L’orco, l’umano e la natura. Scienze e metodo storico nell’Apologie pour l’histoire di Marc Bloch

Written in the dramatic years of the Nazi occupation of France and the resistence, Apologie pour l’histoire is, on the one hand, a synthesis of Bloch’s new history which he championed since the foundation of the Annales (1929), and, on the other hand, both an instrument for the institutionalization of the new history in France, and a monument to 20th century historiography. Bloch was interested in the history of technology, and he tried (with Lucien Febvre) to place the history of science and technology within what they called “total history”; moreover, his historiography was close to the methods of the emerging human sciences (sociology and anthropology above all). However, this paper focuses on Bloch’s reflections on scientific method in the Apologie. It examines the analogies Bloch drew between scientific methods (observation, experimentation, and the reading of material traces) and historiographical methods on the grounds of the new scientific paradigms emerging in the first decades of the 20th century. This paper explores a tension in the Apologie between an older conception of time and nature (the legacy of Bloch’s 19th-century historiography which he studied in his education), and a new conception of the reversibility and fluidity of time, and of the borders between the human and the natural that were typical of early 20th-century scientific culture. The famous metaphor of the historian as the ogre of fairy tales who only looks for human flesh will be useful to analyze this tension, still interesting if read in the context of current trends in the history of science.