Eighty-two years after his execution by the Gestapo on June 16, 1944, the historian and Jewish resistance fighter Marc Bloch will enter the Pantheon on June 23, Emmanuel Macron’s entourage informed Agence France-Presse (AFP), Sunday February 8.
In November 2024, during a speech in Strasbourg on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Alsatian capital, the head of state announced his pantheonization, “for his work, his teaching and his courage”. The president praised his “scathing lucidity which still strikes us today”son “audacity of words and ideas which was coupled with physical courage” and its “French will until its last breath, until assassination by the Gestapo”.
His family demands that the far right be excluded from the ceremony
Coming from an Alsatian Jewish family, professor of medieval history at the University of Strasbourg from 1919 to 1936, Marc Bloch profoundly renewed the field of historical research by extending it to sociology, geography, psychology and economics. Captain and Croix de Guerre in 1914-1918, mobilized again in 1939, he got involved in the resistance at the turn of 1942-1943.
The author of The Strange Defeatwritten in 1940 and published after the war, was arrested in Lyon on March 8, 1944, imprisoned and tortured at Montluc prison in Lyon, then shot on June 16 with 29 of his comrades.
The date of June 16 had initially been anticipated for his entry into the Pantheon, but the ceremony had to be postponed by a few days due to the G7 which will be held in Evian-les-Bains, in Haute-Savoie, from June 15 to 17. In a letter to the President of the Republic, consulted by AFP, his family requested that “the extreme right, in all its forms, be excluded from any participation in the ceremony”.
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