French resistance fighter and historian Marc Bloch will be inducted into the Pantheon in Paris on Tuesday, giving President Emmanuel Macron another chance to shape France’s national memory through one of the Republic’s most symbolic ceremonies.
Issued on: 23/06/2026 - 11:40
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Bloch - who was tortured by the Gestapo and executed in 1944 - will become the first historian inducted into the monument under the Fifth Republic. The Elysée Palace described him as “a man of the Enlightenment” and “the thinker of the century”. “He was a man who reflected on the past in order to act in the present. He did not have a static view of history; for him, it had to serve action in the here and now,” the Elysée Palace said in a statement. The ceremony was preceded by a vigil on Monday evening at the École normale supérieure in Paris, the university where Bloch studied from 1904 to 1908. On Tuesday morning, the coffins of Bloch and his wife Simonne Vidal were carried in procession to the Pantheon. Vidal will accompany him at the family’s request but will not herself be honoured there.
A gravestone plaque bearing the name of French historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch at the cemetery of Le Bourg-d'Hem, central France on 1 June 2026. Bloch, born in Lyon on July 6, 1886, was executed by the Gestapo at Saint-Didier-de-Formans on 16 June 1944, and is set to be inducted into the Pantheon in Paris on 23 June 2026. AFP - PHILIPPE LOPEZ
