TY - JOUR
AU - Harvey, John
AB - INTRODUCTION Alfred Cobban enjoyed a long and distinguished career, though it was cut short by his untimely death in 1968, when he was at the centre of a burgeoning controversy over the causes and nature of the French Revolution, for which he is best remembered in academia. The dispute had begun after his appointment as Professor of French History at University College, London (UCL) when, in 1954, in the presence of the French ambassador, he delivered an inflammatory inaugural lecture entitled ‘The Myth of the French Revolution’.1 He questioned the ‘bourgeois’ credentials of an upheaval that was not led by ‘capitalist’ entrepreneurs, but lawyers and administrators, who had acquiesced in the abolition of ‘feudalism’ rather than seeking its destruction. Ten years later, when he published a series of invited lectures as The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, he proceeded to query other aspects of what was called the ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the Revolution.2 For those defending the established view, this became a ‘revisionist’ challenge to an essentially Marxist perspective, which during the next couple of decades turned into a general debate over the origins and outcome of the French Revolution.3 This cause célèbre will receive due attention in the articles that follow, though they will also demonstrate that Cobban was much more than an agent provocateur, even though he clearly relished the cut and thrust of an argument. He would certainly defend his corner, but he was willing to be proved wrong, and he always showed respect for the research conducted by those whose work he was criticizing, which he believed was not reflected in the conclusions they drew from it. He contributed significantly to the history of ideas, the area in which he began work in the 1930s, as he was a recognized scholar of the Enlightenment, much appreciated in the United States, always fully engaged in the issues of the day, acting as a determined opponent of authoritarianism on the Right or Left. Most importantly, he taught a generation of postgraduates in French history who emanated from North America as well as Britain and whose influence on the study of history continues to be felt today.4 Extremely active, Cobban also found time to serve the wider interests of the subject through his involvement in the Historical Association, which still seeks to serve a broad and varied community of those interested in the past. Indeed, he is doubtless best known among this ‘lay’ audience, and also fondly remembered among former university students, for his Penguin History of Modern France.5 It was John Harvey, from St Cloud State University in Minnesota, a specialist in historiography and intellectual exchange, who had the splendid idea of exploring his legacy at the Society for the Study of French History’s annual conference, which was held at Leeds in 2019. He persuaded two of Cobban’s former students, Pamela Pilbeam and Tim Le Goff to contribute, by reflecting on their time as postgraduates under his direction, together with Bill Doyle, who spoke about the contemporary study of the French Revolution at Oxford, and kindly agreed to run the rule over the papers presented here. I was pleased to act as chair, as a London postgraduate who participated in the research seminar in modern French history over which Alfred Cobban had presided at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), though I joined the year after he died. I was thus supervised by Douglas Johnson, whom Le Goff recalls as the new, and somewhat different, Professor of French History at UCL, who saw his own doctoral thesis through to successful completion. The articles that follow thus offer insight into Cobban’s legacy as a director of postgraduate study and to anglophone historiography. As Harvey’s original research demonstrates, the latter was rather more differentiated than the expression suggests, although the nuances Harvey draws to our attention have all too rarely been acknowledged. However, before readers embark upon the three papers, which have been revised and extended for publication, I would like to offer a few remarks about Cobban’s reception in France. On account of his critical stance towards the widely accepted interpretation of the Revolution, this was often, if not invariably, a somewhat negative, even hostile, one. Besides illustrating some ideological and institutional, as well as historical differences, the controversy that Cobban’s critique provoked also informs us about the way in which British and French, as well as American, historians interacted at that time. Above all, it shows how their respective historiographical approaches and academic traditions contrasted in the period between the end of the Second World War and the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989. Georges Lefebvre, though long retired from the Chair of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, and by then in his early eighties, dispatched an immediate riposte to the inaugural lecture that Cobban delivered in 1954, which, according to the prevailing practice, had then been published in pamphlet form. Lefebvre was given space to make his comments in the Revolution’s house journal, the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (AhRf).6 He considered the two main objects of Cobban’s critique: the question of the existence of ‘feudalism’ in 1789 and the composition of the Third Estate deputation to the Estates General. In an amicable fashion, Lefebvre contended that the seigneurial institutions and practices of eighteenth-century France amounted to a feudal system and, far from being a ‘myth’, it was recognized as such by contemporaries. On the second point, he acknowledged the originality of analysing the occupational profile of those elected in 1789 but, while these non-noble deputies were not capitalists, the reforms they went on to enact had contributed to the creation of a more liberal economy and society. There the matter rested, and when Cobban’s Social Interpretation appeared during the following decade, it was scarcely reviewed at all across the Channel. Indeed, after a French translation belatedly appeared, in 1984, with some positive prefatory remarks from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, setting it in this later context, the editor of the AhRf simply saw fit to reprint Lefebvre’s response to the lecture Cobban had given thirty years before.7 By contrast, the Social Interpretation made a significant, and immediate, impact on either side of the Atlantic, where some British and American colleagues can still recall their excitement when they encountered this short, pungent text, which apparently sold thousands of copies, far more than most academic books. It certainly prompted a good deal of robust debate in anglophone circles, so the absence of any similar reaction across the Channel requires some explanation.8 Perhaps in a French academic culture that prized the bulky research monograph or a sharply focused article, Cobban’s freewheeling survey did not seem to demand an urgent, detailed response. The silence might also be attributed to opposition, at least among proponents of what became known as the ‘orthodox’ view, because they regarded his wide-ranging critique as an iconoclastic assault on the ‘classic’, Republican and Marxist interpretation of the Revolution that had been carefully elaborated in France since the turn of the twentieth century. It is essential to grasp the particular status of the subject in French culture and society, for the establishment of a chair of the Revolution at the University of Paris, in 1891, had created a national historical institution with no equivalent in Britain or the United States. This helps to explain why those who were associated with the Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, set up by Lefebvre at the Sorbonne, as well as the closely related Société des études robespierristes, and those in charge of the AhRf, saw much more than historiography at stake. It was not merely another academic controversy, a factor which British and American critics, who were familiar with the recent ‘storm’ over the English Revolution, did not fully appreciate.9 The initial lack of engagement, I think, also reflects a time when contact between historians in different countries was much less commonplace than it has become today. Travel is now much easier, while resources are available to fund extensive research trips or finance international conferences, not to mention the ubiquity of the Internet or the greater extent and diversity of the historical community. In those days, conversely, it was more difficult for historians in France to keep abreast of publications in English.10 Richard Cobb was, of course, well known to French historians of the Revolution, but he had lived in France and had hitherto mostly written in French.11 The demands of the doctorat d’État, which represented the acme of scholarly achievement, meant that most French academics were limited to studying the history of their own country, so that when members of my generation began invading the archives départementales, we were frequently asked why we were not investigating our own past. Even as late as the early 1980s, when Michel Vovelle, recently installed as successor to Albert Soboul at the Sorbonne, invited historians like myself to become involved in the forthcoming bicentenary of the Revolution, he proposed that we give papers on reactions to it in Britain. It was politely pointed out to him that we were specialists in French history, eager to share our expertise accordingly. At all events, a reaction to the Social Interpretation was slow to emerge in France, but when it arrived it was an antagonistic one, which would only harden in future. Soboul, who had produced a summation of the ‘orthodox’ view in his Précis d’histoire de la Révolution française in 1962, would later describe Cobban’s ‘offensive’ in the Social Interpretation as a ‘dangerous’ initiative.12 A few years earlier, in 1970, he had already declared that polemic was necessary in the light of recent publications, which had ‘called into question more than half a century of historiographical achievement, from Jaurès to Lefebvre’. He went on to assert that every effort must be made to defend ‘the historical reality of the Revolution’, albeit without any sacrifice of erudition. His words prefaced a collection of essays by Claude Mazauric which appeared under a title that clearly announced its parti pris: Sur la Révolution française. Contributions à l’histoire de la révolution bourgeoise. 