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Marc Bloch: Did he repudiate Annales history?
Marc Bloch: did he repudiate Annales his tory? Bryce Lyon
Since the summer of 1944 when Marc Bloch fell before a NaxiJiring squad, no book dedicated to him and his historical writing has yet appeared. There is, however, an imposing corpus of publications in learnedjournals and collections of articles discussinghis contributions to historical methodology and also his life, especially those acts of courage that led to his untimely death. The task here, then, is to probe into Bloch’s writings and to ponder his life and what others have said about him in an attempt to ferret out his thoughts about the nature of history and historical‘methodology and to determine whether in the last few years’of his lrfe his view of history altered dramatically.
Journal of Medieval 0304-4181/85/$3.30
History 0 1985
11 (1985) 181-191 Elsevier Science Publishers
Why, after World War I, did Marc Bloch, co-founder with his colleague and friend Lucien Febvre of what has come to be known as Annales history, become disillusioned with those methods of research and writing that dominated the historical profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very methods by which he had been trained as a young medievalist just prior to 1914? Why did he turn his back on conventional political, diplomatic, military, and biographical history? Why did he become intrigued with social and economic history which, for him, involved the study of seignorialism, feudalism, and the activities of ordinary people such as peasants? Why did he come to tout comparative study as the most effective way of learning about historical similarities and dissimilarities? And why did he strongly welcome the methodology and information made available to the historian by such disciplines as economics, sociology, anthropology, philology, folklore, comparative literature, archaeology, geography, psychology, and agronomy?’ Quite properly it has been suggested that he owed much to one of his masters, Ferdinand Lot, who was more comparative and innovative. And certainly Bloch was familiar with the views of such as Michelet and Fustel de Coulanges on social history; with the methodologies of the sociologist Durkheim, the geographer P. Vidal de la Blache, and the economist Francois Simiand; and with the philosophy of Bergson which suggested the importance of collective mentalities and intuitions. He also knew the innovator Henri Berr who had founded the Revue de synthise historique in which Bloch published some of his first articles arguing
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for new historical perspectives (Lyon 1980: 69-70). To these principal French intellectual breezes that obviously underlay Bloch’s decision to plot a new course, others were added. After 1918 when Bloch and Febvre were called to teach at the University of Strasbourg not only did they find in each other kindred spirits but they also established a close intellectual rapport with the renowned Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, whose works on social and economic history and pleas for comparative study struck in them a responsive chord. Often at Strasbourg for lectures, Pirenne soon became the one to whom they turned for advice and assistance in their efforts to found a journal which offered an alternative to, the kind of history they were renouncing. The copious correspondence of the three between 1919 and 1935, the year of Pirenne’s d.eath, provides a marvelous account of the evolution of the ideas of Bloch and Febvre and of Pirenne’s responses to their questions. Convinced that Pirenne’s prestige would be of inestimable help if associated with their journal, they invited him to be its director, promising to perform all the burdensome tasks. Unwilling to shoulder this responsibility, Pirenne nevertheless promised to support the journal and to urge young historians to publish their articles in it. When the first number of Annales appeared in 1929 it included an article by Pirenne, evidence of his sincerity and good faith (Lyon 1980: 70-7). That Pirenne and his ideas exerted a formative influence on Bloch and Febvre during the incubation period of Annales history is indisputable, but it would be less than historical to give Pirenne sole credit for his novel ideas. Some of them came from the
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German historian Karl Lamprecht with whom he had developed close intellectual ties and with whom he regularly corresponded between 1883 and 1915. In his letters to Pirenne, Lamprecht explained and defended his heretical views which so infuriated the Rankianer and gave rise to the bitter polemical articles during the last decade of the nineteenth century. In Pirenne’s responses it is clear that he was extremely sympathetic to Lamprecht’s revolt against narrow political and biographical history. Pirenne wrote articles supporting the views of Lamprecht and he incorporated these views in his works, especially the Histoire de Belgique (Lyon 1966: 161-231). Karl Lamprecht, one of the first historians to appreciate the significance for history of such social sciences as sociology, economics, anthropology, and, especially, psychology, regarded political history as too little representative of the historical process, contending that only by investigating all human action and thought could historians begin to comprehend the past. What, he asked, was the historian’s proper subject matter individual or collective phenomena? Could the details of long historical development be presented as a coherent structure and an orderly process by looking to specific causes? He did not think so. Meaningful history, that which reflected human accomplishment, beliefs, and aspirations, must be collective. The historian must end his preoccupation with individuals because in concentrating on individuals and political events he had become little more than a biographer. The individual, at most only a representative of his time, an expression of collective society, must be deemphasized as the object of historical re-
search. Individual phenomena derive meaning from the general context of the prevailing mode of life. The proper task of the historian is thus to comprehend collective, long-term phenomena. Ideally, history should be so written that individuals are totally embedded in collective movements and developments. Everyone, so Lamprecht argued, is dependent upon the civilization in which he lives and is in this sense the child of his age. This is true even for the greatest of men. The historian must give attention to large-scale movements and to masses of people.’ It takes little acumen to see that Lamprecht’s views are also largely those of Bloch and Febvre. And it is inconceivable that they had not read some of his essays on methodology. There is, however, no indication that either were much interested in Lamprecht, a reaction easy to explain. Their memories of the France-Prussian War and of the German annexation of Alsate plus their involvement in the war of 1914-18 made them little receptive to German historical ideas, even those for which they came to campaign. Thus it was that Pirenne played a vital part; he was the bridge over which the ideas of Lamprecht traveled to Bloch and Febvre. But Pirenne did not act simply as a conveyor belt. Aware of some deficiencies in Lamprecht’s methodology, he eliminated any he could while incorporating into his history what he regarded as the valid ideas. Under his skilled touch the Lamprechtian system was transformed, improved, and made credible. Lamprecht’s ideas, thus intelligently and deftly filtered, were then conveyed by Pirenne to Bloch and Febvre. Were it not for Pirenne, Bloch and Febvre most proba-
bly would not have been influenced by Lamprecht’s ideas. They could, however, accept the filtered version of Lamprecht through the intermediary of their friend Pirenne. Such, then, were the principal intellectual influences on the development of Bloch’s Andes history. But were there other influences? Insofar as is known Bloch never said that his military service influenced his views on history, yet it cannot be simply coincidental that in 1919 when he went to Strasbourg he began to advocate a history more reflective of the contours of reality, one primarily concerned with the collective activities and attitudes of masses of people. Before 1914 he seemed little interested in the kind of history he wrote and promoted after the war. That research for his t/z&se, published in 1920 and dealing with the emancipation of the peasantry in the region around Paris, was completed prior to 1914 may explain why in its methodology and the questions posed it closely resembled other works on the subject (Bloch 1920). The intention of what follows is to show that Bloch’s service at the front during World War I, which brought him wounds as well as decorations for bravery, caused him to re-evaluate his attitude toward history and to found Andes. Also, it will be argued that the dismal decade of the 1930s leading to World War II and to Bloch’s service in the army and in the R&stance produced such a loss of faith in Andes history that, had he survived, he would probably have repudiated the kind of history he had embraced between 1919 and 1939. Born 6 July 1886 at Lyon where his father Gustave was professor of ancient history, Bloch lived there only until 1887 when his
