L'Étrange Défaite

Par Marc Bloch

Ce témoignage sur la défaite de 1940, écrit sur le vif par un grand historien, est particulièrement précieux. Avec le recul, on ne peut qu'admirer la lucidité, la clarté d'esprit de Marc Bloch. Ces qualités, alliées à un vrai humanisme et à une qualité d'écriture certaine, font que nous vous conseillons vivement la lecture de ce texte. En seconde partie du livre, divers écrits de Marc Bloch vous sont proposés. Le dernier traite de la réforme de l'enseignement. Là encore, l'auteur nous propose un texte passionnant, qui n'a que très peu vieilli, et dont les ministres, toujours prompts à vouloir réformer l'Éducation nationale, pour l'amener de mal en pis, feraient bien de s'inspirer...

• Langue: Français
• Éditeur: Elmac
• Date de sortie: 24 avr. 2020
• ISBN: 9782070325696

Marc Bloch

Marc Bloch, one of the great historians of our time, was born at Lyons in 1886 and educated at the Ecole Normale in Paris. He was for many years Professor of Medieval History in the University of Strasbourg before being called in 1936 to the Chair of Economic History at the Sorbonne. He fought in both World Wars, volunteering for active service in 1939 when he was already fifty0three. After the fall of France in 1940 he went to the South, where he taught successively at the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand and Montpellier. When the South too was occupied he joined the Resistance, but was caught by the Gestapo, tortured, and finally shot in the neighborhood of Lyons in June 1944.

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[dinadansfriend · Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles]

Marc Bloch made his reputation in Medieval history, but as a good Frenchman he re-enlisted for his second world war, in 1939. On the spot for the astonishing collapse of the French army in 1940, he whiled away his time in a prison camp by penning this memoire of the campaign. Involved in resistance activities, he was shot by the Germans in 1944. The book deals with a number of the grievances felt by the French after the fighting in the spring of 1940, and explores the reasons that both parties, the French and the English, may have felt after the spring campaign, and the Dunkirk evacuation. Gerard Hopkins' translation has given us a book well worth reading, a worthy contribution to the literature of WWII. I reread this book in 2013, and it held up well.