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“... of the 19th century. He wanted to liberate himself from nationalism, but did not entirely succeed. Marc Bloch wanted to also: he wrote that there could be no national history, only world history: but he was killed by the Nazis for it. Today nationalism is no longer a religion, only a superstition. The nation has been replaced by the individual, not only ...”

“... historians whose work is ‘weighted down with discourse about the text’, just as his praise for Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre (no argument there) is followed by a peevish complaint about contemporary Annalistes who seem ‘more interested in deconstructing method than in reconstructing the past’. This is an oddly myopic response to the famous ...”

“... and society. The history of ‘collective mentalities’, as practised by French historians from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre before the Second World War, to Philippe Ariès and Michel Vovelle today, appeals to him for much the same reason. The long section on ‘minds and manners.’ in his Crisis of the Aristocracy was one of the first serious ...”

“... and Leszek Kolakowski. The book fails to convey a sense of change in this period, a period that Marc Bloch took as the starting point for his great analysis of Medieval society. With Mr Leyser’s book we enter the authentic world of the early Middle Ages. We don’t merely learn how an 11th-century count settled a feud (hanging his enemy by the legs ...”

“... century; it was its intellectual assistant, its speech therapist.Raulff, who has written books on Marc Bloch, Aby Warburg and Stefan George, makes inspired connections across the history of technology, critical theory, military history, cultural anthropology, philosophy and art. Farewell to the Horse is a narrative that combines odd historical back ...”

“... Mandrou, a historian of mentalities who had himself been a pupil of Lucien Febvre. Like his friend Marc Bloch, Febvre was a kind of historical anthropologist who insisted on the otherness of the past, and on the need to study the unspoken assumptions in different periods as a way of making this otherness intelligible. To sense the difference between our ...”

“... tradition of intellectual history the histoire des mentalités developed between the wars by Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Georges Lefebvre and, not least, the Sinologist Marcel Granet, a follower of Emile Durkheim whose major work, La Pensée Chinoise, appeared in 1934. Characteristic of this approach is the triple stress on collective attitudes ...”

“... only, whereas historians deal with groups or institutions too, without penal authority over them. Marc Bloch, in the spirit of the Annales, had rejected the intrusion of judicial models into history, as encouraging not only concern with famous persons rather than collective structures, but moralising treatments of them. For Ginzburg these are sound ...”

“... as the original sin of the history of mentalities, as practised in the early 20th century by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. It was part of their Durkheimian heritage. More recently, historians of mentalities have been trying to avoid these dangers, but Schama continues to follow the Durkheimian model, acknowledging a ‘bias towards emphasising those ...”

“... religious community – he has some unforgettable pages on the subject, working with ideas from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre – was the model of togetherness that the nation displaced. Or whose historical authority – whose productivity and plausibility – the nation took up into itself. I am not a partisan of the idea that the age of the ...”

“... abbot had finally succeeded in prohibiting the townspeople from milling grain by hand, and, as Marc Bloch recorded in an article from 1935, translated in the posthumous collection Land and Work in Medieval Europe (1967), ‘from all over the town the millstones were brought into the monastery, and the monks paved their parlours with them, like so many ...”

“... here turn communist. Postan was astonished to find that the medievalists ignored the work of Marc Bloch and none of the lectures on political thought mentioned Marx. Brooke explains on his very first page that though Cambridge draws its students from far and wide, ‘it is also profoundly inward-looking.’ So is his book. Of the effect that ...”

“... sort of do-it-yourself structural history. Thus Revel alludes to Lucien Febvre (the founder, with Marc Bloch, of the historical journal Annales ESC), and to Braudel’s ‘longue durée’. But the gourmet history of cuisine is far from the methods of the Annales historians themselves (Le Roy Ladurie, for example, on famine, amenorrhea and wet ...”

“... opening words – epigraphic if not actually placed as an epigraph – are by the historian Marc Bloch: ‘L’historien ressemble à l’ogre de la fable. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier.’ It is a potent image, at once menacing and playful. The historian is like the ‘ogre of fairy tales’ because when ‘he ...”

“... cultures have been attracted for millennia. I think sometimes of the great French historian Marc Bloch on the brink of death: the teenage boy to whom he was handcuffed as the two were about to be executed by the SS in the summer of 1944 was terrified. ‘This will hurt,’ the boy cried. ‘No, my boy, it won’t hurt,’ ...”