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 19th 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 19th and early 20th 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.
__________________________
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 19th 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 19th and early 20th 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.
__________________________
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.
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.
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.
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.
________________________
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.
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
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
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