On Reading Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat

The Democrats’ loss in the election has led to a never-ending takes industry devoted to dissecting the defeat. The postmortems are more like score-settling, with centrists blaming the party for going left and leftists blaming the party for going center. Of course, the authors claim they were the ones who were right all along. These pieces have made reading about politics an exhausting waste of time.

One of my coping mechanisms post-election has been refusing to read anything written by a pundit. I have also decided to tear myself away from the tyranny of the screen and read as many books as I can. This last week I revisited Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, an account of France’s fall to fascism that was about a hundred times more enlightening than any of the hot takes polluting social media right now.

In case you don’t know, Bloch was an important French historian who pioneered social history through the annales school. He served in World War I, and again in the second war in his fifties. A true French patriot, he was also Jewish and a member of the Resistance, which would lead to his torture and death at the hands of the Nazis.

Strange Defeat is an attempt to understand the reasons for France’s loss, but unlike the pundits today, Bloch turned his microscope on everyone in French society, including himself. In fact, he is perhaps the most pointed when decrying the failures of his profession and social class to prevent catastrophe. He manages to do so, however, without devolving into polemic or bitterness. Bloch really and truly wants to see the defeat with clear eyes because he is writing a secret, unpublished tract to aid in resistance, not a public post calibrated for likes and engagement.

To be sure, Bloch is describing a very different time and place than 21st century America. I did not read the book seeking for parallels, but mostly in an attempt to draw lessons from his approach. With that caveat out of the way, Bloch’s description of a society too weak and disunited to prevent a fascist takeover hit pretty hard.

I first read the book in my first year as a PhD student in history. I can’t recall if I read it for a class or out of curiosity, but it certainly made an impression. That said, I was reading it in either the fall of 2000 or the spring of 2001, the very tail end of the “End of History” malaise that was about to turn into something far, far worse. In that moment Bloch’s book really did feel like a historical relic. I felt the earnestness of his analysis and tragedy of his death quite deeply, but it was more of a theoretical feeling. This time, it was a visceral feeling.

At the dawn of the new millennium the future seemed like it would be a lot like the present. The present certainly had a lot of issues then, but the dark days of the 1930s and 40s felt like they had been exorcised. Now fascism has returned and the future seems less like the present and more like the dark pasts that once seemed so far away. Bloch talks about his own generation having a “bad conscience” and that line chilled me to the core. I am in the generation that entered adulthood in that “end of history” moment, and a generation that has done little to avert the current crisis and a lot to abet it (especially if you look at voting data.)

There are a lot of fingers I could point right now. I could rail about the fatuousness of a “left” that values being a beautiful loser over making the compromises necessary to win. I could mock the centrists who stand for nothing and have contempt for the masses then are surprised when people don’t go out and vote for their preferred candidate. I could scream about the complacent white bourgeoisie that is already making peace with a Trump presidency because they are okay with migrants being thrown in camps if their taxes go down and their children have less competition for elite college admissions. I could rend my garments over the corrosive hypocrisy of Christians whose religion seems to merely consist of punishing the people they don’t like and making an alliance with a criminal scoundrel to do it. All of these things I feel, but in Bloch’s spirit, it’s time to look with clear eyes and put the mirror on myself and my generation.

We were born into the neoliberal turn, and did almost nothing to fight it. Our rebellion took the form of anti-social refusal, giving a middle finger or becoming a “slacker” in response to being the first generation in America to have lower prospects than our parents did. We stayed out of politics, and grumbled rather than gettitng organized. I could exonerate myself and say I was one of the people who actually cared, but really, what did I ACTUALLY DO to stop the groundwork of any of this? Mostly I just grumble about how interacting with other people in my demographic makes me want to gouge my ears out.

Bloch has a lot to say, but I was struck by his critique of the French military in World War II being dominated by old leaders who lacked imagination and the creativity to respond to new circumstances. Many people my age seem obsessed with being the last ones to get on the American Dream helicopter with the Boomers before all of the younger generations are left behind. Anything and anyone else can go to the devil as long as they get theirs. That’s exactly the message that Trump is feeding them. Even if I didn’t fall for it, I must reckon with the fact that the vast majority of people my age, race, class, sexuality, and gender bought it harder than any other demographic group in America.

Those of us who do care need to lead by example. That’s certainly what Bloch did. It’s time to point our fingers less at others and put our shoulders on the wheel. I am also inspired to have brutally honest conversations about where we are, but to have them with real life people that I am organizing with, not just blaring my opinions out in the arena of social media for clicks and clout. It will be for younger generations to create the new future, but perhaps those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows can help clear the way for them and to clean up the wreckage of our own failure.