Social Disturbances in the 14th Century by Henri Perinne

I

 The beginning of the 14th century may be considered as the end of the period of medieval economic expansion that began in the 12^th.* Up to then progress was continuous in every sphere. The progressive enfranchisement of the rural classes went hand in hand with the clearing, drainage and peopling of uncultivated wastelands.. The development of industry (principally cloth, exchanged for luxury goods in the East) and commerce completely transformed the appearance and the very existence of society. While the Mediterranean and the Black Sea on the one side and the North Sea and the Baltic on the other became the scenes of a great trade, and the ports and trading posts sprang up all along their  coast and and in their islands, continental Europe was covered with towns from which the activity of the new middle-classes radiated in all directions.

Under the influence of this new life, the circulation of money was perfected, all sorts of new forms of credit came into use, and the development of credit encouraged that of capital. Finally, the growth of population was an infallible indication of the health and vigor of society. During the early years of the 14^th century, however, there is  observable in all these directions not perhaps a decline but a cessation of all advance. Europe lived, so to speak, on what it had acquired; the economic front was stabilized. It is clear that Europe was entering upon a period of conservation rather than creation, and social discontent seems to suggest both the desire and the inability to ameliorate a situation which no longer completely harmonized with men’s needs.

It is only fair to point out that if the 14^th century did not continue to progress, the catastrophes which overwhelmed it were largely responsible. The terrible famine which laid waste the whole of Europe from 1315 to 1317 seems to have caused greater ravages than any which had preceded it. Thirty years later, a new and still more appalling disaster, the Black Death, burst upon a world which had hardly recovered from the first shock. To the natural calamities, political calamities no less cruel were added. Italy was torn by civil strife during the whole century. Germany was prey to permanent political anarchy. Finally, the Hundred Years War ruined France and exhausted England. All this weighed heavily upon economic life. The number of consumers decreased and the market lost part of its powers of absorption.

These misfortunes unquestionably aggravated the social troubles which make the 14th century so violent in contrast to the 13th, but their chief cause must be sought in the economic organization itself, which had reached a point when its operations provoked discontent in urban and rural populations alike.

The enfranchisement of peasants, however generally it had taken place in the previous age, had still left behind traces of serfdom. In many countries corvees continued to weigh heavily on the peasants and the disappearance of the manorial regime made them a still greater infliction. For the lord had ceased to consider himself the protector of the men on his estate. His position in relation to his tenants was no longer that of an hereditary chief whose authority was accepted by reason of its patriarchal character; it had become that of a landlord and recipient of dues. Since all the former wastelands of the great estates were now occupied, no more villes nueves were founded and there was no longer any motive for giving serfs their  freedom which, instead of being profitable for their lord, would have deprived him of the rents and services which he continued to extract from them.

Doubtless, the need for money often drove the lords to sell charters of enfranchisement for a good price, or to free a whole village in return for the cessation of a part of the common lands. But the fact remains that now that the period of clearance was over the peasant no longer had any hope of improving his condition by emigrating to virgin lands. Everywhere serfdom remained , it became all the more odious because now being exceptional, it took on a derogatory appearance. The free cultivators on their side were impatient of the manorial courts, by virtue of which they held their  tenures and through which they remained subject to economic exploitation by the lords, whose men they had once been. Ever since the monks, in the course of the 13th century, had lost their early fervor and, with it, their prestige, tithes were paid most unwillingly. The larger farms established in the  demesne lands were crushing weight on the villagers. They claimed the greater part of the common lands as pasturage for their flocks, and rounded off their boundaries at the expense of the villagers. It was easy for them to encroach because they were often in the hands of the lord’s bailiff and or reeve, and thus they were able to oblige a number of  inhabitants to work for them as agricultural laborers.

The these causes of discomfort were added the evils produced by frequent wars. The Hundred Years’ War especially, during which mercenaries continue to live on the country after their disbandment, turned many regions of France into deserts ‘where there was no longer to be heard a cock crowing or a hen clucking.” This desolation was, it is true, a phenomena peculiar to France, and it would no doubt be incorrect to argue that in the rest  of Europe the situation  of the peasants became worse in the course of the 14th century. The social discontent of which it gave so many proofs is not to be explained everywhere in the same way. It may equally well have arisen from excessive misery and from a wish to put an end to a state of thing as all the more shocking because men believed themselves equal to overthrowing it.. If the Jacquerie in the Ile de France in 1357 was an uprising of populations driven to extreme by distress and hatred of the nobles who were held responsible for it, it seems to have been quite otherwise with the rising in Western Flanders in 1323 to 1328 and the insurrection of 1381 in England .  .  .

The rural insurrections  of the 14th century really owed their appearance of gravity to the brutishness of the peasantry. By themselves they could not succeed. Though the agricultural classes formed by far the largest part of society, they were incapable of combining in a common action and more incapable still of any thought of making a new world. All things considered, these risings were but local and short-lives spurts, outbursts of anger with no future. Although the economic contrast between the peasant who tilled the soil and the nobility who owned it was as real as that between the workman and the urban capitalist,, it was less felt, by virtue of the very conditions of rural existence, which bound a man by so many ties to the land which he cultivated and which left him, in spite of everything, a much higher degree of personal independence than was enjoyed by the wage-earner in great industry. Thus it is not surprising that in  bitterness, duration and results alike  the city agitations of the 14th century are in striking contrast with those of the country people.

