Marc Bloch | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | 16 June 1944 | (aged 57)
Cause of death | Execution by firing squad |
Resting place | Le Bourg-d'Hem |
Education | Lycée Louis-le-Grand |
Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure |
Occupation | Historian |
Spouse | Simonne Vidal |
Children | Alice and Étienne |
Military career | |
Allegiance | France |
Service/ | French Army |
Years of service | 1914–1918, 1939 |
Rank | Captain |
Awards | Legion of Honor War Cross (1914–1918) War Cross (1939–1945) |
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (/blɒk/; French: [maʁk leɔpɔld bɛ̃ʒamɛ̃ blɔk]; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944).
Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the École Normale Supérieure, and from an early age was affected by the antisemitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 and became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. There, he formed an intellectual partnership with modern historian Lucien Febvre. Together they founded the Annales School and began publishing the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929. 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.
During the Second World War Bloch volunteered for service, and was a logistician during the Phoney War. Involved in the Battle of Dunkirk and spending a brief time in Britain, he unsuccessfully attempted to secure passage to the United States. Back in France, where his ability to work was curtailed by new antisemitic regulations, he applied for and received one of the few permits available allowing Jews to continue working in the French university system. He had to leave Paris, and complained that the Nazi German authorities looted his apartment and stole his books; he was also forced to relinquish his position on the editorial board of Annales. Bloch worked in Montpellier until November 1942 when Germany invaded Vichy France. He then joined the French Resistance, acting predominantly as a courier and translator. In 1944, he was captured in Lyon and executed by firing squad. Several works—including influential studies like The Historian's Craft and Strange Defeat—were published posthumously.
His historical studies and his death as a member of the Resistance together made Bloch highly regarded by generations of post-war French historians; he came to be called "the greatest historian of all time".[1] By the end of the 20th century, historians were making a more sober assessment of Bloch's abilities, influence, and legacy, arguing that there were flaws to his approach.
Marc Bloch was born in Lyon on 6 July 1886,[2] one of two children[3] to Gustave[note 1] and Sarah Bloch,[3] née Ebstein.[5] Bloch's family were Alsatian Jews: secular, liberal and loyal to the French Republic.[6] They "struck a balance", says the historian Carole Fink, between both "fierce Jacobin patriotism and the antinationalism of the left".[7] His family had lived in Alsace for five generations under French rule. In 1871, France was forced to cede the region to Germany following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.[8][note 2] The year after Bloch's birth, his father was appointed professor of Roman History at the Sorbonne, and the family moved to Paris[10]—"the glittering capital of the Third Republic".[11] Marc had a brother, Louis Constant Alexandre,[5] seven years his senior. The two were close, although Bloch later described Louis as being occasionally somewhat intimidating.[3] The Bloch family lived at 72, Rue d'Alésia, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Gustave began teaching Marc history while he was still a boy,[3] with a secular, rather than Jewish, education intended to prepare him for a career in professional French society.[12] Bloch's later close collaborator, Lucien Febvre, visited the Bloch family at home in 1902;[3] although the reason for Febvre's visit is now unknown, he later wrote of Bloch that "from this fleeting meeting, I have kept the memory of a slender adolescent with eyes brilliant with intelligence and timid cheeks—a little lost then in the radiance of his older brother, future doctor of great prestige".[13]
Bloch's biographer Katherine Stirling ascribed significance to the era in which 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".[6][note 3] When Bloch was nine-years-old, the Dreyfus affair broke out in France. As the first major display of political antisemitism in Europe, it was probably a formative event of Bloch's youth,[15][note 4] along with, more generally, the atmosphere of fin de siècle Paris.[6] Bloch was 11 when Émile Zola published J'Accuse…!, his indictment of the French establishment's antisemitism and corruption.[17] Bloch was greatly affected by the Dreyfus affair, but even more affected was nineteenth-century France generally, and his father's employer, the École Normale Supérieure, saw existing divides in French society reinforced in every debate.[14] Gustave Bloch was closely involved in the Dreyfusard movement and his son agreed with the cause.[14]
