The nation of France honored historian Marc Bloch on Tuesday with interment in the Panthéon in Paris in a ceremony led by French President Emmanuel Macron.
A French Jewish academic, who helped found the Annales school of historiography, Bloch is perhaps best remembered today for his wartime heroism as a member of the French Resistance whom the Nazis captured, tortured and executed in 1944.
Caskets for Bloch and his wife containing the historian’s medals and photographs of the couple were buried with military honors in the presence of his living descendants at the secular mausoleum reserved by law for France’s national heroes. At the request of his family, Bloch’s ashes remain buried in the village where he resided for much of his life in central France.
Macron eulogized the historian by quoting Bloch’s description of himself as “a Jew, who does not hide.”
“Handed over to the Nazis and murdered, along with his companions, on the evening of June 16, 1944, Marc Bloch was portrayed by Vichy propaganda as a terrorist simply because he was Jewish,” Macron said. “Let us state it clearly. This is where antisemitism inevitably leads as soon as anyone embarks on this path of darkness.”
“Faced with this nightmare, Marc Bloch’s greatness lies in the fact that he never lost hope for France and the French people,” Macron said.
Bloch was born in 1886 in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family and raised in Paris. He volunteered for the French Army in 1914 at the start of the First World War, in which he was wounded twice and awarded the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre.
After two decades in academia as a specialist in medieval studies who helped revolutionize the study of history in France by co-founding the journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Bloch was re-mobilized for military service on the eve of the Second World War at age 53.
His book, “Strange Defeat,” written in 1940 and published posthumously, is a first-hand account of France’s military failure and surrender in the face of Nazi Germany’s invasion.
Under the collaborationist Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain, Bloch joined the French Resistance.
“When the enemy occupied France, starting in June 1940, when the government of the French State, in the hands of Pétain and Laval, embarked on the path of collaboration, Marc Bloch’s fate, like that of all Jews, was irrevocably altered,” Macron said.
“A true republican at heart and in his thinking, an ardent and tireless defender of secularism, Marc Bloch endured the consequences of the state-sponsored antisemitism initiated by Marshal Pétain’s government,” he added.
The Gestapo arrested Bloch in March 1944. Though he was subjected to torture under Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi war criminal responsible for deporting thousands of French Jews to death camps, Bloch refused to divulge information about his associates.
The Nazis executed Bloch shortly after D-Day.
Macron credited Bloch as being among those who “saved the honor and soul of France” amid a generation tainted by Jew-hatred and collaboration with Nazism.
Some of Macron’s potential successors to the French presidency on the political left and right sparred on social media on Tuesday over the meaning of the historian’s legacy.
“His contribution to the discipline of history is immense, but it is his work of testimony and analysis ‘Strange Defeat’ that enjoys the widest posterity today for its unrelenting indictment of the cynicism, selfishness and blindness of a portion of the French elites who led our country into the abyss in 1940,” wrote Jordan Bardella, president of the right-wing National Rally party, in French.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has run for the presidency three times as the head of left-wing parties and is seeking office again in 2027 as the leader of La France Insoumise, accused Bardella of being an heir of Vichy.
“Those who ‘drove our country to the abyss’ were the ones who shouted: ‘Hitler rather than the Popular Front,’” Mélenchon wrote in French. “De Gaulle and the Resistance pulled France out of that abyss. Your founders tried to assassinate him. Don’t think we’ll fall for your electoral disguise.”
Bardella responded in kind by accusing the man who helped arrest Bloch of being a communist.
“Bloch was denounced by Francis André, who campaigned for the French Communist Party in the 1930s, before following one of its leaders, Jacques Doriot, into the French Popular Party,” Bardella said in French.
“Mr. Mélenchon’s culture stops where the crimes of the left begin,” he added.