Throughout the whole of Western Europe the haute bourgeoisie had from the beginning monopolized town government. It could not have been otherwise, if we remember that city life, resting essentially on commerce and industry, made it inevitable that those who promoted the latter should at the same time direct the former. Thus during the 12th and 13th centuries, an aristocracy, recruited from among the most notable merchants, had everywhere exercised municipal government. Their government had been a class government in the full sense of the term, and for long it possessed all the virtues of its class, energy, perspicacity, devotion to the public interest, which was indeed identical with and the chief guarantee of their own private interest. The work which  it accomplished  bears testimony to its merits. Under it urban civilization took on features  which were to distinguish it to the end. It created the whole machinery of municipal administration, organized its various services, founded civic finance and credit, built and organized markets, found the necessary money to build strong ramparts and to open schools, in a word, to meet all the needs of the bourgeoisie. But little by little there were revealed the faults of a system which entrusted the economic regulation of the great industry to the very people who lived upon its profits, and were naturally inclined to reduce the share of the workers to a minimum.

We have already seen that in the greatest manufacturing cities of the medieval world, in the Flemish towns, the cloth-worker had begun to manifest a hostility to the patrician echevins, which is clearly shown in the outbreak of strikes. To their own discontent was added that of a growing number of well-to-do bourgeoisie. For, in the meantime, the patrician regime had in any towns become a plutocratic oligarchy, jealously withholding power from all who were not members of a few families, and exercising it more and more in their own interests. Thus an opposition which was both social and political grew up against town government. It was the social opposition, obviously the most violent, which gave the signal for a conflict which, with many bloody vicissitudes, was to continue right into the 15th century.

 The revolt of the crafts against the patrician regime is often styled a democratic revolution. The term is not wholly exact, if by democracy is meant what the word denotes today. The malcontents had no intention of founding popular governments. Their horizons was bounded by the walls of their city and limited to the framework of their corporation. Though each craft claimed a share of the power it was very little concerned with its neighbors and its action was narrowly circumscribed by particularism. It sometimes happened, of course, that corporations of the same town combined against the common enemy, the oligarchy of the echevins, but they frequently also turned on each other after the victory. It must not be forgotten that these self-styled democrats were all members of industrial groups possessing the enormous privilege of monopoly. Democracy, as they understood it, was nothing but democracy of the privileged.

Not all towns were disturbed by the demands of the crafts, Neither Venice, nor the Hanseatic towns, nor the English cities show any traces of agitation. No doubt the reason was that the government of the haute bourgeoisie did not degenerate there into a closed and selfish oligarchy. New men, enriched by commerce, were constantly renewing and rejuvenating the ruling class. For centuries, the Venetian aristocracy set an admirable example of the highest virtues of patriotism, energy and skill, and the prosperity which they gained for the Republic shone upon all alike, so the people never dreamed of throwing off their yoke. It seems likely that similar causes preserved the rule of the patriciate in the Hanseatic towns. In England, the control exercised by royal authority over the towns was strong enough to check, if necessary, the efforts of the common people. The same is true of the French towns, which, from the end of the 13th century, were increasingly subordinated to the authority of the agents of the Crown, baillis, or seneschals. Elsewhere, as for example in Brabant, the territorial prince constituted himself the protector of the great bourgeois.

It was above all in the large industrial towns of the Low Countries, on the banks of the Rhine and in Italy, that municipal revolutions broke out. Their first cause must be sought in the abuses of the governing oligarchy. Wherever princely power was too weak either to forbid or to control it, nothing remained but to overthrow it, or at least compel it to share the power which it sought to monopolize. As to this everyone, rich and poor alike, was agreed, merchants who were kept out of commercial affairs no less than the craftsmen and wage-earners in the great industry. This movement which started in the second half of the 13th century, reached its conclusion in the course of the 14th. In consequence of riots, which almost always developed into armed struggles, the  ‘great’ were obliged to cede to the ‘small’ a more or less share in the municipal administration. Since the majority of the population was grouped into crafts, the reform necessarily consisted in associating these with government. Sometimes they received the right to dispose of a few seats on the body of the echevins or the town council, sometimes a new body of magistrates elected by them was formed by the side of the old one; sometimes all measures concerning the finances or political organization of the city had to be submitted for the approval of their delegates in general assembly. Sometimes they even succeeded in seizing the whole of this power from which the patriciate had excluded them so long.

But what was  possible in towns, where no one industry had a decided advantage over the others, was impossible where the balance manifestly inclined in favor of one of them. In the large manufacturing cities of Flanders, the numerical superiority of the weavers and fullers, whose crafts counted many thousands of members, prevented them from being satisfied with the role assigned to the small corporations which comprised no more than a few score. They were all the more anxious for ascendency because their condition as wage-earners differed greatly from that of craftsmen serving the local market. For them, the fall of the patriciate was not only a political question, it was first and foremost a social one. In it they looked forward to the end of their economic subordination, hoping that when the power to regulate conditions of work and rates of wages passed into their hands, the precarious condition to which they had been reduced by their profession would be over. Many indulged in confused dreams of equality, in a world where ‘every man should have as much as another.’ It was they who, in all the large towns, at the end of the 13th century, had given the signal for revolt and maintained the momentous struggle which brought them a temporary ascendency after the victory of Courtrai. But  their domination had soon roused the rest of the bourgeoisie against them. The divergence or, rather, the incompatibility of their interests with those the merchants and the artisans, was too great for the latter to submit to being subordinate to the cloth-workers. . . Nothing is more tragic than the situation of the Flemish towns in the 14^th century, in which social hatred raged with the frenzy of madness. . .

