On June 10, 1944, the Anglo-American coalition organized the Normandy landings, marking a complete turn in the situation in World War II. A week later, on the early summer evening of June 16, at a place on the banks of the Saône called La Rousille, the Jewish-French historian Mark Bloch was shot by The German Nazis. Ten days earlier, Bloch had spent his 58th birthday in prison torture.
A total of 28 people were escorted to the execution ground with Bloch, two of whom miraculously survived. They said Bloch was one of four people in the first group to be taken to be shot, and before dying, he comforted another young man who had joined the French underground resistance group so that he would not be afraid. The "Sorbonne Professor", who was "old, gray-haired, short in stature and wearing gold-rimmed glasses," shouted "Long live France" and fell on French soil.
In his later years, Mark Bloch was also the last photograph of his life, taken circa 1943
As one of the founders of the "Almanac School", Bloch's investigation of the miracles of kings in the Middle Ages, the interpretation of feudal society, the analysis of the relationship between French serfs and landlords, and the analysis of socio-economic history are still valued by the academic community today. Bloch's works were translated into Chinese by experts such as Zhang Xushan and Huang Yanhong, which made the Chinese academic circles very familiar with Bloch's teachings. The theoretical approach of the Almanac school also bears similarities with the materialist view of history, which has given Bloch a special influence on the Chinese world historiography.
For understanding a historian, in addition to examining his writings, he must also experience his life. In a way, their practice of their own lives is a true portrayal of what they think in the deepest recesses of their hearts.
Chinese translations of Mark Bloch's works published in China in recent years
Bloch's genealogical roots and academic growth
As a Jews, Bloch's family broke away from Jewish religious feuds early on. Bloch's great-grandfather became a soldier during the bloody period of the French Revolution of 1793. His grandfather, Mark, orphaned at the age of 11, became the first Jewish student at the Colmar Pedagogical College and served as principal of the Jewish Secondary School in Strasbourg. Bloch's father, Gustav Bloch, entered the Paris High Division in 1868 and took part in the Defence of Strasbourg in 1870. After receiving his doctorate from the Sorbonne, Gustav returned to his alma mater, the Paris Collegiate, from the University of Lyon, where he had previously taught, and later became a professor at the merged Sorbonne until his retirement in 1919, when he was a well-known scholar of Roman history in France. It is the story of a Jewish family that has struggled for generations, and for more than a hundred years they have become very indifferent to their religious identity, but even if they have become the great figures in the Academic Circles of Paris, they are still "Jews in exile in Alsace".
Bloch was born in Lyon on 6 July 1886, when his father was a faculty member at the University of Lyon. When Bloch was two years old, the family went to Paris, which gave him a complete "Parisian" growth process. Before Bloch's birth, France had embarked on a new centralized educational reform to recreate the glory of the French nation through history, thus healing the wounds of foreign invasions and defeat in war for the entire nation. That generation of young people was full of patriotic enthusiasm and attached great importance to physical exercise, which can be described as the pioneers of "civilizing its spirit and barbarizing its physique".
The Dreyfus case left a deep imprint on the growth of Bloch Jr., and even in his later years he often wrote about his feelings at that time, and from time to time in various studies, he used the case to illustrate his arguments. Because of this case, Bloch has always been skeptical of the news media, believing that the media will deliberately make up "explosive news" for the sake of attracting people's attention. At the same time, the trial of this case also made Bloch deeply fascinated by court procedures, which is very clear in his later historical research. Therefore, he paid special attention to the collection of historical evidence, and paid more attention to the analysis and identification of historical evidence.
The darkness of the Dreyfus case convinced Bloch that they were not Jews on French soil, but French people of Jewish descent. This conviction never wavered in his heart.
Bloch received his bachelor's diploma from the Paris Collegiate in 1905 and later passed the teacher qualification examination in the subjects of history and geography. In 1908, he went to Berlin and Leipzig, Germany, to study.
