Narratives of resistance in Marc Bloch's L'E´trange De´faite

Abstract

Marc Bloch's L'E´trange De´faite is a fundamental text of the French Resistance, a narrative about the will and means to resist in a society that seemed to have defeated itself. Bloch's belief that resistance began with a critique of French social and political culture made L'E´trange De´faite a therapeutic work for Bloch himself, as he wrote it in 1940, and for the French when it was first published in 1946. The core of the work is Bloch's effort to think as a historian about change in order to counter the paralysing effects of the traumatic memory of the First World War in France. It is a romantic text as well because the assertion of a new French identity, a goal shared by all internal French resistance movements, was an unrealised dream when Bloch wrote in 1940 and therefore could not yet be betrayed, as many of his Resister readers already thought was happening when L'E´trange De´faite appeared in 1946.