Marc Bloch will soon be honoured in France’s Panthéon—but his greatest legacy lies not in where he rests, but in how he taught us to understand the medieval world. Joëlle Rollo-Koster explores why Feudal Society still matters, even as historians have challenged many of its conclusions.
By Joëlle Rollo-Koster
On June 23, 2026, the French medieval historian Marc Bloch will be inducted into the Panthéon, the resting place of figures who shaped France’s intellectual and political life. Originally built as a church in the eighteenth century, the Panthéon became, after the French Revolution, a national mausoleum. Bloch will join figures such as Marie Curie, Simone Veil, Émile Zola, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Josephine Baker, and Jean Moulin.
In the foreword to the Routledge Classics edition of Feudal Society, Geoffrey Koziol offers perhaps the clearest reason for reading Bloch today: “We read it because of what he would have regarded as his acts of citizenship.” Bloch’s scholarship cannot be separated from his civic conscience. According to a Smithsonian Magazine account based on survivors of the execution that killed him, Bloch, at fifty-eight, held the hands of a terrified sixteen-year-old boy moments before they were shot, reassuring him and shouting “Vive la France!” as the firing began.
Respect is certainly due to such a man. But respect alone is not enough. The most meaningful way to honor Bloch is to read him.
Not for His Conclusions—but for His Method
Marc Bloch – Wikimedia Commons
We should not read Bloch because his model of feudalism remains unchallenged. It does not.
As a woman historian I buck at his male-dominated patriarchal feudal world, where he relegated women to their traditional “pawn” place. Largely they existed to transmit property—notwithstanding the help, physical and intellectual, that Marc’s wife Simonne Vidal offered him. Autres temps, autres mœurs as they say. Rather, we should read Bloch because his method—holistic, comparative, structural, ethically grounded, remains foundational to modern historical thinking. We read Feudal Society not to learn “what feudalism was,” but to learn how to think historically. And while Bloch never delivered a feminist agenda, his views on social groups and total history paved the way for women’s history.
The Annales Revolution
Marc Bloch, his wife Simonne Vidal, and their two youngest children (circa 1932) – Wikimedia Commons
It is not my purpose to rehearse Bloch’s biography in detail. Others have done so skillfully. What matters here is his intellectual contribution. In 1929, Bloch co-founded the journal Annales with Lucien Febvre, launching what would become the Annales School.
This movement transformed historical writing. Against political narrative and event-driven history, the Annales historians emphasized social structures, economic rhythms, environments, collective mentalities, and long-term change (la longue durée). They favored comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on geography, sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology. Close to a century later, this sensibility still shapes how historians practice their craft.
Rethinking Feudalism
A Jew of France’s Third Republic, Bloch benefited from a meritocratic university system that carried him from Strasbourg to the Sorbonne, but not to the Collège de France. The Dreyfus Affair was not distant history; in the early twentieth century, even a self-confident and patriotic Jew met clear institutional limits. That marginality, intellectual and social, helps situate Bloch’s deep suspicion of inevitable historical progress, nationalism, and heroic historical narratives.
Alongside The Royal Touch (1924), focused on the “healing” powers of the medieval kings of France and England, Feudal Society is Bloch’s most influential work. It offered not a legal definition of feudalism, as earlier scholars had done, but a synthetic social history of medieval Europe. Feudalism was presented as a total social structure encompassing environment, mentalities, kinship relations, law, political authority, and class.
Methodologically, the book rejected chronology in favor of thematic and structural analysis, moving from material conditions to human relationships, institutions, and social hierarchies. Feudalism, for Bloch, was not merely a system of fiefs and vassals but the product of insecurity, fragmentation of power, and personal dependency. Its bonds were contractual yet deeply social, shaped by reciprocal obligation and fear rather than abstract legality. Crucially, Bloch defined feudal ties against kinship: “feudal ties proper were developed when those of kinship proved inadequate.”
Since Bloch’s time, historians have challenged the very concept of feudalism. In 1974, Elizabeth (Peggy) A. R. Brown famously declared that “the tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed.” Susan Reynolds, a generation later, further dismantled the model by emphasizing the diversity, horizontality, and customary nature of medieval social relations, especially before the twelfth century. Legal coherence was often imposed retrospectively, not lived contemporaneously. Free holdings (allods) predominated; relationships were less vertical and less systematized than Bloch had assumed. In short “feudalism” and “feudal” may be a teaching, rationalizing tool to explain something that people at the time did not recognize as such, a term of convenience like most of the “ism’s.”
And yet this is precisely why Bloch still matters.
Entering the Medieval World
What endures is not the rigidity of his model but the acuity of his intuition. Bloch understood feudalism as an adaptive response to disruption and insecurity, an insight that allowed him to weave environment, material constraints, and mental climate into historical explanation. His attention to climate, landscape, subsistence, fear, and habit was radical for 1939. He treated mentalities—attitudes toward time, religion, nature, memory, and authority—not as mere side effects but as historical forces. Concepts that now shape historians’ everyday practice were, in Bloch’s hands, innovative tools.