13 The first half of this book was devoted to a series of critical studies rebutting ‘revisionist’ historiography, in which Cobban was accused of denying the class struggle, when he had addressed the question of the bourgeoisie and feudalism, on the basis of anecdotal evidence and atypical examples.14 Mazauric was, however, obliged to concede the existence of a Cobban ‘school’, which included fellow scholars such as George V. Taylor, whose research on eighteenth-century French economic history had suggested that most activities in this domain were at odds with the class basis of the bourgeois revolution.15 Mazauric proceeded to put fellow French historian, Roland Mousnier, in the firing line, on account of his attachment to the concept of a ‘society of orders’ rather than classes in eighteenth-century France. In fact, Cobban had referred to Mousnier in the Social Interpretation, citing the latter’s strictures on a history of upheaval in seventeenth-century France, which forced its findings into a Marxist theory, causing it to explode.16 It was thus no accident that Mousnier invited Cobban to a colloque held at Paris in 1966 on the subject of Problèmes de stratification en histoire sociale. The issue of finding a more appropriate vocabulary for the discussion of social groups in early modern societies was, of course, one that Cobban had raised in the early chapters of the Social Interpretation. He was asked to give a paper and the ensuing discussion was also recorded verbatim in the published conference proceedings.17 Unafraid, as always, to criticize another historian’s views, Cobban used the review of his ‘little book’, written by revolutionary specialist Jacques Godechot, as a foil for reiterating his beliefs about the inadequacies of the existing terminology employed for social history. He argued forcefully that it was overdependent on political categories and contemporary usage, with ‘feudalism’ in 1789 a good case in point. The debate that followed was a constructive one, though it concluded that resolving the question of stratification in the emergent discipline of social history was far from settled and the subject required further investigation. Cobban had the final word, stating that a suitable vocabulary must be found, without recourse to general theories and ‘throwing ourselves into the arms of the sociologists’, points he had already made in the Social Interpretation. In fact, Godechot, who was present at the conference, and perhaps surprised that his review had been called into question (though it turned out to be the only one to appear in a French academic journal), was at least willing to grant Cobban a hearing. As he had written in the Revue historique: ‘This small book is of great interest and it has the great merit of prompting reflection. Some of the criticism … seems justified, other aspects appear less well founded, and certain parts call for more serious reservations.’18 Although they were by no means entirely in accord with Cobban’s views, some non-Marxist historians in France had been preparing the ground for ‘revisionism’.19 Louis Bergeron, for example, regarded many of his arguments as debatable, but the ‘conservative economic outcome of the Revolution’ was incontestable.20 Jean-Clément Martin later wrote that although his reception in France had been unfavourable, Cobban had helped to clarify ‘terms and assumptions’.21 Above all, François Crouzet wrote a warm tribute in a letter to The Times, shortly after he learned of Cobban’s death: ‘He had brought to his studies of the Revolution a fresh and unbiased approach which, though resented by a few dogmatic and nationalist writers, has stirred up much stimulating controversy and shaken up some jejune tenets. His Social Interpretation is undoubtedly one of the most original works on this problem …’.22 However, in 1965 the orthodox view of the Revolution was decisively challenged in its heartland by the first volume of François Furet and Denis Richet’s La Révolution française.23 This pair of authors were clearly the targets of Soboul’s ire when he wrote that ‘certain individuals, publicists rather than historians’ were participating in an assault on the classic account. The barb was based on the fact that neither Furet nor Richet were historians of the Revolution per se, while their two volumes were lavishly illustrated and aimed at a broad audience.24 Yet there is no evidence to suggest that either of them was aware of, let alone influenced by, Cobban’s work when they first went into print, though they had evidently come to share his rejection of historical determinism after leaving the French Communist Party.25 They actually devoted little space to a discussion of the bourgeoisie in their first volume, save to say that it was ‘more intellectually than economically mature’, but their notion of an enlightened elite, bourgeois and noble, which unexpectedly split asunder in 1788, was extremely controversial, like their claim that the Revolution had ‘spun out of control’ after 1792. It was only in the bibliographical essay appended to the English translation of their book, which appeared in 1970, that the Social Interpretation was acknowledged.26 In fact, the efforts of Cobban and other critics of orthodoxy would be subsumed into those of Furet and Richet, quite transparently in the former’s subsequent onslaught against the Marxist ‘vulgate’, which appeared in 1971.27 Having made the connection, which was reinforced through his growing relationship with historians in the United States, where Cobban’s critique was widely endorsed, Furet fully embraced what had generally become known as ‘revisionism’.28 As an outstanding former student of his, Olwen Hufton, rightly states in the British Dictionary of National Biography, Cobban paved the way for revision of the Revolution’s history, and the publication of his Social Interpretation was clearly a landmark.29 Indeed, this accolade was repeated in the extensive, but also critical, introduction which Gwynne Lewis supplied for a new edition of the text at the turn of the twenty-first century.30 In the anglophone world, Cobban’s arguments were symptomatic of growing dissatisfaction with existing explanations for the outbreak and course of the Revolution, though the objections were often justified by detailed research that was conducted within the Marxist paradigm. Cobban’s forthright comments, founded on the interrogation of received wisdom rather than original research, were quickly absorbed within a thoroughgoing reappraisal, which attracted support across the Atlantic and later outre-Manche. By the time a French translation of the Social Interpretation was published in 1984, Cobban’s criticisms, if by no means all of his suggestions for an alternative reading, had been broadly accepted and the heat was going out of the controversy he had initiated, not just once but twice, first in the 1950s and then more decisively in the 1960s.31 As the bicentenary of the Revolution approached in 1989, a different debate was taking shape, which was dubbed ‘post-revisionism’ in some quarters, not without its own profound disagreements, over the nature of the Terror for instance. With the publication of Penser la Révolution française in 1978, Furet had created a fresh agenda, which took discussion in a new direction, with an emphasis on semiotics and political culture.32 Somewhat ironically, in view of his earlier work on intellectual history, Cobban had remained attached to pursuing the social and economic significance of the French Revolution, albeit not from a Marxist perspective and even though he regarded it, above all, as a political upheaval.33 As he himself said of his later work, he had once been ‘more interested in what went on in people’s heads … than what went into their pockets’.34 Some residual friction notwithstanding, a more fruitful set of cosmopolitan relationships would develop within the expanding community of historians who specialized in the vitally important revolutionary decade in France. In an increasingly global context, the ever-wider scope of its historiography would emerge from competing methodologies rather than different national identities. In the wake of the bicentenary, ‘the ideological attacks and personal animosities that had characterized the historiography of earlier generations’ gave way to a more cooperative approach.35 Those postgraduate students whom Cobban supervised would contribute hugely to the exploration of these new avenues, thus helping to ensure his enduring legacy, as the following articles will confirm. ALFRED COBBAN, HIS WRITING AND HIS TEACHING Alfred Cobban was Professor of French History at UCL from 1953 to 1968. He was born in Chelsea in 1901, the son of a furniture salesman.36 He did not come from an academic or a wealthy family, which was unusual in the academic world of the time: he never forgot that he was totally dependent on what he could earn month by month. He won a scholarship to a prestigious fee-paying school, Latymer Upper and another to Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, where he was awarded First Class Honours. After completing a doctorate at Cambridge, he became a lecturer at King’s College, Newcastle, and in 1937 Reader in French History at UCL. Cobban remained in this post until 1953 although the potential for promotion to professor existed. Sir John Neale, his head of department, said he was keen to promote him, but Neale had a reputation for not promoting his juniors. 