ABSTRACT
Some time in the 1930s, as the world was about to explode into war, a young French boy, Étienne, asked his father, the medievalist Marc Bloch, a hauntingly simple question: “Tell me, Papa. What is the use of history?” Bloch had no doubt about the importance of the problem. “The question far transcends the minor scruples of a professional conscience,” he would write. “Indeed, our entire Western civilization is concerned in it.”1 The observation soon took on a particular poignancy. In 1940, Bloch – a professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne – would be called for military service to resist the Nazi onslaught, and soon, like his son, joined the French resistance. Under these circumstances, he wrestled with the question that Étienne had posed, and began to write a searching defense of the study of history. Bloch would die without finishing The Historian’s Craft, as the work would be known in its English translation. He was captured by the Germans, tortured, and – on 16 June 1944 – executed. His meditation on historical studies and their use for the contemporary world would be published four years after the war’s end.