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father was called to Paris to become professor of Roman history at the Sorbonne. Reared in a cultured academic circle, Bloch attended Parisian lydes, the Ecole Normale Superieure where he trained in history and geography, and then worked toward his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Between 1909 and 1914 he did research for his t/z&e, studied at Leipzig and Berlin, and taught at lycees in Montpellier and Amiens (Perrin 1948: 161-88). Th is life of student and teacher, a life far removed from laborers, peasants, and agents of business and banking, was exchanged abruptly in 1914 for a life remote from the archives and classroom, a daily existence where survival was a primary concern. For the first time Bloch lived among men from totally different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, many being peasants, miners, and factory workers. That he was intrigued by these men is evidenced by his frequent references to them in his remarkable diary, Souvenirs de guerre, 1914-1915 (Memoirs of war) and in his later book, L’e’trange delfite (Strange defeat) (Bloch 1957). The latter work, written after the capitulation of France in June 1940, tried to account for the disastrous defeat of France. Of its three sections entitled “Presentation of the witness,” “One of the vanquished gives evidence,” and “A Frenchman examines his conscience,” the last is the most interesting. Like a skilful pathologist, Bloch performs an autopsy on France in the years between 1918 and 1940, seeking the military, social, economic, intellectual, and psychological causes of the malady. How differently he perceives the France of that period from the France of the period between 1914 and 1918. While not remember-
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ing the first war with relish, he recalls with pride his participation in a struggle that was ultimately victorious and the scenes of courage he witnessed. “In the course of those now far distant four years of 1914-1918 and for me they will always be the ‘real’ war - I saw many such cases of courage. About them I shall say no more. If I let myself go, I could talk on forever.” He speaks of “all of us who had known those years of fighting, unforgettable reminders of personal dangers faced and overcome, of friends killed at our side . . . of the intoxication which had taken hold of us when we saw the enemy in flight.” But in 1939-1940 he sensed a change. “I have a feeling that, even among the men of military age, something had been lost of that fervent fraternity in danger which meant so much to most of us in the old 1914 days” (Bloch 1968: 105, 132, 121). With what kind of men did Bloch share this feeling of camaraderie and intoxication? Decent men in the habit of doing their daily work “conscientiously and properly,” men a sense of solidarity with who “shared others.” He vows that he had “never come across better fighters than the miners of the Nord and the Pas de Calais whom I saw at close quarters in the first war.” He witnessed only one exception and “the man in question was a ‘scab’, by which I mean a non-unionist employed as a strike-breaker.” He greatly admired the peasant. “From having seen at first hand how he lives, from having once fought at his side, and from having much pondered the details of his history, I know the true worth of the French peasant, the vigorous and unwearied quickness of his mind”(Bloch 1968: 104, 148). What emerges from Bloch’s writing is
that he developed a deep respect for ordinary men. His few references to generals and other officers seldom exude the same sentiment; he mentions generals, politicians, and civil officials usually to criticize them. It is .fair to suggest that his military experience in World War I introduced Bloch to ordinary men whom he came to respect, who became the focus of most of his research, and that this experience also whetted his appetite for the kind of history he wrote between the wars. Diverging from his predecessors who were mostly concerned with the legal and institutional structure of seignorialism, Bloch concentrated upon agrarian routine and tradition, technological change, field arrangements, variations in regional agrarian techniques and production, patterns of peasant communities, and the peasant mentality. He never wrote about the individual peasant but, as Febvre noted, he forsook the medieval agrarian history of his predecessors who had “their peasants always plough with cartularies, charters for using ploughshares” (Bloch 1966: xix). He roamed the provinces to become familiar with French agriculture over the long term, with the contours of peasant villages, with agrarian routine, its sounds and its smells. In his book on feudal society, a subject for which the sources afforded the possibility of knowing the individual more intimately, he took the same approach, ignoring the feudal aristocrat as a person (Bloch 1966). Here one will not acquire an intimacy with any feudal lord or vassal. One reads of men, not of man; of the collective image and of collective men, not of the individual or of the concrete. One reads of abstract ideas, like the idea of power, but gets no concrete picture
of an early German chief or a later feudal prince who had power and made it work for him. Feudal men are violent, but there is no picture of one feudal man and his violence (Lyon 1963: 275-83). In writing history that increasingly used the methodology and vocabulary of the social sciences, Bloch seemed little interested in the peasants described in the autobiography of Guibert de Nogent or in such feudal aristocrats as Fulk Nerra, Thomas of Marle, and William Marshal. Is this not paradoxical in view of his association with those peasants and workers in 1914 who won his admiration and interest and made him sympathetic to the social and economic history of ordinary people? Why, when he was so intrigued by these individuals, did he proceed to concentrate upon the collective life and functions of their forbears in the middle ages and leave them faceless? For answers to these questions one should turn not to Bloch’s papers and his marvelous letters to Henri Pirenne,3 but to his Strange defeat, a book written under circumstances that seem to assure its credibility. Having fought this time on the losing side, Bloch was living in a defeated and partly occupied nation. Disillusioned and shocked, he is ruthlessly honest with the shortcomings and failures of both himself and all Frenchmen. He compares the spirit of 1914-1918 with that in the 1930s. Proud of France’s victory over Germany in 1918 and of being a participant in this victory, Bloch, like the majority of Frenchmen, felt that a job had been well done, well enough that the peace and future of France and western Europe were assured. The natural desire of all was to return to work and normalcy. Of this he says:
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The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience. It is true that we emerged from the last war desperately tired, and that after four years not only of fighting, but of mental laziness, we were only too anxious to get back to our proper employments and take up the tools that we had left to rust upon the benches.
In the 193Os, however, he and many other Frenchmen knew that matters were going badly but they did not act. We knew all that, dice, we let things opposition of the ignorant mistrust up in public and . . . . We preferred haunted tranquillity
and yet, from laziness, from cowartake their course. We feared the mob, the sarcasm of our friends, the of our masters. We dared not stand be the voice crying in the wilderness to lock ourselves into the fearof our studies (Bloch 1968: 171-
2).
That Bloch, a scholar, &ould prefer teaching and research to the hurly-burly of participating in movements and causes is understandable, but the follo.wing statement may well provide the real reason he distanced himself from the events of the 1930s. But we were all of us either specialists in the social sciences or workers in scientific laboratories, and maybe the very disciplines of those employments kept us, by a sort of fatalism, from embarking on individual action. We had grown used to seeing great impersonal forces at work in society as in nature. In the vast drag of these submarine swells, so cosmic as to seem irresistible, of what avail were the petty struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors? To think otherwise would have been to falsify history. Among all the characteristics that mark the rise and fall of civilizations, I know of none that is more significant than the gradual movements of the collective mind towards self-consciousness (Bloch 1968: 172-3).
