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Bloch also emphasised the importance of geography in the study of history, and particularly in the study of rural history. He suggested that, fundamentally, they were the same subjects, although he criticised geographers for failing to take historical chronology or human agency into account. Using a farmer's field as an example, he described it as "fundamentally, a human work, built from generation to generation". Bloch also condemned the view that rural life was immobile. He believed that the Gallic farmer of the Roman period was inherently different to his 18th-century descendants, cultivating different plants, in a different way. He saw England and France's agricultural history as developing similarly, and, indeed, discovered an Enclosure Movement in France throughout the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries on the basis that it had been occurring in England in similar circumstances. Bloch also took a deep interest in the field of linguistics and their use of the comparative method. He believed that using the method in historical research could prevent the historian from ignoring the broader context in the course of his detailed local researches: "a simple application of the comparative method exploded the ethnic theories of historical institutions, beloved of so many German historians".

At Strasbourg he again met Febvre, who was now a leading historian of the 16th century. Modern and medieval seminars were adjacent to each other at Strasbourg, and attendance often overlapped. Their meeting has been called a "germinal event for 20th-century historiography", and they were to work closely together for the rest of Bloch's life. Febvre was some years older than Bloch and was probably a great influence on him. They lived in the same area of Strasbourg and became kindred spirits, often going on walking trips across the Vosges and other excursions.

Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the École Normale Supérieure, and from an early age was affected by the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 and became a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg. There, he formed an intellectual partnership with modern historian Lucien Febvre. Together they founded the Annales School and began publishing the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Bloch was a modernist in his historiographical approach, and repeatedly emphasised the importance of a multidisciplinary engagement towards history, particularly blending his research with that on geography, sociology and economics, which was his subject when he was offered a post at the University of Paris in 1936.

From this fleeting meeting, I have kept the memory of a slender adolescent with eyes brilliant with intelligence and timid cheeks—a little lost then in the radiance of his older brother, future doctor of great prestige.

Bloch's research at the Fondation—especially his research into the Capetian kings—laid the groundwork for his career. He began by creating maps of the Paris area illustrating where serfdom had thrived and where it had not. He also investigated the nature of serfdom, the culture of which, he discovered, was founded almost completely on custom and practice. His studies of this period formed Bloch into a mature scholar and first brought him into contact with other disciplines whose relevance he was to emphasise for most of his career. Serfdom as a topic was so broad that he touched on commerce, currency, popular religion, the nobility, as well as art, architecture and literature. His doctoral thesis—a study of 10th-century French serfdom—was titled Rois et Serfs, un Chapitre d'Histoire Capétienne. Although it helped mould Bloch's ideas for the future, it did not, says Bryce Loyn, give any indication of the originality of thought that Bloch would later be known for, and was not vastly different to what others had written on the subject. Following his graduation, he taught at two lycées, first in Montpelier, a minor university town of 66,000 inhabitants. With Bloch working over 16 hours a week on his classes, there was little time for him to work on his thesis. He also taught at the University of Amiens. While there, he wrote a review of Febvre's first book, Histoire de Franche-Comté. Bloch intended to turn his thesis into a book, but the First World War intervened.

Bloch began working energetically, and later said that the most productive years of his life were spent at Strasbourg. In his teaching, his delivery was halting. His approach sometimes appeared cold and distant—caustic enough to be upsetting—but conversely, he could be also both charismatic and forceful. Durkheim died in 1917, but the movement he began against the "smugness" that pervaded French intellectual thinking continued. Bloch had been greatly influenced by him, as Durkheim also considered the connections between historians and sociologists to be greater than their differences. Not only did he openly acknowledge Durkheim's influence, but Bloch "repeatedly seized any opportunity to reiterate" it, according to R. C. Rhodes.

The inaugural issue of the Annales stated the editors' basic aims: to counteract the arbitrary and artificial division of history into periods, to re-unite history and social science as a single body of thought, and to promote the acceptance of all other schools of thought into historiography. As a result, the Annales often contained commentary on contemporary, rather than exclusively historical, events. Editing the journal led to Bloch forming close professional relationships with scholars in different fields across Europe. The Annales was the only academic journal to boast a preconceived methodological perspective. Neither Bloch nor Febvre wanted to present a neutral facade. During the decade it published it maintained a staunchly left-wing position. Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian who wrote comparative history, closely supported the new journal. Before the war he had acted in an unofficial capacity as a conduit between French and German schools of historiography. Fernand Braudel—who was himself to become an important member of the Annales School after the Second World War—later described the journal's management as being a chief executive officer—Bloch—with a minister of foreign affairs—Febvre.

During this period he supported the Popular Front politically. Although he did not believe it would do any good, he signed Alain's—Émile Chartier's pseudonym—petition against Paul Boncour's Militarisation laws in 1935. While he was opposed to the growth of European fascism, he also objected to "demagogic appeals to the masses" to fight it, as the Communist Party was doing. Febvre and Bloch were both firmly on the left, although with different emphases. Febvre, for example, was more militantly Marxist than Bloch, while the latter criticised both the pacifist left and corporate trade unionism.

To Bloch, France collapsed because her generals failed to capitalise on the best qualities humanity possessed—character and intelligence—because of their own "sluggish and intractable" progress since the First World War. He was horrified by the defeat which, Carole Fink has suggested, he saw as being worse, for both France and the world, than her previous defeats at Waterloo and Sedan. Bloch understood the reasons for France's sudden defeat: not in the rumours of British betrayal, communist fifth columns or fascist plots, but in her failure to motorise, and perhaps more importantly, her failure to understand what motorisation meant. He understood that it was the latter that allowed the French army to become bogged down in Belgium, and this had been compounded by the French army's slow retreat. He wrote in Strange Defeat that a fast, motorised retreat might have saved the army.

