Marc Bloch, strange defeat, the historian's craft and World War II: Writing and teaching contemporary history

Abstract

The roles of small and great books, and passionate yet well-considered writings in the general education of a “college” or “university” trained teacher are questions which should be turned back upon the historian as teacher and writer. Where resides the historian's classroom? Who are the students and how do (and did) teachers come to be? What subject matter should be used to prod and provoke an often dormant humanity awake? Professor Marc Bloch's work, his passion for history's rôles and its voices from the past speaking to the present, had a Renaissance in the cauldron of World War II. Bloch's commitment to teaching and writing history, teaching about the forceful, or surprising and shocking, “presences” of history's supposed past-tense experiences, remains seminal to the historian's craft. Bloch's own voice from the past was forged in an intensity of present-time experience. Reflection was searing experience. Memory was “now” and remembrance was an accident of preservation for futures then unknown. These futures need to know of the experiences of former, fragile, personal and generational memories if the very same futures were to be lived more surely and securely. Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft (or, more accurately, Explanatory Defence for History or Craft of the Historian = Apologie pour l’histoire, ou Métier d’historien, original French title and abbreviation = A.P.H.), remains a vindication of the human-centred, purposive roles of history in a general education. Moreover, this general education can now be said to cover (if not embrace) the broad sweep of “secondary schooling” experiences. This sweep of schooling and post-schooling experiences is beginning, however tentatively and problematically, to extend itself into worlds of work, the futures of work and the academic futures or courses (what once might have been termed optimistically “the progress”) of higher education: the arena of tertiary and university education.

In a not dissimilar fashion but in an even more intense spirit, Bloch's work, L’étrange défaite (E.D. = Strange Defeat: manuscript “finished” July–September 1940), examines the explosion and implosion of France and, in effect, Western Europe in the years, months and days leading up to the German offensive in the West of 10 May 1940. Bloch recognized that education and the failures to harness intellect, true intellectual freedom and innovative teaching weighed heavily upon the disastrous course of events in 1940.

Professor Bloch's texts can serve two complementary purposes. First, his works, Strange Defeat and The Historian's Craft remain as significant, contemporary records of personal thoughts, argumentative methodologies, and recollections of world-shattering events. They constitute, quite literally, an historian's craft in action. Second, Bloch's texts can serve an equally valuable role where the writer seeks to take his reader (who might or might not be a fellow citizen) through and beyond the immediate historical question, methodology or series of unravelling events into an intellectual duel which stands upon the historian's engagement with worlds, past and present. Questions and actions, makings and doings matter in this world. Understanding is not only a prime responsibility of the historian; it is a duty which might well prove dangerous.

Given the above observations, this essay will seek to emphasize that world history and the teaching of broad histories of humanity recognizes few, if any, borders which seek to block or hold at bay the presentation of the “passport” known as understanding. Teaching history is much more than teaching civics (however well-intentioned) or recognizing civilizational variety and its barbarous opposites. Teaching history is an act, however imperfect, of recognizing ourselves in time.

(i) My brother (fraternal) “schoolmasters”—when it came to the point, you did, for the most part, put up a magnificent fight. It was your goodwill which managed to create in many a sleepy secondary school, in many universities—prisoners of the worse routines (habitual practices or routinism—) the only form of education of which, perhaps, we can feel genuinely proud. I only hope that a day will come, and come soon, a day of glory and of happiness for France, when, liberated from the enemy, and freer than ever in our intellectual life, we may meet again for the mutual discussion of ideas. And when that happens, do you not think that, having learned from an experience so dearly purchased, you will find much to alter in the things you were teaching only a few years back?

Strange Defeat, 142).1

(ii) What was at stake was a geological upheaval of thought …2

Notes

Composed/written: Guéret-Fougères (Creuse): juillet–septembre 1940. References to the following works by Marc Bloch can be found throughout this article: Strange Defeat (or S.D.): Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949; reprinted New York, 1968); L’étrange défaité (or E.D.): Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaité (Gallimard, 1990; 1946, first Fr. edition). The Historian's Craft (or A.H.P.): Marc Bloch, Explanatory Defence for History or Craft of the Historian: Block, M. (1949; 1974, critical edition, 1993, Etienne Bloch.) Apologie poor l'historie, ou Métier d'historien. Paris: Armand Colin Eng. trans., The Historians Craft (Manchester U.P., 1992; first pub. 1953): Block, M. (1995). Histoire and Historiens. Textes réunis par Etienne Bloch. Paris: Armand Colin.

