The Historian and the Pantheon
Marc Bloch, in First World War French uniformBorn to a family of French Jewish intellectuals from Alsace, Bloch was early promised to a brilliant academic career. Yet that destiny became fatally entwined with that of heroism when he answered his country's call to arms in 1914.
Earning the War Cross and Legion of Honor for selfless acts of service in the Great War, he also volunteered in 1939 to put his life on the line once more for his country, in spite of his 53 years and incapacitating chronic pain.
In between times he had penned a seminal work of medieval history, and then history full stop. The Royal touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France changed how we understand the medieval past. It was in these years as well that he co-founded the Annales journal and school of thought, paving the way for present avenues of the historical enquiry, through to today and well beyond.
Then came the Strange Defeat as he called his posthumously published work, penned from July to September 1940, after the Nazis had marched triumphantly into Paris. He'd had a first row seat to the debacle. Its cause lay in irresposible leaders still fighting the last war according to a top-down authoritarian hierarchy, while a fragmented civil population were not taught critical thinking.
The Vichy government, collaborating with Nazi ideas of "race", excluded Bloch from teaching (exceptionally allowed briefly back). So he wrote, as he could, Apology for History or The Historian's Craft as he could, with few notes and fewer books, all left behind him in fleeing to "Free France" across the southern line of demarcation.
He appealed to the US to move his family there and was met with refusal, much as did Otto Frank in his attempts to save his wife Edith, and daughters Margot and Anne. We know now that quotas of Jewish immigrants were imposed in the US, grounded in blatantly anti-semitic policy.
In 1943 the Nazis overran the whole of the country leaving him nowhere to go but into hiding and into the Resistance. Kindly silver-haired and bespectacled, he became "M. Blanchard," hardly fitting anyone's idea of what the Occupant called "Terroristen." In a year's time he gained a reputation amongst the Lyon Resistance cells for inspiring others as well as a shrewd, acute analysis of strategy and tactic.
As his stature grew, so did his knowledge of other cells and contacts, until, a year later, one amongst them betrayed him. He was arrested by a French Gestapo collaborator. Tortured for three months in the Ecole de Santé Militaire and the Montluc Prison, run by the infamous Klaus "The Butcher of Lyon" Barbie, Bloch gave away nothing of interest, held firm in the face of brutal, sadistic interrogation techiques that broke many.
While Bloch did not live to tell what specifically he experienced ... "A surviving female resistant, Lise Lesevre, recalled that Barbie had tortured her for nine days, beating her, hanging her up in spiked handcuffs, ordering her to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water and then half-drowning her, and finally beating her with a rubber baton and a form of mace–a spiked ball attached to a chain, which shattered a vertebra and left her in pain for the rest of her life. Bloch was subjected to similar interrogations at least twice, and he spent four weeks in the infirmary recovering from his second encounter with Barbie. His ailments—he was suffering from double bronchial pneumonia and serious contusions—suggest prolonged exposure to the ice-bath treatments and the rubber club described by Leserve."
A few witnesses were able to relay: "[He was} bleeding from the mouth (this bloodstained gash in place of that mischievous smile he had last bestowed me on a street corner just before the horror had occurred). . ." while another saw him "covered in bruises, breathing with difficulty (…) left for dead, soaking wet on the icy floor of a cell at the military health centre."
And yet despite his state, he taught the history of France to other political prisoners "to pass the time," conveying to the last his attachment to the land of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Finally he was brought before a firing squad on the 16th of June 1944, ten days after the Allied Landing. As the soldiers took aim in an isolated field outside of Lyon, he looked to a trembling 16 year old. "It's going to hurt" said the youngster. Bloch took his arm and replied "No, my boy, it doesn't hurt."
82 years later the Pantheon received his cenotaph.
The far right wing Rassemblement National, originally founded by former Waffen SS members, tried to muscle in,, but were forbidden by the Bloch family descendants. Other representatives of the far right still made an appearance, trying to recuperate the heritage of this hero and rebrand themselves as acceptable elements of the French political landscape.
We would do well to take the lessons of Strange Defeat to heart.
Bibliography
Marc Bloch
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940. Translated by Hopkins, G. London: Cumberlege. Bloch, M. (1963).
The Historian's Craft: Introduced by Joseph R. Strayer, Translated by P. Putnam,, New York: Knopf, 1953
The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England, translated by J.E. Anderson, 1973 Routledge Revivals, Dorset Press
Mike Dash, "History Heroes: Marc Bloch," Smithsonian Magazine, November 10, 2011
Carol Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History, Cambridge University Press, 1989
Stéphanie Trouillard, "France inducts Resistance fighter, soldier, historian Marc Bloch into its Panthéon of greats," France 24, 23, June 2026
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