Bloch was educated at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand for three years, where he was consistently head of his class and won prizes in French, history, Latin, and natural history.[3] He passed his baccalauréat, in Letters and Philosophy, in July 1903, being graded trés bien (very good).[18] The following year,[6] he received a scholarship[18] and undertook postgraduate study there for the École normale supérieure (ÉNS)[6] (where his father had been appointed maître de conferences in 1887).[19] His father had been nicknamed le Méga by his students at the ÉNS and the moniker Microméga was bestowed upon Bloch.[20][note 5] Here he was taught history by Christian Pfister[21] and Charles Seignobos, who led a relatively new school of historical thought which saw history as broad themes punctuated by tumultuous events.[6] Another important influence on Bloch from this period was his father's contemporary, the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who pre-figured Bloch's own later emphasis on cross-disciplinary research.[6] The same year, Bloch visited England; he later recalled being struck more by the number of homeless people on the Victoria Embankment than the new Entente Cordiale relationship between the two countries.[22]
The Dreyfus affair had soured Bloch's views of the French Army, and he considered it laden with "snobbery, anti-semitism and anti-republicanism".[23] National service had been made compulsory for all French adult males in 1905, with an enlistment term of two years.[24] Bloch joined the 46th Infantry Regiment based at Pithiviers from 1905 to 1906.[23]
By this time, changes were taking place in French academia. In Bloch's own speciality of history, attempts were being made at instilling a more scientific methodology. In other, newer departments such a sociology, efforts were made at establishing an independent identity.[25] Bloch graduated in 1908 with degrees in both geography and history (Davies notes, given Bloch's later divergent interests, the significance of the two qualifications).[4] He had a high respect for historical geography, then a speciality of French historiography,[26] as practised by his tutor Vidal de la Blache whose Tableau de la géographie Bloch had studied at the ÉNS,[27] and Lucien Gallois.[26] Bloch applied unsuccessfully for a fellowship at the Fondation Thiers.[28] As a result,[28] he travelled to Germany in 1909[4] where he studied demography under Karl Bücher in Leipzig and religion[21] under Adolf Harnack in Berlin;[4] he did not, however, particularly socialise with fellow students while in Germany.[20] He returned to France the following year and again applied to the Fondation, this time successfully.[28] Bloch researched the medieval Île-de-France[4] in preparation for his thesis.[10] This research was Bloch's first focus on rural history.[29] His parents had moved house and now resided at the Avenue d'Orleans, not far from Bloch's quarters.[30][note 6]
Bloch's research at the Fondation[note 7]—especially his research into the Capetian kings—laid the groundwork for his career.[33] He began by creating maps of the Paris area illustrating where serfdom had thrived and where it had not. He also investigated the nature of serfdom, the culture of which, he discovered, was founded almost completely on custom and practice.[30] His studies of this period formed Bloch into a mature scholar and first brought him into contact with other disciplines whose relevance he was to emphasise for most of his career. Serfdom as a topic was so broad that he touched on commerce, currency, popular religion, the nobility, as well as art, architecture, and literature.[30] His doctoral thesis—a study of 10th-century French serfdom—was titled Rois et Serfs, un Chapitre d'Histoire Capétienne. Although it helped mould Bloch's ideas for the future, it did not, says Bryce Loyn, give any indication of the originality of thought that Bloch would later be known for,[21] and was not vastly different to what others had written on the subject.[2] Following his graduation, he taught at two lycées,[21] first in Montpelier, a minor university town of 66,000 inhabitants.[34] With Bloch working over 16 hours a week on his classes, there was little time for him to work on his thesis.[34] He also taught at the University of Amiens.[4] While there, he wrote a review of Febvre's first book, Histoire de Franche-Comté.[35] Bloch intended to turn his thesis into a book, but the First World War intervened.[36][note 8]
Main article: First World War |
Both Marc and Louis Bloch volunteered for service in the French Army.[37] Although the Dreyfus Affair had soured Bloch's views of the French Army, he later wrote that his criticisms were only of the officers; he "had respect only for the men".[38] Bloch was one of over 800 ÉNS students who enlisted; 239 were to be killed in action.[39] On 2 August 1914[31] he was assigned to the 272nd Reserve Regiment.[35] Within eight days he was stationed on the Belgian border where he fought in the Battle of the Meuse later that month. His regiment took part in the general retreat on the 25th, and the following day they were in Barricourt, in the Argonne. The march westward continued towards the river Marne—with a temporary recuperative halt in Termes—which they reached in early September. During the First Battle of the Marne, Bloch's troop was responsible for the assault and capture of Florent before advancing on La Gruerie.[40] Bloch led his troop with shouts of "Forward the 18th!" They suffered heavy casualties: 89 men were either missing or known to be dead.[40] Bloch enjoyed the early days of the war;[31] like most of his generation, he had expected a short but glorious conflict.[31] Gustave Bloch remained in France, wishing to be close to his sons at the front.[37]
