George Rudé (February 8, 1910–January 8, 1993) was a British Marxist historian, specializing in the French Revolution and "history from below," especially the importance of crowds in history.
Contents |
Born in Oslo, Norway, the son of Jens Essendrop Rude, a Norwegian engineer, and Amy Geraldine Elliot, an English woman educated in Germany, Rude spent his early years in Norway. After World War I, his family moved to England where he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. A specialist in modern languages, he taught at Stowe and St. Paul's schools. In 1932 Rudė visited the Soviet Union and joined the British Communist Party three years later. During World War II he served in the London Fire Service.
After the war, he returned to St. Paul's but in 1949 was forced to leave because of his politics. Turning to history, he received his doctorate at the University of London in 1950 for a thesis on crowd action during the French Revolution. Unable to attain a university post because of his political leanings, he taught modern languages in English secondary schools while publishing. His first book, The Crowd in the French Revolution, soon became a classic.
In 1960 Rudė moved to Australia where he taught at the University of Adelaide. During his "exile" down under, he published a series of works on Revolutionary and Australian history. After a year spent teaching as the first holder of the Chair of History at the University of Stirling in Scotland and another at Flinders University in Adelaide, he moved to Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada, in 1970.
After retiring, Rudė returned to England, eventually dying in hospital at Battle on January 8, 1993. His widow Doreen placed his ashes in the garden behind their home in Rye. A tall, handsome and athletic man, he always retained the manners of an English gentleman as well as his left-wing sympathies.
The twentieth century stands as the flowering for history as it developed into a more inclusive and reasonable discipline. George Rudé led the charge to incorporate new ways of looking at history with his writing of “history from below.” Through his life and works he developed a strong career that helped shape history as we know it today.
George Rudé was born in Norway in February 1910. His family moved to England in 1919 where he went through to public school system at Shrewsbury School on a scholarship. George later went on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he graduated and received a degree in modern languages in 1931.
After completing university, Rudé took a trip to the Soviet Union with friends. When he returned he was a “committed Communist and anti-Fascist”, despite his family’s fairly conservative political views. [1] In 1935 he joined the British Communist Party. This new drive in communism awoke in Rudé an interest in history in which he pursued during the 1930s and 1940s attending London University part time. During this time he taught at the preparatory schools of Stowe and St Paul’s. When the war broke out he joined the London Fire Service where he extinguished fires caused by German bombs.
George Rudé was actively involved with the Communist party, an affiliation which caused him many hardships during his life. In 1949, he was relieved of his duties at St Paul’s for the activities of the political party which he was affiliated with. He accepted teaching positions at Sir Walter St John’s School and later at Holloway Comprehensive School. Rudé, making his new academic focus history, and with very little to back his research in Paris of revolutionary France, became a leading British historian of the French Revolution. Rudé contributed to the “history from below” view of history, which is history from the view of the oppressed. He focused especially on those who participated in the riots and rebellions. After writing an article about rioters during the French Revolution, he was awarded the esteemed Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 1956. Rudé wrote and was featured in a number of journals and created a scholarly name for himself under the wing of his mentor, Georges Lefebvre.
Despite earning his PhD in History 1961, it was nearly impossible for him to acquire a teaching position at the collegiate level. Many believe this was due to his thesis advisor, (Alfred Cobban, a political conservative), blocking any chances Rudé may have had at getting an appointment at a University.[2] Feeling shunned George Rudé began looking to opportunities abroad.
In 1958 Rudé applied for a position at the University of Tasmania, but the university prevaricated because he was a communist.[2] Rudé did, however find work in Australia. In 1959 he was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, in his wife Doreen's home town. He took the opportunity of his time in Australia, to research 19th century British and Irish political prisoners transported to Australia as convicts. This later resulted in a major work, Protest and Punishment: The Story of Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868.
It was later revealed that Rudé, like most prominent communists in Australia, was put under surveillance by the government's domestic security agency, ASIO.[2] However, they found little of interest to record. One agent noted: "history books of which he is the author and reports of his class work at schools in England all show that he is objective in his approach to his teaching subject and has not let his own personal politics intrude in any way."
Rudé accepted an offer of a foundation chair of history, at the new University of Stirling, in Scotland, during 1967. However he fell out with the university administration and returned to Adelaide in 1969, as professor of history at Flinders University.
In late 1970, Rudé and his wife moved to Montreal, Canada, where he taught at George Williams University (later Concordia University) until he retired in 1987. He also founded the Inter-University Center for European Studies. Rudé was also a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Columbia University in New York and the college of William and Mary in Virginia.[3] Rudé was not able to work an extensive amount in his latter years of his life due to deteriorating health since the early 1970s and had a brain tumor removed in 1983. George Rudé died in January, 1993.[1]
George Rudé’s literary achievements focused predominately on the French Revolution and various situations throughout Europe, mostly France and Great Britain, during the 18th and 19th centuries. Rudé utilizes the method of reporting and analyzing history from the “bottom up,” focusing on the people, not the leaders and elites. George Rudé’s most notable works include The Crowd in the French Revolution, The Crowd in History, Revolutionary Europe: 1783-1815, Ideology and Popular Protest, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century, Debate on Europe: 1815-1850 and Captain Swing: A Social History of the great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (co-authored by Eric Hobsbawn).
