Strange Defeat

Marc Bloch

Description

A renowned historian and Resistance fighter - later executed by the Nazis - analyzes at first hand why France fell in 1940. Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat during the three months following the fall of France, after he returned home from military service. In the midst of his anguish, he nevertheless "brought to his study of the crisis all the critical faculty and all the penetrating analysis of a first-rate historian" (Christian Science Monitor). Bloch takes a close look at the military failures he witnessed, examining why France was unable to respond to attack quickly and effectively. He gives a personal account of the battle of France, followed by a biting analysis of the generation between the wars. His harsh conclusion is that the immediate cause of the disaster was the utter incompetence of the High Command, but his analysis ranges broadly, appraising all the factors, social as well as military, which since 1870 had undermined French national solidarity. "Much has been, and will be, written in explanation of the defeat of France in 1940, but it seems unlikely that the truth of the matter will ever be more accurately and more vividly presented than in this statement of evidence." - New York Times Book Review. "The most wisdom-packed commentary on the problem set [before] all intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen by the events of 1940." - Spectator.

Sujets

• History
• World War II
• Military
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781774643907
• Langue: English

Extrait

Strange Defeat
by Marc Bloch

First published in 1946
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Strange Defeat













by MARC BLOCH




































































Table of Contents








INTRODUCTION



FOREWORD



Chapter One. PRESENTATION OF THE WITNESS



Chapter Two. ONE OF THE VANQUISHED GIVES EVIDENCE



Chapter Three. A FRENCHMAN EXAMINES HIS CONSCIENCE



THE TESTAMENTARY INSTRUCTIONS OF MARC BLOCH























































Introduction



THIS penetrating, poignant, outspoken book stands out among other books about France and the first year of the Second World War as the work of a very distinguished scholar, a professor of the Sorbonne, who was later to be one of the leaders in the movement of resistance and to be put to death for his part in it. The book is a piece of analysis and a contemporary judgement by a man who wrote as a Frenchman, 'that is to say, a civilized man, for the two are identical', but also, and always, as a French historian who had earned the right to be heard.



Marc Bloch began his career as a writer and teacher of history in 1905, in his twentieth year. His family was firmly established in France. He tells us that a, great-grandfather fought in the revolutionary army in 1793, that his father fought in 1870. He himself fought in the First World War and, at the age of fifty- three, the father of six children, was again in service in 1939; but he wrote this book as a student of history. The turning-point in his academic life came, I think, in 1929, the year in which he gave a course of lectures at Oslo on the invitation of the Norwegian Institute for the Comparative Study of Institutions, for these lectures gave rise to his finest book, Les Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française it was in the same year that, with M. Lucien Febvre, he founded the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, the periodical which he used as a forum, and through which he became one of the most influential economic and social historians of his time. During the years after the First World War he had tended to concentrate his attention upon that rather perplexing, because mysterious, region of the spirit where political and religious feelings met in the development of medieval kingship. His first considerable work, published in 1924, was Les Rois thaumaturges, 'a study of the supernatural character attributed to the royal power, especially in France and England. Its main theme was the growth of the curious practice known as 'touching for the king's evil', which most of us used to hear about in connexion with 'Good Queen Anne' and her alleged power, as a ruler of divine right, to cure scrofula. But, of course, Bloch was interested in it as the symbol and expression of an important development in religious thought and popular belief. It led him into new inquiries, for example, to the study of the cult and biographies of our last Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. Indeed, some of us first made his acquaintance through his interest in English history, and to some scholars, interested as he had been in the study of kingship, he was always best known by the book to which I have referred. I remember vividly how one evening some twelve years later he was dining at high table in Oriel College. Another guest was a well-known German scholar, at that time spending a year in Oxford. Suddenly the German realized that the quiet reserved little man sitting on the opposite side of the table was Marc Bloch. He burst out in great excitement: 'Is that Bloch? the author of Les Rois thaumaturges? I have been wanting to meet him for years.' At the time I was amused by the contrast between the scene and the conventional idea of a meeting of a staid Teuton with an ebullient Gaul; now my memory of that evening arouses sadder and deeper reflections about the comradeship of scholars all over the learned world, then so promising, now broken, though we hope broken only for a time.



In the movement of international fellowship and understanding between scholars Bloch took an active part. As I have said, his book on rural France grew out of lectures given at Oslo. He was prominent in international conferences. He made his review one of the chief centres of learned studies in social history. He was in constant touch with friends and colleagues in other lands. Here in England he made many friends, especially in Cambridge and London, where he was welcomed by John Clapham and Eileen Power and many others. English readers can judge the quality of his mind and the width of his learning in a chapter contributed by him to the first volume of the Cambridge Economic History. The news of his death on 16 June 1944, as it slowly and doubtfully became known to us, at first seemed unbelievable. His light had burned so brightly. This last swift little book of his, written with such passion, patriotism, and knowledge of the past, will in its English dress make him known to hundreds of people who never read his learned work--wise and clear though it is--and is his best memorial.





F. M. P.



OXFORD January 1948


































Foreword



HOW admirable it is that this 'Statement of Evidence' could have been conceived, written, and hidden away for our future reading at a time when France was reeling beneath the thunder-clap of disaster. When our world was crumbling in an appalling confusion of men and things, when the land of Liberty, of the Rights of Man, of spiritual grandeur and civilized elegance, had, through the machinations of Vichy, taken on the semblance of a savage tribe bidden to make obeisance before barbarian totems and absurd taboos, when so many men of letters were rushing at top speed into the open arms of slavery--how admirable, indeed, that this great witness who, four years later, was to fall in the service of the Resistance, could thus uncover, could thus analyse with such lucidity, the secrets of one of the strangest defeats in all history. Read on and you will see. . . .



I say without hesitation that, till now, no account, no explanation of, no inquiry into, events of 1940, has appeared comparable in clarity or in firmness of design. It is right that we should declare in no uncertain tones that this voice from the grave of a great civilian martyr, who died without for a single moment doubting that the dawn would break, has more true things to tell us about the evil which plunged France into darkness, than those of any of his contemporaries.



Marc Bloch wrote this book, as he says himself, in 'a white heat of rage'. It was the fine rage of a noble soul which would not acquiesce, of an intelligence which refused to come to terms with lies: it was the anger of a witness who knew. But this fighter in the chaos of defeat, this historian who was compelled to live through and endure one of the worst periods of our history, could, nevertheless, in spite of disgust, in spite of revolt,give to his thought and to his style a fine serenity; could view the contemporary scene with a relentlessly objective eye. Strange Defeat has the movement, the tone, the accent of a study which has managed to fight free of the chaotic present, of the urgent and battering tide of immediate fact. Written though it was under the pressure of experience and with a burning immediacy, with the salt of the overwhelming billows on its lips, it is as though this book bad managed to create for itself an historical perspective.



That alone would suffice to make it a great book, but it contains much more than a vivid and precise description of the disaster of 1940. There is in the whole 'Statement', and particularly in the third chapter--in which a Frenchman examines his conscience--the shattering confession of a distinguished French intellectual who sets himself to examine in detail, and w