Bloch then frets over this dilemma. He argues that the general mind is composed of a multitude of individual minds continually reacting upon one another. And yet he admits that the individual can introduce a grain of leaven into the general mentality, can thus perhaps modify it to some extent
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and can exert some influence upon the course of events, dictated in the last analysis by human psychology. “The real trouble with us professors,” he concludes, “was that we were absorbed in our day-to-day tasks. Most of us can say with some justice that we were good workmen. Is it equally true to say that we were good citizens?” (Bloch 1968: 173). In regretting that he and other individuals did not act and then ascribing this inaction and passivity to those vast impersonal collective forces which deprive the individual of initiative and action, Bloch sits astride the horns of his dilemma in the twenties, thirties, and even in 1940. Here also is the unsolved tension of his history. Torn by these feelings, he sought resolution in his self-examination by coming down on the side of Annales history. But what was his ultimate assessment of the individual vis-&vis collective history? His actions after 1940 in the last four years of his life suggest that he opted for the individual. He exchanged the cosiness of academic life and the isolated study for the R&stance, for a life of danger shared with ordinary individuals, a life that ended with death before a firing squad of the Gestapo. He died comforting a youth of sixteen who had asked him whether the bullets would hurt. During these years Bloch was a man of action who introduced his grain of leaven into the general mentality. He did what he regretted not having done between the wars. Does this mean, however, that, had he survived, he would have revised his view of history? Would the individual have loomed larger in his history? Would Bloch have become more tolerant of political, diplomatic, and military history? Would he
have made some accommodation with the unforeseen event, the chance in history? Probably so, judging from the sense of his Strange defeat. Seeking the causes of France’s defeat, Bloch remained faithful to Annales history, first by examining the totality of French society that, for him, meant the collective mentality and esprit of the military profession, the politicians and their parties, the trade unions, the bourgeoisie, and the academic professions, and secondly by probing the psychological, technological, and military reasons for the astonishing German success. Yet he approaches this problem quite differently from his examination of historical developments and crises in his previous books. As a participant in a collective disaster, emotionally and mentally involved with individuals and with specific human groups, he seldom writes like an Annales historian. His explanations for the events in France have the ring of traditional history. Sprinkled throughout Strange defeat are the words destiny, fall of the cards, unexpected, accidents of time, fate, and salvation. “But destiny decided that I, with most of my generation, should, on two separate occasions, separated from one another by a stretch of twenty-one years, be jerked violently from the ways of peace... . The fall of the cards has brought me plenty of variety” (Bloch 1968: 2-3). It was fate that placed officers in positions where daily routine was but an extension of their peacetime habits, fate that seemed to dog the trade union movement. “History tells us of men who were neither fools nor, in the matter of personal danger, cowards, but who, for all that, succumbed to misfortune, and on them its verdict has ever been one of contempt”
(Bloch 1968: 111). But what of the individual? There is the captain, too rare in those days of 1940, with whom Bloch worked in perfect harmony. He says of another offrcer that he has “known one really great man” (Bloch 1968: 32). There are descriptions of certain men and their critical mistakes, of a general dismissed for drunkenness. That the generals of 1940 should have acted in the manner of Joffre in 1914 is an oft repeated theme. A general, writes Bloch, should not despair of his genius until the last moment. The genius of Napoleon was “his power of always being able to see the truth behind the appearance” (Bloch 1968: 114). From witnessing men’s behavior under stress of war, Bloch concludes that “those who teach history should be continually concerned with the task of seeing the solid and the concrete behind the empty and the abstract. In other words, it is on men rather than functions that they should concentrate their attention” (Bloch 1968: 27). When Bloch analyses defeat, it could be any historian writing about a period of national crisis. On a long list of deficiencies are corruption, greed, petty profiteering, dirty politics, the making of scapegoats, timidity, defeatism, low civilian morale, collaboration, and denial of country. France was moreover poorly served by a dishonest press, pervaded by mental laziness, and too often slovenly. Everywhere there was lack of leadership, failure of confidence, and thought of capitulation. On this backdrop of black marks Bloch carves in bas-relief the qualities required during periods of challenge. Officers need discipline, imaginative realism, adaptable intelligence, and, above all, character. During war there is no substi-
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tute for courage and toughness of fiber. For the French army “the whole question of ‘authority’ was passing through a crisis” (Bloch 1968: 88). F or France in general there was a lack of patriotism and of ruthless heroism, a revulsion against tough decisions, privation, and sacrifice. “When sacrifice is the order of the day, any exception should be out of the question.” It could almost be de Gaulle speaking when Bloch asserts that there are two categories of Frenchmen who will never really grasp the significance of French history: those who refuse to thrill to the Consecration of our Kings at Rheims, and those who can read unmoved the account of the Festival of Federation . . . . Unfortunately, the men whose ancestors pledged their faith on the Altar of the Nation have lostcontact with the profound realities ofnational greatness (Bloch 1968: 1667).
Strange defeat concludes with a quotation from Montesquieu: “A State founded on the and that People needs a mainspring: mainspring is virtue” (Bloch 1968: 176). If Bloch’s assessment of the characteristics of a nationality is fair and realistic, it is also traditional. Returning to Cherbourg with other evacuees from Dunkirk and experiencing a long delay in disembarkation because none of the dockworkers had yet arrived for work, Bloch comments: “We were back, alas, in the rear zones of a France at war” (Bloch 1968: 21). He frankly admits a widespread French anglophobia, linking it to historical memories of the Maid and of the hateful Pitt and Palmerston. While lack of sincerity is not one of the national faults of the English, the English soldier is, however, by “nature a looter and a lecher: that is to say, he is guilty of two vices which the French peasant finds it hard to forgive when both are satisfied to the de-
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triment of his farmyard and his daughters” (Bloch 1968: 70). The English regard continental Europeans as natives, as inhabitants of their colonial possessions, as their inferiors. The English officers, exuding their well-known “club atmosphere,” were “deeply imbued with that social snobbery from which the members of the English upper middle class are rarely free.” They had those “national prejudices which are inherent in the old crusted Tory tradition” (Bloch 1968: 78-9). Stationed in Alsace during the phony phase of the war, Bloch occupied himself by writing a book on historical method, published posthumously under the title M&tier d’historien (The historian’s craft). Here, even before the fiasco of May and June 1940, he was pondering chance, probability, contingency, the unforeseen, and prevision in history, an indication that he was already uncertain about some of the ideas that have become the trademark of Annales history. In Strange defeat he reflected further on history (Bloch 1957: 124-6). Regarding military strategy and tactics, he wrote that “the only sensible thing is to fall back on the lessons of the past, and to learn from them what, in other words, we should find out by experimenting” (Bloch 1968: 117). From the study of history one can even try to see into the future, and not always, I think, unsuccessfully. But the lesson it teaches is not that what happened yesterday will necessarily happen tomorrow, or that the past will go on reproducing itself. By examining how and why yesterday differed from the day before, it can reach conclusions which will enable it to foresee how tomorrow will differ from yesterday (Bloch 1968: 118).
