Who was Marc Bloch that Emmanuel Macron wants to bring into the Pantheon ?

Marc Bloch died in 1944, assassinated by the Gestapo. &On the occasion of the 80&amp ;nbsp;years of the Liberation of Strasbourg, President Emmanuel Macron announced his pantheonization.

“For his work, his teaching and his courage, we decide that Marc Bloch will enter the Pantheon.” “On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Strasbourg, Emmanuel Macron announced in a speech on Saturday, November 23, 2024, the pantheonization of this “man of the Enlightenment in the army of shadows”. Who was he ?

Resistance fighter and historian, Marc Bloch was assassinated by the Gestapo in 1944 near Lyon. But his courage and his death are not the only reasons motivating his entry into the Pantheon. He was considered as “the founder of the history of mentalities, beliefs, ways of thinking”, historian Julien Théry explains to the Parisien . His methods, considered pioneering, approach history in a new way, which is interested in “the depths of society”.

Born into a non-practicing Jewish family in 1886 in Lyon, Marc Bloch came from a father who was a history professor at the University of Lyon and the École Normale Supérieure, reports Le Parisien. A family heritage and an exemplary academic career that led him on the same path. He joined the ENS in 1904, and obtained his aggregation in history four years later.

“The most atrocious collapse of our history”

If he began his career as a history teacher in turn, it was quickly put on hold in 1914. He was mobilized as an infantry sergeant, and over the years of war he became a captain. He was decorated with the Legion of Honor and the War Cross. At the end of the war, he resumed teaching, and was appointed “in charge of medieval history courses at the Faculty of Letters of the University of of Strasbourg, then obtained the chair of medieval history in 1927, according to the institution. In 1929, after his meeting with Lucien Febvre, the two men launched the journal of Annales d'histoire &eacuteconomique et sociale, considered the spearhead of the French historiographical school, and with worldwide resonance.

In 1939, at the age of 53, with six children, and suffering from debilitating polyarthritis, Marc Bloch asked to enlist in the French army. The defeat in June 1940 and the years that followed were for him “the most atrocious collapse in our history,” he wrote in L'étrange défaite, a work published posthumously. When Germany invaded the free zone, he and his family took refuge in Creuse. Then he joined the Resistance in 1943, notably in Lyon, where he joined the Franc-Tireur movement. He operated under the pseudonyms “Chevreuse”, “Arpajon” and “Narbonne”. But on March 8, 1944, he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured in Montluc prison. He was shot on the evening of June 16, 1944, behind his back, with 29 comrades.

In memory of their grandfather, Marc Bloch's family asked the President of the Republic that the Pantheonization ceremony be held without the participation of the extreme right. “The work of this convinced patriot is profoundly anti-nationalist, built against the national novel and the reduction of French history to national borders,” wrote in a letter to Emmanuel Macron his granddaughter Suzette Bloch and his great-grandson Matis Bloch, on behalf of the beneficiaries. The ceremony should take place before the end of the president's five-year term.