He wrote down this verse from Corneille in his notebooks: “I don’t hate life, and I love to use it / But without attachment that smells like slavery” (PolieucteV, II). Marc Bloch, in October 1940, reflected on life, war, history, in his house in Fougères, a pretty building with burgundy shutters bordered by a large garden, in the small village of Bourg-d’Ahem, in the heart of Creusa. The great historian is 54 years old, has painful polyarthritis, has six children and has just put the finishing touches on his book. The strange defeat (Franc-Tireur, 1946) – important work that will only be published after the Liberation and after its execution.
Marc Bloch has been Professor of History at the Sorbonne since 1936, taking up the Chair of Economic History two years later, and at the height of his fame. But the first statute of the Jews, of October 3, 1940, cut short his career: the researcher, founder with Lucien Febvre of the prestigious Annales school, was fired, as were almost 3,000 Jews, including around a thousand teachers. .
“I am Jewish, wrote Marc Bloch at the same time in The strange defeat, If not by religion, which I practice no more than any other, at least by birth. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this, since, I hope, I am a good enough historian not to ignore that racial predispositions are a myth and that the very notion of a pure race is a particularly flagrant absurdity. (…) I only claim my origin in one case: in front of an anti-Semite. »
Add this beautiful page: “France, finally, from which some would willingly conspire to expel me today and perhaps (who knows?) will succeed, will remain, no matter what happens, the homeland from which I cannot tear my heart. I was born there, I drank from the sources of its culture, I made its past my own, I only breathe well under its sky and I strove, in turn, to defend it as best I could. »
Teaching and research are his whole life. His father, Gustave, was already a respected professor of Roman history at the Sorbonne, and little Marc followed in his footsteps: the Louis-le-Grand institute in Paris, where he excelled – the director notes in his brochure: “First-class student, with truly remarkable firmness of judgment, distinction and mental curiosity” –collects prizes in the general competition, every year and in all subjects. The young man entered the Higher Normal School in 1904, where his father taught, who certainly did not joke with discipline.
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