Towards the end of the century a proletariat began to make its appearance in the small crafts, in spite of the fact that their whole organization was designed to safeguard the economic independence of their members. Between the master-craftsmen and the apprentices or journeymen whom they employed goodwill had lasted as long as it was an easy matter for the latter to rise to the positon of masters. But from the moment the population ceased to grow and the crafts were faced with the necessity of stabilizing production, the acquisition of mastership had become more and more difficult. The tendency to make it a close family reserve is shown by all sorts of measures , e.g. long terms of apprenticeship, the raising of fees which had to be paid for obtaining the title of master and the exaction of a ‘masterpiece’ as a guarantee of proficiency in those who aspired to it. In short, each corporation of artisans was gradually transformed into a selfish clique of employers, determined to bequeath to their sons and sons-in-law the fixed clientele of their small workshops. . . .But the attempted revolutions of the towns were doomed to certain failure. The provinces and the nobility came to the rescue of all those who were threatened by them, great merchants, rentiers of the haute bourgeoisie and master-craftsmen. During the 125^th century the wave that had arisen in the preceding one fell back on itself, to break against the inevitable coalition of all the interests which had united against it.

II

The period in which the craft gilds dominated or influenced the economic regime of the towns is also that in which urban protectionism reached its height. However divergent their professional interests might be, all industrial groups were united in their determination to enforce to the utmost the monopoly which each enjoyed and to crush all scope for individual initiative and all possibility of competition. Henceforth the consumer was completely sacrificed to the producer .The great aim of workers in export industries was to raise wages, that of those engaged in supplying the local market top raise, or at least stabilize prices. Their vision was bounded by the town walls, and all were convinced that their prosperity could be secured by the simple expedient of shutting out all competition . . .evidence as of this outlook are to be found on all sides . . .( there were exceptions to the rule).

But it was in vain that the towns pursued their policy of taxing and exploiting largescale commerce; they could not escape it, nor indeed did they desire to do so, for the richer, the more active and the more populous a city was, the more commerce was indispensable to it. After all, it provided the town people a great part of their food supply and the crafts with almost all their raw materials. It was trade that the products of urban industry were exported to outside markets. All that the towns could do was to regulate the forms which this multifarious and essential activity assumed within their walls. They were quite unable to exercise any control over its expansion and circulation, the sources from which it was fed, or the credit which it employed; indeed the whole economic organization  which was dependent  on wholesale commerce eluded it. Over this enormous field the power of capital reigned supreme, dominating both large-scale navigation and transport, both the import and the export trade. It spread over the whole of Europe and the towns were borne in its bosom, as islands are born upon the circumambient ocean.

This movement was set on foot by a whole new class of men, who appeared just at the moment when urban economy was being transformed under the influence of the crafts. This was certainly no chance coincidence. The old town patricians, driven from power and thrown out of gear by the new conditions which were henceforth to dominate economic life, became, with few exceptions, a class of rentiers, living on the house and land rents, in which they had always invested a part of their profits. In their place parnvenus formed a new group of capitalists, who were hampered by no traditions and were able to accept without any difficulty the changes which took place in the old order. For the most part they were ‘factors’, commercial agents, or sometimes well-to-do artisans, for whom the progress of credit, speculation and exchange opened a career, but many who had grown rich in the service of princes also ventured their fortunes in business.

Indeed, the advance of administration and the increasing expense of maintaining armies or mercenaries and arming them with artillery, had obliged kings and great territorial lords alike to surround themselves withy a personnel of counsellors and agents of all sorts, who undertook the task which the nobility either disdained or was unable too perform. Their chief occupation was he management of finance . . Indeed, however various their origins, the capitalists of the 14th and 15th centuries were all obliged to enter into relations with princes and a complete solidarity of interests was established between the two. On  the one side the princes could not meet either their public or their private expenses without recourse to the financiers, but on the other the great merchants, bankers and ship-owners looked  to the princes to protect them against excessive municipal particularism, to put down urban revolt, and to secure the circulation of their money and merchandise.

In the favor they showed to the progress of capitalism the kings and princes were not actuated solely by financial considerations. The conception of the State which began to emerge as their power increased, led them to consider themselves as the protectors of the ‘common good’. Hitherto it had intervened there  indirectly, or rather in pursuance of its judicial, financial and military prerogatives. Though in its capacity as guardians of the public peace it had protected merchants, laid tolls on commerce, and in case of war placed embargoes on enemy ships and promulgated stoppages of trade, it had let the economic activities of its subjects to themselves. Only the towns made laws and regulations for them. But the competence of the towns was limited by their municipal boundaries, and their particularism caused them to be continually in opposition to each other and made it manifestly impossible for them to take measures to secure the common good, at the possible expense of their individual interests. The princes alone were capable of conceiving a territorial economy, which could comprise and control the urban economies. At the close of the Middle Ages men were, of course, still far from a decided movement or a conscious policy, directed towards this end, As a rule only intermittent tendencies are to be observed, but they are such as to make it evident that, wherever it had the power, the State was moving in the direction of mercantilism.**



*It was only the abrupt entry of Islam on the scene in the 7^th century and its conquest of the eastern, southern and western shores of the great European lake which altered the position of northern Europe. Henceforth, instead of the age-old link which had hitherto been between the East and the West, the Mediterranean became barrier, though tenuous links with Byzantium remained. By the end of the 11^th century this barrier began to crumble, global trade started to, penetrate Europe and its economy began to grow.


