Georges Lefebvre, when he died in August, 1959, in his eighty-sixth year, was internationally known as the greatest authority on the French Revolution. His career had been extraordinary in its enduring creativity. Born at Lille, the son of a small commercial employee, he obtained secondary and university training with the help of scholarships, taught for more than twenty-five years in secondary schools, and entered university teaching at the age of fifty, after completing a monumental doctoral thesis, Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française.1
In the French educational system a period of secondary teaching is not uncommon on the part of scholars awaiting opportunities at the university level. Lefebvre’s contribution at each stage far exceeded the usual limits. After the quarter century of labour in provincial archives which paralleled his secondary teaching, he broke new ground by demonstrating in depth what the revolution had meant to the peasants. In the university career which followed, he proved himself, in the art of exposition, the equal of his famous predecessors Alphonse Aulard and Albert Mathiez, and produced syntheses which have ranked him, forsome, with the great historians. Lefebvre also played an important institutional role as the recognized leader in his field, reviewer of its important books and guide to innumerable research projects, a man around whom gathered a whole generation of scholars who continued to acknowledge his learning, lucidity, and balance.
Georges Lefebvre’s first university teaching was at Clermont-Ferrand and Strasbourg. Another decade passed before he was called to Paris in 1935. Upon the death of Albert Mathiez in 1932, Lefebvre was named president of the Société des Études robespierristes and director of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, centres of his service to the profession during the following decades. In 1937 he succeeded to the Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, the professorship made famous by Aulard and Mathiez. Although Lefebvre appeared to be following in the footsteps of the dynamic Mathiez, he was not his disciple. The two were, within a few months, the same age, but while Mathiez in the early years of the century was becoming famous, first as the brilliant pupil of Aulard and then as his critic, Lefebvre was busy elsewhere. He translated Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England into a French edition in three volumes (1907, 1923, and 1927) and together with the medievalist Charles Petit-Dutaillis, under whom he had studied at Lille, wrote many pages of notes and commentary. As early as 1914 he published a collection of documents, titled Documents relatifs à l’histoire des subsistances dans le district de Bergues pendant la Révolution (1788–An V).1 As the title shows, he was already taking the direction indicated by Jean Jaurès, the socialist historian who was to be martyred by an assassin in 1914 and whose Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française had appeared in four volumes between 1901 and 1904. Lefebvre always acknowledged that Jaurès was his model: ‘I saw and heard Jaurès only two times, lost in the crowd . . . but if anyone cares to assign me a maître, I recognize only him.’2
It may have been coincidental that Lefebvre chose 86 Boulevard Jean-Jaurès in Boulogne-sur-Seine, a plebeian suburb of Paris, as his residence; yet one suspects that his close friends were not surprised, for Lefebvre, like Jaurès, had deep emotional commitments. Both men were rationalist humanitarians in the tradition of the Enlightenment, who thought that the times called for democratic socialism. Lefebvre always remained true to this ideal. He was also a French patriot in the Jacobin tradition, who admired Robespierre for upholding civic virtue as essential to national independence. He could see Robespierre’s weaknesses, as he could see weaknesses in Jaurès and Marx. Lefebvre was deeply influenced by Marx, and, like many of his generation, had passed through the experience of having to decide which parts of Marxism to accept and which to reject. He retained a strong tendency to wring the utmost in the way of historical explanations out of social and economic material. He had, however, an exquisite sense of balance and a deep appreciation for all kinds of evidence, and was above all an empiricist whose art consisted in telling the truth as his researches and fine understanding disclosed it to him. Lefebvre cared more for the exact statement of truth than for any other cause. ‘His historical integrity,’ as Beatrice Hyslop has written, ‘was unimpeachable, and like Robespierre, incorruptible’.1
In his university career, Georges Lefebvre wrote works of synthesis and was drawn into a multitude of services to scholars and scholarship. He never ceased, however, to value above all the finding and publishing of new material, as is illustrated by his collection of documents Questions agraires au temps de la Terreur (1932), by his work for the Commission de recherche et de publication des documents relatifs à la vie économique de la Révolution, by his activities in connection with the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, and by the Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, which he founded and kept going in spite of the Second World War and the post-war inflation.1 His retirement in 1945 from his chair at the Sorbonne neither diminished his zeal nor curbed his influence. As the decade of the 1950s, and his own lifetime, drew to a close, Lefebvre was promoting a great collective effort of historical research designed literally to ‘count’, as he was fond of saying, the numbers, kinds, and resources of Frenchmen at the end of the Old Regime. His own unfinished Études sur l’histoire économique et sociale d’Orléans et du département du Loiret pendant la Révolution française was associated with this project. Meanwhile, year by year, Lefebvre took account in the columns of the Annales historiques of every important publication related to the French Revolution. He also furnished direct personal guidance to scholars from many lands who visited him at 86 Boulevard Jean-Jaurès.
