A French Medieval Historian, Who Served His Country in Both World Wars, Helped Pioneer a New Approach to History in Between Them
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A French medieval historian, who served his country in both world wars, helped pioneer a new approach to history in between them. John Broich THE STUDIOUS RESISTANCE OF MARC BLOCH 40 | History Today | December 2019 THE STUDIOUS RESISTANCE OF MARC BLOCH Previous page: Above: the University Marc Bloch serving of Strasbourg, 1949. with the 72nd Infantry Right: German troops Regiment, c.1918. in Belgium, May 1941. n 1943 a prim figure could be seen most name, ‘Narbonne’. Along those routes, days walking a meandering route across Narbonne collected and delivered coded Lyon in occupied France. Starting from messages, some going to the saboteurs and a quiet suburban lane, the small man assassins of the Maquis, some to other regional with greying hair might enter an alley to commands. He contributed to Lyon’s Iexchange a few words with apparent strangers. underground newspaper. And, after the Allied Next, to a print shop where his briefcase might landings in Italy in early 1943, Narbonne and click open, papers emerging, and click shut. other Resistance officers began planning for the Halting in a shadowy spot, he would discreetly Allied invasion of France. check slips of paper folded in a book of poetry or By all reports, Narbonne was an effective medieval lyrics, always at hand. Some days, leader, especially capable at organisation, able crossing a bridge over the Rhône, he smiled and to consider large communication and logistics shook hands with someone as if he hadn’t seen problems and to make logical plans for them for years, though the two had met only overcoming them. He was daring – colleagues recently. Monsieur Blanchard – that was the suspected that under the gentle exterior was name he gave – was supposedly a salesman, a love of danger – but it was his professionalism, an occupation that justified his long walks calm and judiciousness that endeared him through Lyon. But he did not look like one with to his comrades in the Lyon Resistance. his round glasses, books and a cane for when his A generation older than most, his younger arthritic knee acted up. agents revered him as a reassuring father figure, And so it might, since the walking routes one who was, you could say, ‘professorial’. were long and the days of secret work longer for Agent Narbonne was Professor Marc Bloch. ‘M. Blanchard’, regional Resistance leader, code Born into a Jewish family in France in 1886, 42 | History Today | December 2019 December 2019 | History Today | 43 Victory march of the Front Populaire, Marseille, 15 June 1936. Bloch’s most recent post had been teaching His experiences in the Great War were like medieval and economic history at the Sorbonne those of countless others, in that he saw the in Paris. That ended when he reported for heights of gritty endurance and the lows of duty as a captain in the French army reserve murderously poor leadership. And he witnessed on the eve of war with Germany. It was not his the war’s great levelling. A friend, a miner from first war. Calais, died in Bloch’s arms. Men and boys of all ranks and stations grew bearded and War lessons lice-infested together in the mud. And disease On a morning in June 1918, 31-year-old Captain struck a cross-section of French classes, Bloch’s stretch of the Western Front came in for including many of Bloch’s friends. Though he a pounding. The Germans were only eight miles came from a bourgeois family, Bloch embraced from the provincial capital of Amiens. Bloch thereafter a deep sympathy and respect for the needed to hold his line or Paris itself, already working people of France and an esteem for the subject to the Germans’ long-range guns, French army’s rank and file. might be lost. If he and his men could hold on, After the war, Bloch returned to life as a tanks could be brought to reinforce their line. history lecturer, hired by the University of Under the German artillery barrage a fellow Strasbourg in Alsace, newly transformed from officer was killed near Bloch. Then, with wind German territory to French. In addition to conditions favouring the enemy, gas shells teaching medieval history, he had to teach started falling among the French. Still, Bloch’s French so that hundreds of students could learn men held the line. Bloch received his fourth in their new language. He married a war hero, commendation of the war for that feat, stating Simone Vidal, who had successfully organised he was a model ‘of courage and cool resolution’. refugee relief, and they started a large family. 