37 As Reader in French History Cobban taught two specialized undergraduate courses, a special subject on the French Revolution (1787–94) and an optional subject on French constitutional history from 1714 to the present. From 1947 he ran a seminar at the IHR which soon attracted excellent doctoral students from Britain and North America. His list of publications on political ideas and French history grew rapidly, as did his reputation as a leading specialist in French history in Britain. It is said he was always consulted on French history posts at British universities. Cobban had been awarded a Rockefeller scholarship in 1943 and, while Reader at UCL, he was visiting professor at Chicago in 1947 and then at Harvard. He turned down the offer of a tenured Chair at Chicago about the same time. In 1953 he was promoted to be Professor of French History at UCL, a post he was to hold until his death in 1968. Cobban served as head of the history department until 1966, edited the journal History and served on a large number of boards and committees and as external examiner to other universities, including Cambridge. He received numerous offers to visit prestigious US and Canadian universities. In 1964 he was invited to Johns Hopkins, Washington DC, the University of Texas at Austin, Yale, Dartmouth College and Brandeis.38 He was always careful to fix timings to miss as little as possible of his UCL teaching or else rearranged his teaching to do it before he went away. In 1966 he received a substantial number of such invitations, including one to Berkeley, but was diagnosed with stomach cancer. After surgery at University College Hospital he was moved to Guy’s Hospital. He refused further operations. When he came out of hospital for the second time at the end of November 1967, he wrote to the provost stating that he would resume teaching, particularly of his research students, who were most important to him. But in March 1968 his wife, Muriel, wrote a letter saying he was going into a nursing home and he signed it. He died in April 1968. Now, to consider his contribution to the study of history.39 In Britain during the 1950s and 1960s Alfred Cobban was the outstanding historian of France. Many of his thirteen books and numerous articles contained detailed critical analyses of the research of leading scholars in French universities. He questioned their arguments and conclusions, but was always careful to allow their voices to be heard, whether he agreed with them or not. Cobban was an empiricist, disdaining abstract theory. Historical writing had to be based on archival evidence, but evidence needed to be presented within a coherent argument. He abhorred the ‘mere academic magpie collecting of insignificant facts’.40 He worked in the Archives nationales for his book on Ambassadors and Secret Agents (1954) and in the Côte-d’Or and other departmental archives for two articles on the elections of 1848. His intended volume on 1848 was never completed. Cobban was as much a political philosopher as a historian. His first books were on Burke and Rousseau. He dedicated his Rousseau volume to his wife, who organized ordinary life so effortlessly that he was able to devote himself totally to writing, to teaching and to shaping and managing the study of history. For him, as for Marc Bloch, a French historian he much admired, a historian could only understand the past in the context of the present. He was deeply concerned that his generation was experiencing such turbulent, violent and inhumane times. His solution was an active and passionate attempt to return to the moral and ethical standards which had been abandoned. He was committed to social change through reform and had no time for revolution or violence. In line with this philosophy, he brought out in quick succession a series of influential polemics: Dictatorship in Theory and Practice in 1939, The Crisis of Civilisation in 1940, National Self-Determination in 1945 and, in 1954, he contributed a history of Vichy France to Arnold Toynbee’s Hitler’s Europe. In 1949, Cobban had written an introduction to a new edition of Édouard Dolléans’ Le Chartisme, which, though brief, offers an indication of Cobban’s own philosophy of history and is worth quoting at length, given that Cobban wrote and published little in French. The first edition had appeared in 1914 with an introduction by Sidney Webb, leading Fabian and founder of the London School of Economics (LSE). That Cobban wrote the new introduction indicates his sympathy with Fabian socialism, which sought social reform through education and legislation, not revolution. Cobban compared Chartists and Jacobins. ‘Jacobins and Chartists were parliamentarians, constitutional revolutionaries, with a store of liberal ideas.’ Cobban described Chartism as ‘one of the most successful failures in history’. Their charter was important as the basis for subsequent, successful democratic socialism. Cobban’s conclusion summarized his philosophy of the role of the historian. It is not the historian’s job to judge these fundamental questions or to embark on the stormy seas of contemporary controversy. We should rather imitate the spirit of impartiality, joined with a fine and sensitive sympathy, in which Édouard Dolléans has written this history of the Chartists … We have hoped to show, behind the historical question, the existence of an actual problem of prime importance, which today gives this study of Chartism a higher relevance than it could have had when first published.41 Cobban’s best-remembered and most influential contribution to history was his interrogation of the social significance of the 1789 Revolution. He claimed that French academic historians, led by Georges Lefebvre, believed the 1789 Revolution was made by and for the bourgeoisie, in keeping with Karl Marx’s assertion that 1789 was the first stage in an inevitable historical process which would lead to a proletarian takeover and then a classless society. Albert Soboul, a successor of Lefebvre’s at the Sorbonne, began his 1965 account of 1789: ‘The Revolution marked the advent of bourgeois, capitalist society in the history of France’.42 In his inaugural lecture as Professor of French History in 1954, entitled ‘The Myth of the French Revolution’ and later, in The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), his most influential book, Cobban asserted that, although the Revolution of 1789 brought radical political change, the complex social structures of France were far more difficult to alter. ‘The social history of the revolutionary period has suffered because historians have adopted a sociological theory based in circumstances of a later age and have used the events of a mere year or two in the revolution for their analysis’, he wrote.43 Cobban questioned both contemporary sociological and especially Marxist theory concerning 1789: What are the facts of the so-called bourgeois revolution, and in particular, who were the bourgeoisie? What was the feudalism they are supposed to have overthrown? How was the bourgeois revolution related to the revolt of the peasantry? … What was the part played in the revolutionary situation by the lower social orders?44 Cobban extensively quoted detailed evidence that showed the complexity of social groups, particularly from the research of Lefebvre, Soboul and also Ernest Labrousse.45 He concluded that their own archival evidence did not support the more simplistic Marxist theories they later enunciated. Cobban did not deny that the eighteenth century saw the rise of bourgeois groups and that the Third Estate members elected to the Estates General in May 1789 were predominantly bourgeois. Citing the earlier, detailed statistical research of Lefebvre himself, and the American historian George V. Taylor among others, Cobban pointed out that the Third Estate in the Estates General were predominantly bureaucrats, state servants and professionals, especially lawyers and landowners, not capitalists, and noted with some glee that this had also been Lefebvre’s own conclusion in Quatre-vingt-neuf.46 Lefebvre claimed, and Cobban agreed, that 1789 was the consequence of long-term social conflict, but Cobban argued that eighteenth-century society was far more complex than Marxist theory allowed and that social change was the result of slow development, not revolution. Cobban had great respect for Lefebvre as ‘the most recent of the greater historians of the French Revolution’.47 Indeed, Cobban sent Lefebvre copies of his academic articles which Lefebvre retained in his personal