French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that Marc Bloch, one of the country’s most iconic historians executed by the Nazis in 1944, will be inducted into the Pantheon of Great French Personalities.
At an event to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the city of Strasbourg, Macron justified this decision, which was not yet given a specific date, “by the enormous lucidity” of Bloch, which “remains completely relevant today.”
Together with Lucien Febvre, Bloch founded in 1929 the so-called Annales School, which was a precursor to the “New History”, which attempted to better understand the past and the present through a comprehensive study of history, anthropology and all the social sciences.
The historian, of Jewish origin, fought in the First World War, for which he was decorated, and in the Second World War he joined the underground resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1944, he was executed by the Gestapo in the north of his native Lyon at the age of 57.
Based in Brussels, the European Jewish Congress is the representative umbrella organisation of national Jewish communities. It federates democratically elected national Jewish community organisations in over 40 European countries uniting 2.5 million Jews across the continent.
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