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Marc Bloch: HistorianAuthor(s): Bryce LyonSource: French Historical Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 195-207Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/286263 .Accessed: 18/04/2011 01:51

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Marc Bloch: Historian

Bryce Lyon

In this year 1986, the year that marks the centennial of the birth of Marc Bloch, what can be said about him as a historian or a man that has not already been said?' Since his heroic death in 1944 and the end of the Second World War he has been the subject of an outpouring of writing by friends, colleagues, students, and com- panions in the Resistance. To see him as the learned historian and man of action one must read the articles of Lucien Febvre, his friend and partner in the great enterprise Annales, or those of Charles-Edmond Perrin, Robert Boutruche, Philippe Dollinger, Henri Baulig, or the recollections of his Resistance companion Georges Altman.2 To comprehend his historical attitudes, method- ology, and objectives one must read and ponder his Thaumaturgical Kings, French Rural History, Feudal Society, and numerous articles and mises au point, many of which have been published in the two-volume Melanges historiques and some of which have been translated into

Bryce Lyon is the Barnaby C. and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University. Among his numerous publications are a book on Henri Pirenne and several articles on Marc Bloch. He is presently preparing a book on the emancipation of the peasantry in the Middle Ages and an article comparing the methodology of Marc Bloch and that of the French novelist Jules Romains.

I This article resulted from a paper delivered in 1986 at a session of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago devoted to the commemoration of the centennial of Marc Bloch's birth. His son Etienne, a French avocat and judge, spoke on his father as a private and public figure, and Professor Carole Fink discussed Bloch's relation to French political developments in the early twentieth century.

2 Volumes 1 and 2 of Les Annales d'histoire sociale issued later as Hommages a Marc Bloch contain articles by Febvre, Baulig, and Altman. In 1947 volume 103 of the Publications de la Facult9 des Lettres de l'Universitg de Strasbourg appeared as a memorial to those members of the faculty who died between 1939 and 1945. Here Febvre writes of Bloch as a colleague and Robert Boutruche writes of him as a teacher. Fine evaluations of Bloch and his work are given by Charles-E. Perrin, "L'Oeuvre historique de Marc Bloch," Revue historique 199 (1948): 161-88, and by Febvre, "Marc Bloch," in Architects and Craftsmen on History. Festschriftifur Abbot Payson Usher (Tubingen, 1956), 75-84. See also the foreword by Lyon in Bloch, French Rural History, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley, 1966).

196 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

English and published by the University of California Press.3 But one can never truly understand Bloch without reading his Strange Defeat, The Historian's Craft, his diary Souvenirs de guerre kept during World War I, and his Testament spirituel.4

Why emphasize the need to know this body of writing when it is obviously a sine qua non for evaluating Marc Bloch's place in the long and productive story of western historiography? There are a number of reasons. Too often one neglects to read historians whose ideas, interpretations, and methodology have permeated the histor- ical infrastructure because their contributions have become a part of the historical atmosphere. Has this not also been true with schol- ars in other disciplines as, for example, Marx and Freud? Moreover, so much of what Bloch believed to be the proper task of the histo- rian has become blurred, forgotten, or perverted during the forty- odd years since his death. Frequently the achievements of men endowed with special intellectual and human talents are so magni- fied and eulogized that their real contributions and actions come to be misunderstood or are transposed to the world of legend and myth. Also, since the Second World War it has become fashionable for historians to ignore their intellectual and methodological debts to previous generations and to write history as though only contem- porary or near-contemporary methodology and interpretation made the world of history go round. In a poll of young historians who are not medievalists, how many would know who Bloch was or would realize that he and Febvre were the founders of the Annaliste school of historians? My hunch is that many would be unfamiliar with Bloch and that the majority would identify Fernand Braudel or Le Roy Ladurie as the creator of Annaliste history.

I shall attempt here to do two things-present my image or understanding of Marc Bloch the historian and then relate this image to contemporary Annales history. This image, with which others may disagree, rests upon a reading of most of Bloch's writing; talks with some of his colleagues and students, especially Edouard

3These three English translations originally were published by Bloch in 1924, 1931, and 1939-40. The two-volume Mtilanges historiques (Paris, 1963) also has a complete bibliography of Bloch's work. For the translations of Bloch's articles see J. E. Anderson, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe (Berkeley, 1967), and William R. Beer, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (Berkeley, 1975).

