Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a
French historian who cofounded the highly influential
Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated
Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the
Dreyfus Affair. He studied at the elite
École Normale Supérieure; in 1908–9 he studied at Berlin and Leipzig. He fought in the trenches of the
Western Front for four years. In 1919 he became Lecturer in Medieval history at
Strasbourg University, after the German professors were all expelled; he was called to the University of Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. He is best known for his pioneering studies
French Rural History and
Feudal Society and his posthumously-published unfinished meditation on the writing of history,
The Historian's Craft. A French soldier in both World Wars, he was captured and shot by the
Gestapo during the
German occupation of France for his work in the
French Resistance.