L'étrange défaite

First edition, with no deluxe-paper copies issued. Privately published by the Société des Éditions Franc-Tireur, a publishing house established at the Liberation from the clandestine newspaper of the same name, one of the leading organs of the Resistance press in the southern zone.

The foreword is by Georges Altman, editor-in-chief of Franc-Tireur, who had himself brought Marc Bloch into the Resistance in 1943.

Photographic portrait of Marc Bloch as frontispiece.

Spine and covers lightly and marginally sunned, as is usual, with a few small spots of foxing to the covers.

Written at a single stretch in the Creuse during the summer of 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the debacle, this text, which Bloch himself entitled « Témoignage », remained unpublished until after his death. Entrusted for safekeeping to a geographer friend and subsequently concealed by members of the Resistance, the manuscript narrowly escaped discovery by a German patrol before being buried and eventually recovered.

Beyond its indictment of the military establishment, the work derives its enduring significance from its author's very method: Bloch brings the historian's critical tools to bear upon events still unfolding, turning upon himself and his country the scrutiny he ordinarily applied to the Middle Ages. His criticism of the high command is continually accompanied by reflections on the deeper causes of the disaster, expressed with remarkable insight despite the absence of historical distance. It is this lucidity, grounded in intellectual honesty and an unwavering refusal to evade the facts, that has secured the work a place far beyond the specialist circle of historians of the period.

Bloch, a medieval historian, co-founder with Lucien Febvre of the journal Annales in 1929, and professor first at Strasbourg and later at the Sorbonne, was excluded from teaching under the Statut des Juifs of October 1940, before obtaining an exemption and a post at Montpellier. The same legislation compelled the removal of his name from the Annales masthead, although he continued to contribute under the pseudonym « M. Fougères »; his name would reappear there only after his death, preceded by a black cross.

Having taken refuge in Lyon, he was recruited into the Resistance by Georges Altman, then clandestinely directing both the Franc-Tireur movement and its newspaper. Bloch adopted the pseudonym « Narbonne » and, in July 1943, became one of the three members of the regional directorate of the Mouvements unis de la Résistance. Arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944 and tortured, he was executed by firing squad near Lyon on 16 June 1944. This foundational work of French self-examination following the defeat of 1940 was therefore published posthumously in 1946, with a foreword by the very man who had led its author into clandestine resistance.

The induction of Marc Bloch into the Panthéon in June 2026, alongside his wife Simonne, lends this text a particularly immediate resonance, with L'étrange défaite occupying a central place in the commemorations. A stage adaptation was also performed in the nave of the monument a few days after the ceremony. 

A valuable copy in its original state of this major testimony to the collapse of 1940, privately printed in a small number of copies by the publishing house born of the Resistance movement in which Bloch fought, and bearing the tribute of the man who had brought him into its ranks.