The Annalist historian André Burguière suggests Febvre did not really understand the position Bloch, or any French Jew, was in. Already damaged by this disagreement, Bloch's and Febvre's relationship declined further when the former had been forced to leave his library and papers in his Paris apartment following his move to Vichy. He had attempted to have them transported to his Creuse residence, but the Nazis—who had made their headquarters in the hotel next to Bloch's apartment—looted his rooms and confiscated his library in 1942. Bloch held Febvre responsible for the loss, believing he could have done more to prevent it.

In spite of knowing a number of francs-tireurs around Lyon, Bloch still found it difficult to join them because of his age. Although the Resistance recruited heavily among university lecturers—and indeed, Bloch's alma mater, the École Normale Superieur, provided it with many members—he commented in exasperation to Simonne that he "didn't know it is so difficult to offer one's life". The French historian and philosopher François Dosse quotes a member of the franc-tireurs active with Bloch as later describing how "that eminent professor came to put himself at our command simply and modestly". Bloch used his professional and military skills on their behalf, writing propaganda for them and organising their supplies and materiel, becoming a regional organiser. Bloch also joined the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (Unified Resistance Movement, or MUR), section R1, and edited the underground newsletter, Cahiers Politique. He went under various pseudonyms: Arpajon, Chevreuse, Narbonne. Often on the move, Bloch used archival research as his excuse for travelling. The journalist-turned-resistance fighter Georges Altman later told how he knew Bloch as, although originally "a man, made for the creative silence of gentle study, with a cabinet full of books" was now "running from street to street, deciphering secret letters in some Lyonaisse Resistance garret"; all Bloch's notes were kept in code. For the first time, suggests Lyon, Bloch was forced to consider the role of the individual in history, rather than the collective; perhaps by then even realising he should have done so earlier.

Bloch's most important early work—based on his doctoral dissertation—was published in 1924 as Rois et Thaumaturges; it was published in English as The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England in 1973. Here he examined medieval belief in the royal touch, and the degree to which kings used such a belief for propaganda purposes. It was also the first example of Bloch's inter-disciplinary approach, as he used research from the fields of anthropology, medicine, psychology and iconography. It has been described as Bloch's first masterwork. It has a 500-page descriptive analysis of the medieval view of royalty effectively possessing supernatural powers. Verging on the antiquarian in his microscopic approach, and much influenced by the work of Raymond Crawfurd—who saw it as a "dubious if exotic" aspect of medicine, rather than history—Bloch makes diverse use of evidence from different disciplines and periods, assessing the King's Evil as far forward as the 19th century. The book had originally been inspired by discussions Bloch had with Louis, who acted as a medical consultant while his brother worked on it. Bloch concluded that the royal touch involved a degree of mass delusion among those who witnessed it.

Daniel Chirot has described The Royal Touch, French Rural History and Feudal Society—all of which concentrate on the French Middle Ages—as Bloch's most significant works. Conversely, his last two—The Historian's Craft and Strange Defeat—have been described as unrepresentative of his historical approach in that they discuss contemporary events in which Bloch was personally involved and without access to primary sources. Strange Defeat was uncompleted at the time of his death, and both were published posthumously in 1949. Davies has described The Historian's Craft as "beautifully sensitive and profound"; the book was written in response to his son, Étienne, asking his father, "what is history?". In his introduction, Bloch wrote to Febvre.

Bloch did not see social history as being a separate field within historical research. Rather, he saw all aspects of history to be inherently a part of social history. By definition, all history was social history, an approach he and Febvre termed "histoire totale", not a focus on points of fact such as dates of battles, reigns, and changes of leaders and ministries, and a general confinement by the historian to what he can identify and verify. Bloch explained in a letter to Pirenne that, in Bloch's eyes, the historian's most important quality was the ability to be surprised by what he found—"I am more and more convinced of this", he said; "damn those of us who believe everything is normal!"

Although Bloch was very reserved—and later acknowledged that he had generally been old-fashioned and "timid" with women—he was good friends with Lucien Febvre and Christian Pfister. In July 1919 he married Simonne Vidal, a "cultivated and discreet, timid and energetic" woman, at a Jewish wedding. Her father was the Inspecteur-Général de Ponts et Chaussées, and a very prosperous and influential man. Undoubtedly, says Friedman, his wife's family wealth allowed Bloch to focus on his research without having to depend on the income he made from it. Bloch was later to say he had found great happiness with her, and that he believed her to have also found it with him. They had six children together, four sons and two daughters. The eldest two were a daughter Alice, and a son, Étienne. As his father had done with him, Bloch took a great interest in his children's education, and regularly helped with their homework. He could, though, be "caustically critical" of his children, particularly Étienne. Bloch accused him in one of his wartime letters of having poor manners, being lazy and stubborn, and of being possessed occasionally by "evil demons". Regarding the facts of life, Bloch told Etienne to attempt always to avoid what Bloch termed "contaminated females".