He defends history against the charge that it was responsible for teaching the French to expect that the war of 1914 would be
fought like the Napoleonic wars and that the war of 1940 would be fought like that of 1914, stating that “no two successive wars are ever the same war” (Bloch 1968: 118). He believes, however, that “successive civilizations show certain repetitive patterns,” that men should be aware of previous mistakes in order to avoid them, and that “the map of the future will be drawn as a result of the lessons they have learned” (Bloch 1968: 118-19). This inspection of Bloch’s thoughts on France between 1918 and 1940 provides a basis for certain observations. As a combatant mingling with ordinary men at the front during World War I, Bloch developed a deep respect for them that contributed to his dissatisfaction with traditional and conventional history and led him to experiment with more effective methods of studying society. His war experience plus the enveloping grip of the social sciences persuaded him that social, economic, and psychological realities were the prime elements of history, realities that should be studied as collective developments and tendencies over the long duration. As he left the war behind, became involved in founding Annales, and wrote the books and articles that embodied his historical conceptions and methodology, he came to ignore the individual. In 1940 Bloch wrote that destiny had decided that he and his generation should again become soldiers, that he should leave his isolated study. Because he remained the soldier until destiny ended his life before a firing squad, he did not return to a life of scholarship. We shall never know how he would have written history had he survived, but his testimony in Strange defeat suggests that he probably would have taken a differ-
ent tack. The catastrophe of 1940 associated him once more with the individual who thereafter had a major place in his thinking and writing. While three-fourths of Strange defeat is devoted to military history strategy, tactics, logistics, leadership, and the action - the rest deals almost exclusively with politicians, labor leaders, capitalists, journalists, and academicians. Bloch is preoccupied with their intelligence, stupidity, courage, cowardice, patriotism, virtue, and the part they played in honesty, France’s defeat. Even more significantly, he talks about destiny, fate, chance, fall of the cards, surprise, and the unforeseen. Rarely does he speak of long-term collective developments and trends. In some respects the Bloch of 1939-1940 resembles the classical Greek historian Polybius who, having witnessed the incorporation of the Greek city-states into the Roman Republic and having been taken as a prisoner to Rome, pondered the Greek political and military failure and the Roman victory. What concerned him most were the reasons for the success and durability of Roman political institutions, as well as those for the victories of the vaunted military organization. How similar are many of the explanations of Polybius and Bloch. None certainly has the ring of Annales history. Virtue, courage, and discipline are all important. History with its tendency to repeat itself has lessons to teach. The historian who avoids involvement outside the study commands little respect. In other ways Bloch also resembles the Pirenne of 1918 who had seen his country suddenly occupied and who had been taken as a prisoner to Germany for two and a half years. Pirenne’s war experiences altered his view
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of history, a view closely resembling Bloch’s prior to 1940. Pirenne had constructed his history around long-term collective social, economic, and institutional developments that largely determined the action of individuals. He had emphasized comparative study of societies and the writing of history within a western European context. But during his long captivity he lost enthusiasm for some of his historical tenets and accorded a more significant role to the individual. He became convinced of, and emphasized, the role of chance in history, frequently lecturing after the war on the theme of Le hasard en histoire (Lyon 1974: 264-7). Bloch was never an armchair historian. Though he criticized his&passive role in the period between 1919 and 1939, it was less passive than he stated. What must be emphasized, however, is his courageous action in both wars and in the R&stance. For nine years he participated in events fraught almost daily with danger and the unforeseen. Because of what he was, he could not be other than involved in history. It was this participation that led him to question what he had come to believe was the proper way of writing history. Living daily amidst unpleasant realities, he had to admit that the individual in history cannot be ignored, that human frailties and strengths influence the course of history, and that chance, destiny, and the unforeseen must be taken into account. He even came to believe that history, properly studied, could provide useful lessons. By 1944 Bloch had reshaped his perception of history, making it more traditional, more like it had been prior to 1914. He had learned and admitted that to write history far removed from the action is very different
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from writing it after active involvement in its realities. Ultimately he sensed that his Annales methodology, in not giving enough recognition to those human and individual elements that his experience had demonstrated to be so fundamental, fell short of explaining history. Faced with the tension involved in writing good history, he acknowledged what most historians refuse to, that the history derived from their various methodologies and their remote studies will never adequately reflect historical reality. Had his life been spared, surely Marc Bloch would have repudiated his Annales history.
Notes 1
For these studies see Bloch 1966: ix-xv; Lyon 1980: 69-84; and Fink 1980: 175-7. 2 Lyon 1980: 77-80. See also Weintraub 1966: 161-207; Lyon 1974: 129-34, 379-80. 3 These letters are in the papers entitled Henri Pirenne, activitt scientifique, preserved in Pirenne archives, Hierges, France.
Literature Anderson, J.E. (trans.) 1967. Marc Bloch. Land and work in medieval Europe. Berkeley. Beer, W.R. (trans.) 1975. Marc Bloch. Slavery and serfdom in the middle ages. Berkeley. Bloch, M. 1920. Rois et serfs. Un chapitre d’histoire capttienne. Paris. Bloch, M. 1928. Pour une histoire comparee des socittes europeennes. Revue de synthese historique 46: 15-50. Bloch, M. 1939 and 1940. La socittt feodale. 2 ~01s. Paris. Bloch, M. 1949. Metier d’historien. Paris. Bloch, M. 1953. The historian’s craft. New York. Bloch, M. 1957. L’ttrange defaite. Paris. Bloch, M. 1961. Feudal society. Chicago. Bloch, M. 1963. Melanges historiques. 2 ~01s. Paris. Bloch, M. 1966. French rural history. Berkeley. Bloch, M. 1968. Strange defeat. New York.
Bloch, M. 1969. Souvenirs de guerre, 1914-1915. Paris. Febvre, L. 1956. Marc Bloch. In: Architects and craftsmen on history. Festschrift fur Abbot Payson Usher, 75-84. Fink, C. (trans.) 1980. Marc Bloch. Memoirs of war, 1914-15. Ithaca. Fink, C. 1983. Marc Bloch: The life and ideas of a French patriot. Canadian review of studies in nationalism 10: 235-52. Hill, O.H. and Hill, B.H. 1980. Marc Bloch and comparative history. American historical review 85: 82847.
Iggers, G.C. 1975. New directions in European historiography. Middletown. Lyon, B. 1963. The feudalism of Marc Bloch. Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 76: 257-83. Lyon, B. 1966. The letters of Henri Pirenne to Karl Lamprecht (1894-1915). Bulletin de la Commission Royaie d’Histoire 132: 161-231. Lyon, B. 1974. Henri Pirenne: A biographical and intellectual study. Ghent. Lyon, M. and Lyon, B. 1976. The Journal de guerre of Henri Pirenne. Amsterdam. Lyon, B. 1980. Henri Pirenne and the origins of Annales history. Annals of scholarship 1: 69-84. Perrin, C.-E. 1948. L’oeuvre historique de Marc Bloch. Revue historique 199: 161-88. Stoianovich, T. 1976. French historical method: the Annales paradigm. Ithaca. Weber, E. 1982. About Marc Bloch. The American scholar 51: 73-82. Weintraub, K.J. 1966. Karl Lamprecht. In: Visions of culture. Chicago.
