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“... What comes to mind when we hear the name Marc Bloch? A great medievalist whose studies of feudal society are still read and admired today? The co-founder with Lucien Febvre of a journal, the Annales, which has given its name to a new school of history with proponents all over the world? A gallant and unyielding résistant who affirmed his Jewish heritage in the face of virulent anti-semitism and died at the hands of a German firing-squad in 1944 crying: ‘Vive la France’? Marc Bloch was all these things ...”

“... circle; he tended to use the term where Durkheim would have written représentations collectives. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, founders of Annales, the journal associated with the ‘new history’ in France from 1929 onwards, were also quick to take up the new concept. Bloch’s book Les Rois Thaumaturges, first ...”

“... to German Jews, being made of stone, stand out. Vienne-le-Château to the south-west is where Marc Bloch was posted in 1915. His war diaries convey the boredom of war work behind the lines, with nothing to read and no sense of what was going on elsewhere. ‘I had little comprehension of the battle,’ he wrote. ‘It was the victory of the Marne but ...”

“... journals, was founded in 1929 by two professors at the University of Strasbourg, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. At that point Febvre and Bloch were anti-Establishment figures, rebels against the continued dominance of political history in France and believers in a ‘wider and more human history’, as they called it, a ...”

“... vocations of the Right. There is also a very moving and intelligent account of the historian Marc Bloch and his tragic death. Some of the other pieces, starting with ‘Nos ancêtres les Gaullois’ and including ‘Left, Right and Temperament’, and thirdly ‘In Search of the Hexagon’, seem rather lightweight and offer at times rather ponderous ...”

“... and ideologies of the present.’ The movement was given birth by Medieval historians, such as Bloch, Febvre and Braudel. It reached its climax in the ‘Braudelian empire’ of the VIe Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, producing such towering figures as Labrousse, Duby and Le Roy Ladurie. Ancient history has been carried along in the ...”

“... with which it has become encrusted. These begin with the journal’s foundation in 1929. Edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, both professors at the University of Strasbourg, it was entitled Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, and from the beginning proclaimed its ambition to play a leading role in the field of economic and social history in ...”

“... indisputably chic. In part because of the campaign against traditional historiography launched by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the 1920s, and partly too, I suspect, because the humiliations of the German Occupation encouraged alienation from the political, there has been a concentration instead on the private and on the popular. Not monarchs, or ...”

“... and fence amiably about history and sociology. ‘Do you really think Weber is more important than Marc Bloch?’ he would ask me with an air of mischievous puzzlement. If we were more circumspect about politics, this was partly a question of tact – he didn’t want to lean on me too heavily, as a cub editor of the journal of which he was a founder. But ...”

“... and dessicated positivism. But neither the subject, nor its fruitfulness, is new. In the hands of Marc Bloch, or of Jean Mabillon, the author of the great De re diplomatica (1681), archival materials, charters and legal records were unpicked, decoded and recontextualised no less vigorously and no less sensitively than chronicles. Diplomatics came alive ...”

“... of The Mediterranean from the camps to his friend and former teacher Lucien Febvre, who with Marc Bloch had founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in Strasbourg in 1929. During the Occupation, Febvre stayed in Paris editing the journal, while Bloch (at the age of 56) joined the ...”

“... the Fall of Tenochtitlán and the Fall of France in 1940, supported by an astute quotation from Marc Bloch: routine and regulations o the French and the Mexicans versus the concrete imagination and suppleness of intelligence of the Germans and the Spanish. That is a clash of cultures, and an uncomfortable comparison, as Thomas clearly ...”

“... societal stress. ‘No war,’ he said, ‘was ever so hard on the nerves.’ The French historian Marc Bloch was thrilled to observe in the trenches ‘a wonderful renewal of oral tradition’. Men moving up and down the line would exchange a few words, often passing on rumours that were groundless but hugely significant for the hearers. The ...”

“... of ideas about the environment. Agrarian notions of collective labour and equality, rooted in what Marc Bloch called the ‘rudimentary communism’ of the village, lingered awkwardly in an early modern world of self-interest and long-distance trade. The desire for abundance and autonomy will probably outlive the factory farm and the oil rig. All the more ...”

“... provide local leadership: Jean-Pierre Lévy in the Isère, Pierre Kaan in the Allier, Jean-Pierre Bloch in Dordogne, Marc Bloch – the historian, who was to be denounced and executed – come to mind. The Jewish 35th Brigade in the South-West received no air-drops, and had to rely on liberated revolvers and handmade ...”