Marc Bloch, the medieval historian and French Resistance fighter executed by the Gestapo in 1944, was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris on Tuesday evening, becoming the first historian to receive the honour. Soldiers carried two symbolic caskets — representing Bloch and his wife Simonne — up the rue Soufflot to the neoclassical monument in the city's Latin Quarter, where a ceremony presided over by President Emmanuel Macron marked the occasion. The caskets contained medals, photographs, books and personal effects; in keeping with the family's wishes, Bloch's remains will not be moved from his burial place in the Creuse, a rural department in central France.

Bloch was born in 1886 into a Jewish family from Alsace, the region on France's eastern border with Germany that changed hands repeatedly between the two countries. He became a towering figure in historical scholarship, pioneering an interdisciplinary approach to the Middle Ages that drew on anthropology, economics and sociology. After serving with distinction in World War I, he co-founded the Annales school of historiography, which transformed the discipline internationally. When World War II broke out he was mobilised again, but by 1940 the Vichy regime — the French government that collaborated with Nazi Germany — had stripped him of his rights as a Jewish academic and requisitioned his apartment. He joined the Resistance in 1943, was captured by Vichy police in 1944, and was tortured under the authority of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon notorious for his brutality. On 16 June 1944, ten days after the Allied landings in Normandy, Bloch was shot alongside fellow Resistance fighters. Witnesses recalled him crying