The French and Their Revolution: Selected Writings [Paperback]

Richard Cobb (Author), David Gilmour (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1999

Illuminating essays on daily life during the French Revolution from a master historian. Like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Richard Cobb had a gift for understanding great historic events in terms of ordinary human relations. Here for the first time Cobb's widely admired chronicles of daily life in Revolutionary France are gathered into one volume with an illuminating introduction by his former pupil, historian David Gilmour. In these pages we meet not makers of history like Robespierre or Danton but les petites gens living in the shadow of events. As Gilmour writes, for Cobb "history was not simply a matter of spending long days in the archives; it had to be walked, observed, smelt, drunk and above all listened to, in cafs, buses, parks and railway stations." These essays combine prodigious scholarship with the best of the storyteller's craft to bring human perspective to the world-shaking events of the French Revolution. Richard Cobb was the author of many books, including Something to Hold On To and The End of The Line.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Rather than write yet another biography of Robespierre or another examination of Girondists or Jacobins, Francophile Richard Cobb chose to spend most of his career writing social histories of Revolutionary France.

These essays are broadly representative of his work, focusing on les petites gens, their influence on the revolution, and the revolution's influence on them. Several pieces provide wonderfully detailed portraits of the individuals inside the masses--within the army, the Sans-Culottes, or simply the common people. In the final essay, Cobb recounts the melancholy testimony of unwed mothers making a déclaration de grossesse to identify their seducer, request a place in the foundling hospital for their unborn children, or both, and points out that, for them, the revolution is not nearly as important as their unwanted pregnancies.

Though the lengthy quotations in French, usually without translations, may dismay the non-Francophone, detailed footnotes and a thorough index make this collection valuable to anyone interested in the French Revolution. --C.B. Delaney

From Library Journal

Cobb, who died in 1996, was the chair of modern history at Oxford and became well known in the 1970s for his works on the social history of the French Revolution. Collected here are excerpts from his major works. Editor Gilmour, one of Cobb's Oxford students and himself a prize-winning biographer, laments the decline of Cobb's reputation after his retirement in 1984. He attributes this decline to Cobb's having never produced a great work of synthesis but focusing instead on a variety of themes, foremost among them the influence of the revolution on ordinary folk (les petites gens) and vice versa. The works collected here are broadly representative of Cobb's craft: his interest in counterrevolution, the individual and authority, popular protest, government repression, human motivation, and social class. Two useful appendixes, one identifying revolutionary figures, factions, and historians and the other showing the correspondence between the Republican and Gregorian calendars, heighten the book's value as a tool for graduate students.AMarie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565845404
• ISBN-13: 978-1565845404
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,832,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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