page_title: Marc Bloch
section_title: Comparative history and the Annales
hierarchical_section_title: Marc Bloch / Career / Comparative history and the Annales
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Lucien Febvre, professeur à la Faculté des lettres de Strasbourg. Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg
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: His Oslo lecture, called "Towards a Comparative History of Europe", formed the basis of his next book, Les Caractères Originaux de l'Histoire Rurale Française. In the same year he founded the historical journal Annales with Febvre. One of its aims was to counteract the administrative school of history, which Davies says had "committed the arch error of emptying history of human element". As Bloch saw it, it was his duty to correct that tendency. Both Bloch and Febvre were keen to refocus French historical scholarship on social rather than political history and to promote the use of sociological techniques. The journal avoided narrative history almost completely.
  The inaugural issue of the Annales stated the editors' basic aims: to counteract the arbitrary and artificial division of history into periods, to re-unite history and social science as a single body of thought, and to promote the acceptance of all other schools of thought into historiography. As a result, the Annales often contained commentary on contemporary, rather than exclusively historical, events. Editing the journal led to Bloch forming close professional relationships with scholars in different fields across Europe. The Annales was the only academic journal to boast a preconceived methodological perspective. Neither Bloch nor Febvre wanted to present a neutral facade. During the decade it published it maintained a staunchly left-wing position. Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian who wrote comparative history, closely supported the new journal. Before the war he had acted in an unofficial capacity as a conduit between French and German schools of historiography. Fernand Braudel—who was himself to become an important member of the Annales School after the Second World War—later described the journal's management as being a chief executive officer—Bloch—with a minister of foreign affairs—Febvre.
  The comparative method allowed Bloch to discover instances of uniqueness within aspects of society, and he advocated it as a new kind of history. According to Bryce Lyon, Braudel and Febvre, "promising to perform all the burdensome tasks" themselves, asked Pirenne to become editor-in-chief of Annales to no avail. Pirenne remained a strong supporter, however, and had an article published in the first volume in 1929. He became close friends with both Bloch and Febvre. He was particularly influential on Bloch, who later said that Pirenne's approach should be the model for historians and that "at the time his country was fighting beside mine for justice and civilisation, wrote in captivity a history of Europe". The three men kept up a regular correspondence until Pirenne's death in 1935. In 1923, Bloch attended the inaugural meeting of the International Congress on Historical Studies (ICHS) in Brussels, which was opened by Pirenne. Bloch was a prolific reviewer for Annales, and during the 1920s and 1930s he contributed over 700 reviews. These were both criticisms of specific works, but more generally, represented his own fluid thinking during this period. The reviews demonstrate the extent to which he shifted his thinking on particular subjects.
caption: Bloch's friend and colleague for most of his life, Lucien Febvre, at an unknown date
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