No historian before him could have embedded, within a discussion of medieval society, a passage like this, regardless of the fact that we now discard the “two feudal ages”:
The men of the two feudal ages were close to nature—much closer than we are; and nature as they knew it was much less tamed and softened than we see it today. The rural landscape, of which the waste formed so large a part, bore fewer traces of human influence. The wild animals that now only haunt our nursery tales—bears and, above all, wolves—prowled in every wilderness, and even amongst the cultivated fields. So much was this the case that the sport of hunting was indispensable for ordinary security, and almost equally so as a method of supplementing the food supply. People continued to pick wild fruit and to gather honey as in the first ages of mankind. In the construction of implements and tools, wood played a predominant part. The nights, owing to the wretched lighting, were darker; the cold, even in the living quarters of the castles, was more intense. In short, behind all social life there was a background of the primitive, of submission to uncontrollable forces, of unrelieved physical contrasts.
Anyone who has read or seen The Princess Bride recognizes Bloch’s shadow in William Goldman’s Fire Swamp–populated by ever-present danger and RUS (rodent of unusual size)–even if Goldman himself never acknowledged the debt. Bloch was the first to place us inside the mental and material world of medieval people and make it feel real.
Bloch’s Legacy
From the Introduction to Feudal Society
For that reason, even as we critique his conclusions, Bloch remains indispensable. He was the first to offer a genuinely holistic vision of the Middle Ages, one that displaced political narrative with social structure, legal abstraction with lived practice, and elite action with collective experience. His legacy runs through Fernand Braudel’s environmental and structural history, Georges Duby’s reintegration of kinship and lordship, Pierre Goubert’s social demography, Jacques Le Goff’s studies of medieval imaginaries, Philippe Ariès’s exploration of unconscious social structures, and, today, Chris Wickham’s comparative and non-legalistic analysis of medieval Europe.
Anyone who treats feudalism as a social condition rather than a code, who prioritizes relationships, obligations, practices, and mentalities, who rejects teleology and nationalism, and who employs comparative and interdisciplinary methods is, knowingly or not, an heir to Marc Bloch’s historical method. I am.
This is why we should still read him.
Joëlle Rollo-Koster is professor of medieval history at the University of Rhode Island and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She recently co-edited the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Papacy.
La Société féodale, by Marc Bloch was published in 1939-1940 in two volumes:
This English version has been republished several times since, sometimes with new introductions. Check out the Routledge reprint here. The book has also been translated into several other languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, Portuguese, and Japanese.
Marc Bloch will soon be honoured in France’s Panthéon—but his greatest legacy lies not in where he rests, but in how he taught us to understand the medieval world. Joëlle Rollo-Koster explores why Feudal Society still matters, even as historians have challenged many of its conclusions.
By Joëlle Rollo-Koster
On June 23, 2026, the French medieval historian Marc Bloch will be inducted into the Panthéon, the resting place of figures who shaped France’s intellectual and political life. Originally built as a church in the eighteenth century, the Panthéon became, after the French Revolution, a national mausoleum. Bloch will join figures such as Marie Curie, Simone Veil, Émile Zola, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Josephine Baker, and Jean Moulin.
In the foreword to the Routledge Classics edition of Feudal Society, Geoffrey Koziol offers perhaps the clearest reason for reading Bloch today: “We read it because of what he would have regarded as his acts of citizenship.” Bloch’s scholarship cannot be separated from his civic conscience. According to a Smithsonian Magazine account based on survivors of the execution that killed him, Bloch, at fifty-eight, held the hands of a terrified sixteen-year-old boy moments before they were shot, reassuring him and shouting “Vive la France!” as the firing began.
Respect is certainly due to such a man. But respect alone is not enough. The most meaningful way to honor Bloch is to read him.
Not for His Conclusions—but for His Method
We should not read Bloch because his model of feudalism remains unchallenged. It does not.
As a woman historian I buck at his male-dominated patriarchal feudal world, where he relegated women to their traditional “pawn” place. Largely they existed to transmit property—notwithstanding the help, physical and intellectual, that Marc’s wife Simonne Vidal offered him. Autres temps, autres mœurs as they say. Rather, we should read Bloch because his method—holistic, comparative, structural, ethically grounded, remains foundational to modern historical thinking. We read Feudal Society not to learn “what feudalism was,” but to learn how to think historically. And while Bloch never delivered a feminist agenda, his views on social groups and total history paved the way for women’s history.
The Annales Revolution
It is not my purpose to rehearse Bloch’s biography in detail. Others have done so skillfully. What matters here is his intellectual contribution. In 1929, Bloch co-founded the journal Annales with Lucien Febvre, launching what would become the Annales School.
This movement transformed historical writing. Against political narrative and event-driven history, the Annales historians emphasized social structures, economic rhythms, environments, collective mentalities, and long-term change (la longue durée). They favored comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on geography, sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology. Close to a century later, this sensibility still shapes how historians practice their craft.
