French scholar and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch, who was tortured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944, entered the Pantheon on Tuesday, becoming the first historian to receive the honour bestowed on exceptional figures in politics, culture and science.
Soldiers on Tuesday evening carried in two symbolic caskets representing Marc Bloch and his wife Simonne Vidal into the former church in the French capital’s Latin Quarter.
President Emmanuel Macron in his homage described the scholar of Jewish heritage, who fought in both World Wars, as a “man of the Enlightenment” who chose “the army of the shadows” – a reference to the French Resistance.
But “Marc Bloch’s resistance was also in thinking and writing,” said Macron, referring to one of his most widely cited works on France’s collapse to Nazi Germany in 1940.
Bloch and his wife’s caskets contained his medals and photographs, as well as letters from her to their children, according to the historian’s granddaughter Suzette Bloch.
