A veteran of the First World War, Marc Bloch was called back to the colors in 1939 at age fifty-three. When he began this book in 1941, he had seen the collapse of France and his livelihood. As a Jew, Bloch could not hold on to his professorship at the Sorbonne and was driven from academic life altogether once the Germans crossed into Vichy territory. He served as a local leader in the French resistance near Lyon until he was captured by the Germans in the spring of 1944. On the 16th of June, ten days after the successful allied landings in Normandy, he was taken from his cell and shot in an open field near Lyons with twenty-six other French patriots.

The solidarity of the ages is so effective that the lines of connection work both ways. Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present. There is an anecdote: I had gone with Henri Pirenne to Stockholm; we had scarcely arrived, when he said to me, “What shall we go to see first? It seems that there is a new city hall here. Let’s start there.” Then, as if to ward off my surprise, he added, “if I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.” This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian. Despite their occasional frigidity of style, the greatest of our number have all possessed it. Fustel or Maitland, in their austere way, had it as much as Michelet. And, perhaps, it originates as a gift from the fairies, quite inaccessible to anyone who has not found it in his cradle. That does not lessen the obligation to exercise and develop it constantly. How? How better than by the example of Henri Pirenne — by keeping in constant touch with the present day?

For here, in the present, is immediately perceptible that vibrance of human life which only a great effort of the imagination can restore to the old texts. I have many times read, and have often narrated, accounts of wars and battles. Did I truly know, in the full sense of that word, did I know from within, before I myself had suffered the terrible, sickening reality, what it meant for an army to be encircled, what it meant for a people to meet defeat? Before I myself had breathed the joy of victory in the summer and autumn of 1918 (and, although, alas! its perfume will not again be quite the same, I yearn to fill my lings with it a second time) did I truly know all that was inherent in that beautiful word? In the last analysis, whether consciously or no, it is always by borrowing from our daily experiences and by shading them, where necessary, with new tints that we derive the elements which help us to restore the past. The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men. The value of these merely instinctive impressions will be increased a hundredfold if they are replaced by a ready and critical observation. A great mathematician would not, I suppose, be less great because blind to the world in which he lives. But the scholar who has no inclination to observe the men, the things, or the events around him will perhaps deserve the title, as Pirenne put it, of a useful antiquarian. He would be wise to renounce all claims to that of the historian.