The Testamentary Instructions of Marc Bloch

Historian and resistance leader Marc Bloch was born in Lyon. The son of a professor of ancient history, Bloch studied at Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École normale supérieure in Paris, and then in Germany. He served as an officer during World War I. After the war, Bloch taught at the University of Strasbourg and in 1936 became professor of economic history at the Sorbonne. Bloch was a cofounder of the Annales School of French social history and its journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. He is best known for his French Rural History and Feudal Society (1931) and his unfinished work on the writing of history, The Historian’s Craft (1953), published posthumously. Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France.