Marc Bloch signed a letter of commitment to serve the country for ten years at the High School in Paris
At that time, an important goal of French historiography was to surpass the Germans, but the way to transcend was to follow the path that the Germans had crossed, such as perfecting the techniques of textual reading, stylistic analysis, etc., and establishing strict guidelines. French academics have always had a tradition of emotion. Whether it is Jules Michelet or Emile Gebal, who is known as the father of modern French historiography, his writing style is characterized by passion and beauty. Compared with modern historiography, historians at that time were more similar to literati writing history, with special emphasis on the power of rhetoric. Even Ranke, who advertises "truthful and straight writing", is no exception.
Bloch's growth process was influenced by the stirring of ideas on all sides. During his time of study, the great historians were Senobos and Langenova, who co-authored The Origins of Historiography, which was translated by Li Sichun into Chinese in 1926. These two scholars strive to oppose the adverse impact of Romanticism on historical research, emphasize that the reconstruction of the past should be thoroughly sorted out, synthesized and analyzed in the literature, and emphasize the fundamental role of the literature and the uniqueness of individual cases. In addition, Bloch was deeply influenced by Bergson and Durkheim, which gave his historical research a deeper theoretical dimension.
In the French historical circles at that time, scholars represented by Ferdinand Lot began to emphasize more on the comparative vision of historical research. Lott is of great significance in the academic history of the European and American Middle Ages in the 20th century, and Charles Homer Haskins of the United States and Richard William Solson of the United Kingdom both came to Paris to study at Lot, and these two were the founders of the new paradigm of research in the middle of the Middle Ages in the United States and Britain.
Bloch's comparative research horizons derived more from the Belgian scholar Henri Piran. Piran's Medieval Cities, Charlemagne and Muhammad, and several volumes of History of Belgium are desk books for scholars to this day. Piran insisted on writing only in French, and even when the University of Ghent abolished bilingual teaching of French and Dutch and allowed only Dutch to be taught, Piran transferred to the University of Brussels. His original chair at the University of Ghent was inherited by his student, Ganshof, who wrote What is Feudal Society. In addition to the academic method, Piran conveyed an attitude to life to Bloch. In 1928, when Piran was touring Stockholm with Bloch, he suggested that it should start with the newly completed town hall: "If I were an antiquarian, I would have been staring at those old things, but I am a historian, so I love life".
The famous Belgian historian Henri Piran
Bloch had a keen interest in the dynamic evolution of history, both in the evolution of the relationship between lords and peasants and in the study of the miracles and coronations of kings. We see here the influence of Bergson's thought. Bergson has always tried to emphasize that we cannot artificially divide time cycles and spatial patterns, because history and geography do not stop abruptly at a certain time or place. In research, the scale of "with variables" should be used to describe. This idea became the hallmark of the "long period" of the later annals school. As a historian, Bloch participated in the First and Second World Wars, which gave him a deeper understanding of history, war, politics, and the state. In the transfer of war and even the escape, Bloch may deepen his understanding of those historical materials in his own experience. Influenced by the rapid development of the social sciences of that era, Bloch believed that historical facts were essentially facts of human psychology. In Bloch's view, the most basic common sense as a historian is to "avoid general abstract terms and reconstruct the only conclusive basic fact hidden behind it—man."
From the trenches to Paris
When World War I broke out, Bloch's career as a historical "apprentice" was coming to an end. Sitting in a carriage piled high with vegetables, Bloch, 28, enlisted in the army in Amiens. During the war, the young historian verified the human tragedies recorded in the history books, and witnessed the cruelty that had not been witnessed in the history books. During World War II in 1940, he recalled the First World War, saying that he had begun to learn to recognize the sounds of empty nights in the trenches, but the humming bullets were like a record made in his head, ready to open.
When he experienced the war firsthand, Bloch understood the mentality of the people in the war more deeply: "Except for some of the noblest and wisest soldiers, few people think of their homeland when they go forward. They are more dominated by a sense of personal honor, which is constantly breeding and becoming very powerful in the group. During the Second World War, Bloch had a similar observation: "When a crisis comes, the defects of character are worn away, but virtue, as a potential force, suddenly erupts." "Whether there is smoke or not on this battlefield, the sense of honor dominates and generously dies to the death of heroes.
