France, June 23 -- Bloch - who was tortured by the Gestapo and executed in 1944 - will become the first historian inducted into the monument under the Fifth Republic. The Elysee Palace described him as "a man of the Enlightenment" and "the thinker of the century".

"He was a man who reflected on the past in order to act in the present. He did not have a static view of history; for him, it had to serve action in the here and now," the Elysee Palace said in a statement.

The ceremony was preceded by a vigil on Monday evening at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris, the university where Bloch studied from 1904 to 1908.

On Tuesday morning, the coffins of Bloch and his wife Simonne Vidal were carried in procession to the Pantheon. Vidal will...