BLOCH, CAMILLE

BLOCH, CAMILLE (1865–1949), French historian, archivist, and librarian. A professor at the Sorbonne, Bloch was an authority on the French Revolution and its economic and social antecedents; he was secretary-general of the Society for the Study of the French Revolution. He was archivist of the Aude departement (1891–96) and the Loiret departement (1896–1904) and in 1904 became inspector general of libraries and archives. In World War I he became director of the War Library and War Museum in Paris, and historian of the war period. His Les causes de la guerre mondiale (1933; The Causes of the World War, 1935) is an important work. During the Nazi period, Bloch was hidden in southern France. After 1945 he supervised for the French government the recovery of books looted by the Germans. He left an unfinished study on the Munich Pact of 1938. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: P. Renouvin, in: Revue Historique, 202 (1949), 147–9; Dictionnaire de biographie française, 6 (1954), 677; New York Times (Feb. 16, 1949) 25. (Herbert A. Strauss)