Nicholas Mulder in The Ideas Letter:
On June 23, choirs of French schoolchildren and a large crowd of dignitaries thronged around the Pantheon in central Paris during a heat wave. Under the glow of torchlight, President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the special courage that had earned the Sorbonne professor Marc Bloch a place in the nation’s most prestigious tomb. Since the French Revolution turned the erstwhile church in the Latin Quarter into a secular temple of civic virtue, France has laid to rest several dozen of its greatest citizens there, among them Charles de Gaulle, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, and Simone Veil. To the sound of the Marseillaise, the caskets of Bloch and his wife Simonne were inducted into the Pantheon, making him the first historian to receive the honor.
Historians have often created heroes, but few have themselves become them. Bloch, however, has managed to rise to this status in France. Born in 1886, the child of secular Jewish scholars from Alsace, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure at the height of fin-de-siècle French theoretical innovation, he fought as an infantry officer in the trenches during the First World War, founded a journal that engendered an entire tradition of historical research, became an expert on feudalism and medieval agrarian history, wrote a sharp indictment of the fecklessness of the French elite in the face of Nazi aggression, and then took part in the French Resistance, until he was captured and executed by the Gestapo in June 1944.
Bloch’s career was short but prolific: Over the course of barely two decades of employment as a professor at the universities of Strasbourg, Paris, and Montpellier, he published seven books, including The Royal Touch, French Rural History, and Feudal Society, and over sixty articles on subjects ranging from watermills to gold coinage and slavery to medieval ideas of empire.
More here.
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