What is a great man? With each pantheonization, the Republic provides a new answer to this delicate question, completes the portrait composed of the “great departed lying in the Pantheon”, as Brassens sang and adds new elements to a definition still pending. So the “great man” of today is not that of yesterday, nor that of tomorrow. Some are also not far from thinking that our present has ceased to produce this type of figure.
What is the “great man” Marc Bloch made of? What does it tell us about our passions, our aspirations, even our more or less hidden desires and our disappointments? We will perhaps be surprised that such a dated scholar, whose seriousness and rigor emerge from the few photographs in circulation, unknown to the general public, occupies such a space today.
The mechanisms of production of contemporary glory, even when it concerns intellectuals, have accustomed us to more spectacular.
Intellectual hygiene
It is true that the French people are attributed, not without some reason, a pronounced taste for history. Thus our compatriots discover a historian whose ways of “doing history” contrast with the usual representations of the discipline. A living story, certainly, but demanding in that it demands the most uncompromising respect for scientific rules.
This rapprochement between a scholarly history, which has established itself in a large part of the international scientific community, and the general public bodes well. Many people will discover a history that loathes political instruments, whatever the causes served.
Marc Bloch should arouse their distrust of all those who claim to rely on a historical novel rather than on history to defend their theses. This intellectual hygiene is good in times where confusionism reigns supreme.
A man of strong convictions, a patriotic republican close to socialism, who agreed to sacrifice his life in defense of the idea he had of his country, Bloch always knew how to preserve the quest for the “truth” that he cherished from any ideological encroachment.
Here we perhaps recognize the “positivist” that some may have criticized him for having been, deploring this restraint made of integrity that he himself may have regretted in the last pages of his great book The Strange Defeat where he analyzed the serious failures which had led his country to the collapse of 1940.
“Scientific” analyzes of contemporary society
Shouldn’t this course of action be meditated on in tormented times, ours, where knowledge is threatened by hostile forces who aspire to domesticate it? Scientists will never defend themselves as well as by ceding none of their intellectual autonomy, by refusing any submission even to the causes they have the right to embrace.
Bloch’s intellectual rigor is also a political lesson. She is in no way indifferent to her times. When he got closer to the Socialist Party, in the first years of the 20th century, he did so in the manner of the scholar that he already was, he, the young normalien, history graduate, close to fellow students enthusiastically launching into the founding of a new science: sociology.
It was with them, often disciples of Émile Durkheim, members or close to the Socialist Party, that Marc Bloch traveled. Their commitment to socialism, however, aimed first and foremost to provide it with “scientific” analyzes of contemporary society on which emancipatory political responses could be based. None of them thought of pursuing any political career or even of exposing themselves to the heat of the political arena. Marc Bloch less than any other.
Political lucidity
Neither indifference nor activism, such was the line followed by Marc Bloch throughout his short life broken by the supreme commitment which led him to his tragic death. His intellectual companion, Lucien Febvre, a head friend more than a heart friend, had followed another path, more in touch with political territory. He even scolded his accomplice at Annales, a magazine that they had both founded in 1929, too cautious according to him because he was reluctant to sign all the petitions that were overflowing between the wars, although Bloch sometimes resolved to do so.
The Popular Front of 1936 did not, however, make him an ardent activist, even if he very quickly perceived the international shift that had been taking place since Hitler’s arrival in power. Febvre was more involved. However, when the time for big choices came, Bloch did not shy away. Not all of the petition signatories were present at this meeting. That’s the least we can say.
We cannot separate Bloch’s political lucidity and even his courage from the intellectual demands and projects that he had been developing since the beginning of the 20th century. Promoting a new way of doing history but also of teaching it against a University not very open to innovations called for energy and tenacity which were already like the outline of courage.
The sacrosanct truth
In his life as an intellectual, Bloch never gave up defending the new ideas he forged. Candidate for the Collège de France in 1934, he could not help but enter into a controversy with the economist François Simiand, one of the voters of the prestigious establishment. In his countless reviews of works, he sometimes did not spare his friends and even praised the scientific interest of the work of German historians who nevertheless rallied to Nazism.
Always in the name of respect for the sacrosanct truth to which he had decided to devote his life. This strength of character put in the service of truth is undoubtedly the trait which does not make us doubt that Marc Bloch can enter today into the category of “great men”. It is not impossible that it is very lacking in our times.
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