Year XXXVIII, Number 1, March 2025

Robert Belot
Historian, holder of the HistEuropa Jean Monnet binomial at the
University of Saint-Étienne, member of the UEF Scientific Council.

On Saturday November 23, 2024, President Emmanuel Macron decided to transfer the ashes of historian Marc Bloch to the Pantheon, “for his work, his teaching and his courage”.

Eighty years ago, on March 8, 1944, Marc Bloch was arrested by the Gestapo. Tortured on the premises of the École de santé militaire, he was incarcerated in the Montluc prison. On June 16, 1944, he was extracted from this prison that had seen so many Resistance fighters pass through, including Jean Moulin. Along with 29 other prisoners, he was taken during the night to Saint-Didier-de- Formans, 30 km from Lyon. All were shot down by the Germans. One of the best historians of his generation, known the world over, disappears. Totalitarian ideologies condemn those they fear: intellectuals, men of knowledge and conviction.

Elements of Marc Bloch's office furniture are now on display at the Centre d'histoire de la résistance et de la déportation (Lyon).A great Resistance fighter, Marc Bloch was also a great historian. He founded the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929 with his fellow traveler Lucien Febvre. It was a revolution in the way history was made.

But what is less well known, and not mentioned by the French president, is that he was also, in the words of Lucien Febvre, a “Great European”. Here's how Febvre summed up their affinities: “We sometimes clashed, so close to each other and so different. We'd throw our bad character back in each other's faces; then we'd meet again, more united than ever in our shared hatred of bad history, of the bad French who were also bad Europeans.” Marc Bloch was one of the first historians to raise the question of France's relationship with Europe and the existence of a “European identity”. Yet this dimension of his personality is generally overlooked. This is what I would like to highlight on this occasion.

Everything about him led him to this European commitment: his experience of war, his rejection of nationalism, his research as a historian. But who was he? Where did he come from? Marc Bloch was born in Lyon in 1886, into an Alsatian Jewish family. His father, Gustave Bloch, was a professor of history and Greco-Roman antiquities at Lyon's Faculty of Letters. A brilliant student, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1904 and passed the agrégation in history in 1908. He studied in Germany, in Berlin and Leipzig, to discover the country and its historians. He studied with Karl Bücher, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Wundt. He opened up to new methods and research, and began to build up an international network.

Back in France, from 1912 to 1914, he taught history and geography at the lycées in Montpellier and Amiens. On July 17, 1914, he gave a prize-giving speech. He quotes Thucydides (460-400 BC), who sums up the historian's struggle to find the truth: “Most men, plutoth to seek the truth, which is indifferent to them, prefer to adopt the opinions which are bordered to them”. In the age of post-truths, fake news and the so-called “social” networks that propagate them, this message takes on an enlightening topicality. It sums up the eternal tension between Knowledge and Opinion.

His wartime experience, alas, provided him with an opportunity to study the logic behind the production of “fake news” by public opinion. Mobilized on August 2, 1914 as an infantry sergeant, he ended the war as a captain. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre (4 commendations) and the Légion d'honneur. For Marc Bloch, it's the present that helps us understand the past, rather than the other way around. Without fear of paradox, he explained that France's defeat in 1940 was primarily due to the fact that “we were thinking late”. Like his friend Lucien Febvre, he saw history as “the science of the present”. He liked to quote a Chinese proverb: “Man is the son of his time as well as of his father.” This is the revolution that both of them introduced into historical research. But this revolution is not only

by an epistemological concern. It expresses an attention to the problems of the moment and an ethical and civic requirement. His commitment to the Resistance is rooted here.

From his experience of the war, he drew a reflection that still retains all its relevance. It is an article published in 1921 in the Revue de synthèse historique: “Réflexions d'un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre” (“Reflections of a historian on the false news of war”). To understand the mechanism of “false news”, he turned to a new discipline: psychology: “Historians have followed with the keenest interest the progress made in recent years by the psychology of testimony. This science is still in its infancy. Marc Bloch formulates a few interpretative models: “Fake news is always born of collective representations that pre-exist its birth; it is fortuitous only in appearance, or, more precisely, all that is fortuitous about it is the initial incident, absolutely unspecified, that triggers the work of the imaginations.” The key to understanding “collective psychology

The “sovereigntists” of yesterday and today are unaware of Marc Bloch's provocative theorem, which explains that all scales are interlocked and intertwined in historical reality: “There is no history of France. There is only a history of Europe. To complicate matters, he adds: “There is no history of Europe, there is a history of the world.

With regard to Europe, he is convinced that it stems from an “incontestable unity” that is the product of history: “The European world, as European, is a creation of the Middle Ages, which, almost at the same time, broke the unity (...) of Mediterranean civilization. (...) Then Europe was born, in the human sense of the word...”. Europe was thus born as a result of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, which “de-Mediterraneanized”, so to speak, the countries north of the Mediterranean Sea. This was also the thesis of his Belgian colleague, Henri Pirenne. that can be summed up in a simple formula: “It's easy to believe what you need to believe”. How can we better define the logic of the conspiracy theories that are invading our cyber environment today? Simplifying, unifying and mobilizing, like “national novels”.

