ABSTRACT
Marc Bloch was caught up in the resistance to the Nazi's before he could finish his final work on memory and history. Marc Bloch was one of the most ambitious and incisive historians of the twentieth century. Bloch claimed that an abandonment of an empirical and theoretical historical practice is quite simply an abdication of the history and science of the memory of the human and human materiality. As Bloch said 'The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies'. Epochal and continental in his deeply structuralized work, he was also an archaeologist of the microscopic in human life and memory. His inability to fully discover and assess the implications of this relationship was partly due to the kinds of epistemological presuppositions he had inherited from the intellectual traditions within which he himself was situated.
