France honors Jewish historian executed by Gestapo with interment in the Panthon

The nation of France honored historian Marc Bloch on Tuesday with interment in the Panthéon in Paris in a ceremony led by French President Emmanuel Macron.A French Jewish academic, who helped found the Annales school of historiography, Bloch is perhaps best remembered today for his wartime heroism as a member of the French Resistance whom the Nazis captured, tortured and executed in 1944.Caskets for Bloch and his wife containing the historian’s medals and photographs of the couple were buried with military honors in the presence of his living descendants at the secular mausoleum reserved by law for France’s national heroes.At the request of his family, Bloch’s ashes remain buried in the village where he resided for much of his life in central France.Macron eulogized the historian by quoting Bloch’s description of himself as “a Jew, who does not hide.”“Handed over to the Nazis and murdered, along with his companions, on the evening of June 16, 1944, Marc Bloch was portrayed by Vichy propaganda as a terrorist simply because he was Jewish,” Macron said.

“Let us state it clearly.This is where antisemitism inevitably leads as soon as anyone embarks on this path of darkness.”“Faced with this nightmare, Marc Bloch’s greatness lies in the fact that he never lost hope for France and the French people,” Macron said.Bloch was born in 1886 in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family and raised in Paris.

He volunteered for the French Army in 1914 at the start of the First World War, in which he was wounded twice and awarded the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre.After two decades in academia as a specialist in medieval studies who helped revolutionize the study of history in France by co-founding the journal Annales.Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Bloch was re-mobilized for military service on the eve of the Second World War at age 53.His book, “Strange Defeat,” written in 1940 and published posthumously, is a first-hand account of France’s milita...