“The professional and ethical credo of the historian Marc Bloch reminds us of the absolute importance of the task which cost the lives of Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard”

2023-10-26 13:00:15

An Islamist terrorist attacked a group of teachers on October 13 in front of his former high school in Arras. He fatally stabbed one of them, Dominique Bernard, and injured three others. In a video he took before the attack, he praises the Islamic State organization and castigates France, in particular for its republican education.

An education where the teaching of the past appears. It was no coincidence that Mohammed Mogushkov asked one of the other teachers if he taught history. This was also the discipline of Samuel Paty, the college professor murdered three years earlier almost to the day.

Never two without three ? Shortly after the assassination of Dominique Bernard, in Sérignan, in Hérault, a high school student sent a Snapchat message to a teacher at his establishment, the Marc-Bloch high school. A message, surrounded by images of knives, saying: “You’re next.” » Arrested by the police, the teenager claimed it was a joke.

Also read the column: “Samuel Paty died for trying to teach young minds to step back and decenter themselves”

No one laughed, but the spirit of Marc Bloch, perhaps, emitted a sigh. In interwar France, with Lucien Febvre, Bloch launched the Annales school movement and revolutionized our understanding of the past. The two historians diverted our attention from those who, we thought, “act” on history – kings, generals, popes, etc. – and directed it towards those who, we thought, “subjected” it: peasants, soldiers , artisans. Political events are nothing more than the foam of the waves on the surface of the ocean; what matters now are the profound demographic, economic and social changes taking place.

The moral imperative of the historian

In his groundbreaking books on medieval France, Bloch presents history as a bitter struggle between a past that pulls us backwards and a present that pushes us forward. This tension, while never resolved, always reveals the wonders of our shared humanity. Historians, Bloch emphasizes, must direct our gaze “towards life” : the life of past generations, yes, but also that of present generations who are shaped by this past. For Bloch, the historian has a moral imperative: we must account for the past accurately, at least as accurately as possible, because only this knowledge of the past can help us master the present.

These beliefs are those of a person who not only studies the past, but acts in the present. Like his father and grandfather, Marc Bloch fights for France. He courageously served his country, first during the First World War and then, when he was already in his fifties, during the Second World War. After the debacle of Republican France and the rise of the anti-Semitic Vichy regime, Bloch declined a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. Despite his Jewish origins, he chose to stay in France and, in 1943, join the Franc-Tireur resistance movement. The following spring, he was arrested by the Gestapo. Then, after weeks of interrogations and torture, he was executed with several comrades.

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