After the spirit of Proust and inspired by Professor Martha Nussbaum, ABC Radio National, “The Europeans,” Easter Sunday, 2002, Australia, re book under discussion: Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Much remains in dispute, much remains to be examined or re-examined and considered—even uncovered. Time has not put World War II to rest. It was, and remains, simply too big, too destructive, and too important. A wide-ranging enquiry could be usefully commenced by viewing the perspectives presented in John Keegan, The Battle for History: Re-fighting World War Two (London: 1995) and R. J. B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945–1990 (London: 1993; 1994 edition).

An equally engaged intellectual who plunged into another, not unrelated, world of politics, war and identity, can be found in an address by I. J. Paderewski, “Remarks on Poland,” Address Delivered at Teachers’ College, Columbia University, May 1917.

Note the salient, general and specific remarks of Bloch on these problems and questions and his wide-ranging, exploratory and inclusive intellectual spirit: Historian's Craft, 50–1, 61–3, 142, 152–4—these references are intended as a taste of Bloch's reflections; and again, in Strange Defeat, 1–3 ff, 36–7, 51–5 ff, 114–21 ff, 165–72 ff, and where the reader chooses. Over 50 years later, discussion and debate upon the subject of “European futures” and the purposes, roles and problematics of “identity” and “cultures/national cultures” continues apace: see further, the exploratory essays: Eric Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” New York Review of Books (16 December 1993): 62–4; Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches From Europe in the 1990's (London: 1999), see for examples: 64–9 ff; 180–1 ff; 208–10 ff, and where the reader chooses.

See for exemplars of menacing, contemporary parallelism, Strange Defeat, 153 and 175–6. See further, the salient remarks of Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (London: 1961), 133 ff. See also, William Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: 1941), 83–7: Letter, Berlin, 27 September 1937; and Leszek Kolakowski, “Talk of the Devil,” in The Devil and Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973; first published, 1965), 128–30 ff. I leave further work on this challenge to my next essay.

For a current, popular guide to the inverted logic of terror and violence, see the report on Carlos the Jackal (Sanchez) and Isabelle Coutant-Peyre: Charles Bremner, “Paris Rebel with a Cause Célèbre,” The Weekend Australian (22–23 December 2001): 12, first published in The Times. For a brief “overview,” model-like explanation, see the remarks of a long-standing Russian historian, Igor M. Diakonov, The Paths of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; first published, 1994 in Russian), 286–7. Diakonov tellingly concludes his work by observing: “But the reader should not forget that each line stands for oceans of blood and almost inconceivable suffering. And I cannot promise anything different for the future.” These remarks should not be solely viewed as deep pessimism as historical judgement rather they should be viewed as the literal product and moral weight of horror.

Bloch recognized the dead weight but destructive power of “race” and “class” nomenclatures, and the radical extent to which such ideas could be opportunistically exploited. See further, Strange Defeat, 139–45, and note Marc Bloch, Cahiers Politiques 3 (August 1943): 2, 9. Bloch saw himself as complexly and unassailably French: Strange Defeat, 3, and see The Testamentary Instructions of Marc Bloch: Le Testament De Marc Bloch (Clermont-Ferraud, 18 March 1941).

For a useful introduction see Daniel Chirot, “The Social and Historical Landscape of Marc Bloch,” in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 22–46. However, Bloch often valued the past and its utility to present-time worlds via an “experiential” model of understanding rather than an “experimental” one. Note Strange Defeat, 116–7, and/or E.D., 149–50. Always, after Bloch, keeping in mind: “Always and everywhere: history remains in its essence a science (a knowledge) of change.” However, the “present” always exerted its influence: Historian's Craft, 36–9, and history remained dynamic: H.C., 32–6; see further, in its entirety, A.P.H., 41–50.

