The Historian's Craft

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WESTERN MAN has always been historically minded, and this trait has been accentuated during the last two centuries. Laymen are more aware than ever be- fore that they are living and making history-witness the care with which great business organizations are preserving their archives, and the determination of our military authorities to have the history of their commands written "while it is hot." Certainly the number of historians, both professional and amateur, has greatly increased in recent years, as has the quantity of historical writing-quality is another matter. We have histories of games and histories of mail-order houses, histories of diseases and histories of delusions, histories of transportation and histories of highways, as well as the old standard mixtures of political, eco- nomic, and social history.

Yet the more history we write the more we worrу about the value and nature of history. The increase in the number of books on historiography and historical methodology is proportionally far greater than the increase in the number of historians. Such books have been especially numerous in the last ten or fifteen years, for obvious reasons. We are all asking, as the author of this book asks in his first sentence: "What Introduction.

is the use of history?" What is the use of history, when the values of the past are being ruthlessly discarded? What is the use of history, when we repeat our old errors over and over again? And even if we are sure that history has its uses, are we able to write the kind of history that can be used?

These are the questions that troubled Marc Bloch, as they have troubled so many of his fellow workers. They must have pressed on him with almost unbearable weight in the dark days of 1941, when he began this book. A veteran of the First War, called back to the colors at the age of fifty-three in 1939, he had seen the collapse of France and of everything in which he believed. His Jewish ancestry made it impossible for him to return to his professorship at the Sorbonne; he took refuge first with the exiled University of Stras- bourg at Clermont-Ferrand, then with the University of Montpellier. He could have fled to the United States, but he refused to leave France, even the France of Vichy. As he said in his testament, he was so thoroughly French, so impregnated with the spirit and tradition of France, that he did not think he could breathe freely in another country. And if the book was begun under evil auspices it was continued under worse. When the Germans crossed the line of demarcation, after the landings in North Africa, Bloch was driven from academic life. He became a member of the Resistance, a leader of the group centering in Lyons. There he was captured by the Germans in the spring of 1944, imprisoned, and cruelly mistreated.