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Since the summer of 1944 when Marc Bloch fell before a NaxiJiring squad, no book dedicated to him and his historical writing has yet appeared. There is, however, an imposing corpus of publications in learnedjournals and collections of articles discussinghis contributions to historical methodology and also his life, especially those acts of courage that led to his untimely death. The task here, then, is to probe into Bloch’s writings and to ponder his life and what others have said about him in an attempt to ferret out his thoughts about the nature of history and historical‘methodology and to determine whether in the last few years’of his lrfe his view of history altered dramatically.
Journal of Medieval 0304-4181/85/$3.30
History 0 1985
11 (1985) 181-191 Elsevier Science Publishers
Why, after World War I, did Marc Bloch, co-founder with his colleague and friend Lucien Febvre of what has come to be known as Annales history, become disillusioned with those methods of research and writing that dominated the historical profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very methods by which he had been trained as a young medievalist just prior to 1914? Why did he turn his back on conventional political, diplomatic, military, and biographical history? Why did he become intrigued with social and economic history which, for him, involved the study of seignorialism, feudalism, and the activities of ordinary people such as peasants? Why did he come to tout comparative study as the most effective way of learning about historical similarities and dissimilarities? And why did he strongly welcome the methodology and information made available to the historian by such disciplines as economics, sociology, anthropology, philology, folklore, comparative literature, archaeology, geography, psychology, and agronomy?’ Quite properly it has been suggested that he owed much to one of his masters, Ferdinand Lot, who was more comparative and innovative. And certainly Bloch was familiar with the views of such as Michelet and Fustel de Coulanges on social history; with the methodologies of the sociologist Durkheim, the geographer P. Vidal de la Blache, and the economist Francois Simiand; and with the philosophy of Bergson which suggested the importance of collective mentalities and intuitions. He also knew the innovator Henri Berr who had founded the Revue de synthise historique in which Bloch published some of his first articles arguing
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for new historical perspectives (Lyon 1980: 69-70). To these principal French intellectual breezes that obviously underlay Bloch’s decision to plot a new course, others were added. After 1918 when Bloch and Febvre were called to teach at the University of Strasbourg not only did they find in each other kindred spirits but they also established a close intellectual rapport with the renowned Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, whose works on social and economic history and pleas for comparative study struck in them a responsive chord. Often at Strasbourg for lectures, Pirenne soon became the one to whom they turned for advice and assistance in their efforts to found a journal which offered an alternative to, the kind of history they were renouncing. The copious correspondence of the three between 1919 and 1935, the year of Pirenne’s d.eath, provides a marvelous account of the evolution of the ideas of Bloch and Febvre and of Pirenne’s responses to their questions. Convinced that Pirenne’s prestige would be of inestimable help if associated with their journal, they invited him to be its director, promising to perform all the burdensome tasks. Unwilling to shoulder this responsibility, Pirenne nevertheless promised to support the journal and to urge young historians to publish their articles in it. When the first number of Annales appeared in 1929 it included an article by Pirenne, evidence of his sincerity and good faith (Lyon 1980: 70-7). That Pirenne and his ideas exerted a formative influence on Bloch and Febvre during the incubation period of Annales history is indisputable, but it would be less than historical to give Pirenne sole credit for his novel ideas. Some of them came from the
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German historian Karl Lamprecht with whom he had developed close intellectual ties and with whom he regularly corresponded between 1883 and 1915. In his letters to Pirenne, Lamprecht explained and defended his heretical views which so infuriated the Rankianer and gave rise to the bitter polemical articles during the last decade of the nineteenth century. In Pirenne’s responses it is clear that he was extremely sympathetic to Lamprecht’s revolt against narrow political and biographical history. Pirenne wrote articles supporting the views of Lamprecht and he incorporated these views in his works, especially the Histoire de Belgique (Lyon 1966: 161-231). Karl Lamprecht, one of the first historians to appreciate the significance for history of such social sciences as sociology, economics, anthropology, and, especially, psychology, regarded political history as too little representative of the historical process, contending that only by investigating all human action and thought could historians begin to comprehend the past. What, he asked, was the historian’s proper subject matter individual or collective phenomena? Could the details of long historical development be presented as a coherent structure and an orderly process by looking to specific causes? He did not think so. Meaningful history, that which reflected human accomplishment, beliefs, and aspirations, must be collective. The historian must end his preoccupation with individuals because in concentrating on individuals and political events he had become little more than a biographer. The individual, at most only a representative of his time, an expression of collective society, must be deemphasized as the object of historical re-
search. Individual phenomena derive meaning from the general context of the prevailing mode of life. The proper task of the historian is thus to comprehend collective, long-term phenomena. Ideally, history should be so written that individuals are totally embedded in collective movements and developments. Everyone, so Lamprecht argued, is dependent upon the civilization in which he lives and is in this sense the child of his age. This is true even for the greatest of men. The historian must give attention to large-scale movements and to masses of people.’ It takes little acumen to see that Lamprecht’s views are also largely those of Bloch and Febvre. And it is inconceivable that they had not read some of his essays on methodology. There is, however, no indication that either were much interested in Lamprecht, a reaction easy to explain. Their memories of the France-Prussian War and of the German annexation of Alsate plus their involvement in the war of 1914-18 made them little receptive to German historical ideas, even those for which they came to campaign. Thus it was that Pirenne played a vital part; he was the bridge over which the ideas of Lamprecht traveled to Bloch and Febvre. But Pirenne did not act simply as a conveyor belt. Aware of some deficiencies in Lamprecht’s methodology, he eliminated any he could while incorporating into his history what he regarded as the valid ideas. Under his skilled touch the Lamprechtian system was transformed, improved, and made credible. Lamprecht’s ideas, thus intelligently and deftly filtered, were then conveyed by Pirenne to Bloch and Febvre. Were it not for Pirenne, Bloch and Febvre most proba-
bly would not have been influenced by Lamprecht’s ideas. They could, however, accept the filtered version of Lamprecht through the intermediary of their friend Pirenne. Such, then, were the principal intellectual influences on the development of Bloch’s Andes history. But were there other influences? Insofar as is known Bloch never said that his military service influenced his views on history, yet it cannot be simply coincidental that in 1919 when he went to Strasbourg he began to advocate a history more reflective of the contours of reality, one primarily concerned with the collective activities and attitudes of masses of people. Before 1914 he seemed little interested in the kind of history he wrote and promoted after the war. That research for his t/z&se, published in 1920 and dealing with the emancipation of the peasantry in the region around Paris, was completed prior to 1914 may explain why in its methodology and the questions posed it closely resembled other works on the subject (Bloch 1920). The intention of what follows is to show that Bloch’s service at the front during World War I, which brought him wounds as well as decorations for bravery, caused him to re-evaluate his attitude toward history and to found Andes. Also, it will be argued that the dismal decade of the 1930s leading to World War II and to Bloch’s service in the army and in the R&stance produced such a loss of faith in Andes history that, had he survived, he would probably have repudiated the kind of history he had embraced between 1919 and 1939. Born 6 July 1886 at Lyon where his father Gustave was professor of ancient history, Bloch lived there only until 1887 when his
