France paid one of its highest national honours this week to Marc Bloch and his wife, Simonne. Their remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, the civic temple that the Republic reserves for those it considers its greatest exemplars of virtue. The tribute is entirely deserved.

Born in Lyon into a Jewish family from Alsace, Marc Bloch became one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century and co-founder of the celebrated Annales School, which revolutionised modern historiography. A decorated combatant in the First World War, mobilised again in 1939, removed from public service by the collaborationist Vichy regime on account of his Jewish identity, a member of the French Resistance, arrested, tortured, and shot by the Gestapo in 1944 — Bloch embodies, within a single life, the qualities that the French Republic most delights in celebrating: intelligence, courage, and sacrifice. That rarest of combinations: a man of thought and a man of action.

In a Europe witnessing the resurgence of antisemitism, his entry into the Panthéon stands as an urgent affirmation of republican values, human rights, and political liberalism.

The ceremony also produces an unexpected effect: it renders all the more conspicuous a certain absence. The absence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus Affair left a profound mark on Marc Bloch’s generation. It remains one of the most emblematic miscarriages of justice in modern history — denounced by the Brazilian jurist Rui Barbosa, and the episode that inspired Émile Zola’s celebrated manifesto J’Accuse…!, published in defence of truth, justice, and the revision of........

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