ABSTRACT
Marc Bloch, one of the twentieth century’s most sophisticated, innovative, and critical scholars and teachers, was born on 6 July 1886 in Lyon, France. He was the descendant of a family of Alsatian Jews who after the Revolution entered the mainstream of French life. His great-grandfather fought against the Prussian army in 1793; his grandfather was a teacher and primary-school administrator in Strasbourg; and his father, Gustave Bloch, became an eminent historian of ancient Rome at the University of Lyon and at the Sorbonne. Bloch’s mother, Sarah Ebstein, born in Lyon to an Alsatian-Jewish family and married at nineteen, lent order and vitality to the academic household. Marc Bloch was raised in Paris, the glittering capital of the Third Republic, where he experienced France’s scientific and cultural achievements and imbibed a strong sense of patriotism.
