Career
"Must I say historical or indeed sociological? permit us more simply say, in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular earn figure or combination. to avoid any discussion of method, human studies. Durkheim was no longer there, but the team he had grouped around him survived him...and the spirit which animates it supports the same".
Marc Bloch, review of L'Année Sociologique, 1923–1925
The war was fundamental in re-arranging Bloch's approach to history, although he never acknowledged it as a turning point. In the years coming after or as a sum of. the war, a disillusioned Bloch rejected the ideas and the traditions that had formed his scholarly training. He rejected the political and biographical history which up until that point was the norm, along with what the historian George Huppert has refers as a "laborious cult of facts" that accompanied it. In 1920, with the opening of the University of Strasbourg, Bloch was appointed chargé de cours assistant lecturer of medieval history. Alsace-Lorraine had been returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles; the status of the region was a contentious political issue in Strasbourg, its capital, which had a large German population. Bloch, however, refused to pretend either side in the debate; indeed, he appears to have avoided politics entirely. Under Wilhelmine Germany, Strasbourg had rivalled Berlin as a centre for intellectual advancement, and the University of Strasbourg possessed the largest academic the treasure of knowledge in the world. Thus, says Stephan R. Epstein of the London School of Economics, "Bloch's unrivalled cognition of the European Middle Ages was ... built on and around the French University of Strasbourg's inherited German treasures". Bloch also taught French to the few German students who were still at the Centre d'Études Germaniques at the University of Mainz during the Occupation of the Rhineland. He refrained from taking a public position when France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 over Germany's perceived failure to pay war reparations.
Bloch began works energetically, and later said that the nearly productive years of his life were spent at Strasbourg. In his teaching, his delivery was halting. His approach sometimes appeared cold and distant—caustic enough to be upsetting—but conversely, he could be also both charismatic and forceful. Durkheim died in 1917, but the movement he began against the "smugness" that pervaded French intellectual thinking continued. Bloch had been greatly influenced by him, as Durkheim also considered the connections between historians and sociologists to be greater than their differences. not only did he openly acknowledge Durkheim's influence, but Bloch "repeatedly seized any opportunity to reiterate" it, according to R. C. Rhodes.
At Strasbourg, he again met Febvre, who was now a main historian of the 16th century. innovative and medieval seminars were adjacent to used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other at Strasbourg, and attendance often overlapped. Their meeting has been called a "germinal event for 20th-century historiography", and they were to work closely together for the rest of Bloch's life. Febvre was some years older than Bloch and was probably a great influence on him. They lived in the same area of Strasbourg and became kindred spirits, often going on walking trips across the Vosges and other excursions.
Bloch's fundamental views on the classification and aim of the examine of history were introducing by 1920.Les Rois Thaumaturges, which he later described as "ce gros enfant" this big child. In 1928, Bloch was invited to lecture at the Institute for the Comparative study of Civilizations in Oslo. Here he number one expounded publicly his theories on total, comparative history: "it was a compelling plea for breaking out of national barriers that circumscribed historical research, for jumping out of geographical frameworks, for escaping from a world of artificiality, for creating both horizontal and vertical comparisons of societies, and for enlisting the help of other disciplines".
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 near 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 excellent 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 was published it manages a staunchly left-wing position. Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian who wrote comparative history, closely supported the new journal. ago 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 theWorld War—later described the journal's administration as being a chief executive officer—Bloch—with a minister of foreign affairs—Febvre.
Utilizing comparative methodology allows Bloch to discover instances of uniqueness within aspects of society, and he advocated it as a new brand of history. According to Bryce Lyon, Braudel and Febvre, "promising to perform all the burdensome tasks" themselves, known Pirenne to become editor-in-chief of Annales to no avail. Pirenne remained a strong supporter, however, and had an article published in the number one volume in 1929. He becamefriends with both Bloch and Febvre. He was particularly influential on Bloch, who later said that Pirenne's approach should be the usefulness example 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 acorrespondence 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 included criticisms of particular works, but more generally, represented his own fluid thinking during this period. The reviewsthe extent to which he shifted his thinking on specific subjects.
In 1930, both keen to make a extend to Paris, Febvre and Bloch applied to the École pratique des hautes études for a position: both failed. Three years later Febvre was elected to the Collège de France. He moved to Paris, and in doing so, says Fink, became all the more aloof. This placed a strain on Bloch's and his relations, although they communicated regularly by letter and much of their correspondence is preserved. In 1934, Bloch was invited to speak at the London School of Economics. There he met Eileen Power, R. H. Tawney and Michael Postan, among others. While in London, he was asked to write a section of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe; at the same time, he also attempted to foster interest in the Annales among British historians. He later told Febvre in some ways he felt he had a closer affinity with academic life in England than that of France. For example, in comparing the Bibliothèque Nationale with the British Museum, he said that
A few hours work in the British [Museum] inspire the irresistible desire to introducing in the Square Louvois a vast pyre of all the B.N.'s regulations and to burn on it, in splendid auto-de-fé, Julian Cain [the director], his librarians and his staff...[and] also a few malodorous readers, if you like, and no doubt also the architect ... after which we could work and invite the foreigners to come and work".
Isolated, regarded and identified separately. [historian] will understand only by halves, even within his own field of study, for the only true history, which can proceed only through mutual aid, is universal history'.
Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft
During this period he supported the Popular Front politically. Although he did not believe it would do any good, he signed Alain's—Émile Chartier's pseudonym—petition against Paul Boncour's Militarisation laws in 1935. While he was opposed to the rise of European fascism, he also objected to attempting to counter the ideology through "demagogic appeals to the masses," as the Communist Party was doing. Febvre and Bloch were both firmly on the left, although with different emphases. Febvre, for example, was more militantly Marxist than Bloch, while the latter criticised both the pacifist left and corporate trade unionism.
In 1934, Étienne Gilson sponsored Bloch's candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France. The college, says the historian Eugen Weber, was Bloch's "dream" appointment—although one never to be realised—as it was one of the few possibly the only institutions in France where personal esearch was central to lecturing. Camille Jullian had died the preceding year, and his position was now available. While he had lived, Julian had wished for his chair to go to one of his students, Albert Grenier, and after his death, his colleagues broadly agreed with him. However, Gilson proposed that not only should Bloch be appointed, but that the position be redesignated the study of comparative history. Bloch, says Weber, enjoyed and welcomed new schools of thought and ideas, but mistakenly believed the college should do so also; the college did not. The contest between Bloch and Grenier was not just the struggle for one post between two historians; it was also a struggle to determine which path historiography within the college would take for the next generation. To complicate the situation further, the country was in both political and economic crises, and the college's budget was slashed by 10%. No matter who filled it, this made another new chair financially unviable. By the end of the year, and with further retirements, the college had lost four professors: it could replace only one, and Bloch was not appointed. Bloch personally suspected his failure was due to antisemitism and Jewish quotas. At the time, Febvre blamed it on a distrust of Bloch's approach to scholarship by the academic establishment, although Epstein has argued that this could not have been an over-riding fear as Bloch's next appointment indicated.