JTA — The symbolic internment in France’s Pantheon mausoleum of Marc Bloch, the Jewish French scholar and World War II resistance fighter executed by the Nazis, has been haunted by persistent divisions over who in France gets to commemorate the terrors of its Nazi occupation.

Bloch’s descendants asked the government to ban far-right leaders — who have claimed him as their own model patriot — ahead of the ceremony Tuesday, which marked the country’s highest honor.

About 80 national heroes have been inducted into the Paris monument over two centuries, from philosopher Voltaire and writer Victor Hugo to magistrate and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil.

Bloch’s wife, Simonne Vidal, who also supported the French resistance, had her casket interred alongside his. The caskets were empty of remains and instead included medals, photos and writings the couple left their children. Bloch’s family requested his ashes remain in the village where he was buried in central France, and Vidal’s remains have never been found.

Bloch, the first historian to be interred in the Panthéon, has in recent years been elevated by French politicians of all parties as a paragon of a leader committed to truth-telling, even at risk to one’s life. His posthumously published book, “Strange Defeat,” excoriates wartime French leadership for its failures and capitulations to the Nazis.

Jordan Bardella, the head of the far-right National Rally — whose founders included former Nazi soldiers — last year quoted Bloch in a letter demanding statistics on illegal immigration from the interior minister.

“As Marc Bloch, historian and hero of the Resistance, wrote — whom the nation will honor by transferring his remains to the Panthéon on June 16, 2026 — ‘Our people deserve to be told the truth and to be trusted with it,’” Bardella wrote. “These words resonate strongly today.”

Bloch’s descendants have repeatedly expressed offense at far-right leaders invoking his legacy over recent years, as have historians.

Carole Fink, a professor emeritus at The Ohio State University who wrote Bloch’s first major biography in 1989, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that right-wing leaders who championed Bloch in their crusades against immigration presented “a complete distortion.”

“There is nothing in his biography that shows this,” said Fink, who visited........

© The Times of Israel