French Forces

Hero of France in two wars.

Captain of Infantry Marc Bloch, photograph taken during WW1 wearing the Croix de Guerre. He was also awarded the Legion d'Honneur in that war. In the interwar period, Bloch emerged as one of the titanic figures in European intellectual life, as an economic and social historian and historiographer. I first came into contact with his work as an undergraduate student through his two-volume "Feudal Society" (he was Professor of Medieval History at Strasbourg at the time), but his work ranged quite widely through the fields of economic and social history. As a historiographer, his historical thinking continues to have profound influence. He was, among other things, a pioneer of the view that a full understanding of history must involve consideration of the economic and social history of all levels of society, and not only, or primarily, of élites, and also of the art of structural social analysis in history. As WW2 opened in 1939, Bloch activated his commission as a Captain of the Reserve in the French Army at age 52. Urged by friends to leave the country (primarily because he had been born to a Jewish family in Lyon), he declined, writing, "I was born in France. I have drunk the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests". He was later to write that, while he had never denied his Jewish heritage, he generally thought of himself simply as a Frenchman. In 1942, Bloch helped found the French Resistance "Franc Tireurs" group, operating under the codename "Narbonne". Captured by French police in 1944, he was handed over to the Gestapo, who proceeded to torture him and to shoot him to death in June, 1944. His period in prison was spent writing his influential historiographical essay, "The Historian's Craft", which was unfinished at the time of his murder. Vive la France ! JR.