Except for two months in hospital followed by another three recuperating, he spent the war in the infantry;[31] he joined as a sergeant and rose to become the head of his section.[41] Bloch kept a war diary from his enlistment. Very detailed in the first few months, it rapidly became more general in its observations. However, says the historian Daniel Hochedez, 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.[41] The historian Rees Davies notes that although Bloch served in the war with "considerable distinction",[4] it had come at the worst possible time both for his intellectual development and his study of medieval society.[4]
For the first time in his life, Bloch later wrote, he worked and lived alongside people he had never had close contact with before, such as shop workers and labourers,[21] with whom he developed a great camaraderie.[42] It was a completely different world to the one he was used to, being "a world where differences were settled not by words but by bullets".[21] His experiences made him rethink his views on history,[43] and influenced his subsequent approach to the world in general.[44] He was particularly moved by the collective psychology he witnessed in the trenches.[45] He later declared he knew of no better men than "the men of the Nord and the Pas de Calais"[10] with whom he had spent four years in close quarters.[10][note 9] His few references to the French generals were sparse and sardonic.[46]
Apart from the Marne, Bloch fought at the battles of the Somme, the Argonne, and the final German assault on Paris. He survived the war,[47] which he later described as having been an "honour" to have served through.[41] He had, however, lost many friends and colleagues.[48] Among the closest of them, all killed in action, were: Maxime David (died 1914), Antoine-Jules Bianconi (died 1915) and Ernest babut (died 1916).[39] Bloch himself was wounded twice[35] and decorated for courage,[42] receiving the Croix de Guerre[49] and the Légion d'Honneur.[41] He had joined as a non-commissioned officer, received an officer's commission after the Marne,[50] and had been promoted to warrant officer[51] and finally a captain in the fuel service, (Service des essences) before the war ended.[20] He was clearly, says Loyn, both a good and a brave soldier;[52] he later wrote, "I know only one way to persuade a troop to brave danger: brave it yourself".[53]
While on front-line service, Bloch contracted severe arthritis which required him to retire regularly to the thermal baths of Aix-les-Bains for treatment.[47] He later remembered very little of the historical events he found himself in, writing only that his memories were[54][45] "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".[54] Bloch later described the war, in a detached style, as having been a "gigantic social experience, of unbelievable richness".[55] For example, he had a habit of noting the different coloured smoke that different shells made — percussion bombs had black smoke, timed bombs were brown.[31] He also remembered both the "friends killed at our side ... of the intoxication which had taken hold of us when we saw the enemy in flight".[10] He also considered it to have been "four years of fighting idleness".[31] Following the Armistice in November 1918, Bloch was demobilised on 13 March 1919.[31][56]
"Must I say historical or indeed sociological? Let us more simply say, in order to avoid any discussion of method, human studies. Durkheim was no longer there, but the team he had grouped around him survived him...and the spirit which animates it remains the same".[57]
Marc Bloch, review of L'Année Sociologique, 1923–1925
The war was fundamental in re-arranging Bloch's approach to history, although he never acknowledged it as a turning point.[2] In the years following the war, a disillusioned Bloch rejected the ideas and the traditions that had formed his scholarly training. He rejected the political and biographical history which up until that point was the norm,[58] along with what the historian George Huppert has described as a "laborious cult of facts" that accompanied it.[59] In 1920, with the opening of the University of Strasbourg,[60] Bloch was appointed chargé de cours[56] (assistant lecturer)[61] of medieval history.[4] Alsace-Lorraine had been returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles; the status of the region was a contentious political issue in Strasbourg, its capital, which had a large German population.[60] Bloch, however, refused to take either side in the debate; indeed, he appears to have avoided politics entirely.[56] Under Wilhelmine Germany, Strasbourg had rivalled Berlin as a centre for intellectual advancement, and the University of Strasbourg possessed the largest academic library in the world. Thus, says Stephan R. Epstein of the London School of Economics, "Bloch's unrivalled knowledge of the European Middle Ages was ... built on and around the French University of Strasbourg's inherited German treasures".[62][note 10] Bloch also taught French to the few German students who were still at the Centre d'Études Germaniques at the University of Mainz during the Occupation of the Rhineland.[56] He refrained from taking a public position when France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 over Germany's perceived failure to pay war reparations.[64]