Lefebvre’s success as a writer of more general works may have occasioned some surprise, for he took this direction in his fifties, after having become known as a scholarly master of statistical tables and economic details. At that time, in the late 1920s, it could not have been foreseen that a whole career lay ahead for him. In any case, Lefebvre’s works of synthesis revealed him as an unusually perceptive observer of human nature and of moods and ideas at all levels of society. His studies of peasant landholding led him to crowd psychology in La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris, A. Colin, 1932, 2d ed. 1956) and in his famous lecture, ‘Foules révolutionnaires,’ published in 1933.2Quatre-Vingt-Neuf, a little book about the year 1789, published in 1939 as part of the sesquicentennial celebration of the Revolution, is completely successful as a popular narrative and yet manages to impart the essence of scholarly findings together with a general statement about the significance of the Revolution. Lefebvre’s eye for particulars combines here with his power to organize quantities of material without losing sight of the drama of long-term trends. ‘This book had the misfortune to appear at the start of the Second World War and to be suppressed by the Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation. Only a few copies survived. Since 1947 an English translation by Robert R. Palmer1 has acquainted many thousands of American students with Lefebvre and with the French Revolution.
As early as 1930 Lefebvre, in collaboration with Raymond Guyot and Philippe Sagnac, published La Révolution française, Volume XIII of the outstanding ‘Peuples et Civilisations’ series edited by Louis Halphen and Philippe Sagnac. For two decades the book was widely believed to be the best on its subject. In the next few years after its publication Lefebvre’s attention turned to Napoleon Bonaparte and his relationship to the Revolution, and in 1935 he published as Volume XIV in the ‘Peuples et Civilisations’ series his Napoléon, which has had four editions, the latest in 1953. This study is still considered by many historians to be the most judicious evaluation of Napoleon’s career. It also illustrates the author’s ability to use social material without failing to appreciate the importance of individual will and character. After completing his Napoléon, Lefebvre went to work on the period from 1794 to 1799, years which had been least satisfactorily explained by historians and into which Albert Mathiez had been directing his researches at the time of his death in 1932. Mathiez’s three-volume history of the Revolution having ended with the downfall of Robespierre, Lefebvre was requested by the publishers to carry the story forward, and did so in Les Thermidoriens (1937) and Le Directoire (1946). It was this work, together with the fresh researches of which he continuously took account in the Annales, which enabled Lefebvre to bring out in 1951 a new version, entirely rewritten by himself, of La Révolution française. The 1957 edition of this book, from which the present translation was made,incorporates some further revisions and bibliographical additions, and may be said to sum up more than half a century of research in its field. Seldom has any work been so consistently held at the crest of current scholarship.1
The ‘Peuples et Civilisations’ volumes, with their global setting and extensive diplomatic and cultural materials, offer a severe challenge to the literary craftsmanship of their authors. This series pioneered in the comparative study of institutions and cultures which has since the Second World War become more commonplace although scarcely less difficult. In the process of comparing developments in various parts of Europe and the world, Lefebvre’s La Révolution française achieved a perspective denied to earlier historians of the Revolution. The author was, of course, best informed and most effective in the European area, which he knew best and to which most of his pages were devoted. He had an unusual knowledge of world history, however, and a talent for comparative descriptions. This aspect of his work may be said to have pointed the way to continued research in the field of comparative studies of institutions.2
Lefebvre’s erudition and conscientious reporting led him to pack his ‘Peuples et Civilisations’ volumes rather tightly in places, but his sense of relevance was very keen. His direct style had a powerful, cumulative effect, and when he broke free into summary passages and interpretation he was extraordinarily eloquent.