library. They can be found today in the collections on 1789 at the Museum of the Revolution located at the Château de Vizille.48 Having questioned how the origins of 1789 were being interpreted in France, Cobban turned to the social consequences of the Revolution. He noted that in the summer of 1789 the decision of the new National Assembly to abolish feudal or seigneurial dues and the tithe was not the choice of bourgeois deputies as Marxists claimed. Many bourgeois had bought these rights and, as Lefebvre wrote, ‘the bourgeoisie had neither the time nor the desire to attack the tithe or the feudal rights’.49 Abolition was dictated by anti-seigneurial insurrection, the general panic known as the Grande Peur. Lefebvre, in his studies on the peasants of the Nord, and his own book, La Grande Peur, had also stressed the significance of peasant action.50 What caused most opposition to seigneurial dues was that they were increasingly owned by urban bourgeois and exploited at higher and higher rates, separate from ownership of the actual land. The abolition of seigneurial dues and the tithe on the night of 4 August 1789 may be seen as one of the major social consequences of 1789 and was a victory of country people against the towns. Better-off peasants thought their new freehold tenure made them the victors of 1789, but Cobban, while acknowledging that the more substantial peasants were victors, noted that that feudal dues actually survived in the form of higher rents peasants were obliged to pay if they were not outright owners of their land.51 Cobban went on to deny the Marxist claim that 1789 led to capitalist growth. Indeed, the upheavals of revolution and twenty-five years of war retarded the French economy, as Henri Sée and even Albert Soboul recognized.52 There was no sudden major large-scale industrial take-off in France in the next century. Nor did 1789 lead to rapid social change, one reason being that peasant land tenure had been made more secure. After 1789 France was unique in Europe with over 6 million peasant families owning some land directly as a consequence of the Revolution, an arguably beneficial outcome, which Cobban did not stress. Although there was some legislation to abolish common rights, much common land, especially woodland, survived into the nineteenth century. Better-off peasants had gained but social change was restricted; a sign of this was the fact that nobles retained virtually the same proportion of French land after 1815 as they had before 1789.53 Lefebvre and his colleagues were shocked by what they saw as the negativity of Cobban’s ‘myth’ of 1789. Only two of his books were translated into French, although most are listed in their English editions in the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue. A translation of The Social Interpretation appeared in 1984, with an introduction by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, but it never seems to have been reviewed in France.54 His only other book translated into French was a beautifully illustrated series of essays on eighteenth-century Europe, written for the general public, which he edited and to which he contributed a chapter on music.55 Yet, although most French scholars, led by Lefebvre, Soboul and Labrousse rejected Cobban’s views, about that time many of their doctoral students actually undertook detailed analyses of local society which revealed its complexity along the same lines as Cobban had suggested and his own students were pursuing. Think for example, of the work of Pierre Goubert on the Beauvaisis, Maurice Agulhon on the Var, Alain Corbin on the Limousin or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on the Languedoc.56 Their theses, often twenty years in the making, transformed social history in France. The bicentenary of 1789, notable for the absence of peasants, workers or bourgeoisie from its historical commemorations, was marked by the burial of the Marxist revolution with the collapse of the USSR. Although French Marxist scholars rejected Cobban’s views, other leading French historians agreed with him, notably François Furet and Louis Bergeron on the limited social impact of 1789, and François Crouzet on the negative impact of 1789 on economic growth.57 Cobban questioned Marxist theory on the inevitability of the replacement of noble by bourgeois power on two grounds. First, that the Crown was challenged not by the bourgeoisie, but by the noblesse de robe in the thirteen parlements, particularly the Parlement de Paris, and by nobles and clergy in the Assembly of Notables of 1787. Secondly, that a new elite of notables, blending noble and bourgeois power, was emerging, making the idea of a straightforward bourgeois takeover simplistic. From the 1950s the role of the notables was exhaustively researched in doctoral theses in France by, among others, André-Jean Tudesq and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret; the latter’s essay on the nobility was translated into English nine years later by William Doyle.58 The theme had been taken up by Doyle himself, by Cobban’s student John Mackrell in his doctoral thesis on the attack on ‘feudalism’, and by David Higgs, whose Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France stressed the persistence of noble power.59 Cobban’s suggestion that office-holders such as parlementaires were critical of the Crown because their offices were losing value was not, however, sustained by Doyle’s later research, upon which he embarked after he had read Cobban’s account. Doyle also expressed doubt over Cobban’s suggestion that office-holders made a profit during the Revolution when they were compensated for losing their offices. Cobban would have been delighted that his questions had attracted such detailed and convincing research. Although he rejected Marxist interpretations of the social significance of 1789, Cobban did not belittle the political importance of the Revolution or the need so keenly felt in 1789 to make French society fairer and more equal. He noted the role of Enlightenment ideas in bringing about revolution, but in a rather different way from earlier commentators. He was less concerned with the Enlightenment as a body of theory than its practical application. His outstanding contributions along these lines were Rousseau and the Modern State (1934) and In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (1959). For Cobban, Enlightenment authors were primarily optimistic utilitarian reformers, confident in the power of education, strongly influenced by advances in science and with some sympathy for emergent republicanism: French Benthams. What mattered was their commitment to humanity and their search for ethical standards. Cobban noted that the influence of enlightened writers persisted through the nineteenth century. His underlying idea was not to give a detailed account of enlightened ideas but rather to bring out their long-term legacy—and their abandonment in the twentieth century. Several of his British students followed him on this path, perhaps the most outstanding being Keith Baker, now a much-honoured senior professor at Stanford, renowned for his work on Condorcet and the revolutionary content of philosophical ideas in 1789.60 Cobban was keen to bring French history to a wider public. His History of Modern France, first published by Penguin in 1957, was designed to tell them that history, beginning in 1715. It was at first a two-volume, then a three-volume, history, completed in 1965. This masterly and highly readable account addressed and captured the interest of a broad readership. It became, and remained for many years, a standard account and is still read. He was also heavily involved with the Historical Association, editing the journal History and a series of pamphlets, invaluable for school and undergraduate students, some of which are still in print. However, his doctoral teaching was absolutely central to his work, and contributed to establishing his reputation as the leading historian of France outside the country. His focus was his doctoral seminar, which met at the IHR on Monday afternoons after his undergraduate special subject seminar. Students brought to it research on PhD topics ranging from the Wars of Religion (Nicola M. Sutherland), through aspects of Louis XIV’s reign (Julian and Cynthia Dent) to 1789 (George Rudé, Nora Temple, Olwen Hufton and Clive Church) and the nineteenth century (David Higgs and myself). In the 1950s and 1960s Cobban was the leading supervisor of French history doctoral students in Britain, attracting students not only from the United Kingdom, including Oxford and Cambridge, but also from North America, particularly Canada. Cobban was already known in North America from his visits to universities and conferences, such as that of the Society for French Historical Studies, where he gave one of the eight papers at its first conference in 1958. His first Canadian students were John McLaughlin (University of Western Ontario), John Bosher (York University, Toronto) and Harvey Mitchell (University of British Columbia). Another crop of Canadian undergraduates made their way to Cobban’s seminar in the 1960s, some of whom had been taught by the earlier generation, including David Higgs (University of Toronto), Tim Le Goff (York University, Toronto, and professor at the Collège de France) and Donald Sutherland (University of Maryland), and three others who pursued other careers after completing their studies. Cobban took all teaching and especially doctoral supervision very conscientiously and seriously, unlike