Professor Emeritus Invited to National Ceremony Honoring Biography Subject

It’s been nearly 40 years since Carole Fink published her pivotal biography of French historian and resistance leader Marc Bloch, and it came full circle in late June when she visited Paris to attend a national ceremony honoring his legacy.

Fink had received an invitation from French President Emmanuel Macron for the event, in which Bloch and his wife, Simonne Vidal, were inducted into the Panthéon, a former church that houses the remains of distinguished French citizens.

Despite the backdrop of extreme summer heat in Paris, Fink, professor emeritus of history, said the ceremony was a “magnificent national occasion,” bookended by interviews and meetings seeking her unique perspective on his life.

“Bloch was a hero to my generation, we revered him for his pathbreaking scholarship and personal courage,” she said. “He was a man we all read and admired.” 

Bloch is the most widely translated French historian, a man who fought in both world wars and was a professor of history at the universities of Strasbourg and Paris. After France was defeated in June 1940, Bloch, who was a Jew, fell under Vichy’s racist laws but was granted an exemption to teach for two years in the southern unoccupied zone. After all of France fell under the Nazi yoke in late 1942, Bloch joined the French resistance at age 56. He was captured in March 1944, brutally tortured, and executed by the Gestapo along with twenty-nine other prisoners on June 16, 1944 shortly after the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Fink, who joined UNCW in 1978 as a German historian, was teaching World War I when she came across a fragment of Bloch’s account from the war. Traveling to Paris to find the original manuscript led to a meeting with Bloch’s son and gaining access to a trove of his personal files. She recalled reading Bloch’s daily accounts of his battlefield experiences, laying out maps on the floor to trace his movements through four years of trench warfare and visiting some of the sites herself.

After the translation was published in 1980, Fink embarked upon a full-scale biography. Plunging into French history was a challenge, but she said the opportunity to examine Bloch’s life through interviews with his loved ones, students and compatriots was a privilege. She published “Marc Bloch: A Life in History” in 1989, and continuing research since then has delved further into his research methods and intellectual world.

“What really strikes me about Bloch, in all the years I worked on him, was his insistence that historical study wasn’t about chronology, it was really about asking very serious questions of the past," she said. "Questions about power, how power operated, shifts in human mentalities, scientific breakthroughs, the effects of technology and how people adapted to it.

"Bloch’s scholarship also taught us how the past and the present relate to one another, thus providing a richer and more critical perspective for understanding the contemporary world.”