Total Historian

Copies history books by historian Marc Bloch, including L’Étrange Défaite and Les Rois thaumaturges, on display in Paris, France, on August 5, 2026. © Riccardo Milani/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty On June 23, choirs of French schoolchildren and a large crowd of dignitaries thronged around the Pantheon in central Paris during a heat wave. Under the glow of torchlight, President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the special courage that had earned the Sorbonne professor Marc Bloch a place in the nation’s most prestigious tomb. Since the French Revolution turned the erstwhile church in the Latin Quarter into a secular temple of civic virtue, France has laid to rest several dozen of its greatest citizens there, among them Charles de Gaulle, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, and Simone Veil. To the sound of the Marseillaise, the caskets of Bloch and his wife Simonne were inducted into the Pantheon, making him the first historian to receive the honor. Listen to this essay Historians have often created heroes, but few have themselves become them. Bloch, however, has managed to rise to this status in France. Born in 1886, the child of secular Jewish scholars from Alsace, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure at the height of fin-de-siècle French theoretical innovation, he fought as an infantry officer in the trenches during the First World War, founded a journal that engendered an entire tradition of historical research, became an expert on feudalism and medieval agrarian history, wrote a sharp indictment of the fecklessness of the French elite in the face of Nazi aggression, and then took part in the French Resistance, until he was captured and executed by the Gestapo in June 1944. Bloch’s career was short but prolific: Over the course of barely two decades of employment as a professor at the universities of Strasbourg, Paris, and Montpellier, he published seven books, including The Royal Touch, French Rural History, and Feudal Society, and over sixty articles on subjects ranging from watermills to gold coinage and slavery to medieval ideas of empire. And though he never left the firmament of the French intellectual world, there has been a strong recent revival of interest in his political activities. A comic book about Bloch’s wartime exploits is available in French bookstores. He is invoked across the political spectrum: socialists, in order to criticize the far right; centrists, to defend the republican middle ground; conservatives, to appeal to the deep identity of France. The urge to claim Bloch for one’s side has made it harder to figure out what he believed and stood for. Peter Schöttler’s intellectual biography of Marc Bloch comes at the right time. It is the most complete record of the thinking and travails of the Third Republic’s greatest historian. Schöttler, a historian of Franco-German intellectual exchange, situates Bloch in the complex early twentieth-century landscape that formed him. It also offers a new view of how the historical discipline developed during the last century. Bloch’s intellectual project revolved around three innovations, each of them concerned with the historical development of societies. He reoriented history away from its emphasis on individual leaders and nations, towards a focus on collective worldviews or mentalités. He gave concrete programmatic shape to this agenda by co-founding a new journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, which became synonymous with a more structural and total approach to history-writing. And he led the way in applying this approach to the study of medieval Europe, formulating a more accurate concept of feudalism. In the nineteenth century, European scholars had placed the study of the past on a more scientific footing. In the effort to distinguish their discipline from the alluring narratives of literature and the seductions of myth and religion, they emphasized that history properly so-called was the objective and dispassionate study of primary sources, aimed at recreating the true nature of eras long since passed. In the words of the German scholar Leopold von Ranke, widely seen as one of the initiators of this movement, history was a search for “how things actually were” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist). But in practice, the nineteenth-century historical profession produced a very selective understanding of what history was. In the age of nationalism, industrialization, and power politics, most historians focused on the great decisions that had produced the national states of the present day. Public documents about matters of state were easily available, and dominated the empirical work. Ranke was convinced that the modern world was the product of diplomacy and foreign policy above all, and coined the concept of “Great Powers” (Großmächte) to describe the prime agents of historical struggle. It was common for nineteenth-century historians to emphasize how every people and state had overcome collective challenges that awakened them to their national identity (Ernest Renan); how their institutions had matured slowly to develop this essence (Hippolyte Taine); and how eventually every state would become the carrier of this exceptional national spirit (Heinrich von Treitschke). Only a few major figures dissented from this view and thought that the struggle within polities had been as intense and formative as that between them, notably Karl Marx and the German historian of ancient Rome Theodor Mommsen. By the turn of the twentieth century, the nationalist and elitist biases of much established history-writing were coming under pressure from the advancing social sciences. In France, Émile Durkheim and his collaborators François Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, and Marcel Mauss examined both quantitative data and the dominant norms that governed social life. Social theorists such as Thorstein Veblen, George Herbert Mead, and Franz Boas in the United States, and Gustav von Schmoller and Max Weber in Germany were overturning old verities about national cohesion and cultural particularity. These scholars all studied societies in a more comparative and comprehensive fashion. They understood power as a question of violence and resources but also as working through potent symbols, and thus emphasized that historical change occurred through the interaction of rulers and ruled, a process both material and ideal. Bloch came of age amidst these new intellectual currents and would apply them to great effect to renovate the study of academic history in France. After having his doctoral research, on medieval kings and serf laborers, interrupted by the First World War, he finished a dissertation in 1920. A few years later Bloch published his breakthrough study, Les rois thaumaturges, which examined how the popular belief in the healing power of the royal touch augmented the power of monarchs in England and France. A mixture of the history of politics, belief systems, and society, it demonstrated how the French kings had been raised to supernatural stature as commoners’ faith in magic reinforced the sacerdotal pretensions of French clergymen aligned with the Crown who sought to assert their autonomy from the Pope. It was a brilliant demonstration of the force of what Bloch called “la conscience collective” in shaping historical possibility. Schöttler argues that Bloch did much more than just invert the study of history by shifting it from a largely top-down to a more bottom-up perspective. He also broadened the understanding of the social reality in question by bringing in interdisciplinary approaches. It was not simply that millions of peasants mattered as much as individual kings, but also that the high ground of politics could not be understood without examining the dominant legal institutions, the distributions of property and wealth, the lifeworld and work patterns of the masses, and the nature of their moral and religious beliefs. In this regard it was fitting that Bloch named the journal he founded with the historian Lucien Febvre in 1929 Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in homage to the great Roman work of history: Like Tacitus, they analyzed past societies in the round, threading the structure of politics, law, and authority together with the common pleasures and rhythms of everyday existence. History, as Bloch saw it, should go beyond the narrow preoccupations of the powerful and propound a more ambitious view of “the great hidden currents of human life.” Anglophone collaborators included many of the best scholars at Cambridge and the LSE, such as R.H. Tawney, Eileen Power, and Michael Postan. But there were also contemporary trends of which the journal and its contributors steered clear. Bloch and Febvre regarded the emergent field of “geopolitics” practiced by scholars such as Karl Haushofer (an influence on the early Nazi movement), as well as the declinist civilizational histories of Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, as reductive, pseudo-scientific, and dangerous. These kinds of monocausal reductionisms and abstract narratives the Annales founders regarded as illusory and outright dangerous. As Bloch put it, “There is no homo geographicus any more than there is a homo economicus.” As the Annales developed during the mid-century decades, it became a broad church of historical research programs fertilized by the social sciences. What made Bloch distinctive, however, was his strong commitment to studying different societies alongside one another. This was in part due to the influence of one of his doctoral supervisors at the Sorbonne, the historian Charles-Victor Langlois, whose mantra was that “who does not compare does not understand” (qui ne compare pas ne comprend pas). Indeed, Schöttler’s book is a welcome reminder that Bloch was nothing if not a comparativist.