French Resistance fighter and historian Marc Bloch was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris.
Bloch — who was tortured by the Gestapo and executed in 1944 — became the first historian inducted into the monument under the Fifth Republic. The Élysée Palace described him as “a man of the Enlightenment” and “the thinker of the century”.
“He was a man who reflected on the past in order to act in the present. He did not have a static view of history; for him, it had to serve action in the here and now,” the Élysée Palace said in a statement.
The ceremony was preceded by a vigil at the École normale supérieure in Paris, the institution where Bloch studied from 1904 to 1908.
The coffins of Bloch and his wife, Simonne Vidal, were carried in procession to the Panthéon. Vidal accompanied him at the family’s request but was not herself honoured there.
The coffins did not contain their remains. Bloch’s descendants wished for his remains to stay in a village in the Creuse department, while Vidal’s body had never been found.
Instead, the coffins held symbolic objects, including medals, ferns representing the family home in the hamlet of Les Fougères, Bloch’s 1941 spiritual testament, and photographs and letters from Vidal to their children.
A veteran of the First World War and recipient of the Croix de Guerre, Bloch had asked to be called up again in 1939 to fight Nazi Germany. Under the Vichy regime’s antisemitic laws, he was stripped of his civil rights and deprived of his home and library because he was Jewish. He went underground in Lyon in 1943 with the Franc-Tireur movement.
Arrested on 8 March 1944, he was tortured by the Gestapo and executed on 16 June alongside other prisoners at the edge of a field, reportedly shouting “Vive la France”.