In June 1915, he made a will, in addition to saying goodbye to his family and friends and believing in the victory of France, he was willing to donate all his salary, pension, etc. to the orphans caused by the war and the alumni association of the Paris Collegiate, and to those "organizations that strive for a fairer and more reasonable society."
Mark Bloch in military uniform during World War I
In 1919, Mark Bloch ushered in a new life in Strasbourg at the end of World War I. Strasbourg was once a free city under the Holy Roman Empire, witnessing the struggle between Catholics and Lutheran and Calvinites during the Reformation, as well as an ancient Jewish community. On 1 October 1919, Mark Bloch was hired as an assistant lecturer in medieval history at the University of Strasbourg. In 1920, Bloch passed a review of his dissertation by a defence committee chaired by Senobos and received a doctorate. His phD application for a major dissertation, "The King and the Serfs: A Glimpse into the History of the Capetian Dynasty," which, while very different from the grand plans of its early designs, has demonstrated Bloch's keen academic vision and solid research foundation.
There were originally many German professors at the University of Strasbourg who left after the war, and a large number of French scholars filled their chairs. Strasbourg's magnificent University Palace makes it easy for teachers of all disciplines to interact with each other, and this geographical proximity also opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary research.
University Palace of the University of Strasbourg
In 1923, at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Brussels, Faivre proposed the creation of an international journal, then called the Annals of Economic and Social History. Bloch then devoted a great deal of time and energy to the compilation of the Yearbook. At the same time, he has always wanted to "jump ship", looking forward to being elected as a professor at the Collège de France and returning to Paris, a paradise of life and research.
In 1924, Bloch published his first monograph, The Miracle of the King, which discussed the miracles of treating inflammation of the lymph nodes in the neck through the touch of the king in England and France, behind which the king established divine authority and competed with the church for the hearts and minds of the people. In His History of the French Countryside, Bloch classifies the land in France and emphasizes that the shaping factors of these land types are not only natural conditions, but more importantly, human labor and adaptation processes. Without human involvement, all classifications would be just talk. Although his research focuses on the late Middle Ages, it also has a strong sense of reality. At that time, the Soviet peasants were in the dark period of the Stalin era, and the peasants in Western Europe after the First World War also faced many problems such as insufficient manpower and fertilizer shortages. Bloch knew that historical research could not provide a direct reference to actual production, but he still wanted to understand the underclass of the past and the present.
After living in his ancestral home of Alsace for more than a decade, Bloch felt increasingly lost. He felt that the University of Strasbourg had a poor student base, that the originally generous salary had been reduced with the reduction of the budget, that the disappointment of the scholars was accumulating, and that many friends had already found another way. In Paris, although the cost of living is higher, the professors are treated much better, and there are the best students, libraries and archives, and various journals and publishing houses. And because of its geographical proximity to Germany, the influence of Nazi ideology in Strasbourg also became stronger.
Mark Bloch while teaching at the University of Strasbourg
From 1928 onwards, Bloch had been worried about the vacancy of professors at the Académie française, as had his friend Faiffel. After several fiascos, Favre finally came to work. In 1932, France's new Minister of Education, Monzi, added a professorial position to the Académie française and nominated Fauvel as editor-in-chief of the French Encyclopedia. At the end of that year, the Public School voted to reinstate professorships in modern history, and in January of the following year, Faiver was formally elected to the chair.
Lucien Faivre, who co-authored the Yearbook with Mark Bloch.
Favre's election also made Bloch feel some anxiety, and he wanted to get the chair as a "comparative historian", but then felt that the odds were not very good, and simply quit. Since then, Bloch and his competitors have waited with anxiety and expectation for the obituary of the professors issued by the Académie française. During this time, Bloch also made a trip to England to have in-depth conversations with Oxford University professor Maurice Bowick and Ernst Cantorovich in exile. He greatly appreciated the charm of British university life and was very discouraged by the state of French academic institutions, which may be a reflection of his anxious state of mind at that time. However, Cantorovich, who was extremely unpopular in Oxford, probably would not particularly appreciate the British atmosphere.