** For early developments in modern State formation see The Crisis of the Twelfth Century; Power, Lordship and the Origins of European Government by Thomas Bisson:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/11/power-in-12th-century-by-thomas-n-bisson.html

What is it? by Emmanuel Falque

But where does this game lead, and where does death go? This is the real question. For one can repeat endlessly the introduction to the death instinct on the side of or in combat with the ‘sexual drive’ understood as a life  instinct, one understands its emergence only by relating back to its originary state and final resting place – the ‘what’ of the ‘It’ that the  ‘death drive’ comes to designate – that is, the inorganic, or even better, the ‘anorganic’ or the ‘lifeless for which we are fated:

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons – becomes anorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘aim of life is death’ and, looking backwards, that the ‘lifeless’ existed before the living.’  (Beyond the Pleasure Principle)

Thus, the ‘anorganic’- rather than the inorganic – as originary is the content of the Id that is woven into me from the start and awaits me in the end: the ‘lifeless’ that I was before and that I will be afterwards. ‘What (then) is it? This absolute void, this hole, this hollow. It is nothing. Or at last nothing human, and yet the nothing that constitutes us as such – not in a nothingness that could still give meaning to my existence (Heidegger), but in an immemorial origin from whence we came and towards which we will return (Freud).


There is thus the underside of the ‘human’, as I have said, and that is ‘animality’. And there is the underside of ‘animality,’  as I have also stressed, and this is’ bestial.’ There is an underside of ‘bestiality,’ as I have just suggested, and it is the ‘brutal’ or ‘becoming brutal’ ( de Lubac). Yet now there is an underside of the ‘brutal,’ and that is the’ lifeless,’ the ‘anorganic’ or even the mineral as described here by Freud.  Death is not only ‘dust’ (Ecclesiastes) of the ‘disappearance of self’ (Heidegger) into nothingness that gives meaning to life, but rather it is resistance to the Ego, a magma or Neuter beyond all meaningfulness, a decent to the lowest rung on the ladder of being - from the human to the animal, from the animal to the vegetable, from the vegetable to the mineral: ‘What I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish. Sartre’s hero Antoine Roquentin as he looks into the mirror confesses in Nausea  in a manner so astonishingly close to Freud’s Id [Ca] that he even uses its name: ‘It [Ca] is alive, I can’t say it isn’t; but this was not the life that Anny contemplated .  .  .’

The lapidary, in all senses of the term – the stone, but also the cleaver – thus makes one feel oneself living as dead, even makes one no longer feel at all. Such is the odd experience that plagues every human. All attempts to elevate ourselves are only fictions or at least constructions, in respect to that to which we are tied to the self or by which we are afflicted within our very being. The church fathers of the desert (Evagrius of Pontus), of the Middle Ageas (Thomas Aquinas) and the Renaissance (Charles de Bovelles), all knew this, and gave it a name: acedia, sometimes wrongly translated as sloth or melancholy. Etymologically, acedia is the absence of care (akedeo), and it is a state rather than a feeling. In the ladder of being, it leads humans back or reduces them to the rank of a mineral, or in other words, to stone (lapis). A sort of forerunner to the death drive or to the reduction to the ‘anorganic’ in Freud: the monk reaches acedia, and thus  also a draining, as in the sense of the bay of Zuyderzee, he no longer senses, no longer senses himself, nor senses that one senses him – be it man or God. As Charles de Bovelles, then the canon of Noyons in the 15th century, notes:

Acedia places man at the last rank and makes him similar to stones. Just as these stones, which remain fixed at the last order, possessing nothing other than their being such that to them there is neither given the exercise of the least natural function, nor any power to move themselves, so also do those who possess this monstrous phenomena of acedia  sleep the dreamless sleep, separated from all work, and made immobile like stones, as if mother nature had given them only being without any manifest force nor any power to act in a commendable manner.


Thus can we state plainly: spirituality and psychoanalysis have something to exchange here, if we don not confuse the aspirations of the first (the soul’s straining towards God and its turning away from sin) with the specificity of the second (the quest solely for human depths). Like the death drive in Freud, the monk in the state of acedia is in somewhat held ‘outside of space and ‘outside of time’ – not at all in the sense of escaping space and time, but rather in feeling oneself entirely ‘invaded’ by space and time.  It is not only this ‘void’ or emptiness that causes suffering, because in the final analysis desire is always still present, or at least the possibility of filling it up. But it is above all the ‘fullness,’ or even the over-fullness (not of God but of self) that produces laziness, weariness, and  exhaustion in the monk – to the point that nothing makes any sense, including the idea of sense and nonsense. Presence is no longer a gift but rather a resistance.

