Mark Bloch: Make historical research a career and spend your life exploring it

Isn't a truly interesting book supposed to be thought-provoking, question-provoking, and even dissenting and critical? --Mark Bloch

Born for History: The Biography of Mark Bloch is a truly interesting book.

In the preface, Carol Fink attempts to show that this is a biography of Mark Bloch, but not a regular biography (a flowing narrative, subjective and highly praised). The author tries to find Bloch's life experience, thoughts and the social environment in which he lived from multiple disciplines, and faithfully restores a real Mark Bloch with story puzzle pieces.

In fact, Born for History: A Biography of Mark Bloch is a bowl of "chicken soup" for historical ascetics, even though the word "chicken soup" is now a derogatory term. But this book does have a fairly high nutritional value - if you are determined to step into the field of historical research, how do you love it and make it your own career; in the face of different research methods and the theoretical persistence of others, how to judge and choose; in the process of doing historical research, how to search and dialectically look at the materials in hand, how to think more deeply step by step, and more importantly, whether historical research can be combined with the research methods and theories of other disciplines, or rather, Can historians do different research in many ways, rather than just holding on to one direction? These questions can be answered using Bloch as a model.

Here a brief introduction is needed to Bloch and the school of almanacs he founded. Marc Bloch (1886–1944), descendant of Jews from eastern France, historian, and one of the founders of the Annals School. The Almanac school originated from the founding of the Annals of Economic and Social History by Lucien Faiffer and Mark Bloch in early 1929 (later renamed the Economic, Social, and Cultural Almanacs) in early 1929, and scholars who held the same views used this as a position to form the "Annals School". In short, the "Annals School" advocates emphasizing the whole with time and space, time includes geographical time, social time and individual time, and the way to solve the "whole" is to borrow research theories and methods from other disciplines (economics, sociology). The "Yearbook School" abandoned the immutable and monotonous thinking and practice of traditional historiography at that time, broke the limitations of traditional historiography only focusing on politics, military and diplomacy in doing historical research, and also because it focused on long-term, holistic, and interdisciplinary cooperation in examining and studying history, and the scope of historical research shifted from limited to political history to social history, cultural history, and mentality history.

Therefore, it is not difficult to find that this "Born for History: The Biography of Mark Bloch" is not only a biography of Bloch, it shows Bloch's exploration of historical research at the same time— spending his life answering the above questions - also created the "Almanac School".

If the "almanac school" approach is used in the same way, it is indeed necessary to combine Bloch's life with the larger socio-historical context in which he lived. Generally speaking, the scholar's own academic career will be separated from politics, and Bloch's personal history to refute it - he participated in social movements and wars such as the French Resistance Movement, the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of the Marne - these experiences have made him think newly about history and re-examine historical research, and the details and traces that are not included in traditional historical research should be valued, and the scope of the so-called historical materials should also be redivided, and more importantly, concerned about politics and participation in politics. Integrating personal experience and experience into the investigation of history is actually the key to Bloch's view of historical research and breaking through traditional historical thinking, which has been ignored. Fortunately for him, during World War I, he served as an officer and was responsible for intelligence work—military orders, liaison with the British, signals, codes, topographic surveys, propaganda, defense of interrogations of French deserters—and he had more "historical scene" experience and reflection than historians who could only read material on paper indoors.

A very interesting example. During Bloch's entry into the war, he experienced the process of "rumor making and spreading" on the Plateau of the French Noble Ladies Trail. "Rumors" themselves are misinformation, in Bloch's view, misinformation is constantly spread is not accidental, he thus pays attention to the process of misinformation and collective psychology, and regards the war as a "laboratory", from which to examine the different classes and groups of rumor participants, the memory of national change and change, to create myths, let us deeply admire the place, he participated in the war, while writing "A historian's reflection on the false news of the war".

Anyone engaged in historical research knows this sentence: "The object of historical research is man." This sentence in Post-World War I Europe actually represented a new trend of historiography, "people-oriented". This is a refutation from the "collective expression" of the past, and emphasizes the importance of "individual consciousness" for social development, and historical research should see this point in history, and should also see the importance of being an "individual consciousness" in history:

If individuals want to form a clear view of social needs and widely disseminate their own views, they must add a grain of yeast to the general idea. In this way, he bought himself an opportunity to improve the general idea at a small level, and ultimately to have a certain influence on the course of events (the fall of France, "fatalism") which were ultimately influenced by the human psyche. The real problem with us professors is that we are too immersed in our day-to-day work. Most of us can prove to be diligent craftsmen, but can we also call ourselves qualified citizens?