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father was called to Paris to become professor of Roman history at the Sorbonne. Reared in a cultured academic circle, Bloch attended Parisian lydes, the Ecole Normale Superieure where he trained in history and geography, and then worked toward his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Between 1909 and 1914 he did research for his t/z&e, studied at Leipzig and Berlin, and taught at lycees in Montpellier and Amiens (Perrin 1948: 161-88). Th is life of student and teacher, a life far removed from laborers, peasants, and agents of business and banking, was exchanged abruptly in 1914 for a life remote from the archives and classroom, a daily existence where survival was a primary concern. For the first time Bloch lived among men from totally different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, many being peasants, miners, and factory workers. That he was intrigued by these men is evidenced by his frequent references to them in his remarkable diary, Souvenirs de guerre, 1914-1915 (Memoirs of war) and in his later book, L’e’trange delfite (Strange defeat) (Bloch 1957). The latter work, written after the capitulation of France in June 1940, tried to account for the disastrous defeat of France. Of its three sections entitled “Presentation of the witness,” “One of the vanquished gives evidence,” and “A Frenchman examines his conscience,” the last is the most interesting. Like a skilful pathologist, Bloch performs an autopsy on France in the years between 1918 and 1940, seeking the military, social, economic, intellectual, and psychological causes of the malady. How differently he perceives the France of that period from the France of the period between 1914 and 1918. While not remember-
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ing the first war with relish, he recalls with pride his participation in a struggle that was ultimately victorious and the scenes of courage he witnessed. “In the course of those now far distant four years of 1914-1918 and for me they will always be the ‘real’ war - I saw many such cases of courage. About them I shall say no more. If I let myself go, I could talk on forever.” He speaks of “all of us who had known those years of fighting, unforgettable reminders of personal dangers faced and overcome, of friends killed at our side . . . of the intoxication which had taken hold of us when we saw the enemy in flight.” But in 1939-1940 he sensed a change. “I have a feeling that, even among the men of military age, something had been lost of that fervent fraternity in danger which meant so much to most of us in the old 1914 days” (Bloch 1968: 105, 132, 121). With what kind of men did Bloch share this feeling of camaraderie and intoxication? Decent men in the habit of doing their daily work “conscientiously and properly,” men a sense of solidarity with who “shared others.” He vows that he had “never come across better fighters than the miners of the Nord and the Pas de Calais whom I saw at close quarters in the first war.” He witnessed only one exception and “the man in question was a ‘scab’, by which I mean a non-unionist employed as a strike-breaker.” He greatly admired the peasant. “From having seen at first hand how he lives, from having once fought at his side, and from having much pondered the details of his history, I know the true worth of the French peasant, the vigorous and unwearied quickness of his mind”(Bloch 1968: 104, 148). What emerges from Bloch’s writing is
that he developed a deep respect for ordinary men. His few references to generals and other officers seldom exude the same sentiment; he mentions generals, politicians, and civil officials usually to criticize them. It is .fair to suggest that his military experience in World War I introduced Bloch to ordinary men whom he came to respect, who became the focus of most of his research, and that this experience also whetted his appetite for the kind of history he wrote between the wars. Diverging from his predecessors who were mostly concerned with the legal and institutional structure of seignorialism, Bloch concentrated upon agrarian routine and tradition, technological change, field arrangements, variations in regional agrarian techniques and production, patterns of peasant communities, and the peasant mentality. He never wrote about the individual peasant but, as Febvre noted, he forsook the medieval agrarian history of his predecessors who had “their peasants always plough with cartularies, charters for using ploughshares” (Bloch 1966: xix). He roamed the provinces to become familiar with French agriculture over the long term, with the contours of peasant villages, with agrarian routine, its sounds and its smells. In his book on feudal society, a subject for which the sources afforded the possibility of knowing the individual more intimately, he took the same approach, ignoring the feudal aristocrat as a person (Bloch 1966). Here one will not acquire an intimacy with any feudal lord or vassal. One reads of men, not of man; of the collective image and of collective men, not of the individual or of the concrete. One reads of abstract ideas, like the idea of power, but gets no concrete picture
of an early German chief or a later feudal prince who had power and made it work for him. Feudal men are violent, but there is no picture of one feudal man and his violence (Lyon 1963: 275-83). In writing history that increasingly used the methodology and vocabulary of the social sciences, Bloch seemed little interested in the peasants described in the autobiography of Guibert de Nogent or in such feudal aristocrats as Fulk Nerra, Thomas of Marle, and William Marshal. Is this not paradoxical in view of his association with those peasants and workers in 1914 who won his admiration and interest and made him sympathetic to the social and economic history of ordinary people? Why, when he was so intrigued by these individuals, did he proceed to concentrate upon the collective life and functions of their forbears in the middle ages and leave them faceless? For answers to these questions one should turn not to Bloch’s papers and his marvelous letters to Henri Pirenne,3 but to his Strange defeat, a book written under circumstances that seem to assure its credibility. Having fought this time on the losing side, Bloch was living in a defeated and partly occupied nation. Disillusioned and shocked, he is ruthlessly honest with the shortcomings and failures of both himself and all Frenchmen. He compares the spirit of 1914-1918 with that in the 1930s. Proud of France’s victory over Germany in 1918 and of being a participant in this victory, Bloch, like the majority of Frenchmen, felt that a job had been well done, well enough that the peace and future of France and western Europe were assured. The natural desire of all was to return to work and normalcy. Of this he says:
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The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience. It is true that we emerged from the last war desperately tired, and that after four years not only of fighting, but of mental laziness, we were only too anxious to get back to our proper employments and take up the tools that we had left to rust upon the benches.
In the 193Os, however, he and many other Frenchmen knew that matters were going badly but they did not act. We knew all that, dice, we let things opposition of the ignorant mistrust up in public and . . . . We preferred haunted tranquillity
and yet, from laziness, from cowartake their course. We feared the mob, the sarcasm of our friends, the of our masters. We dared not stand be the voice crying in the wilderness to lock ourselves into the fearof our studies (Bloch 1968: 171-
2).
That Bloch, a scholar, &ould prefer teaching and research to the hurly-burly of participating in movements and causes is understandable, but the follo.wing statement may well provide the real reason he distanced himself from the events of the 1930s. But we were all of us either specialists in the social sciences or workers in scientific laboratories, and maybe the very disciplines of those employments kept us, by a sort of fatalism, from embarking on individual action. We had grown used to seeing great impersonal forces at work in society as in nature. In the vast drag of these submarine swells, so cosmic as to seem irresistible, of what avail were the petty struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors? To think otherwise would have been to falsify history. Among all the characteristics that mark the rise and fall of civilizations, I know of none that is more significant than the gradual movements of the collective mind towards self-consciousness (Bloch 1968: 172-3).