In the ‘resistance of presence,’ the very idea of an absence as such becomes impossible, and so too does the impulse of desire. Acedia takes us ‘outside of time, or its makes time endure in a duration that is not eternity, but is on the contrary, an infinite ‘persistence’ that can never be suppressed or at least experienced as if it were written in temporality. Evagrius of Pontus, the initiator and founder of this sort of spirituality, says:

The demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon, is the most oppressive of all demons. He attacks the monk at the fourth hour and besieges his soul  until the eighth hour. First of all, he makes it appear that the sun moves slowly or not at all, and the day seems to be fifty hours long.

In regard to both acedia and the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one would be wrong to interpret the Freudian ‘organic elasticity’ – which stretches the drive when it is directed towards life (life-drive)  and relaxes it when it is directed towards death (death drive) – as a simple return to a stable state, a sort of absolute equilibrium, a state of repose or Nirvana – interpretations for which the father of psychoanalysis was wrongly reproached. This is the case because the question of the death drive does not refer to anxiety about tomorrow’s death or yesterday’s coming to life, and thus not  about the worry engendered by the future or nostalgia for the past, but rather is about living in the present time that I traverse as a living or dying being, and thus as a being belonging or already no longer belonging to life: ‘We can live (in a melancholy manner) as if we were already dead . . .We just add now that even if the drive for repetition did not have as its goal this state of minimal tension associate with death, it can very well have another sort of death as an effect, namely, that of the stifling of all creativity and thus the meaning of life. (Bernet, Force-pulsion-desir)

In short, have we understood this much: ‘What is it? In 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? It is certainly a force of life that is also opposed to a force of death or  auto-destructivity. But only in this way does life ‘always tend toward death,’ and thus towards the Neutral, the mineral or the anorganic. – naturally inscribe in the organic, and sometimes more accidentally arising in the psychic. The ‘Id’ stands there before  me, or better, below me, and supports the Ego. More radical than the ‘Khora” as simple resistance (Derrida), more unformed than ‘raw nature’ as element (Merleau-Ponty), the “Id” in someway is now turned toward ego, toward me. It is looking at me or concerns me, it stares at me, it defies me, and it leads my Ego.

Marc Bloch by Carole Fink

Marc Bloch shared nothing of his father’s illusions about France’s military leadership. The Dreyfus affair produced in him a negative image of its snobbery, anti-Semitism, and anti-republicanism, its narrow educational system and jealous protection of its autonomy vis-à-vis the political and judicial sectors of the state. Bloch also acquired a profound skepticism of the press. While acknowledging the commercial and time constraints under which even the best journalists operated, many years later he was still insisting that their ‘stereotyped psychology’ and ‘rage for the picturesque’ placed them at the forefront in the gallery of the ‘fomenters of lies’ ( fauteurs de mensonges).


As a young historian Bloch seemed to relish the task of documentary criticism, and not just for itself. It was a useful tool to rectify the findings of the growing number of enthusiastic but often inadequately equipped local savants who had sprung up in the 19^th century. Based on the analysis of a large number of texts, for example, Bloch describe the ceremony of the rending of the feudal bond. The variations in performing this nearly universal rite offered proof that feudalism was neither rigid nor uniform in its laws and practices. Bloch was also careful with his sources. Despite evidence of a similar Frankish practice of dissolving family ties, Bloch, unlike his Reich colleagues, was careful not to assign ‘Germanic’ antecedents to the feudal rite that developed six centuries later. .  .

In 1914 Bloch was nearing the end of his apprenticeship period. That year his emerging ideas were expressed on two occasion: in a review of a work by his future collaborator Lucien Febvre and his speech in Amiens before the prefect and several other dignitaries at the lycee’s awards ceremony in July.

In his critique of Febvre’s history of his native Franche-Comte, the twenty-seven-year-old Bloch expressed reservations about the book’s flamboyant style and language and about the author’s grasp of medieval social and economic history. He did call the subject a ‘true province,’ worthy of study. Nevertheless, like all pays, this eastern county of Burgundy, which included both the Jura range and the right bank of the Saone, was primarily a product of politics and historical accident.

Bloch faulted Febvre for neglecting a systematic analysis of the region’s history, the growth and nature of its Burgundian patriotism, the extinction of its separatist elements, and the establishment of its French identity in the 19th century. Bloch was also dissatisfied with Febvre’s stereotyped characterization of the ‘authentic Comtois.’ The traits he identified –prudence, level-headedness, a deliberately caustic intelligence, a high level of tenacity, and ‘more solidity than sparkle’ –were traits common to almost all French peasants and petits bourgeois. Febvre’s representative Comtois – Courbet, Proudhon, and President Grevy – were an arbitrary selection that ignored te distinction between ancient inhabitants and recent immigrants. Intrigued by Febvre’s speculations, Bloch nonetheless insisted that the new science of collective psychology required a more ‘solid foundation’ based on the principles of ‘prudence and methodical doubt.’

Bloch’s address to the Amiens students on 13 July 1914, in which he summed up his creed as an historian, the ’leading ideas’ that would guide his whole career, had a distinctively autobiographical tone. The poor historian, unlike his scientist colleague, was doomed to perpetual ignorance about the phenomena he investigated; and unlike his brother, the physician directly involved in the experience, the historian was forced to rely on secondhand testimonies. Like the examining magistrate, he attempted to reconstitute ‘reality’  from witnesses of varying credibility. Historical criticism consisted of disentangling the true, the false, and the probable.

