Marc Bloch

Born July 6, 1886, in Lyon; died near there, June 16, 1944. French historian.

Bloch studied at the École Normale Supérieure and completed his education (1908–09) at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin. He was a professor at the University of Strasbourg from 1919 to 1936; later, he was a professor at the Sorbonne. During the German occupation of France, Bloch was an active participant in the Resistance movement; he was shot by the Gestapo.

In specific historical works, Bloch gave the most profound treatment in bourgeois scholarship of Western European feudalism as an integrated social system, on the basis of generalization from a great quantity of factual material. In 1929, Bloch and L. Fèvre founded and directed the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (now Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations), which strengthened the study of socioeconomic history in France and promoted a more extensive use in historical research of materials from related disciplines (psychology, geography, economics, statistics, and others). The learned school which was formed around Bloch during the 1930’s is still influential in contemporary historiography (especially in the study of the Middle Ages and the modern period).