Rethinking Feudalism
A Jew of France’s Third Republic, Bloch benefited from a meritocratic university system that carried him from Strasbourg to the Sorbonne, but not to the Collège de France. The Dreyfus Affair was not distant history; in the early twentieth century, even a self-confident and patriotic Jew met clear institutional limits. That marginality, intellectual and social, helps situate Bloch’s deep suspicion of inevitable historical progress, nationalism, and heroic historical narratives.
Alongside The Royal Touch (1924), focused on the “healing” powers of the medieval kings of France and England, Feudal Society is Bloch’s most influential work. It offered not a legal definition of feudalism, as earlier scholars had done, but a synthetic social history of medieval Europe. Feudalism was presented as a total social structure encompassing environment, mentalities, kinship relations, law, political authority, and class.
Methodologically, the book rejected chronology in favor of thematic and structural analysis, moving from material conditions to human relationships, institutions, and social hierarchies. Feudalism, for Bloch, was not merely a system of fiefs and vassals but the product of insecurity, fragmentation of power, and personal dependency. Its bonds were contractual yet deeply social, shaped by reciprocal obligation and fear rather than abstract legality. Crucially, Bloch defined feudal ties against kinship: “feudal ties proper were developed when those of kinship proved inadequate.”
Since Bloch’s time, historians have challenged the very concept of feudalism. In 1974, Elizabeth (Peggy) A. R. Brown famously declared that “the tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed.” Susan Reynolds, a generation later, further dismantled the model by emphasizing the diversity, horizontality, and customary nature of medieval social relations, especially before the twelfth century. Legal coherence was often imposed retrospectively, not lived contemporaneously. Free holdings (allods) predominated; relationships were less vertical and less systematized than Bloch had assumed. In short “feudalism” and “feudal” may be a teaching, rationalizing tool to explain something that people at the time did not recognize as such, a term of convenience like most of the “ism’s.”
And yet this is precisely why Bloch still matters.
Entering the Medieval World
What endures is not the rigidity of his model but the acuity of his intuition. Bloch understood feudalism as an adaptive response to disruption and insecurity, an insight that allowed him to weave environment, material constraints, and mental climate into historical explanation. His attention to climate, landscape, subsistence, fear, and habit was radical for 1939. He treated mentalities—attitudes toward time, religion, nature, memory, and authority—not as mere side effects but as historical forces. Concepts that now shape historians’ everyday practice were, in Bloch’s hands, innovative tools.
No historian before him could have embedded, within a discussion of medieval society, a passage like this, regardless of the fact that we now discard the “two feudal ages”:
The men of the two feudal ages were close to nature—much closer than we are; and nature as they knew it was much less tamed and softened than we see it today. The rural landscape, of which the waste formed so large a part, bore fewer traces of human influence. The wild animals that now only haunt our nursery tales—bears and, above all, wolves—prowled in every wilderness, and even amongst the cultivated fields. So much was this the case that the sport of hunting was indispensable for ordinary security, and almost equally so as a method of supplementing the food supply. People continued to pick wild fruit and to gather honey as in the first ages of mankind. In the construction of implements and tools, wood played a predominant part. The nights, owing to the wretched lighting, were darker; the cold, even in the living quarters of the castles, was more intense. In short, behind all social life there was a background of the primitive, of submission to uncontrollable forces, of unrelieved physical contrasts.
Anyone who has read or seen The Princess Bride recognizes Bloch’s shadow in William Goldman’s Fire Swamp–populated by ever-present danger and RUS (rodent of unusual size)–even if Goldman himself never acknowledged the debt. Bloch was the first to place us inside the mental and material world of medieval people and make it feel real.
Bloch’s Legacy
For that reason, even as we critique his conclusions, Bloch remains indispensable. He was the first to offer a genuinely holistic vision of the Middle Ages, one that displaced political narrative with social structure, legal abstraction with lived practice, and elite action with collective experience. His legacy runs through Fernand Braudel’s environmental and structural history, Georges Duby’s reintegration of kinship and lordship, Pierre Goubert’s social demography, Jacques Le Goff’s studies of medieval imaginaries, Philippe Ariès’s exploration of unconscious social structures, and, today, Chris Wickham’s comparative and non-legalistic analysis of medieval Europe.
Anyone who treats feudalism as a social condition rather than a code, who prioritizes relationships, obligations, practices, and mentalities, who rejects teleology and nationalism, and who employs comparative and interdisciplinary methods is, knowingly or not, an heir to Marc Bloch’s historical method. I am.
This is why we should still read him.
Joëlle Rollo-Koster is professor of medieval history at the University of Rhode Island and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She recently co-edited the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Papacy.
La Société féodale, by Marc Bloch was published in 1939-1940 in two volumes:
In 1961, L. A. Manyon did an English translation, Feudal Society. The two volumes are called:
This English version has been republished several times since, sometimes with new introductions. Check out the Routledge reprint here. The book has also been translated into several other languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, Portuguese, and Japanese.
You can also read the journal Annales – it is available on Persee, Cambridge Core and Jstor.
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