Intellectual historian Peter Burke named Bloch the leader of what he called the "French Historical Revolution", and Bloch became an icon for the post-war generation of new historians. Although he has been described as being, to some extent, the object of a cult in both England and France—"one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century" by Stirling, and "the greatest historian of modern times" by John H. Plumb—this is a reputation mostly acquired postmortem. Henry Loyn suggests it is also one which would have amused and amazed Bloch. According to Stirling, this posed a particular problem within French historiography when Bloch effectively had martyrdom bestowed upon him after the war, leading to much of his work being overshadowed by the last months of his life. This led to "indiscriminate heaps of praise under which he is now almost hopelessly buried". This is partly at least the fault of historians themselves, who have not critically re-examined Bloch's work but rather treat him as a fixed and immutable aspect of the historiographical background.

Comparative history, too, still proved controversial many years after Bloch's death, and Bryce Lyon has posited that, had Bloch survived the war, it is very likely that his views on history—already changing in the early years of the second war, just as they had done in the aftermath of the first—would have re-adjusted themselves against the very school he had founded. Stirling suggests what distinguished Bloch from his predecessors was that he effectively became a new kind of historian, who "strove primarily for transparency of methodology where his predecessors had striven for transparency of data" while continuously critiquing himself at the same time. Davies suggests his legacy lies not so much in the body of work he left behind him, which is not always as definitive as it has been made out to be, but the influence he had on "a whole generation of French historical scholarship". Bloch's emphasis on how rural and village society has been neglected by historians in favour of the lords and manorial courts that ruled them influenced later historians such as R. H. Hilton in the study of the economics of peasant society. Bloch's combination of economics, history and sociology was "forty years before it became fashionable", argues Daniel Chirot, which he says could make Bloch a founding father of post-war sociology scholarship.

The same year, Bloch and his family visited Venice, where they were chaperoned by the Italian historian Gino Luzzatto. During this period they were living in the Sèvres – Babylone area of Paris, next to the Hôtel Lutetia.

The English-language journal Past & Present, published by Oxford University Press, was a direct successor to the Annales, suggests Loyn. Michel Foucault said of the Annales School, "what Bloch, Febvre and Braudel have shown for history, we can show, I believe, for the history of ideas". Bloch's influence spread beyond historiography after his death. In the 2007 French presidential election, Bloch was quoted many times. For example, candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen both cited Bloch's lines from Strange Defeat: "there are two categories of Frenchmen who will never really grasp the significance of French history: those who refuse to be thrilled by the Consecration of our Kings at Reims, and those who can read unmoved the account of the Festival of Federation". In 1977, Bloch received a state reburial; streets schools and universities have been named after him, and the centennial of Bloch's birth was celebrated at a conference held in Paris in June 1986. It was attended academics of various disciplines, particularly historians and anthropologists.

The first critical biography of Bloch did not appear until Carole Fink's Marc Bloch: A Life in History was published in 1989. This, wrote S. R. Epstein, was the "professional, extensively researched and documented" story of Bloch's life, and, he commented, probably had to "overcome a strong sense of protectiveness among the guardians of Bloch's and the Annales' memory". Since then, continuing scholarship—such as that by Stirling, who calls Bloch a visionary, although a "flawed" one—has been more critically objective of Bloch's recognisable weaknesses. For example, although he was a keen advocate for chronological precision and textual accuracy, his only major work in this area, a discussion of Osbert of Clare's Life of Edward the Confessor, was subsequently "seriously criticised" by later experts in the field such as R. W. Southern and Frank Barlow; Epstein later suggested Bloch was "a mediocre theoretician but an adept artisan of method". Colleagues who worked with him occasionally complained that Bloch's manner could be "cold, distant, and both timid and hypocritical" due to the strong views he had held on the failure of the French education system. Bloch's reduction of the role of individuals, and their personal beliefs, in changing society or making history has been challenged. Even Febvre, reviewing Feudal Society on its post-war publication, suggested that Bloch had unnecessarily ignored the individual's role in societal development.

At his burial, his own words were read at the graveside. With them, Bloch proudly acknowledged his Jewish ancestry while denying religion in favour of his being foremost a Frenchman. He described himself as "a stranger to any formal religious belief as well as any supposed racial solidarity, I have felt myself to be, quite simply French before anything else". According to his instructions, no orthodox prayers were said over his grave, and on it was to be carved his epitaph dilexi veritatem ("I have loved the truth"). In 1977, his ashes were transferred from St-Didier to Fougeres and the gravestone was inscribed as he requested.

A collection of essays was published in English in 1961 as Land and Work in Medieval Europe. The long essay was a favoured medium of Bloch's, including, Davies says, "the famous essay on the water mill and the much-challenged one on the problem of gold in medieval Europe". In the former, Bloch saw one of the most important technological advances of the era, in the latter, the effective creation of a European currency. Although one of his best essays, according to Davies—"Liberté et servitude personelles au Moyen Age, particulement en France"—was not published when it could have been; this, he remarked was "an unpardonable omission".

Bloch was arrested at the Place de Pont, Lyon, during a major roundup by the Vichy milice on 8 March 1944, and handed over to Klaus Barbie of the Lyon Gestapo. Bloch was using the pseudonym "Maurice Blanchard", and in appearance was "an ageing gentleman, rather short, grey-haired, bespectacled, neatly dressed, holding a briefcase in one hand and a cane in the other". He was renting a room above a dressmakers on the rue des Quatre Chapeaux; the Gestapo raided the place the following day. It is possible Bloch had been denounced by a woman working in the shop. In any case, they found a radio transmitter and many papers. Bloch was imprisoned in Montluc prison, during which time his wife died. He was tortured with, for example, ice-cold baths which knocked him out. His ribs and a wrist were broken, which led to his being returned to his cell unconscious. He eventually caught bronchopneumonia and fell seriously ill. It was later claimed that he gave away no information to his interrogators, and while incarcerated taught French history to other inmates.

