French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Saturday, November 23, that scholar and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch, tortured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944, would be reinterred in the Panthéon – the Paris monument to France's greatest citizens.
Macron made the announcement as France marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the eastern city of Strasbourg from Nazi occupation.
Bloch would be honored "for his work, his teaching and his courage," the president said, calling him a "man of the Enlightenment in the army of the shadows" – the nickname for the French Resistance.
A First World War veteran and medieval history professor in Strasbourg from 1919 to 1936, Bloch revolutionized the field by bringing in ideas from sociology, geography, psychology and economics. His 1940 book L'Etrange Défaite (Strange Defeat), only published after the war, blamed France's elites for failing to prepare adequately for war with Nazi Germany.