Michael Livingston

He was a small, unassuming man in his late fifties, and his name was Marc Bloch. He assured the boy that the bullets would not hurt, then cried out “Vive la France!” as the guns fired. 2/x

Bloch had been one of the most esteemed professors in Europe, yet he made the decision to give his life fighting the great evil of his time. Today, as the world threatens to slip into a far too similar darkness, Bloch’s spirit can and should serve as an inspiration. 3/x

History isn’t passive, and historians can’t be, either. 4/x

The belief that historians have an important role to play in shaping the world, not just reporting on it, is one of the hallmarks of the Annales School of historiography founded by Bloch and his in 1928. 5/x

Bloch believed that historians are inevitably caught up in the events they describe. Bloch’s aim with Annales was to build something inherently interdisciplinary and communal. 6/x

“Isolated,” he once wrote, “each [historian] will understand only by halves, even within his own field of study, for the only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history.” 7/x

Bloch’s focus on history as the collective experience of society was heavily influenced by battle. He’d volunteered to fight for France in August 1914, and in action on the Western Front he saw how class distinctions faded away. 8/x

The bullets at the Marne, the Somme, and the Argonne didn’t care who men were or where they came from. 9/x

After the First World War, Bloch — who’d been wounded twice — found his career path in academia. And he was good at it. 10/x

Whether because of his unique approach to history, his left-wing politics, or his identity as a Jew in a time of rising global anti-Semitism, Bloch had a number of career setbacks in the early 1930s, but he finally managed to achieve a prestigious position at the Sorbonne. 11/x

That same year, Adolf Hitler broke the post-war Treaty of Versailles. Two years later, the Third Reich annexed Austria. 12/x

At the age of 53, twenty-five years after he’d volunteered to serve in First World War, he was mobilized again to serve as a fuel supply officer for the French Army in what would become the Second World War. 13/x

He spent the next months organizing logistics against the Nazis, ultimately standing on the beaches of Dunkirk in June 1940, where he gave the order to burn the last reserves of fuel in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. 14/x

All the while — in spare time, in such notebooks as he could find, apologizing for errors that might result from having little research materials beyond the library of his mind — he was writing a new book that would set out his definition of what it meant to be a historian. 15/x

The book was still unfinished five years later, when he stood in a darkened field as a member of the French Resistance and reassured a boy that the bullets would not hurt. 16/x

Such was the esteem in which Bloch was held that these drafts were published posthumously in 1949 under the title Apologie pour l'Histoire, ou Métier d'Historien; it was translated into English, the first of his works to be so treated, as The Historian’s Craft in 1953. 17/x

In its first lines, Bloch explains that The Historian’s Craft was begun in response to a question from his son: “Tell me, Daddy. What is the use of history?” It was a question Bloch knew to be on the minds of many in the dark days of the 1940s. 18/x

Bloch’s response was two-fold. First, he understood that the past was the key to the present. 19/x

As @prof_gabriele recently wrote, “Living in the darkness of Nazism, Bloch understood that he first needed to seek the roots of the tree casting that shadow before it could be uprooted and toppled.” 20/x

Second, Bloch recognized that “The past is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change. But the knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself.” 21/x

The historian’s work, in other words, was in the journey of the question, not in the destination of the answer. 22/x

Something of this truth may lie behind the fact that, while the book was left in pieces at his untimely death, all three of his surviving drafts had the very same ending: “In a word, in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for…” 23/x

So many of Bloch’s fellow academics chose the safer road when the Nazis came — to stay quiet, to get by. But Bloch did no such thing. 24/x

By March 1943 his search for meaning in the face of unfathomable horrors had led to him becoming a member of the French Resistance. 25/x

He provided his experience as a logistician, as well as leveraging his formidable intellect to the tasks of coded and public communications. He even used his need to visit archives for historical research as a means to travel in the service of the Resistance. 26/x

The gestapo arrested him in Lyon in March 1944. They found a radio and resistance papers in his rented rooms. 27/x

He was tortured repeatedly over the next months, but it’s said that he gave the Nazis nothing. When he was conscious and well enough to talk, Marc Bloch taught his beloved history to fellow prisoners. 28/x

Bloch joined the Resistance for many reasons. He was a Jew disgusted by anti-Semetic laws. He was a patriot angered at the violence done to his country and its people. 29/x

But he was also a historian. And as he recognized that the past was ever-present, he must have recognized, too, that he would have to live, in whatever present he had left, with the choices of his past. 30/x

Martyrdom does strange things to memory. Bloch was a great historian in his time. His books and his thoughts continue to have enormous influence on the humanities. 31/x