermont-Ferrand and then for Montpellier. When persecutions increased, he disappeared into the Resistance. In 1943 he reappeared briefly as "Blanchard," then as "Arpajon," "Chevreuse," and "Narbonne." Captured by the Germans in 1944, he was tortured and, on June 16, shot by a firing squad at Saint-Didier-de-Formans, near Lyons.

Further Reading

A moving personal memoir of Bloch by Lucien Febvre appears in Joseph Lambie, ed., Architects and Craftsmen in History (1956). John Higham and others, History (1965), and H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation, 1930-1960 (1968), contain extensive material on Bloch. A useful background study is Michel François and others, Historical Study in the West: France, Great Britain, Western Germany, the United States (1968).

Additional Sources

Fink, Carole, Marc Bloch: a life in history, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Bloch, Marc (1886-1944). French historian, cofounder of Annales. A champion of comparative and ‘structural’ history who owed much to the theories of Durkheim, Bloch examined the relationship between collective beliefs, political and social institutions, and ideas of kingship in Les Rois thaumaturges (1924). He traced long-term developments and extended the scope of historical evidence in Les Caractéres originaux de l'histoire rurale française (1931), drawing upon artefacts, ancient maps, place-names, aerial surveys, and folklore; and in La Société féodale (1939-40) he analysed the mental attitudes and ways of life underlying feudal organization.

[Rhiannon Goldthorpe]

Marc Bloch
Born	July 6, 1886(1886-07-06) Lyon, France
Died	June 16, 1944 (aged 57) Saint-Didier-de-Formans
Nationality	French
Occupation	Historian

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (July 6, 1886 in Lyon – June 16, 1944 in Saint-Didier-de-Formans) was a medieval historian, University Professor and French Army officer. Bloch was a founder of the Annales School, best known for his pioneering studies French Rural History and Feudal Society and his posthumously-published unfinished meditation on the writing of history, The Historian's Craft. He was captured and shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France for his work in the French Resistance.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Youth and First World War 1.2 Career 1.3 Second World War 2 Legacy 3 Works 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Youth and First World War

Born in Lyon to a Jewish family, the son of the professor of ancient history Gustave Bloch, Marc studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Foundation Thiers in Paris, then at Berlin and Leipzig. He was an officer of infantry in World War I, rising to the rank of captain and being awarded the Légion d'honneur.

After the war, he went to the university at Strasbourg, then in 1936 succeeded Henri Hauser as professor of economic history at the Sorbonne.

Career

In 1924 he published one of his most famous works Les rois thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (sometimes translated in English as The magic-working kings or The royal touch: sacred monarchy and scrofula in England and France) in which he collected, described and studied the documents pertaining to the ancient tradition that the kings of the Middle Ages were able to cure the disease of scrofula simply by touching people suffering from it. This tradition has its roots in the magical role of kings in ancient societies. This work by Bloch had a great impact not only on the social history of Middle Ages but also on cultural anthropology.

In 1929, Bloch founded, with Lucien Febvre, the important journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (now called Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales) whose name came to be attached to an historical approach called the Annales School. Bloch's most important work centered on the study of feudalism. He published a large work, available in a two-volume English translation as Feudal Society. In some ways, his most innovative work is his monograph French Rural History.

Bloch has had lasting influence in the field of historiography through his unfinished manuscript The Historian's Craft, which he was working on when he was killed by the Nazis. Bloch's book and What is History? by Edward Carr are often considered two of the most important historiographical works of the 20th century.

Second World War

In 1939 France declared war on Germany after its invasion and occupation of Poland. As France mobilized its troops, Marc Bloch left his position at the Sorbonne and took up his reserve status as a captain in the French Army at the age of 52. He was encouraged at the time by colleagues both in France and abroad to leave the country. He said it was his personal obligation to stand for the moral imperative.

"I was born in France, I have drunk the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests." - from The Strange Defeat

Bloch's book, Strange Defeat (published posthumously), assesses the rapid failure of the French army to repel the German Blitzkrieg in 1940 and his personal view of his French heritage and obligation to his Nation. Bloch was captured just before the landing of Allied forces in Normandy; he was imprisoned, tortured and eventually shot along with twenty-six others by the Gestapo for his participation in the French Resistance.^[1]

Legacy

• Bloch's focus on the longue durée and his emphasis upon structures underlying events led to misguided accusations of a denial of human agency and a marginalization of political history. In Strange Defeat he clearly states his view that individuals can change events and he castigates the French government's refusal to trust its own officers in the field of battle, thus leading to the surrender of France to the Nazis.

• In 1998 the University of Social Sciences in Strasbourg was renamed in honour of Bloch. Marc Bloch University became a constituent part of the University of Strasbourg on 1 January 2009.

Works

• Feudal Society, Tr. L.A. Manyon, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); 2 volumes.
• French Rural History, tr. Janet Sondheimer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966). Translation of Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931. ISBN 0-520-01660-2
• The royal touch: sacred monarchy and scrofula in England and France (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
• Strange Defeat; a Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1949; New York: W. W. Norton, 1968) Original French text: ^[2]
• The Historian's Craft, Tr. Peter Putnam, (New York: Vintage Book, 1953) Original French text: ^[3]

References

1. ^ Forward, by Bryce Lyon, of French Rural History, X.
2. ^ Marc Bloch, historien français (1886-1944). L'Étrange défaite. Témoignage écrit en 1940. at classiques.uqac.ca
3. ^ http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bloch_marc/apologie_histoire/apologie_histoire.html

• Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge University Press, 1989) ISBN 0-521-40671-4
• H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation, 1930-1960 (1968)
• Joseph Lambie, ed., Architects and Craftsmen in History (1956)

External links

• Centre Marc Bloch (French)
• Université Marc Bloch (English)
• l'Association Marc Bloch (French)

v • d • e Annales School Historians First Generation Marc Bloch · Lucien Febvre Second Generation Fernand Braudel · Ernest Labrousse · Pierre Goubert · Georges Duby Third Generation Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie · Marc Ferro · Jacques Le Goff · Pierre Nora Concepts Longue durée · History of mentalities · History from below · New history

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