Bloch then frets over this dilemma. He argues that the general mind is composed of a multitude of individual minds continually reacting upon one another. And yet he admits that the individual can introduce a grain of leaven into the general mentality, can thus perhaps modify it to some extent
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and can exert some influence upon the course of events, dictated in the last analysis by human psychology. “The real trouble with us professors,” he concludes, “was that we were absorbed in our day-to-day tasks. Most of us can say with some justice that we were good workmen. Is it equally true to say that we were good citizens?” (Bloch 1968: 173). In regretting that he and other individuals did not act and then ascribing this inaction and passivity to those vast impersonal collective forces which deprive the individual of initiative and action, Bloch sits astride the horns of his dilemma in the twenties, thirties, and even in 1940. Here also is the unsolved tension of his history. Torn by these feelings, he sought resolution in his self-examination by coming down on the side of Annales history. But what was his ultimate assessment of the individual vis-&vis collective history? His actions after 1940 in the last four years of his life suggest that he opted for the individual. He exchanged the cosiness of academic life and the isolated study for the R&stance, for a life of danger shared with ordinary individuals, a life that ended with death before a firing squad of the Gestapo. He died comforting a youth of sixteen who had asked him whether the bullets would hurt. During these years Bloch was a man of action who introduced his grain of leaven into the general mentality. He did what he regretted not having done between the wars. Does this mean, however, that, had he survived, he would have revised his view of history? Would the individual have loomed larger in his history? Would Bloch have become more tolerant of political, diplomatic, and military history? Would he
have made some accommodation with the unforeseen event, the chance in history? Probably so, judging from the sense of his Strange defeat. Seeking the causes of France’s defeat, Bloch remained faithful to Annales history, first by examining the totality of French society that, for him, meant the collective mentality and esprit of the military profession, the politicians and their parties, the trade unions, the bourgeoisie, and the academic professions, and secondly by probing the psychological, technological, and military reasons for the astonishing German success. Yet he approaches this problem quite differently from his examination of historical developments and crises in his previous books. As a participant in a collective disaster, emotionally and mentally involved with individuals and with specific human groups, he seldom writes like an Annales historian. His explanations for the events in France have the ring of traditional history. Sprinkled throughout Strange defeat are the words destiny, fall of the cards, unexpected, accidents of time, fate, and salvation. “But destiny decided that I, with most of my generation, should, on two separate occasions, separated from one another by a stretch of twenty-one years, be jerked violently from the ways of peace... . The fall of the cards has brought me plenty of variety” (Bloch 1968: 2-3). It was fate that placed officers in positions where daily routine was but an extension of their peacetime habits, fate that seemed to dog the trade union movement. “History tells us of men who were neither fools nor, in the matter of personal danger, cowards, but who, for all that, succumbed to misfortune, and on them its verdict has ever been one of contempt”
(Bloch 1968: 111). But what of the individual? There is the captain, too rare in those days of 1940, with whom Bloch worked in perfect harmony. He says of another offrcer that he has “known one really great man” (Bloch 1968: 32). There are descriptions of certain men and their critical mistakes, of a general dismissed for drunkenness. That the generals of 1940 should have acted in the manner of Joffre in 1914 is an oft repeated theme. A general, writes Bloch, should not despair of his genius until the last moment. The genius of Napoleon was “his power of always being able to see the truth behind the appearance” (Bloch 1968: 114). From witnessing men’s behavior under stress of war, Bloch concludes that “those who teach history should be continually concerned with the task of seeing the solid and the concrete behind the empty and the abstract. In other words, it is on men rather than functions that they should concentrate their attention” (Bloch 1968: 27). When Bloch analyses defeat, it could be any historian writing about a period of national crisis. On a long list of deficiencies are corruption, greed, petty profiteering, dirty politics, the making of scapegoats, timidity, defeatism, low civilian morale, collaboration, and denial of country. France was moreover poorly served by a dishonest press, pervaded by mental laziness, and too often slovenly. Everywhere there was lack of leadership, failure of confidence, and thought of capitulation. On this backdrop of black marks Bloch carves in bas-relief the qualities required during periods of challenge. Officers need discipline, imaginative realism, adaptable intelligence, and, above all, character. During war there is no substi-
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tute for courage and toughness of fiber. For the French army “the whole question of ‘authority’ was passing through a crisis” (Bloch 1968: 88). F or France in general there was a lack of patriotism and of ruthless heroism, a revulsion against tough decisions, privation, and sacrifice. “When sacrifice is the order of the day, any exception should be out of the question.” It could almost be de Gaulle speaking when Bloch asserts that there are two categories of Frenchmen who will never really grasp the significance of French history: those who refuse to thrill to the Consecration of our Kings at Rheims, and those who can read unmoved the account of the Festival of Federation . . . . Unfortunately, the men whose ancestors pledged their faith on the Altar of the Nation have lostcontact with the profound realities ofnational greatness (Bloch 1968: 1667).
Strange defeat concludes with a quotation from Montesquieu: “A State founded on the and that People needs a mainspring: mainspring is virtue” (Bloch 1968: 176). If Bloch’s assessment of the characteristics of a nationality is fair and realistic, it is also traditional. Returning to Cherbourg with other evacuees from Dunkirk and experiencing a long delay in disembarkation because none of the dockworkers had yet arrived for work, Bloch comments: “We were back, alas, in the rear zones of a France at war” (Bloch 1968: 21). He frankly admits a widespread French anglophobia, linking it to historical memories of the Maid and of the hateful Pitt and Palmerston. While lack of sincerity is not one of the national faults of the English, the English soldier is, however, by “nature a looter and a lecher: that is to say, he is guilty of two vices which the French peasant finds it hard to forgive when both are satisfied to the de-
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triment of his farmyard and his daughters” (Bloch 1968: 70). The English regard continental Europeans as natives, as inhabitants of their colonial possessions, as their inferiors. The English officers, exuding their well-known “club atmosphere,” were “deeply imbued with that social snobbery from which the members of the English upper middle class are rarely free.” They had those “national prejudices which are inherent in the old crusted Tory tradition” (Bloch 1968: 78-9). Stationed in Alsace during the phony phase of the war, Bloch occupied himself by writing a book on historical method, published posthumously under the title M&tier d’historien (The historian’s craft). Here, even before the fiasco of May and June 1940, he was pondering chance, probability, contingency, the unforeseen, and prevision in history, an indication that he was already uncertain about some of the ideas that have become the trademark of Annales history. In Strange defeat he reflected further on history (Bloch 1957: 124-6). Regarding military strategy and tactics, he wrote that “the only sensible thing is to fall back on the lessons of the past, and to learn from them what, in other words, we should find out by experimenting” (Bloch 1968: 117). From the study of history one can even try to see into the future, and not always, I think, unsuccessfully. But the lesson it teaches is not that what happened yesterday will necessarily happen tomorrow, or that the past will go on reproducing itself. By examining how and why yesterday differed from the day before, it can reach conclusions which will enable it to foresee how tomorrow will differ from yesterday (Bloch 1968: 118).