Bloch began working energetically,[60] and later said that the most productive years of his life were spent at Strasbourg.[56] In his teaching, his delivery was halting. His approach sometimes appeared cold and distant—caustic enough to be upsetting[56]—but conversely, he could be also both charismatic and forceful.[60] Durkheim died in 1917, but the movement he began against the "smugness" that pervaded French intellectual thinking continued.[65] Bloch had been greatly influenced by him, as Durkheim also 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.[66]
At Strasbourg, he again met Febvre, who was now a leading historian[56] of the 16th century.[67] Modern and medieval seminars were adjacent to each other at Strasbourg, and attendance often overlapped.[56] Their meeting has been called a "germinal event for 20th-century historiography",[68] and they were to work closely together for the rest of Bloch's life. Febvre was some years older than Bloch and was probably a great influence on him.[69] They lived in the same area of Strasbourg[56] and became kindred spirits,[70] often going on walking trips across the Vosges and other excursions.[29]
Bloch's fundamental views on the nature and purpose of the study of history were established by 1920.[71] That same year he defended,[19] and subsequently published, his thesis.[4] It was not as extensive a work as had been intended due to the war.[72] There was a provision in French further education for doctoral candidates for whom the war had interrupted their research to submit only a small portion of the full-length thesis usually required.[29] It sufficed, however, to demonstrate his credentials as a medievalist in the eyes of his contemporaries.[29] He began publishing articles in Henri Berr's Revue de Synthèse Historique.[73] Bloch also published his first major work, Les Rois thaumaturges, which he later described as "ce gros enfant" (this big child).[74] In 1928, Bloch was invited to lecture at the Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in Oslo. Here he first expounded publicly his theories on total, comparative history:[43][note 11] "it was a compelling plea for breaking out of national barriers that circumscribed historical research, for jumping out of geographical frameworks, for escaping from a world of artificiality, for making both horizontal and vertical comparisons of societies, and for enlisting the assistance of other disciplines".[43]
His Oslo lecture, called "Towards a Comparative History of Europe",[20] formed the basis of his next book, Les Caractères Originaux de l'Histoire Rurale Française.[76] In the same year[77] he founded the historical journal Annales with Febvre.[4] One of its aims was to counteract the administrative school of history, which Davies says had "committed the arch error of emptying history of human element". As Bloch saw it, it was his duty to correct that tendency.[78] Both Bloch and Febvre were keen to refocus French historical scholarship on social rather than political history and to promote the use of sociological techniques.[77] The journal avoided narrative history almost completely.[67]
The inaugural issue of the Annales stated the editors' basic aims: to counteract the arbitrary and artificial division of history into periods, to re-unite history and social science as a single body of thought, and to promote the acceptance of all other schools of thought into historiography. As a result, the Annales often contained commentary on contemporary, rather than exclusively historical, events.[77] Editing the journal led to Bloch forming close professional relationships with scholars in different fields across Europe.[79] The Annales was the only academic journal to boast a preconceived methodological perspective. Neither Bloch nor Febvre wanted to present a neutral facade. During the decade it was published it maintained a staunchly left-wing position.[80] Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian who wrote comparative history, closely supported the new journal.[81] Before the war he had acted in an unofficial capacity as a conduit between French and German schools of historiography.[82] Fernand Braudel—who was himself to become an important member of the Annales School after the Second World War—later described the journal's management as being a chief executive officer—Bloch—with a minister of foreign affairs—Febvre.[83]
Utilizing comparative methodology allowed Bloch to discover instances of uniqueness within aspects of society,[84] and he advocated it as a new kind of history.[70] According to Bryce Lyon, Braudel and Febvre, "promising to perform all the burdensome tasks" themselves, asked Pirenne to become editor-in-chief of Annales to no avail. Pirenne remained a strong supporter, however, and had an article published in the first volume in 1929.[70] He became close friends with both Bloch and Febvre. He 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".[81] The three men kept up a regular correspondence until Pirenne's death in 1935.[70] In 1923, Bloch attended the inaugural meeting of the International Congress on Historical Studies (ICHS) in Brussels, which was opened by Pirenne. Bloch was a prolific reviewer for Annales, and during the 1920s and 1930s he contributed over 700 reviews. These included criticisms of specific works, but more generally, represented his own fluid thinking during this period. The reviews demonstrate the extent to which he shifted his thinking on particular subjects.[85]