According to Bloch, humans were lazy and all too ready to accept opinion as fact. Historians had therefore developed the critical method to impose a ‘constant discipline’ on themselves in the struggle against complacency, overwork, fatigue, and uncertainty over the results. Faced with contradictory evidence, the critical spirit must avoid making judgments: “If your neighbor on the left says to times two is four, and the one the right says it is five, do not conclude that the answer is four and a half.’ If three witnesses presented identical testimony on a particular event, the shrewd historian must search for the plagiarist; often style of presentation and the use of active over passive words distinguished the actor from the copyist. Sheer numbers were no sure guide to accuracy. If no testimony was error free, no false testimony was barren of useful details. The historian’s task was to dissect many whole, often beautiful and entertaining, pieces of evidence, discarding all the inaccuracies and retaining the valid bits. .  .  .

After the Great War, in order to secure a regular appointment at the University of Strasburg, Bloch had to obtain his doctorate. He benefited from a special dispensation for war veterans who were to be allowed to submit abbreviated works for a degree. After rushing to finish, Bloch returned to the Sorbonne on 4 December 10920 and defended his ‘these principale’ and his ‘these complementare’, and receiving  the highest evaluation, ‘tres honorable.’

Like the these complementare, Rois et serfs anticipated Bloch’s future work: his investigations into royalty, the functions and characteristics of royal officials, and the elusive history of the common people. Bloc combined two movements: royal emancipation (originally slow, cautious, and relatively liberal in its terms, which was  transformed by the last impecunious warrior Capetians- who, much like their successors during the next four centuries, chose to sacrifice their future income for immediate remuneration) and the serfs’ urge for freedom, stirred in the twelfth century by the weakening of feudal bonds, the growing extraction of the feudal lord\s, increased prosperity, and alliances between town and rural people. While the royals dominate the text, the serfs’ condition underlies its theme.

Bloch’s style and method were manifested in Rois et serfs. There was no narrative. Instead, like a judicial investigator, Bloch conducted an examination of documents, posing stiff questions (which inevitably led to others) and occasionally inserting pithy commentary on the evidence itself. In several instances he introduced comparative examples to fill specific gaps in his sources and lend perspective to royal policy. Rois et serfs hints at Bloch’s later virtuosity in combining legal, political, social, economic and psychological factors to produce a more rounded and truer version of the past, It also revealed his emphasis on economic conditions, his interest in form and ritual, and his acute awareness of the need to separate the modern sensibility from the medieval.

During his seventeen years at Strasburg, Marc Bloch stood out as a teacher. He had the opportunity to conduct a wide variety of courses centering on the Middle Ages. By all accounts of his former students, these were carefully organized, methodically presented, filled with immense erudition and critical commentary, and also –like his writing- replete with occasionally long and invariably fascinating parenthesis. Bloch was a demanding teacher. Student reports were judged severely; lack of perspective or vigor was especially unwelcome. Some of his students remembered Bloch as ‘glacial,’ caustic, and hypercritical. Though his method was fairly traditional, the new professor astonished his young students with his command of the literature, mastery of auxiliary discipline, skill in languages, and insights.

He opposed all doctrines – racial, economic, class, environmental. The historian’s craft consisted of posing questions more than providing mere demonstrations of transcendent truths. Often he would repeat that historians were neither theologians nor moralists; their role was neither to condemn nor to absolve a particular institution but to understand what circumstance had bought it into existence and what purpose it served.

Bloch’s teaching contrasted with the classical German Bildungsideal, the alles wissen, alles tun which in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries produced a mutable alliance between the idealized sense of personal autonomy and cultivation and the more pervasive reality of obedient and passive scholars, driven by a ’nostalgia for synthesis.’ Bloch viewed education as a quest to situate oneself in relation to all the parts of a whole one could not possibly master. One had to train the mind to develop the processes of critical thinking and analysis together with the goals of logical abstraction, generalization, and effective judgment, all the while remaining open to new ideas. For Bloch the process itself was important, the quality and judgment more significant than the accumulation of facts. In addition, the history Bloch conveyed to his students was a noble jeu d‘esprit: a joyful, humane challenge.

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French intellectuals in the postwar period can be divided into three groups. Between the ideologues and activists of the left and the right were those like Marc Bloch who out of conviction or personal necessity were non-engage. Veterans of the Dreyfus Affair and four years of grueling trench warfare, they wearily withdrew to the sidelines of national politics. Bolstered by the idealism of Julien Benda, the guarded their principles, functioned as disinterested scholars, and stayed above the melee of partisan politics. Like their compatriots in the interior, the read Le Temps each evening and voted regularly, but chose not to speak out on crucial public issues.


One of the consequences of the university’s sealing itself off into a closed, self-perpetuating institution of specialists was a public woefully ignorant of history and of the larger world. Bloch sensed that the ruling classes of France, and also of England, were now less educated than in Germany, and also of England, to meet the challenges of democracy. Bloch later explained that, ‘by a sort of fatalism’ engendered by their disciplines, the professoriate were inhibited from ‘embarking on individual action.  .  .We had grown used to seeing great impersonal forces at work in society as in nature. In the vast drag of these submarine swells, so cosmic as to seem irresistible, of what avail were the petty struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors?’

