Gustave Bloch (1848–1923)

Gustave Bloch was born in Fegersheim, Bas-Rhin, France, to an Alsatian Jewish family. He received his agrégation in 1872, and the following year began teaching classes in rhetoric at the Lycée de Besançon. In 1873, he joined the new Académie française in Rome and was so successful there that he was invited in 1876 to lecture on Greco-Roman antiquities at the University of Lyons. While at Lyons, he received his doctorate for two brilliant theses: Les origines du Sénat romain (Origins of the Roman Senate) and De decretis functorum magistratuum ornamentis (Decrees of the Magistrates). From 1888, he taught history at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and established his reputation firmly by a series of articles in scholarly journals and in the classical encyclopedia of Daremberg and Saglio as well as la Gaule indépendante et la Gaule romaine (1900) in the Histoire de France edited by Ernest Lavisse. In 1904, the position of professor of Roman history was created for him at the Sorbonne. Despite the professional and personal risks, he was an active supporter of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). Gustave Bloch was the father of historian Marc Bloch.