Fighting for Narbonne: Marc Bloch at Bay

‘Tell me Daddy, what is the use of history?’

The best book ever written about how to be a historian was never finished. The final chapters were never written and those that do come down to us are missing quotations and hazy about citations. But as it stands the first chapter begins as above, with the author, Marc Bloch, being addressed by his son, Étienne. As Bloch wrote, this question seemed increasingly hard to answer. He started his final project in the spring of 1941, under gloomy skies in occupied France. Exactly when he stopped working on it is unclear. At some point in March or April 1943, Bloch joined the Resistance. By July he was the chief of the politically centrist Franc-Tireur group in the Rhône region.

The face of a leader of the Resistance. The last photo of Marc Bloch, from 1944.

At 9 o’clock in the morning on 8 March 1944 Marc Bloch was arrested by the Gestapo in Lyon. The following day he was interned in the prison at Montluc, run by Klaus Barbie. It was there that he and his fellow inmates learned of the D-Day landings on the 6 June. On the night of 16 June, eighty years ago to the day this is posted, Bloch and twenty-seven other prisoners were placed in an open truck. They were driven north to a field just outside the small village of Saint-Didier-de-Formans, accompanied by German officers wielding tommy guns. Four by four the prisoners were ordered off the truck, into the meadow, where they were shot. It was not until November that Bloch’s family were able to confirm his death by identifying his spectacles. They did so in a France almost entirely liberated by Allied forces.

Bloch’s last book survived in manuscripts entrusted to Étienne, who gave three of them to his father’s old friend and fellow annaliste, Lucien Febvre, one of the people to who this work was dedicated. Febvre’s editing of his colleague’s work continued their lifelong collaboration into death. Entitled in Bloch’s notes Apologie pour l’histoire ou le Métier d’historien, it first came out in 1949, and was translated and published in English as The Historian’s Craft in 1953. It has also been published in at least eight other languages. I was set it as compulsory reading in the second year of my undergraduate degree and was enthralled. Not only is it an immensely humane text, filled with wisdom, it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read that actually seems to get at what historians do and how they go about it. He had a knack for explaining the hard-to-articulate and making the complex graspable.

But it would be easy to read Bloch’s abandonment of The Historian’s Craft as an act of despair in the value of history. A proud Frenchman, decorated for his service in the First World War, he had immediately volunteered for the army in 1939, in time to grow frustrated in the early days of the phoney war, before watching his nation’s defeat and humiliation in the face of the subsequent blitzkrieg. More perilously, as someone of Jewish descent, he and his family were in immediate danger from the new authorities. There was a grim irony here. Bloch was French first and Jewish decidedly second. In his testament, given March 1941, although feeling no antipathy towards ‘the generous tradition of the Hebrew prophets’, he requested no ‘Hebrew prayers be recited over my grave’. He would die ‘as I lived, an honourable Frenchman.’

Bloch might view his distant Jewish background with nothing more than mild fondness. The world would refuse to permit him that privilege. Bloch was eight years old when Dreyfus was arrested and twenty when his conviction was overturned. As a scholar building his reputation, his efforts to claim a place at the universities and institutes of Paris were frequently thwarted by the need to downplay his provocative brilliance to avoid being perceived as a noisy Jew. The arrival of the German occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime marked a late and appalling culmination of a lifetime of prejudice, albeit now in a form both open and lethal.

Much of Bloch’s energy following the defeat of France was turned to escape. In November 1940 he was appointed Associate Professor in Medieval History at the New School for Social Research in New York, better known as the University in Exile, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. But while he could bring his wife and four dependent children, travelling to the United States would involve abandoning his two oldest children and his eighty-two-year-old mother Sarah. This was unacceptable to Bloch, who instead had to watch his mother’s health slowly decline until she suffered a stroke on Easter Sunday 1941 and died. At the same time, his wife Simonne was bedridden with pleurisy. She would outlive Bloch by a month before dying of cancer.

In addition to these crises filling Bloch’s mind, the historical project he had invested the most time and effort in was being wrested from him. In 1929, as colleagues at the University of Strasbourg, he and Febvre had founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (now Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales). Despite early struggles, the journal became the standard bearer for a new type of history, known as the Annales school, which drew upon the social sciences to address economic and social history. Bloch played an essential role in editing, writing, and reviewing for it. And in early 1941 it was taken from him. On the same day that Bloch’s mother had a stroke, Febvre wrote to him asking him to give Febvre full control of the Annales, which might otherwise be liquidated for having a Jewish owner. Bloch initially refused, viewing it as a surrender. His eventual capitulation in May was filled with bitterness and hurt towards Febvre.

It is easy to see in the circumstances why Bloch’s faith in the value of history could have wavered. In April 1942 he wrote to Febvre, admitting that under the circumstances ‘I do not think only of the Middle Ages’. It would not be surprising if Bloch’s abandonment of The Historian’s Craft marked a final moment of despair in the discipline. And yet although the very last line that survives from the work is unfinished, it nonetheless cautions against such a hasty assumption about his reasons for ceasing to write. ‘In history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for…’

Throughout it all Bloch kept working. He wrote reviews, essays and articles. If present events distracted him from the Middle Ages, he witnessed them with a medievalist’s eye. In the wake of the defeat of 1940, he comforted himself with the memory of the Hundred Years’ War, won not on the battlefields of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt by fast-moving invaders, but by the slow and tenacious resistance of the French.  His first response to the fall of France was to compose a work of history, albeit an intensely curious one. Published in 1946 as L’étrange défaite (The Strange Defeat), it served both as his memoirs of his recent military service and a damning indictment of the French military, political and intellectual classes, at whose feet he placed the blame for his nation’s downfall. While hardly the most balanced piece of historical analysis, it made a powerful case for education as the surest bulwark against the charisma of populist dictators.