In the meantime, the allies had invaded Normandy on 6 June 1944. As a result, the Nazi regime was keen to evacuate and wanted to "liquidate their holdings" in France; this meant disposing of as many prisoners as they could. Between May and June 1944 around 700 prisoners were shot in scattered locations to avoid the risk of this becoming common knowledge and inviting Resistance reprisals around southern France. Among those killed was Bloch, one of a group of 26 Resistance prisoners picked out in Montluc and driven along the Saône towards Trévoux on the night of 16 June 1944. Driven to a field near Saint-Didier-de-Formans, they were shot by the Gestapo in groups of four. According to Lyon, Bloch spent his last moments comforting a 16-year-old beside him who was worried that the bullets might hurt. Bloch fell first, reputedly shouting "Vive la France" before being shot. A coup de grâce was delivered. One man managed to crawl away and later provided a detailed report of events; the bodies were discovered on 26 June. For some time Bloch's death was merely a "dark rumour" until it was confirmed to Febvre.

During the Second World War Bloch volunteered for service, and was a logistician during the Phoney War. Involved in the Battle of Dunkirk and spending a brief time in Britain, he unsuccessfully attempted to secure passage to the United States. Back in France, where his ability to work was curtailed by new anti-Semitic regulations, he applied for and received one of the few permits available allowing Jews to continue working in the French university system. He had to leave Paris, and complained that the Nazi German authorities looted his apartment and stole his books; he was also forced to relinquish his position on the editorial board of Annales. Bloch worked in Montpellier until November 1942 when Germany invaded Vichy France. He then joined the French Resistance, acting predominantly as a courier and translator. In 1944, he was captured in Lyon and executed by firing squad. Several works—including influential studies like The Historian's Craft and Strange Defeat—were published posthumously.

In November 1942, as part of an operation known as Case Anton, the German Army crossed the demarcation line and occupied the territory previously under direct Vichy rule. This was the catalyst for Bloch's decision to join the French Resistance sometime between late 1942 and March 1943. Bloch was careful not to join simply because of his ethnicity or the laws that were passed against it. As Burguière has pointed out, and Bloch would have known, taking such a position would effectively "indict all Jews who did not join". Burguière has pinpointed Bloch's motive for joining the Resistance in his characteristic refusal to mince his words or play half a role. Bloch had previously expressed the view that "there can be no salvation where there is not some sacrifice". He sent his family away, and returned to Lyon to join the underground.

Bloch's mother had recently died, and his wife was ill; furthermore, although he was permitted to work and live, he faced daily harassment. On 18 March 1941, Bloch made his will in Clermont-Ferrand. The Polish social historian Bronisław Geremek suggests that this document hints at Bloch in some way foreseeing his death, as he emphasised that nobody had the right to avoid fighting for their country. In March 1942 Bloch and other French academics such as Georges Friedmann and Émile Benveniste, refused to join or condone the establishment of the Union Générale des Israelites des France by the Vichy government, a group intended to include all Jews in France, both of birth and immigration.

In May 1940, the German army outflanked the French and forced them to withdraw. Facing capture in Rennes, Bloch disguised himself in civilian clothes and lived under German occupation for a fortnight before returning to his family at their country home in Fougères. He fought at the Battle of Dunkirk in May–June 1940 and was evacuated to England with the British Expeditionary Force on the requisitioned steamer MV Royal Daffodil, which he later described as taking place "under golden skies coloured by the black and fawn smoke". Before the evacuation, Bloch ordered the immediate burning of fuel supplies. Although he could have remained in Britain, he chose to return to France the day he arrived because his family was still there.

Bloch felt that the French Army lacked the esprit de corps or "fervent fraternity" of the French Army in the First World War. He saw the French generals of 1940 as behaving as unimaginatively as Joseph Joffre had in the first war. He did not, however, believe that the earlier war was an indication of how the next would progress: "no two successive wars", he wrote in 1940, "are ever the same war".

Two-thirds of France was occupied by Germany. Bloch, one of the only elderly academics to volunteer, was demobilised soon after Philippe Pétain's government signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940 forming Vichy France in the remaining southern-third of the country. Bloch moved south, where in January 1941, he applied for and received one of only ten exemptions to the ban on employing Jewish academics the Vichy government made. This was probably due to Bloch's pre-eminence in the field of history. He was allowed to work at the "University of Strasbourg-in-exile", the universities of Clermont-Ferrand, and Montpellier. The latter, further south, was beneficial to his wife's health, which was in decline. The dean of faculty at Montpellier was Augustin Fliche, an ecclesiastical historian of the Middle Ages, who, according to Weber, "made no secret of his antisemitism". He disliked Bloch further for having once given him a poor review. Fliche not only opposed Bloch's transfer to Montpellier but made his life uncomfortable when he was there. The Vichy government was attempting to promote itself as a return to traditional French values. Bloch condemned this as propaganda; the rural idyll that Vichy said it would return France to was impossible, he said, "because the idyllic, docile peasant life of the French right had never existed".

