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Home , Joseph Darnand, Klaus Barbie, Marc Bloch, Montluc prison

A French medieval , who served his country in both world wars, helped pioneer a new approach to in between them. John Broich THE STUDIOUS RESISTANCE OF

40 | History Today | December 2019 THE STUDIOUS RESISTANCE OF MARC BLOCH Previous page: Above: the University Marc Bloch serving of , 1949. with the 72nd Infantry Right: German troops Regiment, c.1918. in , 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 in occupied . 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 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 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 at the Sorbonne those of countless others, in that he saw the in . 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 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 , 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 , 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 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 . 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 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 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 ; 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 : 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 . 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 ’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’. to slow his comrades down before the inevitable Having escaped to the southern Unoccupied occurred. Bloch saw it all with a historian’s eye: Zone of France, ruled by the collaborators in mentally collecting and cataloguing countless Vichy, Bloch was soon back to teaching history anecdotes which, together, would reveal trends. in Clermont. By the autumn of 1940, the Vichy Beneath the dunes of Dunkirk, Bloch twice government published its Statut des Juifs, managed to get the men under him aboard a set of anti-Jewish decrees reducing Jews’ ships for England; their first ship was sunk by citizenship and barring them from many the Germans. He spent one surreal day in professions. Bloch’s university had to get special England, which seemed a world away from the dispensation for him to teach, while friends in devastation in France. By nightfall, he was the US tried to secure him and his family visas. sailing back to fight. When it became clear that his ailing mother Finally, in June, Bloch’s unit was surrounded and teenage daughter could not be included, in , north-western France. It was the he abandoned any plan of leaving France. day after Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the Germans for a ceasefire and Bloch watched Class war Wehrmacht lorries roll unopposed into the In this climate of fear and anger, Bloch opened town. Bloch chose not to be rounded up as an a new notebook. He decided to apply his skills officer and slipped into his professor’s clothes. as a historian of social currents to the fall of Within hours he was moving through the France. ‘Will these pages ever be published?’, German-occupied town within arm’s reach he began,

46 | History Today | December 2019 , head of the ‘Against Communism’ in Lyon, 1942. poster produced by the , 1944.

I cannot tell … Nevertheless, I have quite made sufficient in the last war, it now meant little to up my mind to proceed with the writing of Panzer tanks and nothing to bombers. them, though the effort will be harsh and Bloch wrote that the French, in turn, failed exacting. How much easier it would be to plead to learn from German tank tactics in Poland or weariness and discouragement as an excuse France. ‘Those attending the cavalry courses at for doing nothing! the staff college’, he wrote, ‘had had it drilled into them that, though tanks might be tolerably Bloch described France’s sluggish movement useful in defence, their value for attack was nil.’ and sluggish thinking. His superiors, he wrote, Bloch’s analysis, however, went beyond seemed to want to fight the last war, while the tactical errors. He sought to examine a spirit Germans were fighting the next. The French that seemed to haunt the officer and political wanted to establish lines and fronts; the class. There was a spectre, he argued, that Germans, to make slices and cuts. whispered in their ears: democracy and liberalism have failed; don’t die for them. It was unthinkable to [a] staff that we should France in the 1930s experienced what many put up any kind of resistance without plotting countries had: a titanic brawl between Left on the map and then pegging out on the ground and Right. Labour and communist parties a fine continuous ‘line’ with switches, forwards wrestled with anti-labour and fascists, positions, battle zones, and all the rest of it. sometimes literally, in the streets. The large centre, where, as a comfortable professor, In reaction to repeated German breakthroughs, Bloch placed himself (though his sympathy Bloch’s superiors ordered retreats of a few lay with the workers) often watched with miles; but while a few miles’ retreat had been dumb complacency.