In the spirit of the preceding remarks see for a sceptical balance, Karl Popper, “Has History Any Meaning?” in The Open Society and its Enemies: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, Vol. II (London: 1996, revised edition; first published, 1945), 259–80.

A guide to the idea of risk (albeit from a history of financial, or rather, economic risk) can be found in the exploratory work of Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: 1996), see 99, 116, 224–5.

Perhaps the spirit of Bloch's idea of mentalité (if not the usage of this term) is best caught in H.C., 64, second-last paragraph re the evaluation at Dunkerque; A.P.H., 72. See further, H.C., 32–6; A.P.H., 44–7, and the path-finding work, Lucien Febvre, “A New Kind of History,” in A New Kind of History From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke (London: 1973), 27–43, originally published in France in 1949, and reprinted in Combats pour l’histoire.

See the extensive argument, intensively placed before the reader in S.D., 136–51 ff or E.D., 169–85 ff, and see Bloch's remarkable, introductory pages to Strange Defeat. Bloch's work here on human dignity, individual rights, freedom and identity pre-figure much later, fine work such as one encounters in Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (London: 1998), see 145, and generally. See further, Mazower's inaugural lecture, Birkbeck College, University of London, “The Making of Human Rights,” extract based on inaugural lecture, 31 January 2002, in The Australian Financial Review (Friday, 15 February 2002), 1–2 of “Review.”

Poetics, ch. ix.

R. G. Collingwood, Historical Imagination (1935), 5.

Leviathan, I, iv.

E. H. Carr, What is History (London: 1961, 1964, Pelican Edition), 62–3.

See further, the telling remarks of Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 1996; 1997 edition), 10–11, and generally, “The Sense of Reality,” 1–39. Note, Jurgen Habermas, “On the Public Use of History,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian's Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Oxford, 1989; first published, 1985, 1987), 229–40. Note the still powerful critique in Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarianism in power,” in The Burden of Our Time (London: 1951), 376–428 ff.

See Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Oxford: 1992), 238 ff; 288–96.

Two compelling ways in which to view this period of conflagration and war, though not necessarily unrelated, would be to consider the scholarly merits of Roger Beaumont, The Nazis March to Chaos: The Hitler Era through the Lenses of Chaos–Complexity Theory (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2000); and Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The available literature is as vast as it is as often as not in conflict.

See further for a guide: Mark Mazower, “Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies,” and “Hitler's New Order, 1938–1945,” in Dark Continent, 77–105 ff and 141–84; Paul Weindling, “From Geo-medicine to Genocide,” in Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945, 225 ff. Note also, Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Michael Ignatieff, “The Man Who Was Right,” New York Review of Books (23 March 2000): 35–7; Marc Lilla, “The Lure of Syracuse,” New York Review of Books (20 September 2001): 81–6. See generally, the perceptive work, Klemens Von Klemperer, German Incertitudes 1914–1945: The Stones and the Cathedral (Westport, CT: 2001).

See E.D., 170–5; S.D., 137–41.

For a companion to such venturous, confronting thought, see Leszek Kolakowski, “On Freedom,” in Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (London: 1999), 95–103. Bloch's own shrewd and keen appreciation of Nazi Germany, and his hopes and intentions for a far better, democratic future for France and his world at large, can be found by reading, Les Cahiers Politiques 3 (August 1943): 1–14.

“Mainspring”: with emphasis placed upon something being “necessarily based upon or indispensable.”

“Pursuit”: to be understood in the senses of being concerned with “design, purpose or reaching for objectives” of a “noble” order.

Another then contemporary combatant and writer, who fought with the French armies, is worth the reader's consideration: Hans Habe, A Thousand Shall Fall (London: 1942). Reflections, opinions and memories live abundantly in this immediate account of May 1940. By way of contrast see Ernst Jünger, Jardins et Routes: Journal 1: 1939–1940 (Paris: 1979 edition). On war, danger and uncertainty, and the plays of catastrophe as fate, see, pp. 199–200, and where the reader chooses. … And then there are the wonderful and quirky insights contained in Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (London: Autumn 1945).

The English translation has been shortened and concentrated a little.