Likewise, Strange Defeat, in the words of R. R. Davies, is a "damning and even intolerant analysis" of the long- and short-term reasons France fell in 1940. Bloch affirmed that the book was more than a personal memoir; rather, he intended it as a deposition and a testament. It contains—"uncomfortably and honestly"—Bloch's own self-appraisal:

It is possible, argues Weber, that had Bloch survived the war, he would have stood to be appointed Minister of Education in a post-war government and reformed the education system he had condemned for losing France the war in 1940. Instead, in 1948, his son Étienne offered the Archives Nationales his father's papers for repository, but they rejected the offer. As a result, the material was placed in the vaults of the École Normale Supérieure, "where it lay untouched for decades".

By early 1939, war was known to be imminent. Bloch, in spite of his age, which automatically exempted him, had a reserve commission for the army holding the rank of captain. He had already been mobilised twice in false alarms. In August 1939, he and his wife Simonne intended to travel to the ICHS in Bucharest. In autumn 1939, just before the outbreak of war, Bloch published the first volume of Feudal Society.

On 24 August 1939, at the age of 53, Bloch was mobilised for a third time, now as a fuel supply officer. He was responsible for the mobilisation of the French Army's massive motorised units. This involved him undertaking such a detailed assessment of the French fuel supply that he later wrote he was able to "count petrol tins and ration every drop" of fuel he obtained. During the first few months of the war, called the Phoney War, he was stationed in Alsace. He possessed none of the eager patriotism with which he had approached the First World War. Instead, Carole Fink suggests that because Bloch felt himself to have been discriminated against, he had "begun to distance himself intellectually and emotionally from his comrades and leaders". Back in Strasbourg, his main duty was the evacuation of civilians to behind the Maginot Line. Further transfers occurred, and Bloch was re-stationed to Molsheim, Saverne, and eventually to the 1st Army headquarters in Picardy, where he joined the Intelligence Department, in liaison with the British.

Bloch was largely bored between 1939 and May 1940 as he often had little work to do. To pass the time and occupy himself, he decided to begin writing a history of France. To this end, he purchased notebooks and began to work out a structure for the work. Although never completed, the pages he managed to write, "in his cold, poorly lit rooms", eventually became the kernel of The Historian's Craft. At one point he expected to be invited to neutral Belgium to deliver a series of lectures in Liège. These never took place, however, disappointing Bloch very much; he had planned to speak on Belgian neutrality. He also turned down the opportunity to travel to Oslo as an attaché to the French Military Mission there. He was considered an excellent candidate for the position due to his fluency in Norwegian and knowledge of the country. Bloch considered it and came close to accepting; ultimately, though, it was too far from his family, whom he rarely saw enough of in any case. Some academics had escaped France for The New School in New York City, and the School also invited Bloch. He refused, possibly because of difficulties in obtaining visas: the US government would not grant visas to every member of his family.

La Société Féodale was published in two volumes (The Growth of Ties of Dependence, and Social Classes and Political Organisation) in 1939, and was translated into English as Feudal Society in 1961. Bloch described the study as something of a sketch, although Stirling has called it his "most enduring work ... still a cornerstone of medieval curricula" in 2007 and representative of Bloch at the peak of his career. In Feudal Society he used research from the broadest range of disciplines to date to examine feudalism in the broadest possible way—most notably including a study of feudal Japan. He also compared areas where feudalism was imposed, rather than organically developed (such as England after the Norman conquest) and where it was never established (such as Scotland and Scandinavia). Bloch defined feudal society as, "from the peasants' point of view", politically fragmentary, where they are ruled by an aristocratic upper-class.

By now, Annales was being published six times a year to keep on top of current affairs, however, its "outlook was gloomy". In 1938, the publishers withdrew support and, experiencing financial hardship, the journal moved to cheaper offices, raised its prices and returned to publishing quarterly. Febvre increasingly opposed the direction Bloch wanted to take the journal. Febvre wanted it to be a "journal of ideas", whereas Bloch saw it as a vehicle for the exchange of information to different areas of scholarship.

Henri Hauser retired from the Sorbonne in 1936, and his chair in economic history was up for appointment. Bloch—"distancing himself from the encroaching threat of Nazi Germany"—applied and was approved for his position. This was a more demanding position than the one he had applied for at the College. Weber has suggested Bloch was appointed because unlike at the College, he had not come into conflict with many faculty members. Weber researched the archives of the College in 1991 and discovered that Bloch had indicated an interest in working there as early as 1928, even though that would have meant him being appointed to the chair in numismatics rather than history. In a letter to the recruitment board written the same year, Bloch indicated that although he was not officially applying, he felt that "this kind of work (which he claimed to be alone in doing) deserves to have its place one day in our great foundation of free scientific research". H. Stuart Hughes says of Bloch's Sorbonne appointment: "In another country, it might have occasioned surprise that a medievalist like Bloch should have been named to such a chair with so little previous preparation. In France it was only to be expected: no one else was better qualified". His first lecture was on the theme of never-ending history, a process, a never to be finished thing. Davies says his years at the Sorbonne were to be "the most fruitful" of Bloch's career, and according to Epstein he was by now the most significant French historian of his age. In 1936, Friedman says he considered using Marx in his teachings, with the intention of bringing "some fresh air" into the Sorbonne.