In 1930, both keen to make a move to Paris, Febvre and Bloch applied to the École pratique des hautes études for a position: both failed.[86] Three years later Febvre was elected to the Collège de France. He moved to Paris, and in doing so, says Fink, became all the more aloof.[87] This placed a strain on Bloch's and his relations,[87] although they communicated regularly by letter and much of their correspondence is preserved.[88] In 1934, Bloch was invited to speak at the London School of Economics. There he met Eileen Power, R. H. Tawney and Michael Postan, among others. While in London, he was asked to write a section of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe; at the same time, he also attempted to foster interest in the Annales among British historians.[76][note 12] He later told Febvre in some ways he felt he had a closer affinity with academic life in England than that of France.[90] For example, in comparing the Bibliothèque Nationale with the British Museum, he said that[91]
A few hours work in the British [Museum] inspire the irresistible desire to build in the Square Louvois a vast pyre of all the B.N.'s regulations and to burn on it, in splendid auto-de-fé, Julian Cain [the director], his librarians and his staff...[and] also a few malodorous readers, if you like, and no doubt also the architect ... after which we could work and invite the foreigners to come and work".[91]
Isolated, each [historian] will understand only by halves, even within his own field of study, for the only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history'.[92]
Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft
During this period he supported the Popular Front politically.[93] Although he did not believe it would do any good, he signed Alain's—Émile Chartier's pseudonym—petition against Paul Boncour's Militarisation laws in 1935.[64][94] While he was opposed to the rise of European fascism, he also objected to attempting to counter the ideology through "demagogic appeals to the masses," as the Communist Party was doing.[64] Febvre and Bloch were both firmly on the left, although with different emphases. Febvre, for example, was more militantly Marxist than Bloch, while the latter criticised both the pacifist left and corporate trade unionism.[95]
In 1934, Étienne Gilson sponsored Bloch's candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France.[96] The college, says the historian Eugen Weber, was Bloch's "dream" appointment—although one never to be realised—as it was one of the few (possibly the only) institutions in France where personal research was central to lecturing.[97] Camille Jullian had died the previous year, and his position was now available. While he had lived, Julian had wished for his chair to go to one of his students, Albert Grenier, and after his death, his colleagues generally agreed with him.[97] However, Gilson proposed that not only should Bloch be appointed, but that the position be redesignated the study of comparative history. Bloch, says Weber, enjoyed and welcomed new schools of thought and ideas, but mistakenly believed the college should do so also; the college did not. The contest between Bloch and Grenier was not just the struggle for one post between two historians; it was also a struggle to determine which path historiography within the college would take for the next generation.[98] To complicate the situation further, the country was in both political and economic crises, and the college's budget was slashed by 10%. No matter who filled it, this made another new chair financially unviable. By the end of the year, and with further retirements, the college had lost four professors: it could replace only one, and Bloch was not appointed.[99] Bloch personally suspected his failure was due to antisemitism and Jewish quotas. At the time, Febvre blamed it on a distrust of Bloch's approach to scholarship by the academic establishment, although Epstein has argued that this could not have been an over-riding fear as Bloch's next appointment indicated.[76]
We sometimes clashed...so close to each other and yet so different. We threw our 'bad character' in each other's faces, after which we found ourselves more united than ever in our common hatred of bad history, of bad historians—and of bad Frenchmen who were also bad Europeans.[88]
Lucien Febvre
