Soldiers carry the cenotaphs of Marc and Simonne Bloch during their Panthéon induction ceremony in Paris on June 23, 2026 (Getty Images)POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Macron eulogised Bloch by quoting his description of himself as “a Jew, who does not hide”.
“Handed over to the Nazis and murdered, along with his companions, on the evening of June 16, 1944, Marc Bloch was portrayed by Vichy propaganda as a terrorist simply because he was Jewish,” Macron said. “Let us state it clearly. This is where antisemitism inevitably leads as soon as anyone embarks on this path of darkness.”
“Faced with this nightmare, Marc Bloch’s greatness lies in the fact that he never lost hope for France and the French people,” Macron added.
Bloch was born in 1886 in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish family and raised in Paris. He volunteered for the French Army in 1914 at the start of the First World War, in which he was wounded twice and awarded the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre.
After two decades in academia as a specialist in medieval studies who helped revolutionise the study of history in France by co-founding the journal Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Bloch was re-mobilised for military service on the eve of the Second World War, aged 53.
His book, Strange Defeat, written in 1940 and published posthumously, is a first-hand account of France’s military failure and surrender in the face of Nazi Germany’s invasion.
Under the collaborationist Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain, Bloch joined the French Resistance.
“When the enemy occupied France, starting in June 1940, when the government of the French State, in the hands of Pétain and Laval, embarked on the path of collaboration, Marc Bloch’s fate, like that of all Jews, was irrevocably altered,” Macron said.
“A true republican at heart and in his thinking, an ardent and tireless defender of secularism, Marc Bloch endured the consequences of the state-sponsored antisemitism initiated by Marshal Pétain's government.”
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks at the Panthéon induction ceremony for the late historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch and his wife, Simonne Bloch, in Paris on June 23, 2026 (Getty Images)POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The Gestapo arrested Bloch in March 1944 but, despite being subjected to torture under Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi war criminal responsible for deporting thousands of French Jews to death camps, Bloch refused to divulge information about his associates. The Nazis executed Bloch shortly after D-Day.
Macron credited Bloch as being among those who “saved the honour and soul of France” amid a generation tainted by Jew-hatred and collaboration with Nazism.
