The March of the World – Marc Bloch at the Panthéon, combatant historian of the present time

A pioneer of modern history, a witness to his own time, Marc Bloch is a veteran of the First World War, volunteering in 1940 at the age of 53. The fighting historian entered the active resistance in 1943 within the Franc-Tireur movement in the Rhône-Alpes region. Finally arrested and tortured by the Gestapo upon denunciation, Marc Bloch was shot in Saint-Didier-de-Formans on June 16, 1944, by the Nazis.

Loving father and husband, husband of Simonne, Marc Bloch chose to sacrifice his life for the Fatherland, the one that his Alsatian Jewish family chose in 1870: France.

For his entry into the Pantheon with his wife Simonne Vidal, we listen to the words of Marc Bloch in the voice of the actress Anne Alvaro – recorded at the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire de Blois 2025 – with our guests Matis Bloch, his great-grandson and the historian Annette Becker, as well that the winners of the Franco-German Marc Bloch High School Competition organized by the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin in a report by Pascal Thibault, our correspondent in Germany.

With all our thanks to Blois History meeting for the performance Marc Bloch the Man, the Historian and particularly to the actress Anne Alvaro.

 

â–º Marc Bloch’s books cited in the show :

• A Historian’s Reflections on Fake War News, published by Dunod

« Fake news, in all the multiplicity of its forms – simple gossip, impostures, legends – has filled the life of humanity. How are they born? From what elements do they draw their substance? How do they spread, gaining momentum as they pass from mouth to mouth or from writing to writing? No question more than these deserves to fascinate anyone who likes to think about history. »

Marc Bloch was a fighter in the Great War. But, in the midst of the fighting, he never forgot to question the source of the information that traveled through the trenches: where did it come from and why was false news so successful? In 1921, he challenged his contemporaries with a short and enlightening article whose reflection is still relevant today.

• The miracle-working kingspublished by Gallimard

From 1944, the date of his heroic death, to the beginning of the 1970s, Marc Bloch appeared above all as the co-founder (with Lucien Febvre) of the magazineAnnaleswho renewed the historical method, and the author of a great synthesis,La Société féodale (1939-1940). For around ten years, historians and researchers in the human and social sciences have increasingly thought that Marc Bloch’s great book is his first real book:The miracle-working kings (1924).

It is devoted to the study of a curious rite: miraculous healing, by simple touch of the hands,nuts ou scrofules (tuberculous lymphadenitis). The attribution of this power to the kings of France and England probably dates back to the 12th century; it will last in England until the beginning of the 18th century, in France until 1825, the date of the coronation of Charles X.

How did the royal touch ritual take place? What was the true nature of monarchical power: were the kings sacred figures, sorcerers who worked miracles? Why, finally, did we believe and then stop believing in the royal miracle? Three questions which led Marc Bloch to explore the paths of collective psychology, rites and myths, popular beliefs. To shed light on the phenomenon, he resorted to anthropology and his greatest theorist of the time, Frazer, to comparison with the most diverse societies, to the mysteries of traditional popular medicine. It is an essential milestone in the exploration of mentalities and the invention of a historical anthropology.

In his important preface, Jacques Le Goff strives to specify the personal reasons and the intellectual circles which led Marc Bloch to write this exceptional book, full of promise, then to abandon this path, and takes stock of the situation ofMiracle kings in historical and anthropological research today, of which this book is one of the flagships.

 

• The strange defeatpublished by Gallimard

“Testimony,” was written on the first page of the manuscript written in one go in the summer of 1940, then hidden waiting for better days, and finally published in 1946 by Éditions Franc-Tireur, Emanation of the resistance group in which Marc Bloch was involved until his arrest in the spring of 1944. The “oldest captain in the French army“, as he liked to describe himself, a fighter in 1914 who became a volunteer in 1939, offers as much an examination of conscience as an uncompromising analysis of the France beaten in a few weeks.

To create this immediate history, he uses his skills as a historian of Middle Ages societies and mentalities, while looking to the future:

« A day will come, sooner or later, I firmly hope, when France will once again see freedom of thought and judgment flourish, on its old soil already blessed with so many harvests. Then the hidden files will open; the mists […] will rise little by little; and perhaps the researchers busy unraveling them will find some benefit in leafing through, if they know how to discover it, this report from the year 1940. »

 

• War writingspublished by Armand Colin

The work is not presented in the classic form of a continuous story divided into chapters on a specific subject. Its unity is constituted by the central character Marc Bloch around whom various questions revolve, all having a more or less direct link with war and the experience of war. It is a work developed from a file compiled by Marc Bloch entitled Memories of war, composed of documents of various kinds, press clippings, handwritten letters, personal writings, postcards of various origins, etc. presented to the reader. The reproduction of Marc Bloch’s war notebooks completes this collection of documents as well as two texts, one the account of the first months of the Great War experienced by Marc Bloch, already published in the form of Cahier des Annales, n° 26, 1969 under the title War memories 1914-1915the famous article in the Revue de synthesis historique, A historian’s thoughts on fake war news. A long introduction by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau situates Marc Bloch in the war and offers a reflection on the way in which it influenced his thinking and his work.

 

â–º For entry to Marc Bloch’s Pantheon, discover the exhibition

Marc Bloch, the spirit of History.

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