Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and the Role of Feelings in History

by Iona Singh

The first difficulty with history, the one that hits you like an arrow, is the human factor: how should feelings be involved in recording the past.

For example, how should historians themselves deal with their own feelings, and should feelings be allowed to endow historical accounts of events and people, not only of the individuals involved, but in their relationship to each other, as groups and communities that have commonality according to class and culture, and even across populations.

Obviously, everyone experiences a variety of feelings according to how their life has gone and how they react emotionally according to forces, circumstances, psychology, expectations and traditions, making any comprehension of the feelings involved in a history of this potentially infinitesimal and mentally confusing. Hence, understanding the role of feelings and emotions, the emotional life of the past has caused great difficulty. 

Arguments between modern historians, since Ranke, put very generally, veer towards making history an ‘unemotional’ collection of information, empirical facts, minimising or negating feelings on the part of the historian in favour of data. Or the school that opposes this by contrast, stating there is no such thing as empirical history because all history is churned out by historians and is therefore entirely subject to the feelings and persona of historians; that history can only be a kind of reflection of who the historian is.

Bloch and Febvre solved the dilemma between these two spheres with their remit that history must have a notion of feeling built into it, providing that this conception of feeling is entirely scientific according to their historiography and method. They reiterate in fact, that history requires the sensory, sensible element of feeling in order to be scientific at all.

How did they arrive at this?

Bloch and Febvre* understood the historian as limited by their own species, which lends her or him the ability to have empathy, sometimes profound empathy for other members of their species (and others as well). To the extent that the human historian can emotionally conjecture - provided they first research the historical circumstances, situations and events as thoroughly as possible - as to how and why individuals, groups and communities behaved, felt and reacted, even if they lived 1000 years ago. Any precision here comes from the amassing of information by the historian, doing as thorough a job as possible, to enable them to construct an emotional ‘environment’ within which lived and felt the lives and communities of the past. 

Jules Michelet and Augustin Thierry, predecessors of Bloch and Febvre, heralded immersion into the study of the adventures of people and their customs and social life. They provided Bloch and Febvre with the tools to shift the concept of an ‘idea’ coming from a single individual, to a collation of ideas and feelings (unconscious communication is alluded to here)  dispersed beyond the individual to groups and communities.  

On a wider scale, Bloch and Febvre's concept of feeling or sensibilities as they called them, go beyond historical studies to provide assistance to the general question of empiricism versus idealism. A problem that existed/exists in most disciplines and in its purer form in philosophy. The issue of how ‘ideas’ and the rational relate to the ‘empirical’, the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’, is understood here by adding a conciliatory element; a sensuous processor that brings together and facilitates internal and external information - the visceral human faculty of sensibilities. Although acknowledged in prior historiographical arguments, sensibilities are presented by Bloch and Febvre in the specific form of a scientific method for history. Engaging thus the material human nervous system, the evolution of the body, emotionally and linguistically (which can also be construed in the work of Chomsky and Freud among others), in a systematic and fundamental schema, and hence as scientific. As such this science has common ground with other sciences that also shape Bloch and Febvre's work (examples of these are found in Bloch's essays in my book): psychology, physiology (nourishment), technology (the effect of radio transmission and the history of time keeping), biology, geography and physics.

Other influences on Bloch and Febvre on this path may have been Marx’s inclusion of the role of feelings in his ‘1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ and in 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon'.And their ideas run parallel to Walter Benjamin's text ‘The Author as Producer’, all themes more recently covered by Gary Tedman’s conception of an aesthetic level of practice (Tedman, 2012, Zero Books).

Iona Singh

* See Lucien Febvre's essay 'Sensibilities and history', RFP 1973.

A few translator’s observations on 'The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944'

Bloomsbury Academic 2025

Translated and edited by Iona Singh

Sick of thinking my own thoughts and writing them down, the possibility of trying to get into someone else’s thoughts and writing them down instead interested me. I knew Lucien Febvre’s work and his subtle approach to the role of feelings from A new kind of history, Sensibility and history and History and psychology (RKP 1973). These are fantastic essays, unique in their field, the kind you dream about when trying to understand the social and political affects of art and design, for example, and they can be applied way beyond the realms of historical studies. And Febvre, in these essays kept mentioning this person Bloch, he died in the war, shot by the Germans, and was a great loss.