Henri Hauser retired from the Sorbonne in 1936, and his chair in economic history[50] was up for appointment.[100] Bloch—"distancing himself from the encroaching threat of Nazi Germany"[101]—applied and was approved for his position.[4] This was a more demanding position than the one he had applied for at the college.[67] Weber has suggested Bloch was appointed because unlike at the college, he had not come into conflict with many faculty members.[100] Weber researched the archives of the college in 1991 and discovered that 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. In a letter to the recruitment board written the same year, Bloch indicated that although he was not officially applying, he felt that "this kind of work (which he claimed to be alone in doing) deserves to have its place one day in our great foundation of free scientific research".[97] H. Stuart Hughes says of Bloch's Sorbonne appointment: "In another country, it might have occasioned surprise that a medievalist like Bloch should have been named to such a chair with so little previous preparation. In France it was only to be expected: no one else was better qualified".[29] His first lecture was on the theme of never-ending history, a process, a never-to-be-finished thing.[102] Davies says his years at the Sorbonne were to be "the most fruitful" of Bloch's career,[4] and according to Epstein he was by now the most significant French historian of his age.[79] In 1936, Friedman says he considered using Marx in his teachings, with the intention of bringing "some fresh air" into the Sorbonne.[64]
The same year, Bloch and his family visited Venice, where they were chaperoned by the Italian historian Gino Luzzatto.[103][note 13] During this period they were living in the Sèvres – Babylone area of Paris, next to the Hôtel Lutetia.[105]
By now, Annales was being published six times a year to keep on top of current affairs, however, its "outlook was gloomy".[80] In 1938, the publishers withdrew support and, experiencing financial hardship, the journal moved to cheaper offices, raised its prices, and returned to publishing quarterly.[106] Febvre increasingly opposed the direction Bloch wanted to take the journal. Febvre wanted it to be a "journal of ideas",[77] whereas Bloch saw it as a vehicle for the exchange of information to different areas of scholarship.[77]
By early 1939, war was known to be imminent. Bloch, in spite of his age, which automatically exempted him,[95] had a reserve commission for the army[29] holding the rank of captain.[47] He had already been mobilised twice in false alarms.[47] In August 1939, he and his wife Simonne intended to travel to the ICHS in Bucharest.[47] In autumn 1939,[47] just before the outbreak of war, Bloch published the first volume of Feudal Society.[4]
Main article: Marc Bloch in World War II |
Torn from normal behaviour and from normal expectations, suspended from history and from commonsense responses, members of a huge French army became separated for an indefinite period from their work and their loved ones. Sixty-seven divisions, lacking strong leadership, public support, and solid allies, waited almost three-quarters of a year to be attacked by a ruthless, stronger force.[47]
Carole Fink
On 24 August 1939, at the age of 53,[47] Bloch was mobilised for a third time.[47] He was responsible for the mobilisation of the French Army's massive motorised units[107] 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.[107] During the first few months of the war, called the Phoney War,[108][note 14] he was stationed in Alsace,[109] this time lacking the eager patriotism he had shown in the war.[9] He also evacuated civilians to behind the Maginot Line[110] and for a while he worked with British Intelligence.[111][note 15]
Bloch began but did not complete writing a history of France.[112][113] At one point he expected to be invited to neutral Belgium to deliver a series of lectures in Liège, on Belgian neutrality.[113] Some academics had escaped France for The New School in New York City, and the School also invited Bloch. He refused,[114] possibly because of difficulties in obtaining visas:[115] the US government would not grant visas to every member of his family.[116]
Main article: Fall of France |
In May 1940, the German army forced the French to withdraw.[67][117][118] Bloch fought at the Battle of Dunkirk in May–June 1940, being evacuated to England.[100] Although he could have remained in Britain,[119] he chose to return to France[67] because his family was still there.[119]
[120] To Bloch, France collapsed because her generals failed to capitalise on the best qualities humanity possessed—character and intelligence[121]—because of their own "sluggish and intractable" progress since the First World War.[108]
Two-thirds of France was occupied by Germany.[122] Bloch was demobilised soon after Philippe Pétain's government signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940 forming Vichy France.[123] Bloch received[124] a permit to work despite being Jewish.[87] This was probably due to Bloch's pre-eminence in the field of history.[115] He worked at several institutions[87] including Montpellier.[125] This, further south, was beneficial to his wife's health, which was in decline.[29] The dean of faculty at Montpellier was an antisemite[126] but who also disliked Bloch for having once given him a poor review.[126] The Vichy government was attempting to promote itself as a return to traditional French values.[127] Bloch condemned this as propaganda; the rural idyll that Vichy said it would return France to was impossible, he said, "because the idyllic, docile peasant life of the French right had never existed".[128]
It was during these bitter years of defeat, of personal recrimination, of insecurity that he wrote both the uncompromisingly condemnatory pages of Strange Defeat and the beautifully serene passages of The Historian's Craft.