some other supervisors at that time. He never missed his teaching appointments and was always fully prepared to give helpful advice. He used to supervise about eight doctoral students at any given time, each at various stages of their research. He was realistic, taking on no more students than he could place in university posts. He was a very practical supervisor. He always stressed that a PhD was an apprenticeship for a university position and so had to be based on archival sources (he failed Eugene Weber’s Cambridge doctoral thesis on the Action Française, supervised by David Thomson, because it had no archival base). He would often suggest a topic that stemmed from his own work, then students would spend at least one of three years working in archives in France. I was assigned to the July Monarchy because Cobban considered 1789 was well covered. If he had no direct knowledge of the relevant archives, he would introduce the student to an expert, who would then serve as an examiner for the doctorate. Cobban would meet us individually, about twice a term, as well as in his IHR seminar, which became a close community. As a seminar, we met weekly and we were expected to make brief regular oral reports on our research to the group, as well as present one full paper shortly before we completed our theses. It was a seminar which focussed on postgraduates, unlike the seminars at the IHR today, although Cobban would invite outside speakers on occasion, including Richard Cobb from Oxford. At the end of the academic year Cobban would invite us to enjoy Muriel’s superb cooking and their wine. When we finished our doctorates, we tended to keep in close touch, and still do. Readers will note that several of Cobban’s students have generously read this account. Cobban encouraged his PhD students to pursue themes with a social history content, which often required us to work outside Paris in departmental archives. Olwen Hufton used this base for her very impressive book on Bayeux, then later on the poor and on women in eighteenth-century France.61 Clive Church found material that forced him to conclude that the Directory was no bourgeois social revolution.62 In my own thesis and subsequent book, I concluded that 1830 was a political, not a social, takeover.63 George Rudé, Cobban’s most outstanding student, held a Marxist interpretation of social unrest, similar to that of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, which he developed in his lucid and highly influential The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959) and The Crowd in History (1964). Rudé attended Cobban’s IHR seminar from 1947 when he enrolled with him to work on his doctorate and he gave a paper to the seminar when he completed his thesis in 1950.64 Rudé’s name disappeared from the attendance book after the 1956–7 session.65 It is generally agreed that he and Cobban fell out when Rudé remained in the Communist Party after the Hungarian rising of 1956, although by that stage Rudé was no longer a party activist. Cobban was always careful to ensure his doctoral students secured university posts, yet Rudé remained a schoolteacher for ten years after he completed his doctorate and until after the publication of his first book. He had taught at St Paul’s, then as now an outstanding London public school, where the head had reluctantly asked him to resign in 1949 after parents complained that they had seen him distributing Communist Party literature. But his politics never obtruded into his teaching. Subsequently he was head of history at Holloway School and a member of a London County Council committee investigating the history syllabus in schools.66 In the late 1950s British universities had their own brand of McCarthyism and it may have impinged on Rudé’s career. The most prestigious Marxist historian in Britain, Eric Hobsbawm, struggled to gain a lectureship at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 1947 and, despite the eminence of his publications was not made professor until 1970. Trying to secure a university job after over twenty years as a schoolmaster was difficult, as one of Rudé’s referees commented.67 Also very few vacancies were likely to have existed in the rather restricted academic market before the Robbins Report promoted rapid university expansion in the 1960s. Ironically Rudé would probably have had no difficulty securing a British post a few years later; as a new PhD in the mid-sixties I had a choice of a first job. The publication of Rudé’s first book in 1959 and the excellent reviews he received may have encouraged him to make applications to Commonwealth universities. When Rudé secured his first university post at the age of fifty, as Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide in 1960, Cobban was not a referee, which is unusual, but according to Rudé himself he ‘had in fact been very helpful’.68 Rudé was promoted to a newly created second Chair of History there in 1964. Cobban always acknowledged Rudé’s exceptional scholarship. He cited Rudé’s research when discussing the revolutionary crowd in The Social Interpretation, besides encouraging students to read Rudé’s books. He also fulfilled his role as PhD supervisor in finding publication opportunities for his star student. Cobban invited Rudé to write Interpretations of the French Revolution, which Cobban published as an Historical Association pamphlet in 1961, a successor to his own 1946 pamphlet on Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution. Rudé took Cobban’s earlier pamphlet as a model for his own. He made only a passing reference to Marx, but he did discuss Cobban’s challenge to traditional views.69 Cobban took his editorship of the Historical Association’s publications very seriously and it would have been inconceivable for him to have asked Rudé to write the pamphlet if they were in dispute. Rudé was the only one among his students to have been given this opportunity. He also contributed a chapter on the origins of 1789 to the New Cambridge Modern History (vol. viii, 1965), following the two chapters that Cobban himself had written for the previous volume (vii, 1957), a further indication of Cobban’s positive view of Rudé’s scholarship. John Bosher, another student of Cobban also contributed a chapter to the 1957 volume. Cobban’s widow, Muriel, invited Rudé to the memorial service for Cobban and Rudé subsequently contributed a chapter to Cobban’s Festschrift.70 In the 1950s and 1960s few women studied for PhDs; Cobban supervised eight females, including myself. All but three of them went on to pursue a lifelong university career, though one of those who did not, Joan MacDonald, published a book on Rousseau and the French Revolution.71 Those who became academics included Nicola Sutherland, who wrote on the age of Catherine de Medici and taught at Bedford College, London, and Nora Temple, who wrote a thesis on eighteenth-century French local government and was appointed to Cardiff University. Cobban supervised two female Canadian students, one of whom, Cynthia Dent (née Goulden), wrote on the Church under Louis XIV and went on to a permanent post at York University in Toronto. Olwen Hufton was the most illustrious, going on to Chairs at Harvard, the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and Oxford (Merton College) and was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire. For fun, Richard Cobb used to say that Cobban looked out for working-class girls who researched the poor. Very few girls from such families went to university in the 1960s, and almost none produced doctoral theses and became lecturers. Olwen was brought up in a council flat in Oldham and my father was a blacksmith in a steel works in the Potteries. Cobban’s own humble background may have encouraged him to have sympathy for students from similar origins. His seminar was very unusual in the large number of women, but competence and employability were Cobban’s prime criteria in selecting postgraduates. To conclude on Cobban’s legacy. First and foremost, come his research and published writing which inspired a lasting interest in the history of France in universities and the wider world. The stimulating, questioning approach of his writing and his constant dialogue with his own and other scholars’ detailed, original research encouraged young scholars to question established views and interrogate the past. He was totally committed to both his teaching and writing. He never stopped, and even gave a paper at a conference organized by Roland Mousnier at the École de Saint-Cloud in 1966, immediately after his first cancer surgery.72 He supervised research students from his hospital bed two days before his death. He inspired and educated a numerous and above all genuinely altruistic community of scholars, who have had a marked impact on how the history of France is understood and whose own students now teach in universities in Britain, Canada, the United States, Japan and elsewhere. In the 1950s and 1960s French history was regarded as a prime subject for study, in Britain, Australasia and North America especially. The liberal tradition of 1789 seemed vitally important in a world that had suffered two world wars and horrifying political and social collapse. The French experience seemed to offer a tiny bit of hope for humanity. Cobban reflected that belief in his research and writing and he committed himself to reinforcing it. REMINISCENCES OF A CANADIAN POSTGRADUATE STUDENT IN LONDON: THE SEMINARS OF ALFRED COBBAN AND DOUGLAS JOHNSON (1965–1970 AND AFTER) In the autumn