Anna Brzezińska

University of Lodz

Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat in Egodocumental Perspective 

As Philippe Arbos wrote, we must not limit Marc Bloch to the role of a historian and university professor. To do so would be to diminish his persona. The historian and professor could not exist detached from life, the way he understood it. Arbos was the man who saved the Bloch’s manuscript of Témoignage (English: Testimony), written in 1940 and published in 1946 under the title Strange Defeat (in French: L’Étrange Défaite). I am reading Bloch to gain insight into his thoughts and emotions during the Phoney War. I am reading the thoughts of one of France’s leading historians, the co-founder of the revolutionary review “Annales”, as history comes for the historian. I am analysing the state of mind of a man facing the decline of his country and the world, whom he devoted his life to as a citizen and a scientist.