Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

From August 1914 to January 1915, a 28-year-old French historian of middle-class upbringing and Jewish ancestry named Marc Bloch was an infantry sergeant in the hastily dug trenches of the muddy Marne valley, 30 yards from the Germans. He kept a journal. In the spring and early summer of 1940, Bloch--by then 54 and the author of several celebrated works of medieval history--was once again in uniform. He was a captain, the oldest (so he claimed) in the French forces, and in charge of fuel supplies at the northern end of the French line. When the Germans broke though in May, he witnessed the disintegration of the French positions at close hand. He was evacuated from Dunkirk on a British paddle-steamer, spent two days in England and returned across the Channel to Normandy to rejoin the French army. When Petain capitulated, Bloch put on civilian clothes and went to Lyons, his birthplace. There he wrote, taught and became one of the leaders of the Resistance. In 1944 he was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and, 10 days after D-Day, executed; his last words to the firing squad, “Vive La France!”

Bloch’s short journal of World War I, “Souvenirs de Guerre 1914-15,” was published in Paris in 1969 and in English by Cornell University Press in 1980. Bloch’s account of the French collapse in 1940 was written in the late summer of that appalling year, “when the fate of the French no longer depended on the French.” L’etrange defaite was brought out in Paris in 1946 and as “Strange Defeat” by Oxford University Press in 1949. The two books are complementary: the first full of battlefield chaos, discomfort and courage, seen at ground level; the second, also full of chaos, seen somewhat more professorially, from a higher level at headquarters, albeit often under fire, and with a historian’s eye for a larger picture. Bloch realized in 1940 that the flabby and sluggish French general staff was still fighting World War I, but the Germans were not. They rarely did what the French expected them to do. They understood speed. They had grasped a 20th century “idea of distance” and didn’t mean to get bogged down again in static confrontation. Their blitzkreig worked, the Maginot Line was turned and the Third Republic was finished.

Bloch is well known as a great historian of the Middle Ages, but I recommend these two personal “testimonies” of his that remind us that he was also a born fighter, a patriot and a robust thinker in his own time--a great man who, when things were at their worst in 1940, when the fate of France was no longer in its own hands, wrote that he found it impossible to despair for the French people.