Alfred Cobban

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Cobban walked into his inaugural lecture as Professor of French History at University College London in 1954 and proceeded to dismantle one of the most entrenched interpretations in modern historical scholarship. His target was what he called the "social interpretation" of the French Revolution. He argued, bluntly, that it was a myth. The lecture was published the following year under that very title: "The Myth of the French Revolution."

  Cobban was born in London on the 24th of May 1901. He was educated at Latymer Upper School and then at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Long before he reached the professorship that made his name, he taught history at King's College in Newcastle-on-Tyne, held a Rockefeller Fellowship for research in France, and served as a visiting professor at both the University of Chicago and Harvard University.

  He edited History magazine and placed articles in the English Historical Review, the Political Science Quarterly, and International Affairs. His bibliography stretches across four decades, from a 1929 study of Edmund Burke to a posthumous volume on the Enlightenment published in 1969. But it is his challenge to Marxist readings of the French Revolution that shaped how later historians came to see the entire field. That challenge gave birth to what would eventually be called Revisionism.

• 2. The Myth He Attacked

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  The orthodox Marxist school held that the French Revolution was the moment when the bourgeoisie and the proletariat rose against the nobility, marking the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It was, in this reading, a symbol of historical progress. Cobban rejected this directly.

  His counter-argument was specific. He did not say the Revolution changed nothing. He said it was a political revolution with social consequences, not a social revolution driven by economic forces. The crucial distinction was this: capitalism and class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the nobility were not, in his view, the engines of what happened in 1789. He pressed this case most fully in his 1964 book The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, published by Cambridge University Press. George V. Taylor joined him in attacking the traditional Marxist conception of history within Marx's dialectic.

  The French historian Francois Furet shared Cobban's classical liberal reading of the Revolution. Together they represented a challenge to a view that had long dominated academic history. Cobban's work became the foundation for a historical school that would come to be called either Revisionism or Liberalism.

• 3. What France Actually Looked Like

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  Cobban's argument rested on a close reading of French society in the decades around 1789. He quoted his own analysis directly: "Probably some 95 per cent of France's 26 millions lived in isolated farms, hamlets, villages, and small country towns." Agriculture followed routines inherited from the Middle Ages. Industry was still largely domestic in character.

  In his view, the decade of revolution changed almost none of this. He wrote that it matters little, in those fundamental respects, whether one is describing France in 1789 or France in 1799. The Revolution did not materially add to or subtract from the basic resources of the country. Cities held small workshops and artisans' enterprises, often employing around four people, rather than large-scale factories. The town of Anzin was an exception, with iron foundries and coal mining employing four thousand workers.

  The French Industrial Revolution, Cobban argued, came later in the nineteenth century. The countryside had been pushed by rural overpopulation onto marginal land on moor and hilltop that was subsequently abandoned. Mountain and forest still covered large tracts of the country. None of this landscape of daily life had been fundamentally reorganized by the revolutionary decade.

• 4. Who Won and Who Lost

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  Cobban's reading of the Revolution's social consequences was pointed. He believed that traditional landowners and the middle class had wanted access to political power. What they got, and what they kept, was a collective title: the bourgeois and many nobles together became known as the "Notables," retaining political and economic leadership and dominance after 1789.

  For the urban poor, his judgment was bleak. They fared worse than before the Revolution, in his assessment, because they lost the charity that the Roman Catholic Church had supplied. That loss became concrete in 1791, when the National Constituent Assembly abolished the tithe and sold Church properties. Social inequality persisted in visible forms.

  On the question of women, Cobban noted that sex equality did not advance far. Women were still considered the lesser sex, and what rights they had gained during the Revolution were subsequently stripped away under the reign of Napoleon I. What the Revolution promised and what it delivered were, in Cobban's account, starkly different things.

• 5. A Career Across Boundaries

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  Cobban's published work ranged well beyond France. His first book, in 1929, examined Edmund Burke and the revolt against eighteenth-century thought. In 1934 he turned to Rousseau and the modern state. A 1939 study took on dictatorship, its history and theory. In 1945 he published National Self-Determination for Oxford University Press.

  The multi-volume A History of Modern France appeared between 1957 and 1965. The Penguin edition launched the first two volumes in 1957, covering the period from 1715 through 1871. Jonathan Cape published expanded editions and added a third volume in 1965, bringing the story forward to 1958. The full set became a standard reference across universities.

  He also published Ambassadors and Secret Agents in 1954, on the diplomacy of the First Earl of Malmesbury at the Hague. A 1960 volume examined the role of the Enlightenment in modern history. Late in his career, he co-edited The Correspondence of Edmund Burke with Robert Arthur Smith for Cambridge University Press in 1967. He died in London on the 1st of April 1968, with a final volume, Aspects of the French Revolution, appearing that same year from George Braziller in New York.

• 6. Legacy and the Revisionist School

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  The memorial volume published in 1973 by The Athlone Press of the University of London, French Government and Society 1500-1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban, was edited by J.F. Bosher. Nearly all of its essays were written by Cobban's former students. The one exception came from his friend George Rude. A photograph of Cobban, a complete list of his publications, and an essay on his life and work by C.V. Wedgwood are all preserved there.

  The school of thought Cobban helped to create, Revisionism, would shape debates about the French Revolution through the late twentieth century. Francois Furet became its most prominent French voice. The argument that 1789 was a political event with social fallout, rather than a class-driven social rupture, gave historians a framework that still generates debate.

  Cobban's Rockefeller Fellowship had taken him to France for research, and his visiting professorships at the University of Chicago and Harvard had spread his ideas across the Atlantic. The 336-page memorial volume stands as the record of how far his influence reached, gathered entirely from the work of those he had trained.