The Death Of Marc Bloch
How the French Historian Became Part of History
Word War II was filled with stories of everyday heroism in the face of Nazi barbarism. Some of these stories are widely known. Perhaps most famous, due to the masterful film accounting for his life during the Holocaust, was Oskar Schindler, he of the list-making. Another is Sophie Scholl, executed by the Nazis for resisting their violent totalitarianism, valiant and fearless to her last moment. As with all moments in history where people are compelled against their will to reckon with dark forces such as the Nazi regime, the period between 1933 and 1945 has so many it will take endless lifetimes to record them all.
One such life was the life of French historian Marc Bloch. Within the historical community, Bloch is a titan. He was a medievalist, meaning he studied the era after the fall of Rome through the Renaissance, especially as it concerned his homeland France, but contributed changes to the DNA of historiography still felt in the study to this day.
Bloch was the son of a prominent French historian, Gustave Bloch, a scholar of the classical era at the Sorbonne in Paris. The Blochs were Jewish and originally from Alsace. They left Alsace after the Franco-Prussian war, emigrating to Paris, and settling comfortably in with the bourgeois French intellectuals of Paris. Marc Bloch grew up in comfort and around the presence of some of the most exceptional academics of the day.
Bloch was on his way to joining the family trade as a medieval historian when fate threw the apocalyptic nightmare of the First World War at him. Like so many millions of his countrymen, Bloch was called up in the fall of 1914 to serve on the front in the French army. Bloch spent the entire war on the front, excluding brief respites for recovery from typhoid fever and the small breaks afforded soldiers, and acquitted himself admirably. Bloch was much older at the time than many of the young who made up the bulk of the armed forces. At 28, he was not in a military sense a spring chicken, but his historian’s eye and sharp observational skills allowed him to end his career as a Captain. He received numerous medals, such as the Légion ďhonneur, and had a chest full of pins indicating the wounds he had received on the front. Ironically, the knowledge of those wounds would aid him in the last moments of his life.
After he was demobilized from active service with the French army in the spring of 2019, Marc Bloch threw himself into life once again. He was rewarded his doctorate and wrote and published a prodigious amount of historical writing. All the more remarkable, Bloch published competently in several languages. Nothing seemed to slow the tiny titan down-Bloch was a diminutive 5’5’’ and plain-looking with receding hair and round glasses on a curious round face.
Bloch’s most famous intellectual partnership was with the historian Lucian Febvre. Together, they founded the influential historical journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, Annales for short, from which rose the Annales school of historical study. Bloch and Febvre believed, along with others, that history needed studying bottom up and in an interdisciplinary fashion. As Bloch once observed, a historian cannot write about a farmer unless he knew what it was like to pull the plow. Annales was popular for several years, as was its unique approach to historical study. Eventually, publisher support for the journal dried up, but Bloch and Febvre remained committed to the philosophy.
Bloch’s academics once again became the victim of war. The Nazi Blitzkrieg was set to roll over Europe. Once again, Bloch was mobilized in the French army. Bloch was an ardent French republican, but the events of the interwar years left a bitter taste in his mouth, and the fifty-three-year-old professor was not the valiant soldier of his youth. Nevertheless, Bloch once again performed his duties as a petrol supply officer for France’s mechanized forces well. During his time before the fall of France, he wrote as regularly as he could, including what would become an influential posthumous text, The Historian’s Craft.
Germany overran the French, and Bloch fled under perilous circumstances, fighting and hiding along the way. He fought and participated in the evacuation at Dunkirk, making it to England. Fatefully, he returned immediately to France to reunite with his family. This, and a declined invitation from the New School in New York City, sealed Bloch’s fate as a Jew in Nazi-controlled France.
The occupation years were times of great frustration for Marc Bloch. His partnership with Febvre came under increased strain. Bloch had obtained one of only ten Jewish work permits given to university scholars in Nazi-occupied France. However, his daily life was made miserable by the open anti-Semitism of the academy chiefs, and the increasing oppressiveness of Nazi demands that Jewish influence be removed from French intellectual life. Febvre and Bloch battled over the preservation of Annales. Febvre felt the journal must be kept alive at all costs, including the removal of Bloch as a named editor if his Jewish heritage was a roadblock, while Block felt it was not his duty to give in to these foolish demands. Ultimately, Bloch acceded to Febvre’s desires and published in the Annales under a pen name.
In late 1942, compelled by “Case Anton,” the Nazi occupation of Vichy France, Marc Bloch resolved to join the French resistance. Despite initial setbacks due to his age, Bloch jumped wholeheartedly into his role. He utilized his years as a military man and his skills as an academic to aid the Lyon area resistance with logistics and propaganda. The little harmless professor moved about Lyon with notebooks of coded information. He used his position as a historian to free up his travels, claiming archival research.
Unfortunately, the walls closed in on Bloch. The Vichy Milice, a paramilitary arm of Vichy France designed to counter resistance efforts, picked up Bloch during a roundup in the Spring of 1944. “Maurice Blanchard,” as Bloch was going by at the time, was handed over to Karl Barbie, head of the Lyon Gestapo, also known as the “Butcher of Lyon.” After finding the artifacts of his resistance efforts in his apartment, Bloch was imprisoned in Montluc prison. There, he was tortured frequently, and his wife also perished during his imprisonment. In typical Bloch fashion, between torture sessions, Bloch taught French history to the other inmates.
In June, the Allies invaded France, and the Germans were eager to “liquidate their holdings,” and Karl Barbie began to secure his place in history. Over seven hundred were massacred. Among them was Marc Bloch.
The Death of Marc Bloch was as remarkable in its touching humanity as was his life in its scope. Bloch took time in his last moments to comfort a young man, believed to be around sixteen years of age, weeping and worried if the bullets would hurt.
Bloch, who knew the pain of the bullet from his service in the First World War, gripped the boy tightly and reassured him, “don’t be afraid, it doesn’t hurt. It will happen fast.”
Soon after, Bloch and twenty-five others were executed in a field outside Les Roussilles. Karl Barbie would not answer for his crimes until 1987, when a French court in Lyon, France sentenced him to life imprisonment, where he died four years later. Lucian Febvre carried the torch of Bloch’s academic legacy, publishing his posthumous work as much as he could. Marc Bloch is considered one of the most influential historians to have ever lived.
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