It has to be said that this "individual consciousness" in Bloch shows a sense of social responsibility, patriotism and mission as a historian. His attention and reflection on the state and politics and war, placed in the experiment of exploring and breaking through the traditional historical research theory, has achieved the "new historiography" that began with him, and his insistence on historical dialectics has influenced the students and posterity of his education. Of course, it also led to his arrest and persecution to death. He knew that there would be such consequences, because the background of the "individual consciousness" was that the teachers and students kept a distance from political and social issues, "ignored the question", and we knew what the outcome of the two choices was, and the person in question, Bloch, naturally knew it.

"Individual consciousness" is also prominently demonstrated in Bloch's study of historical issues. Born for History: A Biography of Mark Bloch tells the story of Bloch's life and also speaks of the origins of the "Almanac School." However, whether it is the "new historiography" or the "annals school", these professional terms are not the core of Bloch's exploration of new breakthroughs in historical research and his theory, and the separation of the schools is not his original intention. In teaching, he "proposes neither any method nor any grand plan, insisting that everyone needs to develop their own way of understanding the text." In other words, he did not want to invent any new vocabulary, but to think deeply about how historians should study historical problems.

There is no doubt that a breakthrough in traditional research is inevitable, but it is also a very bold "feat", and breakthroughs often mean challenging tradition and authority. What's more, Bloch also kicked out a series of academic fraud at the awards ceremony of Amiens High School. This involves a collective distortion of reality, and it is extremely easy to label Bloch as "lying" without a dialectical and critical view of the problems existing in academia. Therefore, when dealing with historical materials and existing research, Bloch advocated that historians should have the same eyes and minds as judges, treat materials and research with a meticulous and cautious attitude, and absolutely not allow fabricating historical materials and copying others.

Second, the difficulty of historical research lies in how to integrate all fragmented information into a complete research case. In Bloch's time, historiography was indeed undergoing reforms, and interdisciplinary collaboration was on the verge of flourishing. The problem is that there is always a difference between the humanities and the natural sciences, for example, historiography cannot draw conclusions directly from phenomena like the natural sciences, historiography does not need to involve too much analysis and classification as the natural sciences, and it is clear that society is not a "group of individuals" and history does not occur alone. Bloch advocated focusing on "events" and "phenomena"—"the former being a random combination of facts, and the interconnections between them being temporary; the latter being produced only after the analysis of the events involved." ”

For history not to be divided into individuals, Bloch's Kings and Serfs can be used as a reference for the classics. In addition to the non-narrative and judge-scrutinized research styles, the work "skillfully combines legal, political, social, economic, and psychological factors to provide a more comprehensive and objective version of history." Bloch is not limited to a single historical research method and research direction worth learning from our descendants, and his familiarity with disciplines other than history, such as economics and geography, not only broadens his horizons in examining historical problems, but also allows him to restore history more comprehensively and three-dimensionally, he examines the monarchy, he also pays attention to the problem of serfdom, and even the problem of rumor propagation mentioned above, but also to note that his erudition and widespread love and concern for various disciplines are also related to his opposition to all dogmatism - the teaching of history at that time was single and boring and extremely limited.

Based on this, when he became a faculty member, his true attitude also became his teaching:

One of the skills of historians is to ask more questions than to merely display transcendental truths.

Historians are neither theologians nor moralists, and their role is not to condemn or exonerate a particular situation, but to understand the causes of such phenomena and to find the purpose behind them.

Grasp a problem, conduct in-depth and meticulous research, travel through time and space, until a phased conclusion is reached, and then a new question is raised.

At this point, it can be explained that Carol Fink's "Born for History: The Biography of Mark Bloch" is not just a regular biography. For history beginners and historians, it is "chicken soup", a "guide book" and a "reflection". Looking at the domestic historical research over the years, there are many new historical materials, new methods, and new perspectives, and there are many controversies, but it is undeniable that historical research is moving towards a model, quantifying and limiting the environment of humanities and social science research, which also makes researchers impetuous, and novices are eager to complete tasks and try to find shortcuts with templates... In contrast, Bloch's life and his exploration of historical research as a career remind us: what is historical research for us? Also, do you want to take historical research as a career and spend your life exploring it? This is not a matter of ephemerality.