Marc Bloch

Marc Bloch (1886-1944), French historian, was the cofounder of the Annales School of French social history, and a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair. He studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure and became a professor at the university of Strassbourg, and was called to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history.

His memoir of the first days of the World War II, Strange Defeat, written in 1940 but not published until 1946, blamed French social and political culture for the defeat and helped after the war to neutralize the traumatic memory of France's defeat and by helping to build a new French identity.

Bloch joined the French Resistance in late 1942, driven by ardent patriotism, identification with his Jewish roots and a conception of France as champion of liberty. He was captured, tortured and shot by the Gestapo in 1944, and became a national martyr.

Bloch was highly interdiciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). With colleague Lucien Febvre he founded the Annales School in 1929, by founding the new scholarly journal, Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history"), which broke radically with traditional historiography by insisting on the importance of taking all levels of society into consideration and emphasized the collective nature of mentalities. Bloch's own ideas, were best expressed in his masterworks, French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931) and Feudal Society The November 1935 issue of the Annales contains Febvre's introduction that defines three essential approaches to a history of technology: to investigate technology, to understand the progress of technology, and to understand the relationship of technology to other human activities. Bloch's article, "The Advent and Triumph of the Watermill in Medieval Europe," incorporates these approaches by investigating the connections between technology and broader social issues.

Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities at the same time period as the psychological novel came of age is an oft-overlooked fact of his scholarship and one that is critical to an understanding of his contribution to 20th-century methodological developments. Stirling (2007) examines this essentially stylistic trait alongside Bloch's peculiarly quixotic idealism, which tempered and sometimes compromised his work through his hope for a truly cooperative model of historical inquiry. While humanizing and questioning him, Stirling gives credit to Bloch for helping to break through the monotonous methodological alternance between positivism and narrative history, creating a new, synthetic version of the historical practice that has since become so ingrained in the discipline that it is typically overlooked.

Bibliography

• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89, (1990), the major study in English excerpt and text search
• Fink, Carole. Marc Bloch: A Life in History, (1989) excerpt and text search
• Friedman, Susan W. Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (1996) excerpt and text search
• Morpeth, Neil. "Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat, the Historian's Craft and World War II: Writing and Teaching Contemporary History." European Legacy 2005 10(3): 179-195. Issn: 1084-8770 Fulltext: Ebsco
• Stirling, Katherine. "Rereading Marc Bloch: the Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist." History Compass 2007 5(2): 525-538. Issn: 1478-0542 Fulltext: History Compass

Primary sources

• Bloch, Marc. Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924) , translated as The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (1990), his doctoral dissertation
• Bloch, Marc. La Vie d'Outre-tombe du Roi Salomon (1925)
• Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth and Ties of Dependence (1989); Feudal Society: Vol 2: Social Classes and Political Organisation(1989) excerpt and text search
• Bloch, Marc. French Rural History an Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1972)
• Bloch, Marc. The Historian's Craft (1992)
• Bloch, Marc. Memoirs of War, 1914-1915 Cornell U. Press, 1980. 177 pp.
• Bloch, Marc. The Strange Defeat (1946), written between July and September of 1940 excerpt and text search