Georges Lefebvre gave his consent to the present translation project, and discussed it with the translator, Elizabeth Moss Evanson, but he didnot live to see the finished product. Mrs. Evanson, an Editor at the Columbia University Press, was graduated from Swarthmore College and studied history there as well as in the graduate school of Columbia University and in the course of several periods of residence in France.
PAUL H. BEIK
Swarthmore College,
Swarthmore, Pa.
1 Lille, C. Robbe, 1924. A second edition with the same text but omitting many notes and statistical tables has been issued by an Italian publisher, Laterza (Bari, 1959; Preface by Armando Saitta and Albert Soboul).
1 Lille, C. Robbe, 1914. A second volume appeared in 1921.
2 Cited in Albert Soboul, ‘Georges Lefebvre historien de la Révolution française 1874– 1959’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, No. 159 (Janvier–Mars, 1960), p. 3. This entire issue is devoted to ‘Hommage à Georges Lefebvre’ on the part of his students and friends. See also Beatrice F. Hyslop, ‘Georges Lefebvre, Historian’, French Historical Studies, Vol. I, No. 3 (Spring, 1960), pp. 265–82, a perceptive appraisal by one who perhaps of all American historians knew Georges Lefebvre best; and Robert R. Palmer, ‘Georges
Lefebvre: The Peasants and the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History, XXXI (March– December, 1959), pp. 329–42.
1 Beatrice Hyslop, ‘Georges Lefebvre, Historian’, French Historical Studies, Vol. I, No. 3 (Spring, 1960), p. 278.
1 A revised and enlarged edition of the Questions agraires was published in 1954 (Strasbourg, F. Lenig). Concerning the Commission, see the article by Marc Bouloiseau, ‘De Jaurès à Lefebvre’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, No. 159 (Janvier–Mars, 1960), pp. 57–66, which summarizes Lefebvre’s views concerning the value of systematically planned group research projects using statistics. The Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, although reduced to a small, part-time research staff, produced in 1953 the first volume of a Recueil de documents relatifs aux séances des États généraux, mai–juin 1789, edited by Georges Lefebvre and Anne Terroine. Lefebvre also published, in collaboration with Marc Bouloiseau, Albert Soboul, and J. Dautry, the Discours de Maximilien Robespierre (4 vols., Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950–59). The fourth volume reaches July, 1793.
2 This and other important articles, for example ‘La Révolution française et les paysans’ and ‘La Révolution française dans l’histoire du monde’, together with a brief biographical note and a list of his principal publications, were published in honour of Georges Lefebvre’s eightieth birthday as Études sur la Révolution française (Paris, Presses Uni-versitaires de France, 1954). A recent book by an English historian, George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959), is dedicated to Lefebvre and acknowledges his influence.
1 The Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press).
1 Lefebvre in his turn took account of the discoveries of friends and disciples who had continued to emphasize economic and social materials, for example C. E. Labrousse, La crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1944), and Albert Soboul, Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II. Mouve-ment populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 2 juin, 1793–9 thermidor an II (Paris, Librairie Clavreuil, 1958). Other long-time associates of Lefebvre have been Marc Bouloiseau, author of Robespierre (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957) and other studies, and Jacques Godechot, whose most recent books are Les institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1951) and La grande nation. L’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799, 2 vols. (Paris, Aubier, 1956).
2 See, for example, Robert R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution. A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800. Vol. I: The Challenge (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1959).