Rereading Marc Bloch: The Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist

Abstract

AbstractThis article seeks to defamiliarize and reassess Marc Bloch, the canonical historian and co‐founder of the Annales School, as a quintessential modernist. In resituating Bloch, I seek to separate him from both the hagiography that has come to dominate studies of his work due to his sympathetic biography and the co‐opting of his ideas by the second‐generation Annalistes, led by Fernand Braudel. It is crucial to examine Bloch's life and works in tandem, and this article seeks to chart them alongside one another in order to elucidate his curiously liminal and groundbreaking perspective. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities at the same time period as the psychological novel came of age is an oft‐overlooked fact of his scholarship, and one that I argue is critical to an understanding of his contribution to twentieth‐century methodological developments. The article examines this essentially stylistic trait alongside Bloch's peculiarly quixotic idealism, which tempered and sometimes compromised his work through his hope for a truly cooperative model of historical inquiry. While humanizing and questioning him, it gives credit to Bloch for helping to break through the monotonous methodological alternance between positivism and narrative history, creating a new, synthetic version of the historical practice that has since become so ingrained in the discipline that it is typically overlooked. This article seeks to shed a fresh light on Bloch by stripping away the tidy packaging that usually surrounds accounts of his life and work and portraying him as the flawed visionary that he was.