France recently made a choice that re-affirmed what she reveres and encourages. It arguably offers inspiration for everyone, so is worthy of special note today, Bastille Day.

For over 200 years, France has honored her very greatest citizens at the Panthéon, a grand temple-like structure in Paris. Only a very select cohort get commemorated there, those who excelled in service to the nation, or to literature and science of global stature. For comparison, the ashes of Voltaire, the greatest philosopher of France or almost anywhere, are enshrined within. Many others were Napoleonic officials largely unknown today, reflecting evolving political and cultural priorities.

But this year, French President Macron directed that, for the first time, an historian, Marc Bloch, be ‘Panthéonisé,’ have a monument within its walls. The attached video shows part of the formal ceremony of his induction into this Gallic Valhalla (Gal-halla?). This reflects not only gratitude, but inspiration – even appropriate awe – at his glorious example.

This exalted privilege was bestowed on Bloch partly for his immense contributions to global study of history, but also for selflessly risking his life opposing France’s Nazi occupiers, who eventually martyred him.

His scholarly deeds alone might qualify him for this elevation, but his extraordinary bravery absolutely must. Other great minds (Zola, Marie Curie, Victor Hugo etc.), and gallant citizens (Jean Moulin, another patriot martyr) are lionized there, but few, if any, others so exemplify both the ‘Light and Fire’ – the mind and the spirit – referenced by this post’s title.

Fittingly, the Panthéon is not far from the Sorbonne, France’s elite university and venerable epicenter of academic excellence. Bloch taught there during the 1930s, contributing substantially to its heritage.

Born in Lyon in 1886, he was ardently patriotic, out of unforced love for his homeland, and her Revolutionary pillars, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. He fought valiantly for France in World War I, was wounded twice, receiving two of his nation’s highest awards, the Croix de Guerre medal, and induction into her Legion of Honor. A secular Jew, Bloch likely felt spurred to demonstrate his loyalty in response to the Dreyfus Affair, when a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of espionage. It had convulsed the country during his childhood, and its anti-Semitic tremors lingered long.

After the Great War, he resumed his studies, devising (with colleague Lucien Lefebvre) the Annales School of history. That method examined the impact of ordinary people, not the famous and powerful, on historical events. Since there are few records, for example, of lives of serfs (topic of Bloch’s magnum opus ‘Feudal Society’), ‘Annales’ inquiry required cross-disciplinary extrapolation from long-disregarded sources to study them.

This approach implicitly bypassed ‘Great Man’ history, focused on Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Churchill, etc. Ironic, as Bloch will now be remembered in a temple officially dedicated to the nation’s ‘Great Men.’

When France declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, Bloch, by then a 53 year-old professor, re-enlisted in the Army as a logistician. It was patriotic, but probably also from fierce desire to obstruct Hitler, embodiment of all that Bloch, elite scholar and individualist citizen, must detest. The feeling would be mutual; Jew-hating Hitler was also violently anti-intellectual.

The Germans, having converted their country into a war-making machine, swiftly defeated France, then occupied the northwestern half of its territory, leaving the southeast nominally ‘free.’ Its improvised capital was at a Spa town now synonymous with national dishonor: Vichy.

Expelled from teaching at the Sorbonne by Nazi bans on Jewish educators, Bloch moved to the free Zone, where he taught again, and eventually joined the Resistance, ‘Partisans’ combating the German occupiers. This was an act of almost insane courage, due to his age, relative notoriety, and being, as a Jew, already a prime target of Nazism.

It is breathtaking to ponder the terrible dangers to which he knowingly exposed his flesh and blood for abstract principles he considered more precious than his own life. He was given vital noncombat work, such as translation, coordination, and composing Resistance propaganda.

Examine Bloch’s picture in the video; he is late middle-aged, not some naïve, reckless youth. He knew the lurking horrors of the world, and surely realized what risks he faced among the Partisans. He faced them anyway, entering a lion’s den like the Old Testament Prophet Daniel, but unlike him, paid with terrible suffering when the beasts devoured him.