In 1919, he was appointed lecturer in medieval history at the University of Strasbourg, now French again, and from 1927 held the chair of medieval history. In 1936, he moved to Paris and the Sorbonne. In 20 years, he published 4 major works: in 1920, his doctoral thesis : Rois et Serfs; in 1924 Les Rois thaumaturges; in 1927 Les Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française; in 1939 La société féodale

It was in Strasbourg that he met Lucien Febvre. In 1929, the two of them founded the “Annales d'histoire économique et sociale” (Annals of Economic and Social History), which had a threefold ambition: to move away from event-based and political history; to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to study the complexity of societies and “mentalities”; and not to confine itself to the national framework. In an article published in 1928, he made the following appeal: “In a word, let's stop, if you please, talking eternally from national history to national history, without understanding each other. A dialogue of the deaf...”.

That same year, Marc Bloch applied to the Collège de France, where Lucien Febvre was already working. The title was quite a program: “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes” (“For a comparative history of European societies”). He wanted Europe to become a legitimate object of historical research, which was totally new for the time, and he wanted to show that there were “synchronous societies” in Europe, “stemming from one, or at least several, common sources”. So new that his application was rejected. He tried again in 1934, but failed again. Here's how he presents the importance of his proposal:

“By its very nature, and because there is as yet no equivalent (teaching) abroad, it would undoubtedly prove capable of extending its influence beyond our borders. Today, however, it cannot be conceived within the rigid confines of our universities. That's why it seemed natural to me to propose its creation to a house that traditionally welcomes scientific innovation.

But Marc Bloch liked to warn against what he called “the idol of origin”. Europe's genetics are so complex that it is difficult to create a simplifying, unifying and mobilizing narrative, like the “national novels”. This is where the difficulty lies in making people understand that Europe, which is a historical being and a social project, is nothing without the nations that make it up, and that nations do not exist outside this framework.

He was to experience the worst of Europe, the Nazi-fascist Europe that had denied the humanist heritage of its history.On August 23, 1939, he volunteered to take part in the evacuation of Dunkirk. After the defeat, it was the turn of the Vichy regime to deny France's republican heritage. The status of the Jews (October 1940) excluded him from the Sorbonne.

The Germans looted his library and research notes, and requisitioned his Paris apartment: 17 rue de Sèvres. His books were sent to Germany in 1942, in accordance with a Rosenberg directive that applied to the property of non-Aryans.

Fortunately, in January 1941, he was “relieved of disqualification” for “exceptional scientific services rendered to the French State”. Marc Bloch resumed teaching in January 1941, at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Strasbourg, which had retreated to Clermont-Ferrand. He decided not to leave for the United States, although he had received an invitation from the New School of Social Research, a prestigious university founded in New York in 1919. Taking shelter in a time of extreme peril was not compatible with his moral universe.

Transferred to the Faculty of Letters in Montpellier, he was dismissed on March 15, 1943. Involved in the Combat movement, he joined the Franc-Tireur resistance movement after meeting Georges Altman. And we soon saw,” recounts G. Altman, the Sorbonne professor share with astonishing phlegm the exhausting life of 'street dogs' that was the underground Resistance in our cities”. A committed intellectual, he contributed to the debate on what France and Europe should be like after the war through Cahiers politiques (created by Comité général d'Études, an organ of the Conseil national de la Résistance) and La Revue libre, published by Franc-Tireur. He writes a fundamental article: “Reforming the school”.

In Lyon, he takes part in the national leadership of the MUR (Mouvements unis de Résistance), an attempt to reunite Resistance movements initiated by Henri Frenay. His mission was strategic: to set up regional Liberation Committees and prepare the “insurrection plan for the Lyon region”. It was in this context that he was arrested by the Gestapo. His clandestine activities did not prevent him from writing. He wrote an Apologie pour l'histoire or Métier d'historien. He warns young historians against the myth of the single cause: “Let us beware, moreover: the superstition of the single cause, in history, is too often only the insidious form of the search for the person responsible: hence, of the value judgment. Whose fault, or whose merit? says the judge. The scholar “simply asks Why? and accepts that the answer is not simple”.

He fought against both “cause monism” and “the idol of origins”: both sources of what we would today call cognitive biases that stand in the way of knowledge.

Finally, against the prejudices that are the source of intolerance and dogmatism, he appealed for modesty: “A historian must not simply say: this is how the

things have happened. But: here's how and why I know; to what extent I don't know.”Also during the war, he was both an actor and an “observer of his time”. He wrote his best-known work: L'Étrange défaite. It was published posthumously in 1946 by Franc-Tireur. Marc Bloch denounced a weak regime that had led to catastrophe:

“Our ministers and assemblies undoubtedly prepared us poorly for war. The high command, no doubt, did little to help them. But nothing, precisely, betrays a government's softness more bluntly than its capitulation to the technicians. This regime was therefore weak.

He does not hesitate to stigmatize outdated military strategists: The teaching of history by the military was totally inadequate, for “to the leaders of 1914, he persuaded that the war of 1914 would be that of Napoleon; to the leaders of 1939 that the war of 1939 would be that of 1914...”. For him, “this teaching was not history. It was, in truth, the antithesis of the science it claimed to represent”. Mentalities were not ready to accept that history is not the science of the past, but the “science of change”.

He died leaving a draft History of France in the context of European civilization. As Lucien Febvre summed it up so well: “Marc Bloch, a great Frenchman, because good and a great European, thought with Michelet that it's not too much for the whole of Europe to write the history of France”.