International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Marc Bloch was a historian, soldier, and a member of the French Resistance during World War II. He was an influential founder of the Annales school of social and economic history, which reached prominence in the middle of the twentieth century, as well as the author of the posthumously published Strange Defeat , a seminal account of the 1940 fall of France to Nazi Germany. A veteran of both world wars, and a patriot devoted to French democracy, Bloch ultimately gave his life in the French Resistance. Born in a middle-class Jewish home, Bloch identified less with his religious background than with forbears who had fought in the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and in the Franco-Prussian Wars in 1870–1. Growing up near the turn of the century, however, he was still affected by anti-Semitism, especially by the Dreyfus Affair , in which a Jewish captain in the French army was wrongly convicted of espionage. Following distinguished service during World War I (1914–18), in which he received the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, Bloch went on to achieve considerable success as a historian. He published his doctoral thesis in 1920, taught at the University of Strasbourg, then the Sorbonne, and made his scholarly reputation with pioneering studies of medieval agrarian history and feudal society. An emphasis on long-term, as opposed to event-centered, history inspired ... log in or subscribe to read full text