4Strange Defeat (New York, 1968) is the English translation of L'Etrange defaite (Paris, 1957). The Historian's Craft (New York, 1953) is the English translation of Metier d'historien (Paris, 1949). The Testament spirituel is printed in Hommages a Marc Bloch. The Souvenirs de guerre (Paris, 1969) was translated by Carole Fink as Memoirs of War (Ithaca, 1980).

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j'ai clit clans uin compte rendu 'a paraitre dans les Annales touite l'acmiration quie m'in- spirait votrc belle synthese suLr l'&onomie medievale [Histoire economique et sociale du moyen-age, 1933]. 11 m'a fallu etre relativement bref car vraiment devant uin otivrage de cette qutalite il ny a (t'a dire: "lisez et profitez! Tout historien doit en faire son profit; touit historien dui nmoyen-age doit en partir." J'espere cependant avoir retussi a faire comprendre adi lecteuir la place quie desormnais tiendra le livre dans notre litterature historique."

198 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Perroy; an enlightening evening with his son Daniel; and a reading of all his letters to Henri Pirenne between 1920 and 1935.5

Born into a family that breathed and talked history, because his father Gustave was a distinguished classical historian who taught at the universities of Lyon and Paris, Marc Bloch received the rigorous historical training typically given in the early twentieth century at the Ecole Normale by such teachers as Christian Pfister and Ferdinand Lot.6 A year at Leipzig and Berlin introduced him to Bucher and demography and to Harnack and religion. This superb training plus a few years of teaching at two lycees was Bloch's acquaintance with history before 1914. There is no indication at this point that Bloch held other than the accepted ideas on historical methodology, an observation that comes from reading his thesis, Rois et serfs, un chapitre d'histoire capetienne, completed before the war and published in 1920. Dealing with the emancipation of serfs on the royal domain, it was an important contribution to the problem of emancipation and showed Bloch's early fascination with social and economic history, especially with the meaning of liberty. But it was a traditional study and devoid of the historical ideas that one associates with him. An earlier and more popular book, a geograph- ical and historical description of the Ile de France published in 1913 and written for a series edited by Henri Berr, the innovative founder of La Revue de synthese historique, only hinted at Bloch's later awareness of geography's importance for history.7

It was, I believe, the war and four years at the front that abruptly altered Bloch's view of history, a view that he developed and upheld until 1940. Thrown suddenly into an existence alien to his life as an intellectual, Bloch found himself in a world where differences were settled not by words but by bullets and where he lived among men whom he had previously known only at a dis- tance-peasants, miners, factory workers, and petty bourgeois shop- keepers. His Souvenirs de guerre and Strange Defeat graphically de- scribe his adjustment to this perilous life and to these men for whom he developed a lasting respect, a respect that became mutual be-

5 These letters of Bloch plus many by Febvre are now being edited by Lyon. Presently a part of the Pirenne archives, many are discussed by Lyon in Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent, 1974).

6 Both distinguished medievalists, Pfister became rector of the University of Strasbourg in 1919 and Lot became professor at the Sorbonne. Lot is well known for his publications on French institutions, the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the middle ages, and medieval warfare.

7The complete title of this work is L'Ile de France (Les Pays autour de Paris).

MARC BLOCH: HISTORIAN 199

cause Bloch was the true soldier, wounded and decorated for brav- ery, who established a real camaraderie with his comrades in the trenches. He returned to his bookish world with respect for these ordinary individuals and a disdain for most of the generals, politi- cians, bureaucrats, and upper bourgeoisie.8 For the next twenty years, common, humble people, the mass of mankind, especially peasants, were to be the focus of his research while the individual and political history were to be mostly ignored.

Diverging from his predecessors, who had been primarily con- cerned with the legal and institutional structure of seignorialism, Bloch concentrated upon agrarian routine and tradition, techno- logical change, field arrangements, variations in regional agrarian techniques and production, the collective peasant mentality, and the meaning of liberty for the varied social and legal segments of agrar- ian France. He never wrote about the individual peasant, but he roamed the provinces to become familiar with French agriculture over the long term, with the contours of peasant villages, with agrarian routine, its sounds and smells.9 In his book on feudal society for which the sources offered the possibility of knowing the individual more intimately, he took the same approach, ignoring the feudal aristocrat as a person. Here one does not acquire an intimacy with any feudal lord or vassal. One reads of feudal men, not of a feudal man; of the collective feudal image, not of the individual or his concrete acts. One encounters abstract ideas, like the idea of power, but finds no picture of an early German chief or a later lord who had power and used it. Feudal men are violent but there is no particular man and his violence.10 Such was the history that chiefly engrossed Bloch between the wars and such was the history that he and Febvre advocated in their new journal Annales, which was begun in 1929. Bloch turned his back on political, dip-