When I first began as a French to English translator, some years before, I had the naive idea that some of the ‘Frenchness’ of the original language should be maintained in the translation, if possible, even if this was not quite correct English. A slight miscommunication with the editor of a Publisher I was translating several books for convinced me they wanted a literal translation of the tenses used in French. English and French are different in this way, the imperfect tense, for example, is used more frequently in French. I’m embarrassed to say this now, but I followed this through and the translation read like the events were ongoing and in the present, like the editorial of Hello magazine. Luckily, the misunderstanding was soon straightened out, forgiven, and I never did that again!

This is one set of innumerable choices that the translator must make to determine not just how to interpret the meaning of the original writing but also the way it is expressed, I would call this the politics of translation. Is a text to be translated formally or officiously or is it casual, should I use slang words or stick to polite terms, middle class or aristocratic phrases and how literal do you need to be in the translation in order to really convey what the writer wants.

These were all questions I needed to mull, especially when translating the writings of Marc Bloch. In the beginning it still seemed charming to retain a little of his French expressions and grammar, but by the time I had finished, over years, I ended up understanding that I only needed to convey what Bloch actually MEANT and that alone. And often these charming Frenchisms got in the way and definitely had to GO.

Translating a work awards a great deal of power, leverage and responsibility to an interpreter. For me the best way to honour that was to grasp the sentiment of what Bloch wanted to say, the feeling, as well as the language. I decided it needed to be like Bloch chatting out loud and explaining it. His writing has a chatty element and by the end of the process, every time I read it, I could hear him saying the words out to me in English (with an English accent)?!

It helps a translator to understand what they can about the personality of the translated. When I began stumbling through Bloch’s long sinuous sentences (even his biographer Carole Fink mentioned these as difficult) and pairing them with the stiff war time photos of a middle-aged Bloch and his grand position in French education, I was intimidated into reading and translating his texts literally and formally, which came across as a bit boring and slightly pompous. But with perseverance the nuances emerged and I realised it was in fact ME reading these things into the work. If his writing is a bit polite and formal at times it needs to be adjusted against the politeness and formality of the epoch which is finally therefore negated to reveal that Bloch, who was mainly addressing young people, students, and academics from outside the mainstream discipline of history, was trying to convey things on their level. From then on, the sentiment of what Bloch actually MEANT and how he meant to say it became much clearer.

And how did he mean to say it? After Bloch’s death in the war Lucien Febvre recalls him recounting an argument wearing ‘that slightly amused look on his face’. And that image clicked with me, because on removing those starchy barriers whether from Bloch’s own pages or from inside my head, that comment dovetailed with the texts to reveal that Bloch was funny. That the contradictions he points out are befuddling puzzles he’s trying to solve, and they often quite amuse him.

The difficulty of trying to get to this as a translator, to facilitate his words as if he is enunciating them, (some of the chapters in the book are transcriptions of lectures) and informally speaking to his class, became the main challenge. When translating from French, the words chosen from the available English are not, of course, to be translated on their own, they are part of a line of words, and sentences of words, and each of these, adjusts the others. The meaning, starts as a fluid dynamic, moving through the intellectual variables of space and time, but gradually in view of the wider text, this is homed in and any inexactitudes whittled away until the meanings are contained within their correct limits and the spirit, irony, and humour finally comes clean.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Marc Bloch chatting to me over many afternoons while the thread of his language was checked and rechecked - even if I couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes little paragraphs that caused so much trouble at the time still come back to me out of the blue. Ancient words in French I did not know but now will never forget, and I’ve talked about them so much to my husband that he won’t forget them either. And now the book is published it's a bit of a shame to leave my talkative old mate behind.

A reviewer of the book mentioned that Bloch’s voice ‘shines through’ from within the edition but made no reference to the role of translation in this. Bloch’s voice does shine through, but not of its own accord as some transcendental force that asserts itself under any circumstances, it shines through by the material mechanics of translation, the processes of understanding what that voice is and of eventually ridding it of anything that stifles it.  

Iona Singh

The paperback edition of The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944 is available from 20 August 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/selected-writings-of-marc-bloch-9781350513433/ and Amazon.