Bio: (1886–1944) French historian. Marc Bloch studied history and geography at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, after which he became a secondary school teacher. He was an enlisted soldier in World War I and after the end of the war, he became a lecturer, and later a professor, of medieval history at the University of Strasbourg. Bloch and his university colleague Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Bloch became a professor of economic history at Sorbonne in 1936. After France was defeated and occupied by Germany in 1940 Bloch lost his position due to his Jewish background and was later executed by Nazi soldiers in 1944. Bloch is most known for his lifelong research of the social and economic history of medieval Western Europe and his examination of the historical method.

                             Works on Medieval History

Bloch’s first book on medieval history was Rois et serfs, un chapitre d’histoire capétienne (1920). In this book, Bloch states that two emancipation ordinances issued by French kings in 1315 and 1318 were subtle ploys to ensure the power of kings and not an endorsement of the liberties and freedoms of the people. In the article ‘A Historian’s Thoughts on War Rumors’ (1921) Bloch promotes the idea that historians, to understand how rumors start and spread, have to understand the collective consciousness of the people that they are researching.

In his second book, The Royal Touch (1924) Bloch examined the origins and the development of the folk belief in the royal miracle touch that could heal inflammation caused by tuberculosis in medieval England and France. Using data from medicine, iconography, and psychology Bloch concluded that French and English kings started with the practice of royal touch healing in the 11th century to establish legitimacy control the power of the church, and ensure hereditary rights. Bloch, in the book French Rural History (1931), used maps and other evidence to depict how geography influenced the social institutions of people in France from the early Middle Ages to the time of the French Revolution. He began his analysis using the regressive method of ‘reading history backwards’, as he concluded that the best way to start is from the situation about which he had the best data – a variety of field patterns in prewar France – and to unravel the data about previous situations, going back to the Middle Ages. In this book, Bloch introduces the concept of long duration (longue durée) which states that the focus of history should be on long-term social processes, and not on individual events.

Bloch’s most famous work is the two-volume book Feudal Society (1939–1940). In it, he studies the social, political, and economic structure of societies in Western and Central Europe between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Bloch divides societies in that geographic area into those with indigenous feudal systems (France, Germany, and Italy), those with imposed feudal systems (England), and societies where feudalism wasn’t adopted (Scotland and Scandinavia). He also examined cases of feudalism outside of Europe, like in Japan. Due to the fact that his field of study was geographically and historically very wide question of the uniformity of feudalism as a system arises. While some historians argued that feudalism was one uniform system through all of this area and time, others state that differences across time and place were too wide for feudalism to have any semblance of a unified system. Bloch took the middle ground in those debates as he argued that feudalism existed in a similar form all over said period and area.

The main feature of feudalism is that it was a hierarchic and contractual system based on reciprocal dependence of actors. Feudalism came into existence in specific geographic area and historical moment because those circumstances allowed subjects of monarchic rule to seek more freedoms and limit the power of their rulers by installing reciprocal binding contracts. Bloch distinguished two periods in the development of European feudalism, the first period was the outcome of invasions and devastation, and the later period, where the economy expanded and culture experienced an intellectual revival. With the spread of towns, market economy, and national monarchies feudal system declined, but it left a significant mark on the notion of political contract as the fundamental basis of a political system.

                        Historical Method and the Annales School

Bloch’s theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approach to history developed over time, and, although presented in some aspects in all of his work ) and in his editorial work on the journal Annales, is elucidated in detail in the book The Historian’s Craft (1953). Bloch's approach was influenced by the sociology of Emile Durkheim, the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache, François Simiand’s economic history, and the linguistics of Georges Dumézil and Emile Benveniste.

Bloch and his university colleague Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in 1929, and this journal is stil in print. In the first issue of Annales Bloch and Febvre laid out three goals of the journal: to give a platform for social scientists and historians to unite in productive discussion;  to question the division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern and society into primitive and civilized; and to create a community of the human sciences. The group of interdisciplinary historians was associated with the journal, and their theoretical and epistemological approach came to be known as the Annales School. Although they differed in their methods in topics, their shared approach focused more on social, cultural, and economic history and development, instead of focusing on political history.

Bloch as well as other members of the Annales School promoted a view of history that went beyond the study of political events and paid attention to many aspects of social life. On the other hand, they shifted their focus from studying individual events to the history of "long duration", that is, on long-term processes and slowly developing social changes. In addition to, and complementary to, the focus on the history of long duration, Bloch also employed the perspective he called total history (histoire total). Total history represents an approach to history that focuses on the mentalities (mentalities) of people, that is, their attitudes, ideas, and beliefs.

in the book The Historian’s Craft (1953), Bloch presents history as ‘the science of men in time’, an interdisciplinary field that is part science, part craft, and part art. All of history should be seen as one single entity and can't be compartmentalized. All historical periods and all aspects of social life are interrelated and connected. Focus should be on people's beliefs and customs, and not on individual political events. Historians should: use all types of documents available to them (texts, maps, places’ names, folklore, aerial photographs, and tools); interrogate that evidence; interpret the evidence in the context of the time and the place they belong to; and refrain from passing moral judgments according to personal moral code.

Bloch compared history with natural sciences and concluded that natural scientists deal with phenomena that are in their consciousness, while historians deal with psychosocial phenomena that exist, not only in the minds of historians but also in the consciousness of people who lived throughout history. This difference between history and natural sciences often leads to historians having numerous different interpretations of historical events. Despite this, Bloch believed that should and could strive for scientific validity. One of the methods that historians can apply to ensure validity is the comparative method. He stressed that there are two ways this method can be used. Searching for universal phenomena that exist in all times and places is the first way. The second way is to compare neighboring societies or societies that existed in the same historical period, and this was Bloch's preferred way for applying the comparative method as it brings more precise results.  

Main works

Rois et serfs, un chapitre d’histoire capétienne (1920);

„Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre”, in Revue Synthèse Historique (1921);

The Royal Touch; Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (1973, in French 1924);

French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (1966, in French 1931);

Feudal Society, Volume 1, The Growth of Ties of Dependence (1961, in French 1939);

Feudal Society, Volume 2, Social Classes and Political Organization (1961, in French 1940);

Strange Defeat (1949, in French 1941);

The Historian’s Craft (1953, in French 1949);

Mélanges historiques, 2 vols. (1963);

Memoirs of War, 1914–15 (1980, in French 1969);

La terre et le paysan. Agriculture et vie rurale aux 17e et 18e siècles (1999).