Marc Bloch died in 1944, assassinated by the Gestapo. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Strasbourg, President Emmanuel Macron announced his pantheonization.
“For his work, his teaching and his courage, we decide that Marc Bloch will enter the Pantheon.” On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Strasbourg, Emmanuel Macron announced in a speech on Saturday November 23, 2024 the pantheonization of this “man of the Enlightenment in the army of shadows”. Who was he?
Resistance fighter and historian, Marc Bloch was assassinated by the Gestapo in 1944 near Lyon. But his courage and his death are not the only reasons motivating his entry into the Pantheon. He was considered “the founder of the history of mentalities, beliefs, ways of thinking”, explains to Parisian the historian Julien Théry. His methods, considered pioneering, approach history in a new way, which focuses “on the depths of society”.
Born into a non-practicing Jewish family in 1886 in Lyon, Marc Bloch came from a father who was a history professor at the University of Lyon and the École Normale Supérieure, reports The Parisian. A family heritage and an exemplary school career which lead him on the same path. He joined the ENS in 1904, and obtained his history aggregation four years later.
“The most atrocious collapse in our history”
Although he began his career as a history teacher, it was quickly put on hold in 1914. He was mobilized as an infantry sergeant, and would become captain over the years of the war. He was decorated with the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. At the end of the war, he returned to teaching, and was appointed lecturer in the history of the Middle Ages at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Strasbourg, then obtained the chair of history of the Middle Ages in 1927. “, according to the establishment. In 1929, after his meeting with Lucien Febvre, the two men launched the review of Annals of economic and social historyconsidered the spearhead of the French historiographical school, and with worldwide resonance.
In 1939, when he was 53 years old, had six children, and suffered from debilitating polyarthritis, Marc Bloch asked to enlist in the French army. The defeat in June 1940 and the years that followed were for him “the most atrocious collapse in our history”, he wrote in The strange defeatwork published posthumously. When Germany invaded the free zone, he and his family took refuge in Creuse. Then he joined the Resistance in 1943, notably in Lyon, where he joined the Franc-Tireur movement. He operates under the pseudonyms “Chevreuse”, “Arpajon” and “Narbonne”. But on March 8, 1944, he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured in Montluc prison. He was shot on the evening of June 16, 1944, in the back, with 29 comrades.
In memory of their ancestor, Marc Bloch’s family asked the President of the Republic that the pantheonization ceremony be carried out without the participation of the extreme right. “The work of this convinced patriot is profoundly anti-nationalist, built against the national novel and the reduction of French history to national borders”, write in a letter to Emmanuel Macron his granddaughter Suzette Bloch and his great-grandson Matis Bloch, on behalf of the rights holders. The ceremony should take place before the end of the president’s five-year term.