In 1934, Étienne Gilson sponsored Bloch's candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France. The College, says the historian Eugen Weber, was Bloch's "dream" appointment, although one never to be realised, as it was one of the few (possibly the only) institutions in France where personal research was central to lecturing. Camille Jullian had died the previous year, and his position was now available. While he had lived, Julian had wished for his chair to go to one of his students, Albert Grenier, and after his death, his colleagues generally agreed with him. However, Gilson proposed that not only should Bloch be appointed, but that the position be redesignated the study of comparative history. Bloch, says Weber, enjoyed and welcomed new schools of thought and ideas, but mistakenly believed the College should do so also. The College did not. The contest between Bloch and Grenier was not just the struggle for one post between two historians, but the path that historiography within the College would take for the next generation. To complicate the situation further, the country was in both political and economic crises, and the College had had its budget slashed by 10%. No matter who filled it, this made another new chair financially unviable. By the end of the year, and with further retirements, the College had lost four professors: it could replace only one, and Bloch was not appointed. Bloch personally suspected his failure was due to anti-Semitism and Jewish quotas. At the time, Febvre blamed it on a distrust of Bloch's approach to scholarship by the academic establishment, although Epstein has argued that this could not have been an over-riding fear as Bloch's next appointment indicated.

1931 saw the publication of Les caractéres originaux de l'histoire rurale francaise. In this—what Bloch called "mon petit livre"—he used both the traditional techniques of historiographical analysis(for example, scrutinising documents, manuscripts, accounts and rolls) and his newer, multi-faceted approach, with a heavy emphasis on maps as evidence. Bloch did not allow his new methods to detract from the former: he knew, says the historian Daniel Chirot, that the traditional methods of research were "the bread and butter of historical work. One had to do it well to be a minimally accepted historian". The first of "two classic works", says Hughes, and possibly his finest, studies the relationship between physical geographical location and the development of political institutions. Loyn has called Bloch's assessment of medieval French rural law great, but with the addendum that "he is not so good at describing ordinary human beings. He is no Eileen Power, and his peasants do not come to life as hers do". In this study, Chirot says Bloch "entirely abandoned the concept of linear history, and wrote, instead, from the present or near past into the distant past, and back towards the present". Febvre wrote the introduction to the book for its publication, and described the technique as "reading the past from the present", or what Bloch saw as starting with the known and moving into the unknown.

In 1930, both keen to make a move to Paris, Febvre and Bloch applied to the École pratique des hautes études for a position: both failed. Three years later Febvre was elected to the Collège de France. He moved to Paris, and in doing so, says Fink, became all the more aloof. This placed a strain on Bloch's and his relations, although they communicated regularly by letter and much of their correspondence has been preserved. In 1934, Bloch was invited to speak at the London School of Economics. There he met Eileen Power, R. H. Tawney and Michael Postan, among others. While in London, he was asked to write a section of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe; at the same time, he also attempted to foster interest in the Annales among British historians. He later told Febvre in some ways he felt he had a closer affinity with academic life in England than that of France. For example, in comparing the Bibliothèque Nationale with the British Museum, he said that

Bloch was a committed supporter of the Third Republic and politically left wing. He was not a Marxist, although he was impressed by Karl Marx himself, whom he thought was a great historian if possibly "an unbearable man" personally. He viewed contemporary politics as purely moral decisions to be made. He did not, however, let it enter into his work; indeed, he questioned the very idea of a historian studying politics. He believed that society should be governed by the young, and, although politically he was a moderate, he noted that revolutions generally promote the young over the old: "even the Nazis had done this, while the French had done the reverse, bringing to power a generation of the past". According to Epstein, following the First World War, Bloch presented a "curious lack of empathy and comprehension for the horrors of modern warfare", while John Lewis Gaddis has found Bloch's failure to condemn Stalinism in the 1930s "disturbing". Gaddis suggests that Bloch had ample evidence of Stalin's crimes and yet sought to shroud them in utilitarian calculations about the price of what he called 'progress'".

The comparative method allowed Bloch to discover instances of uniqueness within aspects of society, and he advocated it as a new kind of history. According to Bryce Lyon, Braudel and Febvre, "promising to perform all the burdensome tasks" themselves, asked Pirenne to become editor-in-chief of Annales to no avail. Pirenne remained a strong supporter, however, and had an article published in the first volume in 1929. He became close friends with both Bloch and Febvre. He was particularly influential on Bloch, who later said that Pirenne's approach should be the model for historians and that "at the time his country was fighting beside mine for justice and civilisation, wrote in captivity a history of Europe". The three men kept up a regular correspondence until Pirenne's death in 1935. In 1923, Bloch attended the inaugural meeting of the International Congress on Historical Studies (ICHS) in Brussels, which was opened by Pirenne. Bloch was a prolific reviewer for Annales, and during the 1920s and 1930s he contributed over 700 reviews. These were both criticisms of specific works, but more generally, represented his own fluid thinking during this period. The reviews demonstrate the extent to which he shifted his thinking on particular subjects.

Bloch described his area of study as the comparative history of European society and explained why he did not identify himself as a medievalist: "I refuse to do so. I have no interest in changing labels, nor in clever labels themselves, or those that are thought to be so." He did not leave a full study of his methodology, although it can be effectively reconstructed piecemeal. He believed that history was the "science of movement", but did not accept, for example, the aphorism that one could protect against the future by studying the past. His did not use a revolutionary approach to historiography; rather, he wished to combine the schools of thinking that preceded him into a new broad approach to history and, as he wrote in 1926, to bring to history "ce murmure qui n'était pas de la mort", ("the whisper that was not death'). He criticised what he called the "idol of the origins", where historians concentrate overly hard on the formation of something to the detriment of studying the thing itself.

