Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien by Marc Bloch

But the time will come, I feel sure, when our collaboration can again be public, and again be free.

We are vanquished, for a moment, by an unjust destiny. Yet how can I resign myself to seeing you appear in no more than a few chance references? Long have we worked together for a wider and more human history. You can surmise the name this place requires it is the one permissable allusion to a tenderness too deep and sacred to be spoken. you will find, my friend, another name than yours inscribed upon its dedication page. If this book should one day be published. Indeed, he dedicated the Apologie to his friend and colleague from Strasbourg, Lucien Febvre. He worried constantly about his family as well as his friends. Triomphe, June 14, 1940, Paris, France, World War II, Italian Illustration, Year LXVII, No 25, June 23, 1940.īloch worked on the book for next couple of years, jotting down notes when he could, apologizing in its pages for not being able to access a proper library and so being too dependent on his own notes and his memory. German troops parading down Place de l'Etoile (Place Charles-de-Gaulle) in front of the Arc de. So, taken together, the title suggests that Bloch's last book was about why history mattered, why the call to study the past had an almost spiritual importance. Métier means 'work' but also 'calling' - a pull to something for a higher purpose. The second part, Métier d'historien isn't straightforward either. Apologie pour l'histoire might mean 'An Apology for History' but 'apology' should probably be understood in a sense close to how it was used by early Christians - as a stirring defense of something that is critically important. Translation is always an act of interpretation and this requires some. It's often translated into as The Historian's Craft but its original title is more provocative - Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien. His French Rural History and 2-volume Feudal Society are still classic works for any historian. The early 20th-century French historian Marc Bloch wrote no fewer than 7 books in his lifetime, all of them on the history of France, but primarily with a focus on the European Middle Ages.

Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien by Marc Bloch