Bloch's professional relationship with Febvre was also under strain. The Nazis wanted French editorial boards to be stripped of Jews in accordance with German racial policies; Bloch advocated disobedience, while Febvre was passionate about the survival of Annales at any cost.[93] He believed that it was worth making concessions to keep the journal afloat and to keep France's intellectual life alive.[129] Bloch, forced to accede, turned the Annales over to the sole editorship of Febvre, who then changed the journal's name to Mélanges d'Histoire Sociale. Bloch was forced to write for it under the pseudonym Marc Fougères.[93]
The Annalist historian André Burguière suggests Febvre did not really understand the position Bloch, or any French Jew, was in.[130] Already damaged by this disagreement, Bloch's and Febvre's relationship declined further when the former had been forced to leave his library and papers[115] in his Paris apartment following his move to Vichy. He had attempted to have them transported to his Creuse residence,[130] but the Nazis looted his rooms[105] and confiscated his library in 1942.[87] Bloch held Febvre responsible, believing he could have done more to prevent it.[87]
Bloch's mother had recently died, and his wife was ill; he faced daily harassment.[115] On 18 March 1941, Bloch made his will in Clermont-Ferrand.[131] The Polish social historian Bronisław Geremek suggests that this document hints at Bloch in some way foreseeing his death,[132] as he emphasised that nobody had the right to avoid fighting for their country.[133]
In November 1942 Germany occupied the territory previously under direct Vichy rule.[115] This was the catalyst for Bloch's decision to join the French Resistance[125] by March 1943.[125][101] Bloch had previously expressed the view that "there can be no salvation where there is not some sacrifice".[125] He sent his family away and returned to Lyon to join the underground,[115] although he found this difficult because of his age.[95] Bloch used his professional and military skills on their behalf, writing propaganda and organising supplies and materiel in the region.[115] Often on the move, Bloch used archival research as his excuse for travelling.[100] The journalist-turned-resistance fighter Georges Altman later told how he knew Bloch as, although originally "a man, made for the creative silence of gentle study, with a cabinet full of books" was now "running from street to street, deciphering secret letters in some Lyonaisse Resistance garret".[134] For the first time, suggests Lyon, Bloch was forced to consider the role of the individual in history, rather than the collective; perhaps by then even realising he should have done so earlier.[135][note 16]
Bloch was arrested at the Place de Pont, Lyon,[1] on 8 March 1944, and handed over to the Gestapo.[137] A radio transmitter and many papers were found in his apartment[1] and he was imprisoned in Montluc prison.[114] For being a strong Resistance associate, he was tortured, suffering beatings and ice-baths and his ribs and wrists were broken.[1] It was later claimed that he gave away no information to his interrogators, and while incarcerated taught French history to other inmates.[72]
In the meantime, the allies had invaded Normandy on 6 June 1944[72] and Nazis wanted to evacuate Vichy and "liquidate their holdings".[1] This meant disposing of as many prisoners as they could.[72] Between May and June 1944 the Nazi occupying forces shot around 700 prisoners.[72] Among those killed was Bloch,[114] on the night of[72] 16 June 1944.[101] In a field near Saint-Didier-de-Formans,[72] they were shot by the Gestapo in groups of four.[1] The bodies were discovered on 26 June.[1] For some time Bloch's death was merely a "dark rumour" until it was confirmed to Febvre.[88]
At Bloch's burial he acknowledged his Jewish ancestry while identifying foremost as a Frenchman.[138][note 17] According to his instructions, on his grave was to be carved his epitaph dilexi veritatem ("I have loved the truth").[139]