page_title: Marc Bloch
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Marc Bloch / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Signature of Marc Bloch on "La ministérialité en France et en Allemagne" in Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 1928. This book was offered to Maurice Halbwachs and is now held in the Human and Social Sciences Library Paris Descartes-CNRS Français&#160;: Envoi autographe de Marc Bloch à Maurice Halbwachs sur un tiré à part de "La ministérialité en France et en Allemagne" in Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 1928. Cet ouvrage, offert par la veuve de M.H. à la bibliothèque de sociologie du CNRS, est désormais conservé à la Bibliothèque de sciences humaines et sociales Paris Descartes-CNRS (UMS 3036) Italiano: Dedica autografa di Marc Bloch a Maurice Halbwachs per la pubblicazione "La ministérialité en France et en Allemagne", un estratto da Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 1928). Il libro è stato donato dalla vedova di Halbwachs alla biblioteca di sociologia del CNRS, ed è ora conservato alla Biblioteca di scienze umane Paris Descartes/CNRS
context_page_description: Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. A founding member of the Annales School of French social history, he specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Paris, and the University of Montpellier.
  Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the École Normale Supérieure, and from an early age was affected by the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 and became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. There, he formed an intellectual partnership with modern historian Lucien Febvre. Together they founded the Annales School and began publishing the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929.
context_section_description: Bloch was not a tall man, being 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m) in height and an elegant dresser.  Eugen Weber has described Bloch's handwriting as "impossible". He had expressive blue eyes, which could be "mischievous, inquisitive, ironic and sharp". Febvre later said that when he first met Bloch in 1902, he found a slender young man with "a timid face". Bloch was proud of his family's history of defending France: he later wrote, "My great-grandfather was a serving soldier in 1793; ... my father was one of the defenders of Strasbourg in 1870 ... I was brought up in the traditions of patriotism which found no more fervent champions than the Jews of the Alsatian exodus".
  Bloch was a committed supporter of the Third Republic and politically left wing. He was not a Marxist, although he was impressed by Karl Marx himself, whom he thought was a great historian if possibly "an unbearable man" personally. He viewed contemporary politics as purely moral decisions to be made. He did not, however, let it enter into his work; indeed, he questioned the very idea of a historian studying politics. He believed that society should be governed by the young, and, although politically he was a moderate, he noted that revolutions generally promote the young over the old: "even the Nazis had done this, while the French had done the reverse, bringing to power a generation of the past". According to Epstein, following the First World War, Bloch presented a "curious lack of empathy and comprehension for the horrors of modern warfare", while John Lewis Gaddis has found Bloch's failure to condemn Stalinism in the 1930s "disturbing". Gaddis suggests that Bloch had ample evidence of Stalin's crimes and yet sought to shroud them in utilitarian calculations about the price of what he called 'progress'".
  Although Bloch was very reserved—and later acknowledged that he had generally been old-fashioned and "timid" with women—he was good friends with Lucien Febvre and Christian Pfister. In July 1919 he married Simonne Vidal, a "cultivated and discreet, timid and energetic" woman, at a Jewish wedding. Her father was the Inspecteur-Général de Ponts et Chaussées, and a very prosperous and influential man. Undoubtedly, says Friedman, his wife's family wealth allowed Bloch to focus on his research without having to depend on the income he made from it. Bloch was later to say he had found great happiness with her, and that he believed her to have also found it with him. They had six children together, four sons and two daughters. The eldest two were a daughter Alice, and a son, Étienne. As his father had done with him, Bloch took a great interest in his children's education, and regularly helped with their homework. He could, though, be "caustically critical" of his children, particularly Étienne. Bloch accused him in one of his wartime letters of having poor manners, being lazy and stubborn, and of being possessed occasionally by "evil demons". Regarding the facts of life, Bloch told Etienne to attempt always to avoid what Bloch termed "contaminated females".
  Bloch was certainly agnostic, if not atheist, in matters of religion. His son Étienne later said of his father, "in his life as well as his writings not even the slightest trace of a supposed Jewish identity" can be found. "Marc Bloch was simply French". Some of his pupils believed him to be an Orthodox Jew, but Loyn says this is incorrect. While Bloch's Jewish roots were important to him, this was the result of the political tumult of the Dreyfuss years, said Loyn: that "it was only anti-semitism that made him want to affirm his Jewishness".
  Bloch's brother Louis became a doctor, and eventually the head of the diphtheria section of the Hôpital des Enfants-Malades. Louis died prematurely in 1922. Their father died in March the following year. Following these deaths, Bloch took on responsibility for his ageing mother as well as his brother's widow and children. Eugen Weber has suggested that Bloch was probably a monomaniac who, in Bloch's own words, "abhorred falsehood". He also abhorred, as a result of both the 
caption: Bloch's signature on "La ministérialité en France et en Allemagne" in Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 1928; Bloch offered the book to Maurice Halbwachs and it is now held in the Human and Social Sciences Library Paris Descartes-CNRS
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