Entrance of the historian Marc Bloch into the Panthéon. His links with archaeology.

The historian Marc Bloch, who was murdered on 16 June 1944 for resisting the crimes of the Nazi occupiers and their French collaborators, is today 23 June 2026 being laid to rest in the Panthéon in Paris.

Marc Bloch began his career as a lecturer at the newly established French University of Strasbourg before becoming a professor of economic history at the Sorbonne in 1937. Specialist in the Middle Ages, he is known as one of the pioneers, during the 1920s, of a new way of thinking about and writing history – ‘a broader and more human history’, as he put it in 1941 – which became known as the ‘École des Annales’. This intellectual movement, which had an international influence and has shaped several generations of researchers right up to the present day, sought in particular to move beyond the traditional event-based historical narrative by taking into account elements that had previously been neglected, such as material culture and technology, or the natural environment in which human societies existed.

‘Behind the visible features of the landscape, the tools or the machines, behind the writings that appear the most cold and the institutions that seem the most completely detached from those who established them, it is people that history seeks to capture.’
 

Let us appreciate just how original these ideas were at a time when archaeology, still largely absent from French universities except in its traditional forms, was awaiting its revolution! It was, in fact, only from the mid-1950s, with the development of the social sciences and the gradual emergence of new technologies, that the project initiated by Marc Bloch and his colleagues in history found a genuine resonance in archaeology, now a fully-fledged academic discipline with renewed methodologies.
 

‘For texts, or archaeological documents, however clear they may appear and however accommodating they may be, speak only when one knows how to question them.’

Quotations taken from *L’Apologie pour l’Histoire ou Métier d’Historien* (The Historian’s Craft), an essay written by Marc Bloch during the Second World War