George Rudé

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George Frederick Elliott Rudé (born February 8, 1910 in Oslo , † January 8, 1993 in Rye ) was a British historian who dealt with the French Revolution and the role of social and revolutionary mass movements in modern times.

life and work

He was the son of a Norwegian father and an English mother and grew up first in Norway. The family moved to England after World War I and he graduated from the University of Cambridge ( Trinity College ) in 1931 and was then a teacher of modern languages ​​in Stowe and then at St. Paul's School in London. After a visit to the Soviet Union, he became a member of the Communist Party in 1935. In addition to his teaching profession, he studied history in London, was there in the Second World War in the fire department and received his doctorate in 1950 with the more conservative Alfred Cobban . The subject of his most important book, The Crowd in History , also remained his other research topic: History of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe from the perspective of the lower classes, their protests and uprisings and their suppression. In 1949 he was dismissed from teaching at St. Paul's School because of his membership in the Communists, and membership caused him many difficulties later on (he was a member of the Communist Party until 1959). Since he could not get an academic position in England during the Cold War, he became a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide in 1960 and a professor in 1964. In 1967 he took a chair at the newly founded University of Stirling , but returned to Australia in 1969 after conflicts with the university management and was briefly professor at Flinders University. 1970 until his retirement in 1987 he was a professor at the later Concordia University in Canada. He also taught at York University in Toronto , where he founded the Inter-University Center for European Studies. After his retirement he returned to England and lived in Rye (East Sussex) . He was planning another book on the history of terrorism, but never got around to tackling it. In his last years he could no longer write.

He was visiting professor at William and Mary College, Columbia University, and the University of Tokyo.

He was considered one of the leading experts in England on the French Revolution, with a view similar to that of Georges Lefebvre in France, who became his mentor. He was one of the three Musketeers of Lefebvre who searched the archives in Paris (with Albert Soboul , Richard Cobb ) in pursuit of a Marxist reassessment of the French Revolution. Using police and eyewitness reports, he investigated how popular revolutionary movements from below (the street mob ) were formed. While the origins of the mass movements mostly lay in the demand for the fulfillment of everyday needs, especially for food, and the participants came predominantly from lower strata of the population (workers, small craftsmen), the leaders according to Rudé were almost always from educated strata. During the French Revolution, a momentum developed in the movement of the sans-culottes, who politicized and organized themselves during the revolution and, despite the minority in the legislative assemblies, set the tone for a short time in Paris, whose main demands (control of food prices and the right to vote for all) however did not last.

In England he investigated the machine strikers (Swing Riots) and John Wilkes and in Australia the fate of the workers' uprisings deported there.

From 1946 to 1956 he was in England in the CP historians group, which also included Christopher Hill , Eric J. Hobsbawm , Victor Kiernan , Rodney Hilton , EP Thompson and John Seville .

In 1956 he received the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize for an article on the Gordon Riots.

Works

  • The Crowd in the French Revolution, Oxford University Press 1967
  • Revolutionary Europe, 1783–1815, 1964, 2nd edition, Blackwell Classical Histories of Europe 2000 (editor Harvey Kaye)
  • Paris and London in the eighteenth century, Fontana Press 1970
  • The crowd in history. A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848. New York: Wiley & Sons, 1964
  • Protest and Punishment: Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788–1868, Oxford 1978
  • Crime and Victim: Crime and Society in Early Nineteenth-century England, Oxford University Press 1985
  • Ideology and Popular Protest, 1980, University of North Carolina Press 1995
  • Hanoverian London, 1714-1808, University of California Press 1971
  • Europe in the 18th Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge, Harvard University Press, 1972, 1985
    • German translation: Europe in the 18th century: the aristocracy and its challenge by the bourgeoisie, Kindler's Kulturgeschichte des Abendlandes, 1978
  • with Eric J. Hobsbawm : Captain Swing: A Social History of the great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830, New York: Pantheon Books 1968
  • Wilkes and Liberty, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1962, 1983
  • Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat. 1967, London: Collins 1975
  • Debate on Europe, 1815-1850. Harper & Row 1972
  • Interpretations of the French Revolution. Published for the Historical Association by Routledge and Keegan Paul 1961
  • The French Revolution: Its Causes, Its History and Its Legacy After 200 Years. 1988, Grove Press 1994

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Preston referred to him as the exiled doyen of British social historians, obituary by Harvey Kaye, The Independent, January 16, 1993
personal data
SURNAME Rudé, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rudé, George Frederick Elliott (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Oslo
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1993
Place of death Rye