In 1943 in Lyon, Bloch was betrayed into the grip of the Gestapo, and interrogated under torture for months, supposedly revealing nothing. He was executed June 16, 1944, along with other Partisans, partly as a precaution, after the D-Day Invasion. A witness said Bloch’s last act was comforting a terrified adolescent prisoner, also about to be shot.

Facing imminent death himself, surely in pain from torture, yet still kind enough to soothe a distraught comrade. What humanity, both profound and soaring! And like Daniel, the articles of faith he treasured – France and her Republican virtues – lived on after him. Perhaps even partly because of him: An historian who, himself, contributed to history by hastening the liberation of his beloved country.

I once wrote a meditation about a holding cell I saw in the ruins of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Bloch’s Self sacrifice recalls that I said that if that site ‘saw mainly cruelty and horror, it must also have seen Olympian courage and nobility.’ He unquestionably showed those qualities, struggling against Fascism.

Few of us have the brainpower to attain his scholarly stratum, but theoretically, more people may be capable of heroism. Yet very few of us actually are, so his bravery may be even more astounding than his brilliance.

Now his nation is according him recognition commensurate with his splendid feats. Part of Macron’s decision was likely a wish to address a deeply sensitive chapter of French history. Her Occupation by the Nazis is still an infamous memory, because many Frenchmen aided Hitler not out of expediency – shameful enough – but conviction, seeing him as Europe’s bulwark against Bolshevism. They became his avid accomplices, persecuting their countrymen, especially Jewish ones.

The Great War hero Pétain, who resolutely preferred Hitlerism to Stalinism, became Vichy’s Premier. He set up a regime with like-minded reactionaries who hated many fellow Frenchmen – Liberals, Jews, Communists – more than the conquering Germans. Vichy connived with the Nazis in various ways, most ghastly, deporting multitudes of Jews to death camps from France, where some 80,000 perished.

For decades after, while many who cooperated with the Occupiers were still alive (and some in public office), France avoided confronting the scope of its societal culpability. Now that the War Generation is mostly dead, Macron likely intends Bloch’s commemoration at this most hallowed venue of French greatness, to suggest how the squalid implications of Vichy’s collaboration should be countered.

For Bloch’s spectacular gallantry, even Panthéonisation, a pinnacle rite of national reverence, may seem inadequate. He said of his death-daring decision to resist, ‘There can be no salvation where there is no sacrifice.’

I have no better descriptor for such magnificent nobility than the one I used before: ‘Olympian.’ Or possibly, in deference to his background, ‘Samsonian.’

In recognizing Bloch thus, France pays a debt – atonement? – not only to a patriotic hero, but to one who, by his scholarship, indirectly promoted values for which he ultimately died: the worth and sanctity of the ordinary individual. One whose view of history was that it is not moved only by men on thrones or horseback, but also by ‘ordinary individuals,’ he supported that view by defying bestial oppressors. Not with swords or guns, but words and ideas.

The disgrace of Vichy may always stain France, as tolerating the thwarting of Reconstruction may forever mark America. Societies that cannot acknowledge past error cannot improve, because they deny experience. By celebrating Bloch thus, Macron has decided France needs to face this shame, but also to learn from, and move beyond it.

Bloch’s life offers a luminous ember that France – indeed, the world – can use to kindle determination to resist the darkness to which any quasi-wolves like Hitler would make humanity revert. Republican France was Hitler’s nemesis militarily, but also philosophically, for the hopes of her Revolution were – and are – mutually exclusive with those of Fascism.

If any life could help inspire such determination, Marc Bloch’s could. By honoring him, his nation shines light on a detestable corner of her national story, but also re-asserts her vibrant desire to promote human progress.

Such progress may take place in libraries and classrooms, or cells and torture chambers, sometimes as much as in armed battle.

As against the ramparts of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789.