Georges Lefebvre

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Georges Lefebvre (1874-1959) was a French historian, who was considered in his day to be the leading authority on the French Revolution, with a formidable scholarly reputation, editing the most respected journal on the subject, Annales historiques de la Révolution française and holding the position of Professor of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne. A lifelong socialist, he became more and more influenced by Marxism about the time of the Second World War. He often wrote from a viewpoint which he felt the peasant of the time would have held, as shown in his groundbreaking work, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (1924). Lefebvre was influenced by the Marxist idea that all of history relates to the conditions of the working class, as manipulated by the upper class; however, he was primarily an historian, not a polemicist, and he saw history in its full complexity: as an interplay of social, economic and political factors.

Lefebvre's account of the origins of the French Revolution was written in Quatre-Vingt-Neuf, and published in 1939 to mark the sesquicentennial of the events of 1789, but the Vichy government that took over the following year wanted no left-wing history or sympathetic understanding of the Revolution, as they drew their support from the anti-republican right. The régime suppressed the book, ordering 8,000 copies to be burned; as a result the work was virtually unknown in its native land until it was reprinted in 1970. Its reputation was already secure in the Anglophone world, however, since the English translation, The Coming of the French Revolution (1947) had established it as a clear, yet subtle, classic. It remains the definitive explanation of the Marxist interpretation of the causes of the revolution. His seminal work, La Révolution française (revised edition, 1951) was translated into English as two volumes: The French Revolution (1962-4) and The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (1964). He also wrote a study of the most famous general and ruler in the history of France in Napoléon (4th edition 1953; translated in 2 volumes, 1969).