See Daniel Schneidermann, “À Marc Bloch,” in L’Ètrange Procès (France: 1998), 167–207. In the spirit of Febvre's statement: “It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word” a further note on the term proie is offered. The imagaic power of the ancient Greek word for “dowry,” proix, is apposite when placed alongside the French, proie. In the context of Strange Defeat, the “dowry” or “booty” to be seized was France, and by direct implication, Europe under German domination. See further, Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (London: 1995; first published, 1994). In this context, note Herodotos’ apposite comments on war and plunder: The Histories, V.6.

Herodotos is recognized as the perceptive, contemporary historian he was—at once interested in large events and the intimate costs of war: Strange Defeat, 130 ff (E.D., 163 ff); Historian's Craft, 50–1 (A.P.H., 59–60 ff).

E.D., 159–86, and throughout this chapter; S.D., 126–53, ditto. For complexity and hard-worked perspectives cast upon France in the years preceding 1939–40 and the early years of Vichy and Occupation, see for a beginning: Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: 1996; first published, 1993); Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: 1972); Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: 1981); and Sarah Fishman, ed., France at War: Vichy and the Historians, trans. David Drake (Oxford: 2000).

See Bloch's prescient remarks: E.D., 203 ff; S.D., 171 ff; E.D., 185; S.D., 152.

The potential (and real) impact of Nazi ideas, policy, economic policy and Vichy agrarian sermons in this early stage of World War II, was clearly noted as was the “surprising” ignorance of those who should have known better: E.D., 179–81; S.D., 145–8. Bloch clearly recognized the broad menace posed by Europe-wide (and national forms) of anti-Semitism: note the following sharp and sound observations re Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and living within fragile worlds of tolerance, and amongst rising cultures of blame, fear and race mythology, mysticism and fanaticism: S.D., 3; E.D., 197–9; S.D., 165–7; note A.P.H., 150–1 ff; H.C., 153–4 ff. Note also, Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; 1991 edition), 14 ff; 166 ff; 201–2 ff.

In early 1939, Bloch was engaged in the delivery of his academic researches at Cambridge. Note his remarks in E.D., 35; S.D., 6. For Cambridge connections note: Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History, 194 ff and 203–4.

Note for examples: A.P.H., 41–4; 47–8; 59–61; H.C., 29–32; 36–7; 50–1. See further, E.D., 176–80; S.D., 143–7. See generally, W. Sewell, “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 206–18.

See generally E.D., 169–78; S.D., 136–45.

My clarification.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (London: 1938; 1947, reprint), 179. Niebuhr added tellingly: “In the field of history the things ‘that are’ live in even greater peril than in nature” (221).

A particular word or term such as democracy, capitalism, feudalism or moral/social values terminology (my clarification).

See the useful, extensive discussion on documents, vocabulary and the dynamics of word usage: A.P.H., 137–53; H.C., 138–56. For a path-finding guide, see, Lucien Febvre, “ ‘Civilisation’: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in A New Kind of History, 219–57.

Two powerful, conceptual approaches to this historian's task and quest can be found by reflecting upon the following two essays: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “The Shoah's Challenge to History”; “And by the Power of a Word … ,” in The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Columbia University Press, 1996), 142–50; 163–70, and where the reader chooses.

Gore Vidal, Screening History (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; Abacus, 1993) is inspirational.

In its entirety, Strange Defeat stands as testimony to such a challenge. See also, A.P.H., 60–1; 141; H.C. 51; 142. See generally, Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See further, David Wingeate Pike, “Between the Junes: The French Communists from the Collapse of France to the Invasion of Russia,” Journal of Contemporary History 28(3) (July 1993): 465–85.

See, for a few examples: E.D., 66–7; 81–4; 138–9 ff; 148–52 ff; 175–6 ff and 186 ff, or see, S.D., 36–7; 51–4; 106–7 ff; 115–9 ff; 142–3 ff and 153 ff. These sharp observations above well precede Bloch's work in Cahiers Politiques, 1943, and should complement the observations found in Susan W. Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17.

Victor Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes: A Sociology of Old Attic Comedy (New York: 1962 edition; first published, 1943). It is worth noting that Harvard University Press played a role in this emigré's intellectual survival through publication. See generally, Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).