One of Rudé’s most influential works is The Crowd in History, focusing on the revolutionary peoples of France and Great Britain. Rudé analyzes the impact and importance of the French political revolution and the British industrial revolution and the transition within both societies. In addition, he evaluates the classifications of these crowds in history to examine the causes and effects of each revolution.
In The Crowd in the French Revolution, George Rudé examines the historically neglected crowd of the French Revolution. He explains that the Revolution was not only political but more importantly a social upheaval in which the common Frenchmen played a tremendous role in the course and outcome of the Revolution. Most significantly, Rudé analyzes the French crowds in great depth to understand their composition and force on history.
The focus of Revolutionary Europe: 1783-1815 breaks from Rudé’s usual focus of history “from below.” In Revolutionary Europe, Rudé portrays France and Europe before, during and after the French Revolution. He examines the significance of the Revolution in context to the rest of the European world. The broader focus of this work was a shift from his crowd studies, which would continue in his later works.
George Rudé’s Paris and London in the 18th Century explains the popular protests and revolts of Paris and London during the 18th century. Rudé compares and contrasts the time, place, social, political and economic factors of Paris and London. He examines the pre-industrial stages and the turbulent events that occurred in both European capitals. While this work is not predominately a history from the “bottom up,” Rudé does incorporate the impact of each class in Paris and London during the the18th century events.
In Ideology and Popular Protest, Rudé defines the theory behind the ideology of protest beginning with its origins in Marx and Engels. He explains his theory of ideology through various situations in pre-industrial Europe. Rudé also utilizes his explained ideology in the event of the English protests of the 18th and early 19th century and the development of the English industrial society, and closing with the possibly implications of industry on society.
Rudé, in Debate on Europe: 1815-1850, attempts to utilize the views and interpretations of other historians to argue the significant period of the first half of the 19th century. He examines the rise of national powers, the impacts of the Industrial Revolution, differences of political opinions and the various revolutions throughout Europe during this period. In addition, Rudé inserts his own argument based on the impressive and extraordinary change in Europe during this era as well as inferring at what point this change began.
Captain Swing: A Social History of the great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 is a prime example of George Rudé’s focus on history “from below” and the examination of common people. In Captain Swing, Rudé examines the people of the 1830 agricultural uprising and the impacts of these events. The entire focus of this work is on the crowd and their history, revealing a historical interpretation of history from the “bottom up.”
George Rudé’s influence was his emphasis and development of “history from below.” Following the new Annales School of thought, Rudé strove to cast off the idea that history was not only about nation-states and the men who ruled them. Accompanying Rudé in this shift was the ‘new left’, which according to Mark Gilderhus these liberal historians, “showed the feasibility of doing history while incorporating attitudes and viewpoints other than those associated with white male elites”.[4] Though Rudé was not part of this movement directly, he was firmly inside their ideas and helped to promote them. He believed, along with the ‘new left’ that it was the neglected people who could be used to reshape the face of history. Historian James Friguglietti comments that Rudé’s work, “displayed sympathy for the lower classes, whether laborers or convicted criminals”.[5] By focusing on lower classes Rudé hoped to create a new understanding of histories major events.
Rudé’s communist ties shaped his way of perceiving history and opened him up to the idea of looking at the history of protesters. Revolutions were transforming events, and Rudé sought to bring light to why someone would join in such an endeavor. Marxist theory believes that everyone’s primary motives for acting are always linked with their material need.[6] Using this frame of reference Rudé places it on the people of the French Revolution and created specific faces in the crowds. He sought to dismantle the myth that the crowd in the revolution is seen as a great evil mass of people bent on destruction of order. As Rudé paints it, “those who took to the streets were ordinary, sober citizens, not half-crazed animals, not criminals”.[6] By taking such a view the history of the French revolution was transformed. Common people were suddenly being taken as important historical actors in their own context.
In the decades that Rudé was writing, his new way of looking at history fit well into the social scene. It was the age of liberation, as the oppressive systems that segregated classes, genders, and races were being torn down. People were in need of a new history that included all aspects of society. Writing “history from below,” brought in those forgotten yet not unimportant members of history into the narrative. Rudé did this by showing the common people in the revolutions and protests as key players who actively sought to change history. By focusing on such groups, historians have, “inspired new debates over the roles of class, gender, and race in accounting for human divisions and inequalities."[7] In helping bring a voice to prisoners and protesters, George Rudé contributed significantly to the study of history.
Rudé is not without his detractors. From the start, his severely Marxist view of history banned him from teaching in Great Britain, and brought him severe criticism. The main criticism that continues on after his death was that after developing his initial thesis of the crowd in history, he continued using that model in every case to prove his point.[8] This Marxist mode of thinking rapidly lost credibility after the fall of the Soviet Union and with it much of Rudé’s work as well. Overall his contributions to social history and the understanding of protests greatly enhanced how historians look at the past and its actors.