On 15 January 1935, it was a double blow to Bloch. On this day, the Saarland referendum decided to merge into Germany by overwhelming margin. In the election of the French Collegiate on the same day, Mark Bloch's proposal to establish a professorial seat in the "Comparative History of European Societies" received only one vote of support, from gilsson, a medieval philosophical historian who applied for Bloch. It was a major setback in Bloch's academic career, and it could even be seen as a humiliation. Bloch once said with some banter and indignation that the Académie française, the aristocratic House of Lords of the British Parliament, and the German General Staff were the last bastions of the three great conservatisms. He believes that his defeat was on the one hand due to the strong anti-traditional meaning of the "comparative historiography" method of governance, and on the other hand, the growing anti-Semitism at that time.
In 1936, the Sorbonne Awarded Bloch a professorship in economic history, which eventually led him back to Paris. On the two floors of the top floor of an apartment at 17 Rue de l'Serve, the Bloch family began a new life in Paris. He was exactly fifty years old. In addition to his research in his own studio, Bloch was particularly fond of Agatha Christie's novels, and even during the war, he often read speculative fiction to ease the nervousness. In Paris, he focused on his monumental work Feudal Society on the one hand, and on the other hand, he kept a close eye on the movements of Germany. As a researcher of the historiography of mentality, Bloch deeply understood the incendiary power of symbols and grand ceremonies on the populace, which was playing out on the other side of the border.
Mark Bloch's Book of Feudal Society
In 1939, war broke out again on European soil, and the 53-year-old Bloch once again threw himself into another world war. The aging historian left behind more detailed observations, once again in real state of war, confronting the ability of governments to function and mobilize and the indescribable cruelty of war. After the Evacuation at Dunkirk, Bloch spent some time in England before sneaking back to France. After he changed into civilian clothes, the professor's temperament was similar to the image of the officer on the German military's hunting list. During his ten days in Rennes, he developed a "vicious pleasure" by deceiving all the German officers. But by 1940, The Vichy government in France began purging Jews from the education system. At the time, the person in charge of sorting out the application for the exemption of Jewish professors was Jerome Capino, the acting rector of the Sorbonne, who had been a student of Bloch's father and the two were also good friends. The Minister of Education who maintained the government, GerroBobel, was not only an alumnus of Bloch, his son was also a student of Bloch. Thus, Bloch was among the ten Jews who were first granted the grant of professorships in January 1941.
However, the situation in Europe still worried him, and he wanted to follow in the footsteps of Kontolovich to the United States. At the time, Alvin Johnson, the president of the New School of Social Studies in New York City, used funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to push fifty to a hundred European scholars to take refuge in the United States to teach. After Bloch's application was issued, it received enthusiastic responses from several prestigious universities such as Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. However, due to the large number of Bloch's families, elderly mothers and newly adult children are unable to obtain visas to visit the United States. Moreover, Bloch insisted on going as a family, and booking a one-time transoceanic ferry ticket for eight people was an impossible task at the time, and also required transit visas from Spain and Portugal in wartime. In August 1941, Johnson finally canceled his invitation to Bloch. Although in theory, Bloch could still travel to the United States, he never tried again.
The American scholars who helped Bloch at the time seemed to have lost patience, saying he was reluctant to come to the United States without guaranteeing visas for "his mother, wife, and five children." The cable at the time reported that Mark Bloch was unwilling to travel to the United States without guaranteeing that all family members would be granted visas.
