Marc Bloch

rdf:langString Marc Bloch

rdf:langString Marc Bloch

rdf:langString Marc Bloch

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rdf:langString Alice and Étienne

rdf:langString Historian

rdf:langString It was during these bitter years of defeat, of personal recrimination, of insecurity that he wrote both the uncompromisingly condemnatory pages of Strange Defeat and the beautifully serene passages of The Historian's Craft.

rdf:langString The microscope is a marvellous instrument for research; but a heap of microscopic slides does not constitute a work of art.

rdf:langString We sometimes clashed...so close to each other and yet so different. We threw our 'bad character' in each other's faces, after which we found ourselves more united than ever in our common hatred of bad history, of bad historians—and of bad Frenchmen who were also bad Europeans.

rdf:langString Torn from normal behaviour and from normal expectations, suspended from history and from commonsense responses, members of a huge French army became separated for an indefinite period from their work and their loved ones. Sixty-seven divisions, lacking strong leadership, public support, and solid allies, waited almost three-quarters of a year to be attacked by a ruthless, stronger force.

rdf:langString "Must I say historical or indeed sociological? Let us more simply say, in order to avoid any discussion of method, human studies. Durkheim was no longer there, but the team he had grouped around him survived him...and the spirit which animates it remains the same".

rdf:langString If we embark upon our reexamination of Bloch by viewing him as a novel and restless synthesizer of traditions that had previously seemed incommensurable, a more nuanced image than the traditionally held one emerges. Examined through this lens as a quixotic idealist, Bloch is revealed as the undogmatic creator of a powerful – and perhaps ultimately unstable – method of historical innovation that can most accurately be described as quintessentially modern.

rdf:langString Isolated, each [historian] will understand only by halves, even within his own field of study, for the only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history'.

rdf:langString For Bloch history was a series of answers, albeit incomplete and open to revision, to a series of intelligently posed questions.

rdf:langString Center

rdf:langString Marc Bloch

rdf:langString Lucien Febvre

rdf:langString Marc Bloch

rdf:langString R. R. Davies

rdf:langString Strange Defeat

rdf:langString The Historian's Craft

rdf:langString Marc Bloch, review of L'Année Sociologique, 1923–1925

rdf:langString Carole Fink

rdf:langString Katherine Stirling

rdf:langString Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft

rdf:langString Simonne Vidal

rdf:langString The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience. It is true that we emerged from the last war desperately tired, and that after four years not only of fighting but of mental laziness, we were only too anxious to get back to our proper employments...That is our excuse. But I have long ceased to believe that it can wash us clean of guilt.

rdf:langString Long have we worked together for a wider and more human history. Today our common task is threatened. Not by our fault. We are vanquished, for a moment, by an unjust destiny. But the time will come, I feel sure, when our collaboration can again be made public, and again be free. Meanwhile, it is in these pages filled with your presence that, for my part, our joint work goes on.

rdf:langString A few hours work in the British [Museum] inspire the irresistible desire to build in the Square Louvois a vast pyre of all the B.N.'s regulations and to burn on it, in splendid auto-de-fé, Julian Cain [the director], his librarians and his staff...[and] also a few malodorous readers, if you like, and no doubt also the architect ... after which we could work and invite the foreigners to come and work".

rdf:langString Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (/blɒk/; French: [maʁk leɔpɔld bɛ̃ʒamɛ̃ blɔk]; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944). Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the École Normale Supérieure, and from an early age was affected by the antisemitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 and became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. There, he formed an intellectual partnership with modern historian Lucien Febvre. Together they founded the Annales School and began publishing the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Bloch was a modernist in his historiographical approach, and repeatedly emphasised the importance of a multidisciplinary engagement towards history, particularly blending his research with that on geography, sociology and economics, which was his subject when he was offered a post at the University of Paris in 1936. During the Second World War Bloch volunteered for service, and was a logistician during the Phoney War. Involved in the Battle of Dunkirk and spending a brief time in Britain, he unsuccessfully attempted to secure passage to the United States. Back in France, where his ability to work was curtailed by new antisemitic regulations, he applied for and received one of the few permits available allowing Jews to continue working in the French university system. He had to leave Paris, and complained that the Nazi German authorities looted his apartment and stole his books; he was also forced to relinquish his position on the editorial board of Annales. Bloch worked in Montpellier until November 1942 when Germany invaded Vichy France. He then joined the French Resistance, acting predominantly as a courier and translator. In 1944, he was captured in Lyon and executed by firing squad. Several works—including influential studies like The Historian's Craft and Strange Defeat—were published posthumously. His historical studies and his death as a member of the Resistance together made Bloch highly regarded by generations of post-war French historians; he came to be called "the greatest historian of all time". By the end of the 20th century, historians were making a more sober assessment of Bloch's abilities, influence, and legacy, arguing that there were flaws to his approach.