of 1965, after graduating from the Honours History programme at the University of British Columbia (UBC), I went to study French history with Alfred Cobban, Professor of French History in the University of London. I was not alone; in the two years 1965–6 and 1966–7, there were no fewer than six Canadians in his seminar at the IHR: Donald Sutherland, Fred Affleck, Glennis Parry, John Robinson, Edward Whitcomb and myself. We were not the first Canadians to work with Cobban. Over the previous two decades we had been preceded by John P. McLaughlin, a graduate of Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario), who received his London doctorate in 1951 and was a librarian and teacher for many years after at the University of Western Ontario; Harvey Mitchell, who came from the University of Manitoba, obtained his PhD in 1954 and spent most of his subsequent career at UBC; and John Bosher, from UBC, who got his London doctorate in 1957 and taught at UBC, Cornell and York University (Toronto). After this trio came David Higgs, another UBC man (PhD 1964), and Cynthia Goulden (later Cynthia Dent) from the University of Toronto (PhD 1967). By the time I arrived in London both had already moved back to Canada; David, to make a career at the University of Toronto and Cynthia, at York University. Canadian postgraduates in England in those peoples’ time needed plenty of courage and could not always get the financial support they needed. I learned something of this during my long friendship with John Bosher, who had been one of my teachers at UBC and later became a colleague and close friend after 1969, when we were both engaged by the History Department at York University in Toronto.73 John had graduated from UBC in 1950 with a first-class Honours Degree in History. After a year’s training at the UBC Faculty of Education destroyed any desire he had to teach high school, he was only too pleased to board the bus to Ottawa and start a job with the Canadian federal government’s Civil Service Commission. While working for a time in Toronto, he met Margareta Zoë Chirovici, who had a French mother and a Romanian father. John and Marga eventually married and promptly took ship for a honeymoon in London. There, John profited from his visit to explore opportunities for a career change. He had an interview with Norman Robertson, then Canadian High Commissioner in London, who told him bluntly that he could never have a diplomatic career because of his Romanian father-in-law and wife; this was, of course, the 1950s. John then looked up the renowned Tudor historian Professor S.T. Bindoff of Queen Mary College, with whom he had once corresponded about doing research for a higher degree on the French origins of Canada. At one point in the interview Professor Bindoff asked abruptly, ‘Can you walk?’ John said he could, and the two of them set off down Mile End Road, stopping in each pub along the way, ostensibly to check on the latest cricket scores. At some point in their progress, Bindoff told John, ‘Cobby’s the man for you’, and put him in touch with his colleague Alfred Cobban. His two mentors then worked out a strategy with him: John would use the prestige of the Andison Scholarship, which he had been awarded by the UBC French Department for excellence in that language, to obtain a French Government scholarship, and spend a year at the Sorbonne doing research in 1953–4. The newlyweds went straight from London to Paris. There, they lived by makeshifts while John set to work under the direction of Edmond Perroy and Paul Vaucher, Cobban’s own predecessor at London, who was by then on the faculty of the Sorbonne. Vaucher and Perroy had him prepare a Diplôme d’Études Supérieures (DES), a degree roughly the equivalent of a one-year MA by thesis, and awarded by the French state, unlike the usual university diplomas that the Sorbonne reserved for its foreign students. With help from his friend Hubert Mondor, a young man with a law degree who helped him with his French prose in return for lessons in English, Bosher finished his DES on time in June 1954. His research topic, ‘L’opinion des Physiocrates sur l’Angleterre’, gave him a kernel of material and ideas that he then took with him to start doctoral work with Cobban in London. Living in London was hard for the couple, particularly after the birth of a daughter in March 1955. Queen Mary College gave John an award of £50 (about £1000 in today’s money), but, because he was a foreigner, the English Ministry of Education denied him the supplement of £250 that normally went with it. At that point, John began to contemplate going back to the Canadian Civil Service or even teaching school. Luckily, he thought to apply for a Canadian Government Overseas Award, and got a telegram in May 1955 awarding him $2000 (equivalent to about £800 in those days or around £15,600 today) for another year of research and writing in England and France. With the occasional gift of dollars stuffed into envelopes by his family back home, John and Marga managed to stretch that award into 1956. Then Cobban found him a position as Temporary Lecturer in Modern European History at King’s College. It was during this time that John, with the help of the Canadian Department of External Affairs, managed to extract Mr Chirovici from prison in his native country and settle him in Canada. Pay at King’s College was meagre, and life was never easy. John and Marga lived with about ten other families in an eighteenth-century mansion at Marden Hill, 30 miles north of London. To make ends meet they took in a lodger. John recalls working occasionally as a waiter on British Rail, and even going into Covent Garden with friends to pick up vegetables discarded at the end of the evening. One day the police put a parking ticket on an old van he owned; in court he offered to give over the vehicle in lieu of the £1 fine. Despite the penury, the challenge of the work and research kept up John’s morale, and he finished a thesis (1957) that, in time, became his first book as well as the basis for a chapter in Volume 8 of the New Cambridge Modern History (1965).74 In 1958, Professor F. H. Soward, Dean and Head of the UBC History Department, offered him a job as Assistant Professor, discreetly slipping a cheque for the first month’s pay into the envelope along with the offer. John went out, bought a piece of beef for a banquet with their friends, and left King’s College the following spring for Vancouver. That was John’s experience. A dozen years later, my own decision to go to England and more specifically to Cobban’s seminar in London, rather than study in the United States, was certainly easier than it would have been in the days of McLaughlin, Mitchell and Bosher. Funding was by now more available, particularly in the form of the Commonwealth Scholarship Programme, which paid for travel to England, covered the very reasonable tuition fees then required of postgraduates, and guaranteed a modest but regular stipend of £55 a month (roughly £1000 today, the equivalent of a British postgraduate student grant) for young people preparing research degrees in the various universities of the former Empire. Luckily, after a couple of years, I managed to secure more ample support when the Canada Council extended its scholarships, previously only available for study within Canada, to Canadian postgraduates at universities outside the country. Of course, generous awards available in the USA still made that country the logical destination for most Canadians who aspired to postgraduate degrees, but now the UK and other countries lay more easily within reach. Even the Commonwealth award was enough, however, to ease the daunting choice between austere study in Britain and France and comfortably funded study in the USA. Admittedly, the American option had been very attractive. I had in fact obtained a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship tenable in an American university, and admission offers from several, but it was not a good moment for graduate work in French history in the USA: that was the case at Harvard for example, where I had been accepted. Elsewhere in that country, a new and brilliant generation of French historians—David Bien, Robert Forster, Orest Ranum and others—were still only young men of promise. Cobban by contrast was an established and attractive figure by this time and competent to direct research over a wide area of French history. I knew this. While still in high school I read his Penguin History of Modern France, and, as an undergraduate, his essay In Search of Humanity, as well as several of his articles, and in early 1965, while I was busy applying to graduate schools, his Social Interpretation, which had just appeared. Yet I still worried needlessly about missing out on the automatic recognition and marketability that went with a degree from a good American university. True, John Bosher, who was absent on sabbatical that year, had written to Cobban on my behalf and encouraged me to go to London, as did several other of my teachers such as Christopher Stocker and James Winter, both of them Americans. In the end I think I chose London because I was inclined to take an unconventional path at a place quite different from my native Vancouver—and because in London, there was Cobban. Although it had not been a determining factor, I also sensed dimly before I started—and soon found it true—that an English doctoral training would dovetail better with the specialized Honours BA that I had from UBC than with the course of study offered in graduate