Yet, struck by the consequences of mass mobilization and a vast new range of technology, a small group of historians were determined to expand their discipline’s range beyond its traditional preoccupation with politics, war, diplomacy, and great leaders, to transcend pure narrative with a strong analytic framework, to make history complex, more accurate, and more ‘human’. While old guard of positivists still remained at their posts, writing and training their disciplines, some of Marc Bloch’s generation of war veterans, who had been weaned on the prewar social and behavioral sciences and on innovative works in economic, social, legal and religious history, began establishing themselves in university faculties. They opposed not only the scientific pretensions of the French manual writers but also their rivals, the German historicists, who continued to insist on history’s subjective and unique character.

The new Histoire humaine needed related disciplines in order to comprehend national and global issues and new economic and technological questions, and also to appeal to a larger international audience. The struggle against traditional history, already rooted in the United States, spread beyond Western Europe to Italy, Spain, and the new States in Eastern Europe, and Japan. It was reinforced by the flowering of early Soviet and European Marxist historiography, by the brilliant work of Max Weber and the Frankfurt school, and also by such new journals s Dziejow Spolecznych i Gosopodarczych (1926) in Poland; the Economic History Review (1927) in England; and the Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (1929) founded by Bloch and Febvre. The patron saint of this determined minority was Henri Pirenne. . .

There were several distinctive characteristics in Marc Bloch’s work. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he rejected vulgar present-mindedness, refusing to  ‘insert Clovis or Charlemagne into quarrels about contemporary Europe’ or to emulate pedants who used their parchments to decide the fates of whole peoples. He was opposed  to the system  builders Oswald Spengler and H. G. Wells and also to Marxism’s all encompassing explanations. He rejected all forms of determinism, all grand and seductive theories: ‘Counterbalancing the complexity of nature is the complexity of human emotions and human reason.’ Bloch continued to respect Durkheim and paid tribute to his successors for re-founding Anne Sociologique. But as an historian, though not a chronicler, he insisted on the dimension of change over time, stressing subtle mutations and unpredictable lag as well as the surface ruptures that fascinated his contemporaries. Finally, he maintained that regardless of the topic the historian’s obligation was to understand his subjects, not judge them. The honest craftsman reminded above the immediate, the prosaic, and the partisan aspects of everyday life.

Conceived before the Great War and marked by the war’s passions and outcome, Les rois thaumaturges was Bloch’s contribution to the political history of Europe in the widest and truest sense of the word. It was an investigation of the origins, development and durability of the gigantic fausse nouvelle, the belief in the royal miracle of the healing of scrofula that survived for more than eight centuries. But he resisted the vogue of confusing medieval European monarchs with either Polynesians or African magician kings or with biblical or Roman rulers. He emphasized the unique characteristics that had produced the royal miracle in France and England. He established the political motivations that lay behind the practice of touching for scrofula, a tuberculous inflammation of the neck glands. In France around the year 1000 Robert the Pious, the second Capetian king, exercised this power as a means of establishing the legitimacy and hereditary right of his still precarious dynasty by endowing it with a supernatural character. A century later, according to Bloch, Henry I or Henry II adapted the practice as a means of claiming royal sanctity against the challenge of the Gregorian reformers in the English church.

Bloch demonstrated how popular reverence for the legitimate prince and the specifically Christian conception of the consecrated ruler coalesces in the robust legends of the wonder-working kings. In France and England, and nowhere else in Europe, royal power was manifested not only in military, legal and institutional forms but also in this popular mystique, which helped princes compete with the church in their appeal to mass loyalty. Armed with their healing gifts and bolstered by their loyal officials, the French and English monarchs became quasi-priestly figures. . . Because of Bloch’s use of the Durkheimian term ‘collective consciousness and his search for evidence in a wide variety of documents, Les rois thaumaturges has been termed a forerunner of what is imprecisely termed the history of mentalities.

Bloch had plunged earlier into this problem in the article entitled ‘Reflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de guerre. There he had lauded the young science of the ‘psychology of testimony’ developed by criminologists, psychologists, and folklorists, whose pioneering laboratory experiments in perception and memory had advanced the understanding of the origins of falsification,. He nonetheless maintained that to transcend the preoccupation with individual testimony and address the richer, more complex issue – how fausses nouvelles were disseminated –required an historian capable of probing not only the collective consciousness but also the process by which specific errors established themselves in a favorable terrain, how human prejudices, hates, fears, and other emotions transform ‘ a faulty perception into a legend.. . Bloch concluded that fausse nouvelle always originated in ‘preexisting collective representations’. Only its appearance was accidental. Indeed, it was a mirror in which the collective consciousness revealed itself.

In the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1931) Bloch ventured to characterize the feudal system: In the absence of a strong stable state able to provide material and physical security, it was a regime based on personal and reciprocal ties of dependence’; hierarchic and contractual in character, it was marked everywhere by ‘constraints, violence, and abuses. It varied throughout Europe (and there were places where it never took root, or was artificially planted), existed in more or less similar forms in other parts of the world, and underwent decline with the rise of towns, a money economy, and the establishment of national monarchies, leaving a powerful historical legacy in the notion of a political contract that counterbalanced and ultimately triumphed over the competing tradition of royal sanctity.