Bloch’s work as a historian carried into his activities in the Resistance. From August 1943 he was a contributor to Les Cahiers Politiques, eventually becoming editor. This Resistance journal was intended to communicate what a new post-liberation France might look like. Bloch was primarily concerned with education reform, wanting to remove exams and end compulsory Greek and Latin in favour of global studies. He saw this as the foundation for a new approach to history, but it also indicates a clear hope for a better future in which to design it. More striking and speaking both to the Middle Ages and his Jewishness was his Resistance codename, ‘Narbonne’. Bloch had taken a great interest in Narbonne, visiting the city in June 1942, and beginning to compile notes on the history of the celebrated medieval Jewish community there. Medieval Narbonne offered a deep past of people who were both Jewish and French. In taking that name, Bloch claimed that heritage in order to fight for a future where both those things might be possible.

But perhaps the clearest place where we can see Bloch’s continued commitment to history is in The Historian’s Craft itself. The work may be a timeless classic in teaching the practice of his discipline, but the trials that its author faced while he was writing it are woven throughout the unfinished text. His friends and family loom large in the volume. We have already seen Étienne at its very beginning. It was while nursing his sick wife, Simonne, that Bloch began outlining The Historian’s Craft in his notebooks. Her presence is felt elsewhere. He alludes in a dedication ‘to a tenderness too deep and sacred to be spoken’.  In his introductory observations, Febvre makes explicit this reference to Simonne, while noting her key role as secretary in Bloch’s work, ending ‘I feel it as a duty to set down the name of Madame Marc Bloch, who died in the same cause as her husband and in the same French faith.’ Sarah Bloch also appears in these pages, in the first dedication, ‘in memoriam matris amicae.’

Isolated and desperate, Bloch turned to the memory of his colleagues and friends. Despite Bloch’s sense of wounded betrayal, Febvre’s name appears throughout the book, being quoted enthusiastically and approvingly. He composed a second dedication to his old friend, written in May 1941 shortly before he surrendered his ownership of the Annales:

…how can I resign myself to seeing you appear in no more than a few chance references? Long have we worked together for a wider and more human history. Today our common task is threatened…But the time will come, I feel sure, when our collaboration can again be public, and again be free. Meanwhile it is in these pages filled with your presence that, for my part, our joint work goes on…

Trans. Peter Putnam, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester 1992), 2.

Bloch anticipated a future where this work might be possible. And if he was not there to see it, he could entrust it to his oldest collaborator.

Another friend of Bloch, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (d. 1935), makes a number of appearances in The Historian’s Craft, harking back to happier days during their travels around Scandinavia. But Pirenne did not just represent a useful example for readers to follow or a pleasant memory. Writing without access to his books, Bloch was surely put in mind of Pirenne composing his Histoire de l’Europe médiévale from memory while being interned for resisting the German occupation of his country during the First World War. During the phoney war of 1939, Bloch began making notes for a history of French society dedicated ‘To the memory of Henri Pirenne who, at the time his country was fighting beside mine for justice and civilisation, wrote in captivity, a history of Europe.’ Pirenne offered an example of history as solace and resistance in the face of defeat.

Bloch wanted to understand people by looking at their past. As he notes, this was not a straightforward task, ‘Understanding, in all honesty, is a word pregnant with difficulties, but also with hope.’ That last word, hope, is an important one. Above all, The Historian’s Craft is a hopeful work. Just as the historian must be ever hopeful in the face of setbacks and disasters, so Bloch remained hopeful in his much greater and darker moment of cataclysm.

This is an essay about an educator, but the lessons to be drawn from it are unclear. As long as this planet is afflicted with war then so will be historians, as those currently under fire in Rafah and Kharkiv can testify (and here I would nudge you towards the work of the Council for At-Risk Academics, whose beginnings I have discussed elsewhere). Few scholars today have the experience and training under arms that Bloch did when he joined the Resistance. I know I certainly don’t have his courage. But of the many things that one can learn from reading The Historian’s Craft, it is that something precious can be made in the worst of circumstances.

After the fall of France, Bloch entered a world where the victories available to him were small and often bitter. Perhaps the most important of these for him was his fierce defence of his identity. Upon his capture the Vichy press called him a ‘Jewish-Bolshevik-terrorist’.  But when the authorities shot him, it was not for being a Jew, but for being a soldier of France. Bloch also remained a historian to the very end. He spent his time in the prison at Montluc teaching French history to his cellmate, with a particular attention to field patterns (whether this unlooked-for education reduced or increased the misery of his fellow unfortunate is not recorded). They could deprive him of his freedom and his life, but they could not deprive him of this. It was another, small, victory, a refusal to allow conquest and oppression to take away the future he was fighting for.