Five Reflections on Marc Bloch

The Historian’s Craft is one of the academic-investigative adventures directly inspired by Clio, tasked with passing the baton from one generation to the next in a long race that begins with humanity and will end with it. The logos entrusted to Herodotus is a testimony that every person carries within. Personal history and the history of society merge in that staff. That logos is verb, and the verb par excellence is life. And History is Life. This vital reason is a historical reason, as the Madrid philosopher would tell us, while also being a contradiction, in the words of the Salamanca rector of the Spanish Generation of '98.

Historia magistra vitae et testis temporum (History is the teacher of life and the witness of times) gave us, in the 20th century of the second millennium, a space for reflection—from the wonder of seeing a flying machine to the heartbreak of witnessing the atrocities of world wars and genocides in Africa, Asia, and our Abya Yala (formerly called America). And it is within one of these terrible human inventions that two historians meet, having experienced love for their fellow beings through understanding the present via the past and the past via the present. This does not preclude the condemnation that, as individuals and as a society, we must impose to ensure that crimes against humanity are never repeated. History as a cyclical entity is not part of the historian’s dictionary or that of those who cherish this craft. Marc Bloch and Carlo Ginzburg are two historians united by their unraveling of lived experience for humanity’s learning—and we say learning, for history is that concrete spirit that becomes one with the person. One, a victim of the Gestapo in Nazi concentration camps; the other, watching as his father was taken prisoner through the streets of Rome in an eternal farewell. A ciao, we might say, since a goodbye is a loss forever, while a ciao is a "see you soon." Bloch and Ginzburg are an eternal ciao.

Mom, what is history? It is very likely that young Carlo asked his mother this more than once. Dad, what is history? asked a child close to me, recounts the historian of the Annales school. This Historian’s Craft is what Carlo Ginzburg delivers in this work titled Five Reflections on Marc Bloch, which Editorial Cuadernos de Sofía is proud and honored to publish, thanks to the generosity of the historian behind The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, as well as the efforts of Mexican historian Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas.

We believe, like Niethammer, that truly democratic history is built from below. Truth stems and springs from the sweat of people’s vital experiences. Critical knowledge must be founded not on the vain obstruction of grand narratives but on the modest and trivial books of ordinary, subalternized people, whose sense of freedom and responsibility serves as the sole guarantee against both the dangers foreseen by the prophets of post-history and those they overlooked.

History is a fire that must not be extinguished. Today, amid a rampant pandemic that emerged as a strange epiphany, we emphasize that bold ideals, great human sacrifices, and heroic efforts fade into the monotonous routine of shopping and deliveries. Technical calculations replace imagination. The cry of owls in the night is mournful.

History will reach its end when the last human disappears from the face of the Earth—and perhaps not even then, for intergalactic archaeologists may dust off old books carved in stone, woven in cloth, etched in leather, printed on paper, or encoded in bits, to reconstruct this beautiful time and space of a civilization in a corner of the Milky Way.