schools in the USA; the English degree allowed one to start quickly on a proper research subject rather than plod for several years through the American fare of course-work and comprehensives, which would have often been redundant. It was not a perfect fit; an English doctoral candidate of my age, with an English Honours BA built upon earlier specialization at A-level, would have had read more history than I had. But my instinct told me that there was much to gain from being plunged into the water at the deep end of the pool. And this was what happened. At my very first meeting with Professor Cobban we began to discuss possible thesis topics. Though he did ask me if I had any preferences (I had a couple of ideas, not very good) he made it clear that he viewed social history as the field where important things were happening. At first, he proposed working on some aspect of the seigneurie, possibly in New France, a subject which he thought might open a way to a university job in Canada. I was not very keen—an unwittingly foresighted reluctance, given the way that field soon developed in Canada during the 1960s with the work of Cole Harris and Louise Dechêne.75 Cobban did not insist on his idea, but told me to begin reading books in social history and to meet with him every couple of weeks to discuss them. The first one he assigned was Mousnier’s La Vénalité des offices, a sobering start. But we pressed ahead. Soon we came to the work of Charles Tilly on the social origins of popular counter-revolution in the Vendée, Paul Bois on the Maine, and also a different sort of study, Olwen Hufton’s thesis on Bayeux, which she had done for Cobban, and was soon to appear in print.76 By this route I got interested in the economy and society of eighteenth-century Brittany. At first, I concentrated on the counter-revolution there—Cobban had me write up a paper on it from printed sources and present it to his research seminar in early 1966—but soon the focus shifted to the economy and society of the old regime itself in the south-western part of that province. When I look back on the process, I marvel at Cobban’s kindness, and the time that he took out of his very busy schedule, for those frequent one-on-one sessions with someone who was, after all, only an untried, beginning postgraduate student, and how simple, natural and straightforward he made it all seem. Like all his other students, and many other graduate students and faculty from London and nearby, I also attended Cobban’s weekly seminar on French history at the IHR that year and began to learn how a proper research seminar worked. Soon, in the spring of 1966, I made my first research trip to Brittany. More prolonged stays in Vannes and Rennes followed, alternating with bouts of writing and reading in secondary sources in London; I have particularly fond memories of working in the old British Museum library. After I had written up a couple of chapters, Cobban allowed me to move up from an MPhil to a PhD candidacy Eventually I got a job as a Lecturer at York University (Toronto) in 1969 with promotion to Assistant Professor when I finished my PhD in September 1970.77 The seminar members at London were a varied group; there were not just Cobban’s current students; there were also several former students or current colleagues who had teaching jobs in or around London such as Pamela Pilbeam, Olwen Hufton and Nicola Sutherland, and others from more distant UK universities, who would put in an appearance or sometimes read a paper. Like my fellow postgraduate students, I was often away from London doing research in France, but we got along well when we were together in the seminar and afterwards in the pub. Not all of us went on to academic careers; at least four of my Canadian contemporaries went into the civil service. One of them, John Robinson, eventually became Canadian High Commissioner to Jamaica (2002–4); another, Ed Whitcomb, after teaching in several Canadian universities and turning his thesis on Napoleon’s diplomats into a distinguished monograph, enjoyed, appropriately, a fruitful career in the Canadian Department of External Affairs and Privy Council Office, followed by retirement and a second career in which he has published over a dozen books on Canadian history and Canadian music.78 Fred Affleck had perhaps the most remarkable of these extra-academic trajectories. His thesis (1972) on transport in the Seine valley during the nineteenth century gave him the impetus that carried him to a job in the Canadian Department of Transport, and then on to Australia, for another in the office of the Western Australia Director General of Transport, a spell in the private sector as a consultant, then back to the public sector again, in each of the two national railway corporations and, after various other senior appointments, the position of Deputy Chair of Western Australia’s main port at Freemantle. Then Fred crowned it all in a belated return to academia, with a chair in Transport and Urban Planning, held simultaneously at Western Australia’s four public universities while he directed that state’s Planning and Transport Research Centre. All this was duly recognized by nomination to the rank of Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017. During this time Fred managed to publish two books (soon to be joined by a third) on transport history in Western Australia. ‘The experience of study in the milieu created and sustained by Cobban, Johnson ... and others’, he wrote to me, ‘opened large opportunities outside the academic career stream.’79 Indeed. Many of us in the seminar became close friends. One in particular bulked large both as a friend and in my professional life, Donald Sutherland, a graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa. At Carleton, Don decided he wanted to go to the University of Sussex for further study, rather a general aim like Bosher’s idea in going to London; and, also like Bosher, though not quite so drastically, without abundant material supportin Don’s case, his savings and $100 a month from his family. But at Sussex he had the good luck to prepare an MA thesis with Maurice Hutt on a subject in the French Revolution. Maurice promptly sent him to London and to Cobban in the autumn of 1966. Relative austerity (a shared flat in pre-gentrified Whitechapel during his first year in London) eventually eased, however, with marriage and one of the new Canada Council Fellowships during his final three years. Donald’s initial idea had been a Rudé-style study of popular counter-revolution in Brittany; much transformed and developed, it became his thesis and then his first book.80 At first his proximity to my own research worried me but our interests turned out to be sufficiently divergent that we found a modus vivendi, and soon discovered the real advantage and fun of working in an area of common interest, and particularly in rural history. It no doubt helped that our supervisor was much drawn to that powerful theme. Nearly a third of Cobban’s Social Interpretation consists of chapters on the interaction of the Revolution with the rural world, where he identifies the peasantry, not the bourgeoisie, as the autonomous force that, in attacking seigneurial rights, brought down ‘feudalism’: ‘If “feudalism” in 1789 did not mean seigniorial rights, it meant nothing …. The abolition of seigniorial dues was the work of the peasantry, unwillingly accepted by the men who drew up the town and bailliage cahiers and forced on the National Assembly through the fear inspired by a peasant revolt.’81 Since those early days, separately and together, Don and I have spent much of our professional lives working and publishing on early modern French rural history, often touching on some of Cobban’s preoccupations, notably the exploration of the economic and social changes that the Revolution imposed on rural property-holding and social structure, and their implications for economic growth, which Cobban viewed as generally negative but which we see as more ambiguous.82 But that was for the future. Long before either of us defended our theses, Cobban had ceased to be our supervisor. Sometime in 1966 his students were told that he had contracted stomach cancer. He continued to run his seminar and to work with his us through 1966 and 1967, but then he had to abandon all but occasional meetings on an individual basis. Although this news of Cobban’s illness came as a great shock, I was away doing my research in France during much of that time, so it did not affect me in a practical way as much as it might have done. He and I already had a pretty good idea of where the thesis was going, he trusted me to work independently and in those years I could also turn to Professor Jean Meyer, then at the Université de Rennes, to whom Cobban had given me a reference; Jean Meyer was always ready to provide invaluable counsel and encouragement, and later became a close friend. Nevertheless, I did continue to consult Cobban after he and Muriel had moved to Ealing, when he could no longer come in to University College. Above all, I have a poignant memory of taking leave from him a few days before his death in the early spring of 1968, when he was under care in a Kensington nursing home. One day, during a brief return to London, I went to visit him, and we were soon joined by Fred Affleck and Guy Neave, another member of the seminar.83 Although Cobban was very weak, he was quite lucid and seemed genuinely glad to see us. We talked a bit about various things and then I got the idea of asking him to tell us about