Like all feudal institutions, serfdom developed in a rough atmosphere replete with daily abuse of the law . . .To give a too well-colored image of servile status summed up in a few articles in a code would mean that the historian had failed o communicate all the brutality and arbitrariness permitted when one man had power over another.

In Les caracteres originaux Bloch painted in broad strokes. He described how ages of war, plague, and reduced planting and harvests, had often alternated with more tranquil and prosperous times that had imposed stiffer physical and legal restrictions on the peasants. Writing at the height of Stalin’s onslaught on the Russian peasant and against the backdrop of the prolonged and widespread suffering of postwar Western cultivators, Bloch was no doubt aware that despite elements of distinctiveness, French rural life reflected a pertinent and compelling human drama to which the historian could contribute a still tentative but instructive synthesis.

In Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale  searched for better tools, more erudition, fewer rules and restriction, more breadth and curiosity. Returning to his favorite methodology, Bloch proposed that the study of peoples outside the mainstream (societies d’execption) might well stimulate and enlarge the discipline of comparative history, ‘serving as a marvelous reflection of influences to which they hade not submitted.’ Exceptions, mutations, lag, and precocity –untimely, unplanned, uneven development –these were embedded in Bloch’s experience and consciousness as well in the Annales first decade.

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On the evening of 6 February 1934 a vast throng of right-wing demonstrators and veterans organizations at the Place de la Concorde threatening to cross the Seine, storm the Chamber of Deputies, and topple the new Radical government. Fifteen people were killed and an estimated fifteen hundred  were injured on both sides. A day later Edouard Daladier resigned . . .for the first time in the in the history of the Third Republic a government had been overthrown by street violence. Bloch as appalled and mystified: ‘At the bottom of all this disorder I perceive a horrible and puerile mixture of flabbiness, superficial cliques, poor work habits, and a total lack of intelligence.’ Febvre , profoundly shaken by the specter of a French fascism, which he suspected was being nurtured by the most venerable institutions of higher learning, chastised his collaborator. As the result of a brief message Bloch had sent from London during the crisis, he characterized his younger colleague as the incarnation of one of Benda’s aloof, disinterested clercs.

But Bloch was scarcely indifferent. Privately he expressed concern not only over the extreme nationalist, anti-republican Ligues and the right wing sympathies of his police officials, magistrates, and municipal officials, but also over the glaring inadequacies of the moderates and the left, over governmental corruption and parliament’s weakness. No, he was not so obsessed with his candidacy for the College de France that he ignored the omnipresent danger, exacerbated by the disorder of the universities and the ‘intellectual poverty of so many of our statesmen. He opposed combating the that of domestic fascism by imitating its demagogic methods. He was reluctant to enter a hyper-charged, politicized atmosphere, led by a motley combination of libertarians, pacifists, socialists and communists.

According to Bloch, there were two types of anti-Semites, those who wished to ‘exterminate’ or expel the Jews, whose excessive and repugnant manner rendered them less dangerous than the second, the ‘numerus clausus’ types, who established a fine, impenetrable quota on outsiders. This second category included many assimilated Jews, eager to guard the gate for year own self-aggrandizement and self-defense. In contributing  to his exclusion both had imposed an external limit on Bloch’s aspirations, not unconnected with his intellectual non-conformism, but nevertheless more intractable, painful and generalized in its implications.

After Blum resigned on 22 June 1937, the Popular Front, though governing until April 1938, expired in spirit if not in form, a victim of its adherents’ blunders and equivocations and of it enemies’ obstruction and contempt. Bloch was convinced that France had succumbed to ‘decadence’. Soon he would catalogue its manifestations. A sensationalist press and stultifying educational system had failed to stimulate critical thought. A succession of coalition governments had planted incompatible personalities and ideologues  in positions of power. An atavistic diplomacy had been based on yesterday’s ‘faded ghosts.” The political parties on the left and right had been notorious for their narrowness and contradictions. The trade unions had been marked by sectarian kleiburgerlich considerations that constricted urgent production. The bourgeoisie had been tinged by arrogance and contempt for the masses. And the army had been dangerously isolated from the world of ideas.

In those last days before the German onslaught, Marc Bloch searched for France. His combat experience in the Great War had given him the opportunity to mingle ‘with the people,’ the brave miner from Pais-de-Calais and the shop-keeper from the Bastille quarter who had both died for France, one literally at his shoulder. His strained existence during the drole de guerre exposed him continually to France’s ‘other side,’ a group of polite, marginally educated, narrow-minded, and often petty and selfish middle-class reservists and career officers separated by numerous expressions of taste, manners, language, and ideology from the real France of its people. Bloch recognized that a fissure had deepened, perhaps irretrievably, in June 1936, with the advent of the Popular Front, whose enemies still wanted revenge. On the eve of his second invasion, with no Jaures to champion the people and no Clemenceau to lead, he understood that a divided France was in danger as much from within as from without.

As did the slightly younger Barlone who in Diary, contrasted the ‘rottenness’ of the politicians with the ‘hearty of France . . .clean, honest, brave,’ his men who were ‘the true France. All of them, humble folk, country folk, artisans, working people, small business proprietors – how patriotic, upright, and worthy they were in every sense of the word. And how contemptible are those Deputies who get elected to serve their own ends, and for what they can get out of the people.’


Marc Bloch: A Life in History by Carole Fink, Department of History, University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Cambridge University Press, 1989