Marc Bloch (1886-1944), author of Feudal Society and Land and Work in Medieval Europe, was born in Lyon, central France, to an Alsatian Jewish family with an academic background; his father, Gustave Bloch, was a professor of ancient history at the University of Lyon. Gustave had a considerable influence on his son’s career, both as a teacher and through the historical method demonstrated in his scholarship. In his youth, Bloch was profoundly affected by the Dreyfus Affair, the trial of an Alsatian Jewish artillery officer for treason that took place in the 1890s and 1900s. The case, and the question of Dreyfus’s guilt, was the topic of widespread discussion among the public and in the French press, and was to influence Bloch’s beliefs regarding the role of rumour and misinformation in the collective consciousness; he was later to state that in examining the past, a historian should adopt “the critical spirit” and examine historical documents as if they were witnesses in a legal trial.

Bloch studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and afterwards in Berlin and Leipzig. After the First World War, during which he served in the infantry, he became a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Strasbourg. In 1929 he co-founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale with his colleague Lucien Febvre. This marked a new historiographical approach, referred to as the Annales school, which emphasised the need to break with the purely narrative tradition in order to study all levels of society and the history of mentalities; it was to become one of the 20th century’s dominant schools of history. Although Bloch's teaching duties were extensive, he had access to sufficient resources with which to pursue his research in an open and stimulating academic environment. During this period, he came into contact with a number of academics in other disciplines, with whom he exchanged ideas at weekly seminars. In the early 20th century, Henri Berr advocated a synthesis of these historical and sociological approaches that was to prove a pivotal influence on Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Bloch and Febvre met in 1919 while they were both teaching at the University of Strasbourg. Febvre, a historian of the early modern period, shared Bloch’s desire to find a new historical method that combined the discipline of sociology (as exemplified in the journal L'Année sociologique, founded by Émile Durkheim in 1898) with a view of history as determined by long-term structural factors. Bloch's methodology may be seen as the product of this academic environment, and the work itself a document of Bloch’s beliefs regarding historical practice, which were the motivations for founding the Annales journal.

Today the influence of Bloch’s work on historical scholarship is not immediately apparent. Most references to him are superficial and lacking in direct engagement with his ideas and research. This may be partly explained by his acceptance into the academic establishment, which often results in the ideas of influential scholars becoming part of the public domain rather than the subject of critical discussion. For most contemporary historians, especially those who are not medievalists, familiarity with Bloch’s work is limited to his monograph on historical method, The Historian’s Craft. In this context, both Feudal Society and, probably to a greater extent, Land and Work in Medieval Europe have suffered from neglect.

This is not to say that Bloch's work is lacking in relevance to contemporary historical debate. However, his books' position within the current intellectual environment is difficult to separate from the place in contemporary historiography of the Annales movement associated with the journal. Fernand Braudel, the most prominent of the “second-generation” Annalistes during the 1950s and 1960s, has stated that the period 1929 to 1940 (in which the majority of the essays in Land and Work were written) was the time when the aims and ethos of the Annales school were formulated. In examining the current position of the text within history as a discipline, it is necessary to trace the development of its ideas in the evolution of the Annales movement.

The question of whether Bloch would have anticipated or approved of later applications of his ideas is a matter for conjecture. He believed that history was a constantly evolving discipline, and that the younger generation should challenge the conclusions of their predecessors. However, some have argued that he would have disagreed with subsequent developments in Annales scholarship (and in the social sciences more generally) during the 1960s, when scholars placed an increasing emphasis on quantitative analysis, statistics and demographical studies. This is perhaps best exemplified by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Peasants of Languedoc (1966), which was to a large extent a “history without people” characterised by studies of food prices and population growth. It is hard to imagine Bloch countenancing this approach. Stressing the need to consider the physical realities of the individuals concerned, he argued that history was more than mere quantifiable data.

More recent developments in the work of the Annales historians might be considered closer to the spirit of Bloch’s original ideas. There has been a shift towards cultural history and a renewed emphasis on the idea of past mentalities. The work of Le Roy Ladurie and his fellow Annalistes Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff began to focus on material culture, language, religion and art as a way of writing a new “history of consciousness.” These approaches are closer to those used by Bloch.

It's also worth pointing out that the public profile of Marc Bloch’s work outside his native country was limited by the fact that his works were not translated into English until some years after his death in 1944: Strange Defeat in 1949, The Historian’s Craft in 1949, Feudal Society in 1961, French Rural History in 1966 and Land and Work in Medieval Europe in 1967. Feudal Society (originally published as La Société féodale in 1939), remains his most famous work.

For many, the key appeal in Marc Bloch’s work for historians today lies in his ability to clearly articulate historical problems. Alan Macfarlane describes how he has been influenced by Bloch’s various seminal texts at different points during his career as a historian. For Macfarlane, one of Bloch’s most important contributions is his belief that in order to fully understand the past, a historian should live in the present; in other words, his work should be informed by a knowledge of current issues and debates. Bloch demonstrates this belief at various points, such as in his discussion in Land and Work of how Germany’s imperial past has informed its ideas of nationhood, in his comparison of medieval seignorial power to that of modern commercial enterprise and in his argument for the re-evaluation of categories of currency, which he claims could have applications to the study of the recent economic history of the United States.

It is many years since Bloch’s death. Nevertheless, his work continues to be read widely and to exercise considerable influence – thanks to his status as one of the founders of the Annales school, but also, I think, because he was a highly original, imaginative scholar and capable of considerable insight and considerable nuance, all of which has helped his works survive the radical revision of historians' views on the nature, and even the existence, of "feudalism."

Of course, current proponents of the theories of that school, such as André Burguière, caution against the adoption of these ideas as doctrine, against an approach in which “a scriptural tradition takes root, sacralizing the founders’ texts, as if they had replied in advance to any questions the disciples might raise.” Such an approach would be counter to the aims of the Annales school itself, which saw history as a constantly evolving discipline; for this reason, the work of Bloch and Febvre requires constant re-evaluation. Like his predecessor Fernand Braudel, Burguière rejects the idea that the Annales movement set out to create a new paradigm in historical method. Instead he stresses that its approach was pragmatic and characterised by the blending of ideas from several disciplines. In his view, the most enduring aspect of the Annales’s historical methodology is the idea of mentalities, which he claims is “the best passport historians have at their disposal to gain access to the past.”