MARC BLOCH: A Life in History <i> by Carole Fink (Cambridge University Press: $27.95; 346 pp.) : </i>

Marc Bloch, one of this century’s most important historians, is in many ways an ideal subject for a student of contemporary Europe, as his life spans the period of French history from the Dreyfus Affair to the Holocaust. In this clearly written book, Carole Fink has thoroughly documented Bloch’s fervor for history, his deep devotion to France and his courage as a patriot.

Influenced by the effects of the deeply emotional Dreyfus Affair on French historians, Bloch came to believe that the facts of history were in essence psychological facts. In his most famous book, “The Historian’s Craft,” he writes that the historian is like the ogre in the fairy tales: Where he smells human blood, he knows his quarry is at hand. Likening the historian to the biologist who has a fine microscope but no idea what to study with it, Bloch (who together with Lucien Febvre founded the influential Annales journal) developed a comparative method by which historical testimonies and evidence could be judged and their distortions, deceits and errors understood. During the First World War, he set out to collect the testimony of men on the front, and had to crawl back under a hail of German rifle fire.

Fink’s account clearly etches Bloch’s efforts to render comprehensible the turbulent events of his time and to root his accounts of medieval Europe in an understanding of the present. Typically, the last courses Bloch taught in Paris in 1942 were on the economic evolution of the United States as well as on the peasantry and seigneury in France in the Middle Ages.

During World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New School for Social Research tried to offer Bloch passage out of Europe, but in the end he decided to stay in France with his aged mother, whose visa could not be procured in time. In the most moving chapter of the book, Fink recounts how Bloch, exiled from Paris to Lyon, rose to the highest ranks of the Resistance before he was arrested and shot in 1944. Bloch, Fink sums up, was “a rationalist keenly aware of the power and ubiquitousness of irrational forces.”