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. 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). His own ideas, especially those expressed in his masterworks, French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931) and Feudal Society were incorporated by the second-generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel. 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
• 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, Mark. Memoirs of War, 1914-1915 Cornell U. Press, 1980. 177 pp.