44 | History Today | December 2019 In these postwar years Bloch developed, mysteries. He also began drafting a piece on with like-minded colleagues in France and historical methods meant to accompany a new Europe, a new historical approach, one that history of France, which he intended to write, he would put in to practice, in secret, in the but never did. He worried about his six months leading up to his transformation from children, wife and frail mother. Professor Bloch to Agent Narbonne. A reservist with an arthritic knee, Bloch had Around the turn of the 20th century, reported for duty in the summer of 1939 aged the field of history in European universities 53. He was a patriot, committed to serving had become strong, rigorous and highly France, but he worried about the army’s plans. professional. Breaking from antiquarianism In his first role of evacuating civilians from and history-as-moral-lesson, university frontline areas, he moved around France’s historians set new standards in mastering vast north-eastern frontier on a weekly basis. archives and great volumes of information to He wrote to his wife that, from what he had make their arguments. They were conscious seen, the Allies would not be able to stop and forthcoming about their methods of a Blitzkrieg like that which had overrun Poland. compiling and distilling data and forming their What he saw of his fellow officers and hypotheses. In many ways, they thought of soldiers concerned him, too. They did not seem themselves as scientists. to know what they were about to fight for, Learning at the feet of this generation, Bloch beside self-defence or vengeance for Poland. and his contemporaries took the next step of To Bloch, it seemed that few saw something examining the sorts of questions they should bigger at stake in defeating Nazi Germany. bring to that rigorously collected data. Where He hoped his homeland would fight for the sake their tutors tended to ask about the origins of of justice within and between nations and, as he nation states, the roots of this or that war, or wrote to a friend, hoped to hear talk of class a certain pope’s reign, Bloch and his colleagues cohesion and a common higher purpose. consciously chose new questions. If they Mostly, he heard crude nationalism. opened themselves to new sources, could they In late January 1940, as the Phoney War discover something about the broad realities sputtered on, the army offered Captain Bloch that shaped the lives of all people, not just a position in the French Military Mission in generals and popes? Might big, unmoving Oslo. He knew Norway and its language and factors of geography or climate help explain the was attracted to the idea of breaking away from character of societies? Could historians reveal the monotonous wait for the arrival of the large, persistent trends in people’s beliefs and Wehrmacht; but he baulked at the thought shared ways of thinking? Bloch and his of leaving his family behind. He feared that colleagues hoped to find ways to understand Germany’s concentration camps could be the experiences of the less-educated majority. coming to France. His refusal to be far from Bloch’s first attempt at this was his 1924 his family portended a terrible fate. book Rois et Thaumaturges (later translated In May 1940, Bloch retreated with his as The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles general’s headquarters towards the Channel, in France and England), a history of the ahead of the German tanks moving through the widespread belief among the pre-modern Low Countries. His most recent task had been French and English that their kings could cure to get petrol to the right place at the right time. diseases such as scrofula. A decade after the Now his staff was tasked with setting fuel Great War, Bloch and like-minded historians dumps alight rather than delivering it. ‘The formed a journal to collect such new histories. whole line of our retreat’, he later wrote to his Its title, Annales d’Histoire Economique et teenage daughter, ‘was lit by more fires than can Social, gave a name to their new school of ever have been kindled by Attila.’ thought: ‘the Annales’. At each stop along the miserable path to Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe located and bombed The next war them. Throughout the experience, Bloch In the winter of 1940, Captain Bloch was observed the mistakes, personal shortcomings enduring the cold monotony of the Phoney War, and confusion of the disintegrating officer or ‘la Drôle de Guerre’, in part by reading British corps around him. He also noted instances of December 2019 | History Today | 45 Joseph Darnand during a minute’s silence at the Monument aux Morts, Vichy, 1940. fortitude and bravery, including that of a truck of those he’d have shot without hesitation only driver who insisted Bloch leave him behind, too the day before. The deception, he later injured to stand a chance of survival, but likely recorded, gave him a ‘malicious pleasure’.