The Medievalist Who Fought Nazis With History

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The early 20th-century French historian Marc Bloch wrote no fewer than 7 books in his lifetime, all of them on the history of France, but primarily with a focus on the European Middle Ages. His French Rural History and 2-volume Feudal Society are still classic works for any historian.

His last book, however, was different.

It's often translated into as The Historian's Craft but its original title is more provocative - Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien. Translation is always an act of interpretation and this requires some. Apologie pour l'histoire might mean "An Apology for History" but "apology" should probably be understood in a sense close to how it was used by early Christians - as a stirring defense of something that is critically important. The second part, Métier d'historien isn't straightforward either. Métier means "work" but also "calling" - a pull to something for a higher purpose. So, taken together, the title suggests that Bloch's last book was about why history mattered, why the call to study the past had an almost spiritual importance.

The first sentence of the text itself emphasizes the stakes Bloch saw in the work before him, reporting a moment from a few years before, when his son asked him: "Father, tell me what the point of history is." Now, Bloch said, was the time to finally answer. Now, it mattered.

It mattered because Bloch had begun this book in 1941, just under a year after the disaster at Dunkirk, just under a year after France surrendered to the Nazis, with Bloch living in exile from Paris.

German troops parading down Place de l'Etoile (Place Charles-de-Gaulle) in front of the Arc de Triomphe, June 14, 1940, Paris, France, World War II, Italian Illustration, Year LXVII, No 25, June 23, 1940.

Bloch worked on the book for next couple of years, jotting down notes when he could, apologizing in its pages for not being able to access a proper library and so being too dependent on his own notes and his memory. He worried constantly about his family as well as his friends.

Indeed, he dedicated the Apologie to his friend and colleague from Strasbourg, Lucien Febvre. The dedication reads, in part:

If this book should one day be published... you will find, my friend, another name than yours inscribed upon its dedication page. You can surmise the name this place requires; it is the one permissable allusion to a tenderness too deep and sacred to be spoken. Yet 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... We are vanquished, for a moment, by an unjust destiny. 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... I flatter myself that you will often approve. And you will sometimes rebuke me. In either case, there will be another bond between us.

Bloch never lost hope, even in the face of the Nazi occupation, that he would see his friend again, that they would work together for a "wider and more human history."

But in the end, Bloch never got to finish his final book or work with Febvre again.

After fleeing Paris, Bloch joined the French Resistance and led a group based near his hometown of Lyons. But in March 1944, Bloch was arrested by the Gestapo. He was tortured and executed in June of that year. By that time, D-Day had already occurred and Lyons was liberated less than 3 months later.

Picture released on September 3, 1944 and published in a Braun and Cie book, of French women celebrating the liberation of France, at Place Bellecour in Lyon. (Photo Credit - AFP/Getty Images)

Just a bit later in his Introduction, after that initial question about "the point" of history, Bloch returns to it again, reporting that he heard echoes of that same question from French military officers as they heard reports of the Nazis entering Paris in 1940. The burden of the past weighed heavily on the sudden military collapse France had just suffered in the face of the Nazis.

So, what was the answer to that question? What was the point of history?

He offers his answer, I think, in the very last lines of the book - the moment he had to abandon it during the war. He wrote: "In a word, in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They must be sought."

In the end, the point of history for Bloch was the seeking, the asking. As others, such as Eve L. Ewing and Irina Dumitrescu, have explained in more contemporary moments, the Arts and Humanities are some of the surest safeguards against authoritarianism because they show us possible worlds. The Arts and Humanities show us how things could be different than they are.

Marc Bloch understood this all too well. For him, the study of the past was about better understanding the path to the present - a path whose contours were not to be assumed, but to be rigorously, unrelentingly sought. 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.

In a word, Marc Bloch reminds us that the point of history was to have something to say about the present.

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