He defends history against the charge that it was responsible for teaching the French to expect that the war of 1914 would be
fought like the Napoleonic wars and that the war of 1940 would be fought like that of 1914, stating that “no two successive wars are ever the same war” (Bloch 1968: 118). He believes, however, that “successive civilizations show certain repetitive patterns,” that men should be aware of previous mistakes in order to avoid them, and that “the map of the future will be drawn as a result of the lessons they have learned” (Bloch 1968: 118-19). This inspection of Bloch’s thoughts on France between 1918 and 1940 provides a basis for certain observations. As a combatant mingling with ordinary men at the front during World War I, Bloch developed a deep respect for them that contributed to his dissatisfaction with traditional and conventional history and led him to experiment with more effective methods of studying society. His war experience plus the enveloping grip of the social sciences persuaded him that social, economic, and psychological realities were the prime elements of history, realities that should be studied as collective developments and tendencies over the long duration. As he left the war behind, became involved in founding Annales, and wrote the books and articles that embodied his historical conceptions and methodology, he came to ignore the individual. In 1940 Bloch wrote that destiny had decided that he and his generation should again become soldiers, that he should leave his isolated study. Because he remained the soldier until destiny ended his life before a firing squad, he did not return to a life of scholarship. We shall never know how he would have written history had he survived, but his testimony in Strange defeat suggests that he probably would have taken a differ-
ent tack. The catastrophe of 1940 associated him once more with the individual who thereafter had a major place in his thinking and writing. While three-fourths of Strange defeat is devoted to military history strategy, tactics, logistics, leadership, and the action - the rest deals almost exclusively with politicians, labor leaders, capitalists, journalists, and academicians. Bloch is preoccupied with their intelligence, stupidity, courage, cowardice, patriotism, virtue, and the part they played in honesty, France’s defeat. Even more significantly, he talks about destiny, fate, chance, fall of the cards, surprise, and the unforeseen. Rarely does he speak of long-term collective developments and trends. In some respects the Bloch of 1939-1940 resembles the classical Greek historian Polybius who, having witnessed the incorporation of the Greek city-states into the Roman Republic and having been taken as a prisoner to Rome, pondered the Greek political and military failure and the Roman victory. What concerned him most were the reasons for the success and durability of Roman political institutions, as well as those for the victories of the vaunted military organization. How similar are many of the explanations of Polybius and Bloch. None certainly has the ring of Annales history. Virtue, courage, and discipline are all important. History with its tendency to repeat itself has lessons to teach. The historian who avoids involvement outside the study commands little respect. In other ways Bloch also resembles the Pirenne of 1918 who had seen his country suddenly occupied and who had been taken as a prisoner to Germany for two and a half years. Pirenne’s war experiences altered his view
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of history, a view closely resembling Bloch’s prior to 1940. Pirenne had constructed his history around long-term collective social, economic, and institutional developments that largely determined the action of individuals. He had emphasized comparative study of societies and the writing of history within a western European context. But during his long captivity he lost enthusiasm for some of his historical tenets and accorded a more significant role to the individual. He became convinced of, and emphasized, the role of chance in history, frequently lecturing after the war on the theme of Le hasard en histoire (Lyon 1974: 264-7). Bloch was never an armchair historian. Though he criticized his&passive role in the period between 1919 and 1939, it was less passive than he stated. What must be emphasized, however, is his courageous action in both wars and in the R&stance. For nine years he participated in events fraught almost daily with danger and the unforeseen. Because of what he was, he could not be other than involved in history. It was this participation that led him to question what he had come to believe was the proper way of writing history. Living daily amidst unpleasant realities, he had to admit that the individual in history cannot be ignored, that human frailties and strengths influence the course of history, and that chance, destiny, and the unforeseen must be taken into account. He even came to believe that history, properly studied, could provide useful lessons. By 1944 Bloch had reshaped his perception of history, making it more traditional, more like it had been prior to 1914. He had learned and admitted that to write history far removed from the action is very different
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from writing it after active involvement in its realities. Ultimately he sensed that his Annales methodology, in not giving enough recognition to those human and individual elements that his experience had demonstrated to be so fundamental, fell short of explaining history. Faced with the tension involved in writing good history, he acknowledged what most historians refuse to, that the history derived from their various methodologies and their remote studies will never adequately reflect historical reality. Had his life been spared, surely Marc Bloch would have repudiated his Annales history.
Notes 1
For these studies see Bloch 1966: ix-xv; Lyon 1980: 69-84; and Fink 1980: 175-7. 2 Lyon 1980: 77-80. See also Weintraub 1966: 161-207; Lyon 1974: 129-34, 379-80. 3 These letters are in the papers entitled Henri Pirenne, activitt scientifique, preserved in Pirenne archives, Hierges, France.
Literature Anderson, J.E. (trans.) 1967. Marc Bloch. Land and work in medieval Europe. Berkeley. Beer, W.R. (trans.) 1975. Marc Bloch. Slavery and serfdom in the middle ages. Berkeley. Bloch, M. 1920. Rois et serfs. Un chapitre d’histoire capttienne. Paris. Bloch, M. 1928. Pour une histoire comparee des socittes europeennes. Revue de synthese historique 46: 15-50. Bloch, M. 1939 and 1940. La socittt feodale. 2 ~01s. Paris. Bloch, M. 1949. Metier d’historien. Paris. Bloch, M. 1953. The historian’s craft. New York. Bloch, M. 1957. L’ttrange defaite. Paris. Bloch, M. 1961. Feudal society. Chicago. Bloch, M. 1963. Melanges historiques. 2 ~01s. Paris. Bloch, M. 1966. French rural history. Berkeley. Bloch, M. 1968. Strange defeat. New York.
Bloch, M. 1969. Souvenirs de guerre, 1914-1915. Paris. Febvre, L. 1956. Marc Bloch. In: Architects and craftsmen on history. Festschrift fur Abbot Payson Usher, 75-84. Fink, C. (trans.) 1980. Marc Bloch. Memoirs of war, 1914-15. Ithaca. Fink, C. 1983. Marc Bloch: The life and ideas of a French patriot. Canadian review of studies in nationalism 10: 235-52. Hill, O.H. and Hill, B.H. 1980. Marc Bloch and comparative history. American historical review 85: 82847.
Iggers, G.C. 1975. New directions in European historiography. Middletown. Lyon, B. 1963. The feudalism of Marc Bloch. Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 76: 257-83. Lyon, B. 1966. The letters of Henri Pirenne to Karl Lamprecht (1894-1915). Bulletin de la Commission Royaie d’Histoire 132: 161-231. Lyon, B. 1974. Henri Pirenne: A biographical and intellectual study. Ghent. Lyon, M. and Lyon, B. 1976. The Journal de guerre of Henri Pirenne. Amsterdam. Lyon, B. 1980. Henri Pirenne and the origins of Annales history. Annals of scholarship 1: 69-84. Perrin, C.-E. 1948. L’oeuvre historique de Marc Bloch. Revue historique 199: 161-88. Stoianovich, T. 1976. French historical method: the Annales paradigm. Ithaca. Weber, E. 1982. About Marc Bloch. The American scholar 51: 73-82. Weintraub, K.J. 1966. Karl Lamprecht. In: Visions of culture. Chicago.
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