8Bloch wrote that these decent men did their daily work "conscientiously and properly" and that they "shared a sense of solidarity with others." He states, I have "never come across better fighters than the miners of the Nord and the Pas de Calais whom I saw at close quarters in the first war." Of the peasant Bloch said, "From having seen at first hand how he lives, from having once fought at his side, and from having much pondered the details of his history, I know the true worth of the French peasant, the vigorous and unwearied quickness of his mind" (Strange Defeat, 104, 148).

9For a discussion of Bloch's innovative research and methodology in agrarian history, see Lyon's foreword in French Rural History and Febvre's preface in the same work.

'? For an evaluation of Bloch's approach to feudal society, see Lyon, "The Feudalism of Marc Bloch," Tijdschyift voor Geschiedenis 76 (1963): 275-83, reprinted in Lyon, Studies of West European Medieval Institutions (London, 1978). For Febvre's views on Bloch's methodology, see some of his reviews reprinted in Combats pour l'histoire (Paris, 1953) and Pour une histoire a part entiere (Paris, 1962).

200 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

lomatic, military, and biographical history, convinced that it only scratched the surface and rarely dealt with the totality and realities of history.

To capture what he and Febvre called histoire totale, Bloch be- lieved that the narrow methodology which had dominated his profession must be swept into the dust bin, that the historian had to learn and to use the knowledge of the social sciences, linguistics, philology, comparative literature, folklore, geography, agronomy, and other disciplines. He became ever more insistent that meaning- ful history must be comparative, a view that he first presented in 1928 at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo and that he espoused later that year in an article entitled "Pour une histoire comparee des societes europeennes. "I It was a compelling plea for breaking out of national barriers that circumscribed his- torical research, for jumping out of geographical frameworks, for escaping from a world of artificiality, for making both horizontal and vertical comparisons of societies, and for enlisting the assistance of other disciplines. He concluded: "The clearest and most cogent lesson to be drawn from comparative history" is that "it is high time to set about breaking down the outmoded topographical compart- ments within which we seek to confine social realities, for they are not large enough to hold the material we try to cram into them.... The student must find his own geographical framework, fixed not from the outside, but from within."'2

I have suggested that Bloch's service at the front made him question his view of history, but what was the source of these ideas enunciated by Bloch after the war, ideas that undergirded his books and articles, especially his mises au point and reviews in Annales? Generally French historians have not looked beyond Bloch and Febvre for the origins of Annales history. It was, after all, Bloch who warned against the "demon of origins," who noted the aridity of those quests after the origins of seignorialism and feudalism. He contended that such phenomena arose from a total social situation at certain stages of history when the conditions of the human en- vironment were ripe. He was convinced of the "power of a creative evolution" in every age, a principle he thought could be elevated to the level of a general historical law applicable to the history of all

"Revue de synthese historique 46 (1928): 15-50, reprinted in vol. 1 of Bloch, Melanges historiques, 16-40, and translated as "A Contribution towards a Comparative History of Eu- ropean Societies," in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, 44-81.

12These quotations are from Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe.

MARC BLOCH: HISTORIAN 201

societies.'3 But he really believed that past history does impinge upon present history. He was concerned with connections in histor- ical time and acknowledged that he had learned much from pre- vious historians and social scientists. He and Febvre recognized those scholars in the nineteenth century who whetted their appetites for a new history, especially Comte, Michelet, and Fustel de Cou- langes. In 1891 the Annales de geographie was founded by P. Vidal de la Blache, whose student Lucien Gallois was to teach Febvre. Between 1896 and 1898 Durkheim inaugurated L'Annee sociologique, and in 1900 appeared Henri Berr's Revue de synthese historique. Also fermenting the intellectual atmosphere of the early twentieth cen- tury were the ideas of the economist Francois Simiand and the philosopher Bergson.'4