Marc Bloch, review of L'Année Sociologique, 1923–1925

Bloch's brother Louis became a doctor, and eventually the head of the diphtheria section of the Hôpital des Enfants-Malades. Louis died prematurely in 1922. Their father died in March the following year. Following these deaths, Bloch took on responsibility for his ageing mother as well as his brother's widow and children. Eugen Weber has suggested that Bloch was probably a monomaniac who, in Bloch's own words, "abhorred falsehood". He also abhorred, as a result of both the Franco-Prussian war and more recently the First World War, German nationalism. This extended to that country's culture and scholarship, and is probably the reason he never debated with German historians. Indeed, in Bloch's later career, he rarely mentioned even those German historians with whom he must, professionally, have felt an affinity, such as Karl Lamprecht. Lyon says Lamprecht had denounced what he saw as the German obsession with political history and had focused on art and comparative history, thus "infuriat[ing] the Rankianer". Bloch once commented, on English historians, that "en Angleterre, rien qu'en Angleterre" ("in England, only England"). He was not, though, particularly critical of English historiography, and respected the long tradition of rural history in that country as well as more materially the government funding that went into historical research there.

The war was fundamental in re-arranging Bloch's approach to history, although he never acknowledged it as a turning point. In the years following the war, a disillusioned Bloch rejected the ideas and the traditions that had formed his scholarly training. He rejected the political and biographical history which up until that point was the norm, along with what the historian George Huppert has described as a "laborious cult of facts" that accompanied it. In 1920, with the opening of the University of Strasbourg, Bloch was appointed chargé de cours (assistant lecturer) of medieval history. Alsace-Lorraine had been returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles; the status of the region was a contentious political issue in Strasbourg, its capital, which had a large German population. Bloch, however, refused to take either side in the debate; indeed, he appears to have avoided politics entirely. Under Wilhelmine Germany, Strasbourg had rivalled Berlin as a centre for intellectual advancement, and the University of Strasbourg possessed the largest academic library in the world. Thus, says Stephan R. Epstein of the London School of Economics, "Bloch's unrivalled knowledge of the European Middle Ages was ... built on and around the French University of Strasbourg's inherited German treasures". Bloch also taught French to the few German students who were still at the Centre d'Études Germaniques at the University of Mainz during the Occupation of the Rhineland. He refrained from taking a public position when France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 over Germany's perceived failure to pay war reparations.

Bloch's fundamental views on the nature and purpose of the study of history were established by 1920. That same year he defended, and subsequently published, his thesis. It was not as extensive a work as had been intended due to the war. There was a provision in French further education for doctoral candidates for whom the war had interrupted their research to submit only a small portion of the full-length thesis usually required. It sufficed, however, to demonstrate his credentials as a medievalist in the eyes of his contemporaries. He began publishing articles in Henri Berr's Revue de Synthèse Historique. Bloch also published his first major work, Les Rois Thaumaturges, which he later described as "ce gros enfant" (this big child). In 1928, Bloch was invited to lecture at the Institute for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in Oslo. Here he first expounded publicly his theories on total, comparative history:

While on front-line service, Bloch contracted severe arthritis which required him to retire regularly to the thermal baths of Aix-les-Bains for treatment. He later remembered very little of the historical events he found himself in, writing only that his memories were "a discontinuous series of images, vivid in themselves, but badly arranged, like a reel of motion picture film containing some large gaps and some reversals of certain scenes". Bloch later described the war, in a detached style, as having been a "gigantic social experience, of unbelievable richness". For example, he had a habit of noting the different coloured smoke that different shells made — percussion bombs had black smoke, timed bombs were brown. He also remembered both the "friends killed at our side ... of the intoxication which had taken hold of us when we saw the enemy in flight". He also considered it to have been "four years of fighting idleness". Following the Armistice in November 1918, Bloch was demobilised on 13 March 1919.

Both Marc and Louis Bloch volunteered for service in the French Army. Although the Dreyfus Affair had soured Bloch's views of the French Army, he later wrote that his criticisms were only of the officers; he "had respect only for the men". Bloch was one of over 800 ÉNS students who enlisted; 239 were to be killed in action. On 2 August 1914 he was assigned to the 272nd Reserve Regiment. Within eight days he was stationed on the Belgian border where he fought in the Battle of the Meuse later that month. His regiment took part in the general retreat on the 25th, and the following day they were in Barricourt, in the Argonne. The march westward continued towards the River Marne—with a temporary recuperative halt in Termes—which they reached in early September. During the First Battle of the Marne, Bloch's troop was responsible for the assault and capture of Florent before advancing on La Gruerie. Bloch led his troop with shouts of "Forward the 18th!" They suffered heavy casualties: 89 men were either missing or known to be dead. Bloch enjoyed the early days of the war; like most of his generation, he had expected a short but glorious conflict. Gustave Bloch remained in France, wishing to be close to his sons at the front.

Apart from the Marne, Bloch fought at the battles of the Somme, the Argonne, and the final German assault on Paris. He survived the war, which he later described as having been an "honour" to have served through. He had, however, lost many friends and colleagues. Among the closest of them, all killed in action, were: Maxime David (died 1914), Antoine-Jules Bianconi (died 1915) and Ernest babut (died 1916). Bloch himself was wounded twice and decorated for courage, receiving the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'Honneur. He had joined as a non-commissioned officer, received an officer's commission after the Marne, and had been promoted to warrant officer and finally a captain in the fuel service, (Service des essences) before the war ended. He was clearly, says Loyn, both a good and a brave soldier; he later wrote, "I know only one way to persuade a troop to brave danger: brave it yourself".

