Those Americans for whom the name Marc Bloch has meaning probably first encountered it in the mid-1960s; it was then, some twenty years after the French historian’s death, that his more successful books began to appear in English. The Historian’s Craft (1963) is a charming, if regrettably unfinished, account of what historians do (or should try to do); Strange Defeat (1967) is a personal reflection on the causes of France’s sudden collapse in 1940; Feudal Society (1961)—a hefty, initially rather forbidding tome—proves that vast, even massive learning can be worn (as well as absorbed) lightly and well. Carole Fink’s masterly biography now reveals the unsuspectedly dramatic details which shaped and determined the man’s life and work.

Born in Lyon in 1886, Bloch was the scion of a family of Alsatian Jews who had become assimilated into French life after the emancipation decrees of the 1790s. His father, Gustave Bloch, was a scholar of ancient history who taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and subsequently at the Sorbonne. As Fink explains it, “Gustave Bloch was one of the group of assimilated Jewish savants who, encouraged by the liberal, reformist atmosphere and institutions of the Third Republic, entered disciplines once alien to their people.” Marc Bloch followed a similar trajectory, rising to even higher achievement but—this is perhaps the point of Fink’s book—under far less propitious circumstances.

A normalienlike his father, Bloch went on to teach history at lycées in Montepellier (1912) and Amiens (1913-14) until the outbreak