December 2019 | History Today | 47 After the 1936 election, Léon Blum managed ruination of France at the hands of the to assemble a leftist-labour coalition authoritarians. government and started to address the effects Closing his notebook and hiding it away of the Depression on French workers. It won in September 1940, it would remain a secret, a 40-hour work week, facilitated rights for a historical record of mentalities and a lament workers to strike and helped raise wages. Bloch for his country, until its discovery in 1946. detected irritation among the middle class that In early 1943 a young member of a working men and women were improving their Resistance cell in Lyon, ‘Maurice’, introduced a lot. They were piqued that labourers were fresh recruit to his comrades. The others in the getting what they felt was an undeserved leg up cell did not learn Marc Bloch’s real name. They through ballots and strikes. Workers, some were never shared. Naturally, his comrades gave believed, were forgetting their place. him few important responsibilities at first as The Blum government also tried to break they tested his trustworthiness. The younger ancient strangleholds on institutions that Résistants, meanwhile, took to him like a perpetuated class dominance. It created, for favourite professor. example, a public civil service college to open Indeed, Bloch brought his academic skills access to government jobs. This bred to his expanding responsibilities. When the resentment, which rightist parties capitalised Gestapo or French police put their plans awry on until, in some quarters, the slogan became – a matter of weapons transports, perhaps, or ‘Better Hitler than Blum’. coordination with other units – Bloch said: In his notebook, Bloch wrote that, just as ‘Come we mustn’t let ourselves be carried away. ‘a monarchy needs a personnel composed of The great thing is to isolate and limit the monarchists’, France needed a ruling class of problem.’ Like the historian mastering a dedicated democrats – and France needed such disordered archive, he would distil order from democrats most in its moment of peril in Spring confusion. He worked on a raft of tasks over the 1940. But, democracy having threatened their next year, quickly rising to become an officer, dominance and station, ‘higher officials bred up planning missions for regional fighters and to despise it … serve it only half-heartedly’. saboteurs, aiding underground newspapers Bloch noted that: and helping undermine of French workers to Germany. He became a delegate They were only too ready to despair of the to other groups, which in country they had been called upon to defend, Autumn 1943 took him to Paris, where he dared and of the people who furnished the soldiers they to walk down the street on which his family had commanded … They were ready to find lived before the war. An air-raid searchlight was consolation in the thought that beneath the now installed on one of his home’s balconies. ruins of France a shameful regime might be It was a hunted life. Dropping aliases helped, crushed to death. but it was particularly dangerous to hold a leadership position, being known to so many Bloch argued that this was not the fault of the agents. If just one of them was seized and made rank and file French soldier, whose heroics he to talk, perhaps describing the greying man described and honoured; it was the fault of the with the cane, the modest house in the Lyon older, higher officers, who backed surrender suburb, the rooms above the dress factory that and Pétain to hide their guilt and hurry served as his headquarters, the enemy would providence’s punishment for indulging have him. And there were frequent arrests. liberalisation. The Lyon office of the Gestapo, led by the Bloch’s own generation of middle-class First sadistic Klaus Barbie, was ever-present. Vichy’s World War veterans had failed, he argued, to anti-Resistance militia, the Milice, led by the inculcate their country with the greatest virtues French fascist Joseph Darnand, also operated of France: democracy, liberty and a desire to throughout the city. Bloch, meanwhile, raise the level of justice and equality for every saw lorries taking French Jews to their fate. citizen. Bloch included himself in this failure, ‘If I survive this, I shall go back to my one that left far too many in positions of teaching’, Bloch was known to say. It was a big authority who eventually accepted the if. A few months into 1944, though his spirits

48 | History Today | December 2019 Marc Bloch, c.1940. Further reading Marc Bloch Strange Carole Fink Marc Bloch: Defeat: A Statement of A Life in History Evidence Written in 1940, (Cambridge, 1989) translated by Gerard Hopkins (New York, 1968) had risen with Allied progress into northern place at the wrong time. Ever the historian, Italy, he hinted to friends and family that he was having recovered from one of his rounds of too exposed to survive much longer. So when, torture, Bloch offered a tutorial to some in March 1944, the Gestapo closed in on him, inmates on medieval French history. he could not have been surprised. A raid at a After two more rounds of torture, he could colleague’s headquarters yielded five agents to only have been bolstered when news of the Barbie’s torture chamber. Bloch quickly learned massive Allied landing in Normandy passed of the arrests but, whether to avoid conspicuous through the prison fortress via coded knocks. signs of panic or out of a sense of fatalism, Those landings, though, meant his end, as the attended a small dinner party that same night. Gestapo began systematically murdering most The next morning, he slipped away just before of its Lyon prisoners over the coming few weeks the Gestapo’s black sedans appeared near his before withdrawing. secret headquarters in the dress factory. A baker, A witness told of a stoic scene where Bloch though, told the Germans which way he had and two dozen others were led to a field and gone. They cornered Narbonne on a bridge over there faced the firing squad, with no pleas, no the Rhône. In the coming days, Vichy newspapers cries except, ‘Vive la France’. He had devoted his celebrated the Gestapo’s arrest of this ‘terrorist’, life to France’s best ideals of liberty and equality, whom, they pointed out, was a Jew. even after many others had abandoned them. Those imprisoned and tortured alongside Bloch in Lyon’s infamous John Broich is the author of Blood, Oil and reported that he never spoke except to give his the Axis: The Allied Resistance Against real name, that of a ‘mere’ professor, perhaps to a Fascist State in Iraq and the Levant, 1941 suggest that he had simply been in the wrong (Abrams Press, 2019).

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