“Marc Bloch is the historian with a capital H coupled with a total man, committed to the point of paying for it with his life. The citizen and his work bear witness to the importance of action in the defense of freedom, and first of all that of thinking. A topical message to inspire generations. »
Like so many other intellectuals, the historian Joël Cornette, specialist in the monarchy (1), greets with emotion the upcoming entry into the Pantheon of his illustrious predecessor, announced on November 23 by President Macron as part of the commemorations around the 80 years of the Liberation of France.
A tribute which is first nourished by the personal memory of reading the Miracle kings (1924), the master’s flagship book which helped to anchor his vocation. “As a student, I was dazzled by his fluid and simple style for tackling a profound subject. The work, which offers an analysis of the healer king with an anthropological approach to politics, went almost unnoticed at the time. Until the general public rediscovered this innovative work in the 1980s thanks to the great medievalist Jacques Le Goff. he remembers.
Opening the field of History
This new way of writing History, Professor Bloch will definitively anchor it in the French and global intellectual landscape with the creation, in 1929, of the journal of Annals of economic and social history, which he co-founded with Lucien Febvre, his colleague at the University of Strasbourg where he taught from 1919 to 1936.
“The revolution that he inaugurates takes History out of the narrow field of events to open it to the slow and profound movements of society, by multiplying sources and by calling on other social disciplines, in particular economy whose driving role was shown by the crisis of the 1930s”underlines Joël Cornette. A method that he will apply to his two following works, which have become essential: The original characters of French rural history (1931) et Feudal society (1939-1940).
To this already considerable legacy is added the testimony of a life marked by commitment and courage. Born on July 6, 1886 in Lyon to a non-practicing Jewish Alsatian family, Marc Bloch was involved in all the struggles that darkened Europe in the first half of the 20th century. “Hairy” of the 1914-18 war, anti-fascist in the 1930s, he was mobilized again in 1939, at his request, when he was 53 years old, six children and a debilitating illness.
The Republican Faith of an Atheist
From the French rout, he draws The strange defeatwritten in 1940 but which would not be published until 1946 after his death. “A book of immediate history which outlines the spirituality of this atheist who could be described as a republican faith”summarizes Joël Cornette. A passion that led him to join the Lyon Resistance until going underground at the end of 1942.
Arrested on March 8, 1944 by the Gestapo, he was interned in Montluc prison, tortured and shot in the back like 29 other comrades on the evening of June 16, 1944. In 1977, his ashes were transferred to the family vault in the Bourg cemetery. -d’Hem (Creuse). “He loved the truth” – “I cherished the truth” – are the two words engraved as an epitaph. We can now add “To the great man, the grateful homeland”.
(1) Author of Anne of Austriato be published in 2025 by Gallimard.