At that time, Bloch's wife was terminally ill, and in order to find a more suitable environment for her to recuperate, Bloch moved to the University of Montpellier. Anti-Semitism in France and the government's discriminatory policies against Jews continued to increase, and in order for his son to continue his education, he had to use his historian skills to search around for evidence that he and his wife had been French citizens for less than five generations and had made outstanding contributions to France. During Easter 1942, Bloch's mother died unexpectedly, and his wife also suffered from pleurisy with a high fever. One of his students returned from Paris and told Bloch that his home and all the books in Paris had been "confiscated, removed from the apartment, and transported to unknown places" by the Germans. In the midst of poor salaries, his own inability to attend classes, his wife bedridden, and his children scattered, Bloch's letter of appeal to the Minister of Education listed his contributions to the country as a Jewish-Frenchman. In the place of his signature, he wrote his most cherished titles and honors: "Professor of Economic History of the Sorbonne, Knight of the Legion of Honor, Order of the War Cross of 1914-1918, Cross of war of 1940." ”
Epilogue: The Responsibility of Intellectuals
In early 1943, Bloch finally decided to join the Underground Resistance Movement in France. He returned to Lyon, his birthplace, where he had been exhausted by U.S. visa officers a few years earlier. In the underground resistance movement in Lyon, Bloch, a "small old gentleman with a smile and a very kind", gradually became the leader of the whole region and went to Paris to participate in secret activities. He even took his wife to Paris again, and even when the Nazi flag was flying in the streets, they could only look at their former residence from a distance. Conversations with Faivre and nights on the Seine left him addicted.
The last letter of Bloch's life was addressed to his wife Simon: "Although you are brave and sane, I can imagine the difficulties with which you make all your decisions, and forgive me for being so far away from you." After the letter, dated 28 March 1944, no new writing circulated in Bloch. Less than a year before victory in World War II, the Jewish-Frenchman, one of France's greatest medieval historians of the 20th century, soaked the land of his homeland with his own blood.
Bloch objected to historians who had gone too far in their own research to make value judgments because they were neither theologians nor moralists, and their purpose was not to exonerate or condemn. Their only purpose is to examine the causes of these historical phenomena as comprehensively as possible and to try to reveal the purpose behind them. In other words, the historian's responsibility lies in understanding, not judging, the object of his study. In terms of specific political positions, Bloch, like many intellectuals of the time, belonged to the "Proms" on the periphery. They want to be able to remain impartial as academics and avoid commenting on major public events as much as possible.
Deep in the second world war, Bloch seems to have begun a profound dissection of that generation of scholars and of himself. "We just can't wait to get back in place and pick up the tools we left on the stools and let them rust, we've fallen behind our research, so we're wolfing down at the risk of indigestion," he admits. But at the same time, he admits that they have long been "aware that versailles and ruhr's diplomatic strategy is actually an abyss" and that the serious consequences they may eventually swallow up. Bloch's critique of the intellectual Mingzhe's self-preservation is also a critique of the self. He hopes that each individual can form a clear view of social needs, and that his views will be widely disseminated, improving the universal key on a small thing to ultimately have an impact on the course of events. Bloch noted, "The real problem with us professors is that we are too immersed in day-to-day work. Most of us can prove to be diligent craftsmen, but can we also call ourselves qualified citizens? However, they lived discreetly, enjoying their own comfortable lives in a vague uneasiness until the Great War showed its fangs again.
Behind Bloch, his activities in the Resistance became a monument to the "Almanac School" and even evolved into some form of totem (Norman Canto). Bloch's life was always accompanied by a sense of exile, both as a Jewish-Frenchman and as an advocate of a new approach to historiography. In that big era of eerie events, Bloch never gave up his pursuit of scholarship and his insistence on his heart. He was born for history, and he lived his life as a history.
Attached is a Chinese translation of Mark Bloch's relevant writings (all the most recent versions listed):
1. "Miracles of Kings: A Study of the So-Called Paranormality of British and French Kingship", translated by Zhang Xushan, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2018 edition.
2. "Feudal Society" (upper and lower volumes), translated by Zhang Xushan, Li Zenghong, hou Shudong, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2011.
3. The Skills of Historians, translated by Zhang Hesheng, Shanghai: Shanghai Social Sciences Press, 2019.
4. The Skills of Historians (Second Edition), translated by Huang Yanhong, Beijing: Chinese Min University Press, 2011.
5. History of the French Countryside, translated by Yu Zhongxian, Zhang Penghao, and Che Er, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2011.
6. Strange Defeat: Testimony Written in 1940, translated by Wang Shaoqing, Beijing: Chinese University Press, 2013.
7. [Beauty] Carol Fink: Born for History: A Biography of Mark Bloch, translated by Zheng Chunguang et al., Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, 2019.