How fortunate that one of those chancy Annales events brought Bloch and Febvre together in 1919 at the University of Strasbourg, now again a French university. Indisputably, Febvre had a major influence on his younger colleague at this time. Their extraordinary intellectual kinship is revealed in the tribute Febvre later paid to his departed comrade.'5 Besides these French formative influences upon Bloch were others that I consider even more important. One was Henri Pirenne, the renowned Belgian medievalist who had established his fame before 1914 with his publications on social and economic history and his volumes on the Histoire de Belgique.'6 Emerging from the war as a hero because of his intellectual and moral resistance to the Germans that brought him two and a half years of imprisonment in Germany, Pirenne often lectured at Stras- bourg after 1918 and developed a special intellectual friendship with Bloch and Febvre. They came to regard him as their kind of historian who wrote total, comparative history; who constructed his history around long-term social and economic forces; who down-

13See especially Bloch's section on "The Idol of Origins" in The Historian's Craft, 29-35, and "Part II-The Environment: Conditions of Life and Mental Climate," in Feudal Society (London, 1961), 59-120.

'4For these French methodological antecedents, see Lyon, "Henri Pirenne and the Origins of Annales History," Annals of Scholarship: Metastudies of the Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (1980): 69-84; Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976); Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, Conn., 1975); W. R. Keylor, Academy and Community (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

15 Vol. 103 of Publications de la FacultW de l'UniversitW de Strasbourg. 16For an evaluation of Pirenne as a historian, see Lyon, Henri Pirenne, "L'Oeuvre de

Henri Pirenne apres vingt-cinq ans," Le Moyen Age 66 (1960): 437-93; The Origins of the Middle Ages: Pirenne's Challenge to Gibbon (New York, 1971); and "A Reply to Jan Dhondt's Critique of Henri Pirenne," Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent 29 (1975): 1-25.

202 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

graded political, diplomatic, and military history; and who, by not giving Carlyle's great man a determining role in the making of history, committed a heresy for which he was condemned by Nazi historians who accused him of writing Marxist history and of ig- noring the Filhrerprinzip.'7 In his reviews of Pirenne's books, Bloch stated that Pirenne's history should be a model for all young his- torians. Bloch often referred to Pirenne in his Historian's Craft and Strange Defeat, even dedicating the former work to "the memory of Henri Pirenne who, at the time his country was fighting beside mine for justice and civilization, wrote in captivity a history of Europe."

But it is in his letters to Pirenne that Bloch's admiration emerges even more clearly. Bloch and Febvre asked for and re- ceived Pirenne's support in their efforts to launch Annales. Pirenne, wrote Bloch, symbolized the kind of history they would publish in the new journal. He acknowledged Pirenne as his maitre when writ- ing about his projects, especially about his history of rural France, which he said looked to Pirenne's Villes du moyen age as a model.'8 Until Pirenne's death in 1935 the two regularly exchanged their ideas on history. It must also be noted that Bloch attended the first postwar meeting of the International Congress of Historical Sci- ences at Brussels in 1923 at which Pirenne welcomed the assembled historians with an address entitled "De la methode comparative en histoire." This address so influenced Bloch that he incorporated into his own article, "Pour une histoire comparee des societes eu- ropeennes," many of Pirenne's ideas, as for example, that history must be comparative to escape narrow national and racial history, that it must cease its emphasis on politics and leaders, and that it should be more total, synthetic, and attuned to general knowledge.19

Braudel once wrote: "Behind Bloch, of course, stands Pirenne:

17Such were the views, for example, of the German medievalist Walther Kienast, who, after the death of Pirenne in 1935, evaluated Pirenne's historical work.

18Letters of Bloch to Pirenne, 4 September 1930, 30 November 1931, 20 February 1932. 19 Pirenne's address is printed in Guillaume Des Marez and Fran~ois L. Ganshof, Compte

rendu du 5me Congres international des sciences historiques (Brussels, 1923). Febvre, who also attended the meeting, had this to say about Pirenne's speech: "A condition de se rappeler un menu fait: c'est que l'homme qui, avec le plus de vigeur et d'autorite, proclamait, il n'y a point si longtemps, les vertus de la Methode comparative en hitoire-cet homme, precisement, c'est l'auteur d'une histoire nationale, de cette Histoire de Belgique dont Henri Pirenne a su faire le plus riche chapitre d'une histoire europ&enne encore toute a creer.... Horizontalite ou verticalite? Les deux. L'elargissement dans l'espace, l'extension dans le temps. Voila ce qu'exige l'emploi de cette methode comparative dont Henri Pirenne pouvait, avec tant de clairvoyance et d'esprit critique, ddfinir l'esprit et pr6ner l'usage" (Combats pour l'histoire, 136, 369).