Bloch's first book was L'Ile de France, published in 1913. A small book, Lyon calls it "light, readable and far from trivial", and showing the influence of H. J. Fleure in how Bloch combined discussion on geography, language and archaeology. It was translated into English in 1971. Davies says 1920's Rois et Serfs, (Kings and Serfs), is a "long and rather meandering essay", although it had the potential to be Bloch's definitive monograph upon the single topic that "might have evoked his genius at his fullest", the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Loyn also describes it as a "loose-knit monograph", and a program to move forward rather than a full-length academic text.

By this time, changes were taking place in French academia. In Bloch's own speciality of history, attempts were being made at instilling a more scientific methodology. In other, newer departments such a sociology, efforts were made at establishing an independent identity. Bloch graduated in 1908 with degrees in both geography and history (Davies notes, given Bloch's later divergent interests, the significance of the two qualifications). He had a high respect for historical geography, then a speciality of French historiography, as practised by his tutor Vidal de la Blache whose Tableau de la géographie Bloch had studied at the ÉNS, and Lucien Gallois. Bloch applied unsuccessfully for a fellowship at the Fondation Thiers. As a result, he travelled to Germany in 1909 where he studied demography under Karl Bücher in Leipzig and religion under Adolf Harnack in Berlin; he did not, however, particularly socialise with fellow students while in Germany. He returned to France the following year and again applied to the Fondation, this time successfully. Bloch researched the medieval Île-de-France in preparation for his thesis. This research was Bloch's first focus on rural history. His parents had moved house and now resided at the Avenue d'Orleans, not far from Bloch's quarters.

The Dreyfus affair had soured Bloch's views of the French Army, and he considered it laden with "snobbery, anti-semitism and anti-republicanism". National service had been made compulsory for all French adult males in 1905, with an enlistment term of two years. Bloch joined the 46th Infantry Regiment based at Pithiviers from 1905 to 1906.

Bloch was educated at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand for three years, where he was consistently head of his class and won prizes in French, history, Latin and natural history. He passed his baccalauréat, in Letters and Philosophy, in July 1903, being graded trés bien (very good). The following year, he received a scholarship and undertook postgraduate study there for the École normale supérieure (ÉNS) (where his father had been appointed maître de conferences in 1887). His father had been nicknamed le Méga by his students at the ÉNS and the moniker Microméga was bestowed upon Bloch. Here he was taught history by Christian Pfister and Charles Seignobos, who led a relatively new school of historical thought which saw history as broad themes punctuated by tumultuous events. Another important influence on Bloch from this period was his father's contemporary, the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who pre-figured Bloch's own later emphasis on cross-disciplinary research. The same year, Bloch visited England; he later recalled being struck more by the number of homeless people on the Victoria Embankment than the new Entente Cordiale relationship between the two countries.

Bloch was not a tall man, being 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m) in height and an elegant dresser. Eugen Weber has described Bloch's handwriting as "impossible". He had expressive blue eyes, which could be "mischievous, inquisitive, ironic and sharp". Febvre later said that when he first met Bloch in 1902, he found a slender young man with "a timid face". Bloch was proud of his family's history of defending France: he later wrote, "My great-grandfather was a serving soldier in 1793; ... my father was one of the defenders of Strasbourg in 1870 ... I was brought up in the traditions of patriotism which found no more fervent champions than the Jews of the Alsatian exodus".

Bloch's comparative history led him to tie his researches in with those of many other schools: social sciences, linguistics, philology, comparative literature, folklore, geography and agronomy. Similarly, he did not restrict himself to French history. At various points in his writings Bloch commented on medieval Corsican, Finnish, Japanese, Norwegian and Welsh history. R. R. Davies has compared Bloch's intelligence with what he calls that of "the Maitland of the 1890s", regarding his breadth of reading, use of language and multidisciplinary approach. Unlike Maitland, however, Bloch also wished to synthesise scientific history with narrative history. According to Stirling, he managed to achieve "an imperfect and volatile imbalance" between them. Bloch did not believe that it was possible to understand or recreate the past by the mere act of compiling facts from sources; rather, he described a source as a witness, "and like most witnesses", he wrote, "it rarely speaks until one begins to question it". Likewise, he viewed historians as detectives who gathered evidence and testimony, as juges d'instruction (examining magistrates) "charged with a vast enquiry of the past".

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (/b l ɒ k / ; French: [maʁk blɔk] ; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. A founding member of the Annales School of French social history, he specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944).

Marc Bloch was born in Lyon on 6 July 1886, one of two children to Gustave and Sarah Bloch, née Ebstein. Bloch's family were Alsatian Jews: secular, liberal and loyal to the French Republic. They "struck a balance", says the historian Carole Fink, between both "fierce Jacobin patriotism and the antinationalism of the left". His family had lived in Alsace for five generations under French rule. In 1871, France was forced to cede the region to Germany following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The year after Bloch's birth, his father was appointed professor of Roman History at the Sorbonne, and the family moved to Paris—"the glittering capital of the Third Republic". Marc had a brother, Louis Constant Alexandre, seven years his senior. The two were close, although Bloch later described Louis as being occasionally somewhat intimidating. The Bloch family lived at 72, Rue d'Alésia, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Gustave began teaching Marc history while he was still a boy, with a secular, rather than Jewish, education intended to prepare him for a career in professional French society. Bloch's later close collaborator, Lucien Febvre, visited the Bloch family at home in 1902; although the reason for Febvre's visit is now unknown, he later wrote of Bloch how