The Origins of Freemasonry and the Invention of Tradition
‘ History is therefore never history , but history-for .’
— Claude Lévi-Strauss 1
Among the most famous and remarkable French historians was
Marc Bloch , one of the founders of the Annales school which pioneered the use of sociological , anthropological and comparative techniques in the study of history . After the fall of Vichy France in 1942 , Bloch joined the French resistance . He was captured in Lyon in 1944 and handed over to Klaus Barbie , the head of the Lyon Gestapo . During his imprisonment , Bloch was beaten and tortured . Following the D-day invasion , the Nazis were anxious to dispose of French prisoners and on 6 June 1944 , 75 years ago , Bloch was executed by firing squad . 2
Among the works by Bloch which were published after his death was The Historian ’ s Craft ( Apologie pour l ' histoire , ou Metier d ' historien ), a series of reflections on the historian ’ s method . 3 Ever since its appearance in 1949 , The Historian ’ s Craft has profoundly influenced the way historians think about what they do and how they ap- proach both the past and the present . Among the most celebrated chapters in this short book is ‘ The Idol of Origins ’, in which Bloch suggests that the besetting sin of historians is an obsession with origins . 4 Bloch cites the historian of religion Ernest Renan as an exemplar of the preoccupation of historians with origins , summarising from memory Renan ' s views : ‘ In all human affairs , it is the origins which deserve study before everything else ’. 5 Bloch reminds us how frequently books appear with titles like the Origins of Contemporary France , the Origins of the Reformation or the Origins of the French Revolution .
There is often an ambiguity about the way historians use the term ‘ origins ’. Sometimes they use it as a shorthand for the beginnings of a particular phenomenon . On other occasions , they use origins to mean causes . In Bloch ' s opinion , the danger occurs when the two become conflated — when we assume that we can understand historical events by tracing their beginnings . Simply identifying how something began does not explain how it developed . If we think about the history of Christianity , whether or not Christ was crucified and resurrected is not a very interesting question — what happened to Christ
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss , The Savage Mind ( London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson , 1966 ), p . 257 . This paper was originally given as a keynote lecture at the 3rd World Conference on Fraternalism , Social Capital and Civil Society at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France , 14 June 2019 . Thanks are due to Paul Rich and the Policy Studies Organisation for their support .
2 For an English introduction to the work of Marc Bloch , see Carole Fink , Marc Bloch : A Life in History ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1989 ).
3 The standard English translation is : Marc Bloch , The Historian ' s Craft , trans . Peter Putnam with an introduction by Peter Burke ( Manchester : Manchester University Press , 1992 ).
4 Bloch , Historian ' s Craft , pp . 24-9 . 5 Bloch , Historian ' s Craft , pp . 24-5 .
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