MARC BLOCH: HISTORIAN 203

we all have our precursors."20 This was also true for Pirenne. Behind him stood the German historian, Karl Lamprecht, who in the 1880s and 1890s fought so fiercely against the Rankianer in his crusade for a more meaningful history, a history that must be collective, that must cease its preoccupation with individuals, that must portray the individual only as a representative of his time, as an expression of a collective society. The proper task of the historian is, he said, to comprehend collective, long-term phenomena. History must be comparative and universal and should utilize all related disciplines, especially the social sciences and psychology.2'

As Bloch acknowledged his debt to Pirenne, so Pirenne ac- knowledged his debt to Lamprecht. He stated in the first volume of his Histoire de Belgique that it was guided by many of Lamprecht's ideas, that his concept of Belgium as a microcosm of European history came from Lamprecht.22 He wrote articles explaining and supporting Lamprecht and urged his French friends to become aware of what Lamprecht was saying, advice that fell upon deaf ears after the French debacle of 1870. The correspondence between Pirenne and Lamprecht from 1886 to 1914, when the war broke their long friendship, reveals Pirenne's considerable debt to Lam- precht.23

20Braudel, "Personal Testimony," Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 448-67. 21 Lamprecht's ideas on methodology are most clearly expressed in the following works:

Alte und neue Richtungen in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Berlin, 1896), "Was ist Kulturgeschichte?" Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (1896): 75-150, Zwei Streitschriften der Herren H. Oncken, H. Delbriick, M. Lenz (Berlin, 1897), Die kulturhistorische Methode (Berlin, 1900), Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft (Freiburg, 1904), and Einfiihrung in das historische Denken (Leipzig, 1912). For an evaluation of Lamprecht's views on history see Ursula Lewald, "Karl Lamprecht und die Rheinische Geschichtsforschung," Rheinische Vierteljahrsbldtter 21 (1956): 279-304; Leon Leclere, "La Theorie historique de M. Karl Lamprecht," Revue de l'Universit6 de Bruxelles 4 (1899): 575-95; Gustav Schmoller, "Zur Wurdigung von Karl Lamprecht," SchmollersJahrbuch 40 (1916): 27-54; Herbert Schoenebaum, "Karl Lamprecht," Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 37 (1955): 269-305; Otto Hintze, "Uber individualistische und kollektivistische Geschichtsauf- fassung," Historische Zeitschrift 78 (1897): 60-67; Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture (Chicago, 1966), 161-207. The most recent examination of Lamprecht's influence on methodology is that of Luise Schorn-Schutte, "Karl Lamprecht und die internationale Geschichtswissenschaft an der Jahrhundertwende," Archiv fir Kulturgeschichte 67 (1985): 417-64.

22Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, 5th ed. (Brussels, 1929), 1:xii. Elsewhere in the preface, Pirenne emphasized that political events would be subordinated to social, economic, and cultural developments and that he would concentrate on "l'unit& de la vie sociale" and on "la 'civilisation commune' de la Belgique. C'est elle, en effet, que donne a notre histoire son aspect caracteristique" (xii, xv). For Lamprecht's expression, see his Deutsche Geschichte 3 (Berlin, 1895): 190.

23For Pirenne's assessment of Lamprecht's ideas, see "Une Polemique historique en Allemagne," Revue historique 64 (1897): 50-57. For this correspondence, see Lyon, "The Letters of Henri Pirenne to Karl Lamprecht (1894-1915)," Bulletin de la Commission royale d'histoire 132 (1966): 161-231, and Henri Pirenne. The letters of Lamprecht to Pirenne are in the Pirenne archives.

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Given the Franco-Prussian War, the loss of Alsace, and the First World War, it is understandable that Bloch could not be directly receptive to Lamprecht's ideas. But, interestingly, he could accept them when they were filtered through Pirenne, who then served as an intellectual bridge between Lamprecht and Bloch. Pirenne and Bloch, however, were too open and innovative to be bound by all that Lamprecht advocated.24 Each remained his own man whose work created avenues leading to a more sophisticated and realistic comprehension of history, and each held to certain divergent views. Bloch's enthusiasm for sociology, especially that of Durkheim, was never shared by Pirenne. He wrote to Bloch that sociology lacked vertical perspective and ignored individual accomplishment.25

