It lacks any references –Bloch intended to add these later-and whether what we have is what Bloch would have ultimately published is debatable. Written between 19 ‘as a simple antidote by which, amid sorrows and anxieties, both personal and collective’, it was never completed and was ‘reconstructed’ from three draft copies by his friend Lucien Febvre. His Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien was first published in England as The Historian’s Craft in 1954, an American edition had appeared the previous year. Very few academics revolutionise the way in which History is studied, but Bloch did that, helping to create the hugely influential Annales school, which argued compellingly in favour of the study of ‘history from below’-of everyday life, that is, studied in the context of geography and the social environment and over la longue durée, the long term: typically a thousand years or more.
Although medieval history had come a long way in the past seventy years, Bloch remains an important historian who is still worth reading even if some of his conclusions are now open to question. His La Societe feodale was one of the first books I read at university in the late-60s though in a translation that betrayed the elegance of the original and several years ago I acquired a copy of a book on medieval France that Bloch had signed and which, presumably came from his own library. My great-uncle studied briefly with him in Paris in 1938 just after Bloch moved from to the capital from his position as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Strasbourg and who always proclaimed he was the ‘best’ historian he’d ever worked with.
I have several connections with Marc Bloch, the French historian who was shot in 1944 for being in the Resistance during the war.
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