Narratives of resistance in Marc Bloch's L'E´trange De´faite

Marc Bloch's L'E´trange De´faite is a fundamental text of the French Resistance, a narrative about the will and means to resist in a society that seemed to have defeated itself. Bloch's belief that resistance began with a critique of French social and political culture made L'E´trange De´faite a therapeutic work for Bloch himself, as he wrote it in 1940, and for the French when it was first published in 1946. The core of the work is Bloch's effort to think as a historian about change in order to counter the paralysing effects of the traumatic memory of the First World War in France. It is a romantic text as well because the assertion of a new French identity, a goal shared by all internal French resistance movements, was an unrealised dream when Bloch wrote in 1940 and therefore could not yet be betrayed, as many of his Resister readers already thought was happening when L'E´trange De´faite appeared in 1946.     

Reporting by Letter: The 2nd Earl of Hardwicke and his Parliamentary Correspondents

For much of the 18th century, letter writing remained an important means of communicating news about proceedings at Westminster. Members of leading parliamentary families such as the Hardwickes were prolific letter writers and their correspondence has long been valued as a source for the period before the regular reporting of debates became established in the newspaper press. This article focuses on reporting by letter in the correspondence of the 2nd earl of Hardwicke and his circle. It reconstructs Hardwicke's network of informants and considers how the nature of their connection with the earl affected the way they conceived of their role as reporters. With reference to the epistolary conventions of the time, it asks how the circumstances in which letters were composed and read may have shaped the style and content of the reports. Finally, the article examines the impact made on the epistolary tradition by the emergence of newspaper reporting in the later 18th century and assesses the extent to which this development led letter writers to adjust their methods and goals.