I would like now to turn from Bloch's ideas on history and the intellectual affinities that nourished them to an examination of the considerable incongruity between his works that concentrate upon social and economic developments associated with such classes and collectivities of peoples as the peasantry, the coliberti, the coloni, and the feudal aristocracy, and his words of admiration for the individ- ual miner, laborer, and peasant. How can one juxtapose the Bloch who came out of the war of 1914 so intrigued by the ordinary individual with the author of agrarian history, feudal society, and the chapter on "The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seignorial Institutions" in the first volume [1941] of The Cambridge Economic History? The answer, I believe, is found in his Strange Defeat and Historian's Craft, where one sees how the disintegration of France during 1939 and 1940 profoundly shocked Bloch and forced him to reexamine his thoughts on history. Again in uniform, away from his study, and among individuals and events quite alien to his schol- arly pursuits, he had seen action at Dunkerque, been evacuated to England, and then returned to a France about to be occupied. Reflecting on the causes of France's defeat, he became uncertain about the history he had believed in. He questioned long-term, collective movements and forces, speculated that history was for- tuitous, concluded that a proper knowledge of history had valuable lessons to teach, and emphasized that talented leaders and individ- uals did count. He avowed that a nation needed individuals of

24Lyon, Annals of Scholarship 1 (1980): 69-84. 25 For Pirenne's views on sociology, see "La Tache de l'historien," Le Flambeau 14 (1931):

5-22. The English translation of this article appeared as "What are Historians Trying to Do?" in Methods in Social Science, ed. Stuart A. Rice (Chicago, 1932). Bloch commented on this article in a letter to Pirenne dated 29 September 1932.

MARC BLOCH: HISTORIAN 205

courage, virtue, patriotism, and sacrifice, particularly during mo- ments of political, military, and economic crisis.26 He regretted that he had distanced himself from the events of the thirties and kept to his study, and, in a most revealing passage, explained why: "But we were all of us either specialists in the social sciences or workers in scientific laboratories, and maybe the very disciplines of those employments kept us, by a sort of fatalism, from embarking on individual action. We had grown used to seeing great impersonal forces at work in society as in nature. In the vast drag of these submarine swells, so cosmic as to seem irresistible, of what avail were the petty struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors?"27

Bloch's actions after 1940, in the last four years of life left to him, lead me to believe that in an ultimate assessment of the indi- vidual vis-a-vis collective history he would have opted for the indi- vidual; that, had he lived to resume his me-tier, he would have been more tolerant of political, military, and diplomatic history; and that he would have made some accommodation with the unforeseen event and chance in history. Always the realist, Bloch could not divorce the history he wrote from the way he observed individuals living their lives. To do otherwise would have been to falsify history.

Although it involves sheer speculation, the final question I would like to pursue is how Bloch would react to the changes that have occurred in his Annales history. Speculation is not ordinarily the task of the historian, but I think it not out of place when recalling that in Strange Defeat Bloch did not rule out speculation and even concluded that from a study of history one "can even try to see into the future."28 Much that happened to Annales history after 1945 would have gratified Bloch. While continuing to reserve space for agrarian history, Annales broadened its historical perspec- tive, encompassed new disciplines and methodologies, and pub- lished many seminal articles. Like Pirenne, he would have been delighted to find that some of his conclusions and ideas had been revised. He always emphasized that history is the science of change.29

26Sprinkled throughout Strange Defeat are the words destiny, fall of the cards, unex- pected, accidents of time, fate, and salvation. Bloch writes, for example: "But destiny decided that I, with most of my generation, should, on two separate occasions, separated from one another by a stretch of twenty-one years, be jerked violently from the ways of peace.... The fall of the cards has brought me plenty of variety" (pp. 2-3). Later he refers to the genius of Napoleon and concludes Strange Defeat with a quotation from Montesquieu: "A State founded on the People needs a mainspring: and that mainspring is virtue" (p. 176).

