On June 23, choirs of French schoolchildren and a large crowd of dignitaries thronged around the Pantheon in central Paris during a heat wave. Under the glow of torchlight, President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the special courage that had earned the Sorbonne professor Marc Bloch a place in the nation’s most prestigious tomb. Since the French Revolution turned the erstwhile church in the Latin Quarter into a secular temple of civic virtue, France has laid to rest several dozen of its greatest citizens there, among them Charles de Gaulle, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, and Simone Veil. To the sound of the Marseillaise, the caskets of Bloch and his wife Simonne were inducted into the Pantheon, making him the first historian to receive the honor.
Total Historian
Reviewing Peter Schöttler’s new intellectual biography of Marc Bloch, co-founder of the Annales school, Mulder revisits Bloch’s ambitious vision for the study of history. Bloch rejected the discipline’s traditional focus…

Key takeaways
Marc Bloch, a French historian, was honored at the Pantheon, becoming the first historian to receive this distinction.
- Marc Bloch was inducted into the Pantheon in Paris alongside his wife.
- Bloch was a historian, soldier, and member of the French Resistance.
- He authored numerous works on medieval history and feudalism.
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