27Strange Defeat, 172-73. 28Ibid., 118. 29It is impossible to comment in detail upon all those scholars who have not only

206 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

But surely some of what has come to be written under the banner of Annales history would chagrin Bloch. It is not change alone that would bother him, but unjustified change which removes history from the contours of reality in which he placed so much stock. As he concisely expressed it in his rural France: "What dis- cipline is more imperious in forcing its practitioners to come to grips with history as it really is?"30 Much of what now appears in Annales is not all that close to history "as it really is." Too often articles with promising subjects, be they on the diet of Carolingian monks, the nuclear family, the small farm in late nineteenth-century France, or workers' strikes in St. Petersburg between 1905 and 1914, are so cluttered with graphs, tables, and numbers that they are essentially statistical accounts. It is almost certain that an article lacking this special kind of empirical evidence will not be published in Annales. This attitude is de rigueur with contemporary journals

continued Bloch's research on agrarian history but who have also revised many of his conclusions. Some of the most important work is the following: Georges Duby, La Societe aux onzieme et douzieme siecles dans la region maconnaise (Paris, 1953), L'Economie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l'Occident medigval (Paris, 1962), vols. 1-2; Andre D616age, La Vie rurale en Bourgogne jusqu'au debut du XIe sikcle (Paris, 1940), vols. 1-3; Philippe Dollinger, L'Evolution des classes sociales en Bavihre depuis lafin de l'Npoque carolingienne jusqu'au milieu du treizieme siecle (Paris, 1949); Robert Boutruche, Une SociNte provinciale en lutte contre le regime frodal; L'Alleu en Bordelais et en Bazadais du onzieme aux dix-huitieme sikcle (Paris, 1947); and Isabelle Guerin, La Vie rurale en Sologne aux XIVe et XV' siecles (Paris, 1960). Bloch's research on mentalites and social collectivit6s has, of course, become a favored field of research during the past quarter century. A good example of such work is Duby's little book on L'An mil (Paris, 1967), in which he investigates such subjects as "Connaissance de I'an mil," "Pour une histoire des attitudes mentales," "Le Sens de l'histoire," and "Les MWcanismes mentaux." He deals with the feudal aristocratic mentalite in Les Trois Ordres ou l'imaginaire du flodalisme (Paris, 1978), and in Le Chevalier, la femme et le pretre (Paris, 1981). Another annaliste historian, Jacques Le Goff, codirector of Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations, has concentrated on social and intellectual mentalites. Some of his most interesting and provocative studies have been collected and translated under the title of Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980). In his article on "The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet," Le Goff rehabilitates Michelet's work on the Middle Ages, emphasizing that he was a pioneer in historical mentalitts. But Le Goff writes: "Despite the Pirennes, the Huizingas, the Marc Blochs, and those of their successors who opened the Middle Ages as a field for the history of mentalities and depths, for total history, the Middle Ages remain the period of history most marked by nineteenth-century erudition . .. and by the positivist school of the turn of the century" (p. 3). See also his article on "Dreams in the Culture and Collective Psychology of the Medieval West" (pp. 201-4).

30 For these views, see Bloch's introduction to his French Rural History. An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (Berkeley, 1966). Bloch's assertion that history is the science of change com- pletely agrees with what Pirenne wrote some twenty years earlier: "All those engaged in searching for the truth understand that the glimpses they have of it are necessarily fleeting. They glow for an instant and then make way for new and always more dazzling brightness. Quite different from that of the artist, the work of the scholar is inevitably provisional. He knows this and rejoices in it because the rapid obsoleteness of his books is the very proof of the progress of his field of knowledge" (From a speech given on 12 May 1912 and printed in Manifestation en l'honneur de M. le Professeur Henri Pirenne [Mons, Belgium, 1912], 57-58). See also Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique 7 (Brussels, 1932): xi-xii.

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devoted to social and economic history, so much so that Pierre Chaunu in introducing the new journal Histoire, Economie et Societe in 1982 very politely discouraged scholars from submitting articles which did not deal with measurable facts and concrete realities. Preference would be given, he said, to empirical studies based upon mass analysis and systematically using the serial methods. On the preferred list of articles desired were those on demography, because this discipline is the essential key for understanding economic phe- nomena and has a rigorous methodology.

Obviously there is disagreement among historians on this kind of research, but whatever its merits, no matter how empirical, mea- surable, and concrete it is, it leaves little room for that broad spec- trum of people out there with their goals, successes, failures, emo- tions, and tastes. I would argue that after 1940 Marc Bloch would have felt uncomfortable with this kind of history because he had become disillusioned with a history that he found too impersonal. Marc Bloch never would have repudiated his comparative histoire totale, but he would have insisted that this history must include more than just measurable data, that it must also include depictions of real people. Marc Bloch, the curious, innovative historian, was also the uncertain historian who always kept his mind open and flexible. He could do this, for he was not only a superb historian but also a supreme realist who knew that one cannot do history in one way and then live with people in another.