his career. He started by recounting how as a schoolboy he had worked towards a scholarship at Cambridge: for two years, he read a book a day, and, as he wryly remarked, after that you discover that you know quite a lot. The teaching he got as an undergraduate at Cambridge he had found uneven, but he took a special subject seminar in eighteenth-century English literature and history. He developed a special interest in the history of ideas and did a Cambridge DPhil thesis on Burke, at a time when theses were a novelty in England; he had to cut it by a third for presentation. It became his first book, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (1926). He took a first job, a good position and well-paid, at Newcastle. What started him as a Rousseau scholar in the first instance, he said, was an article he published with R. S. Elmes in the Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France concerning some purported letters by Rousseau in the papers of the comte d’Antraigues.84 He continued to work on the history of ideas, a subject he described as not entirely respectable in those days. The alternative would have been the history of local government (which he did indeed pursue for a while, with an American grant in the early 1930s to study its history in France), but he spent most of his time on the book that became Rousseau and the Modern State (1934). In the mid-1930s Cobban also became involved in the great public issues of the day which emerge so visibly in his Dictatorship, its History and Theory (1939). The intensity of feeling in the 1930s he compared with our worries at the time over the war in Vietnam; the world, he told us, had seemed on a knife-edge, and you had to choose sides. He regretted that his generation had had no great prophet to guide them. At that point Fred Affleck asked, but what about Marx? Yes, Cobban replied, there was Marx, but you needed Marx plus something else and unfortunately ‘all that our generation had was John Stuart Mill, which was only Bentham put more elegantly’. Then he moved on to talk about his career after his appointment as Reader in French History at UCL in 1937, where he began to teach a Special Subject seminar in the French Revolution. There followed work in France interviewing people for his chapter in Toynbee’s Hitler’s Europe, and visits to the USA, which he had enjoyed.85 He thought himself fortunate to have developed an interest in social history which he now considered much more important than the sort of things he had written on earlier in his career, at which point I think we muttered some polite dissent. Anyway, he concluded, in his life he had always managed to make teaching and writing work together, reinforcing each other. He had become more animated as he spoke and when he had finished, we were all a little surprised to realize that he had been talking for nearly a couple of hours, and had clearly enjoyed it. We left shortly after; he stood up and shook our hands, saying ‘goodbye’ to each of us as we went out the door. He died a day or two later. It is fair to say that Cobban regarded himself above all as a professional, a historian among many, with a contribution to make to his field—which meant not just talk and teaching and writing historiography or general books, but serious publications on French history—and he believed that he was training other people in the expectation that they would do the same over the course of their careers. Although Cobban did not preach about them, it does not take long to deduce certain basic beliefs from his writings. John Bosher’s essay on Cobban and the Enlightenment gives an idea of how these developed from the late 1920s onward.86 Cobban assumed the reality of a European community as a framework for historical and political analysis. France and Britain bulked large in this but were not its only element, even though his idea of Europe was very Western European; Russia and Eastern Europe are not much present. One could also see that he thought Germany from Kant onward had lost sight of its message, or never truly grasped it, and that this was one of the reasons why that country went off the rails in the 1930s—as France, in the final analysis, had not. Alfred Cobban was a secular liberal but probably also a Fabian, as Pamela Pilbeam argues in her contribution to this collection, and as suggested by his remark above concerning Marx and J. S. Mill. Given his passionate involvement in the struggle against Fascism in the 1930s and during the war, I have no doubt Cobban would defend the same values if he were alive today, in the world of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen—who along with many others have now, ironically, made his fears for the future of democracy even more immediate than when he spoke to us then in 1968. He thought that university historians had a duty to bring their views and conclusions to an audience broader than just academics and their students. Hence his involvement in the journal History, which aimed at bringing the conclusions of current scholarship to history teachers in secondary schools, offering syntheses, or even specialized articles of general relevance, for use in their teaching. But again, he did this as a professional historian, spreading knowledge and trying to lighten the burden of ignorance in the world in which he lived. Douglas Johnson followed Cobban in the Chair of French History at UCL. Each admired the other, but they were different men, from different generations. Cobban genuinely liked his subject and enjoyed being in France, but it is fair to say that he had a distinctly English approach to it. Johnson, by contrast, was more ‘French’ in his approach to history, by which I mean that he was more alert to cues from France and the French academic milieu. Their social backgrounds were not dissimilar (Cobban’s father was a furniture salesman, Johnson’s a clerk in local government) and both found their way into the great universities on scholarships. But Johnson also spent two years as an exchange student in Paris, at the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm, where he met and married Madeleine Rébillard, a normalienne at the parallel women’s institution in Sèvres. At the ÉNS he made lifetime friendships with many in that brilliant generation of young French intellectuals. Johnson’s political views also evolved across a broader spectrum than Cobban’s, shifting from the Left, in his youth, towards the Right in his old age, when he found he had come rather to admire Mrs Thatcher and to share some of her distrust of the European Union. By comparison Cobban seems to have pretty much stuck to the same political guns all the way through his active life. The succession from Cobban to Johnson in 1968 might have been difficult, as Johnson was really a student of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—his two most important scholarly books were on Guizot and on the Dreyfus Affair and he was committed at that point to a monograph on De Gaulle and the Army—whereas he inherited with us a group of students mostly working on Old Regime or revolutionary topics. But it helped that Douglas was a sociable man. He had a theory that all history departments were really replicas of the animals in A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, and he clearly cast himself as Pooh. He revived the habit—which had once existed under Cobban, in the days of Bosher and Rudé—of going to a pub with his students after the seminar. This affability did not mean that he could not exercise authority when he had to. But he was also a very busy man, mixing an academic and administrative career (he became Dean of Arts for a time at UCL and Chairman of the University of London Board of Examiners in History) with appearances on radio, writing for a larger public, and later as a special consultant on French matters to Prime Minister Thatcher; he was very lucky to have the help of senior members of Cobban’s seminar, particularly Pamela Pilbeam and Nicola Sutherland, to keep it running. I have the impression that Johnson did his duty by the remaining Cobban people in his seminar, though his many duties and interests may have made him somewhat less attentive as a supervisor than Cobban had been. As far as I was concerned, in the last stages of thesis-writing, he was the right man at the right time. Though he knew an impressive amount about my period and taught Cobban’s Special Subject seminar in the French Revolution at UCL, Johnson was not a dix-huitièmiste. But that did not matter; what I needed then was someone who could jolt me out of the hermetic writing style that so many candidates acquire in the course of writing up their theses. In our discussions, Douglas would read out some of the clumsiest passages and simply ask ‘What does this mean?’ and when I fumbled to answer, he would say, ‘Well, people will just not understand. Think of a man in the pub—try to explain this as you would to him, so that he could grasp it’—advice which I found myself giving again and again to my own doctoral candidates. Like Cobban, he knew too that his students had a career to pursue and did what he could to advance it. He wrote excellent references of course, but he also continued to provide advice. After Don Sutherland completed his thesis, Douglas sat down with him, pulled out a list and proceeded to tell him what he needed to do to make it a successful book. He performed an identical service for Don and me when we submitted a version of our first big article to Past & Present. I think he was on its editorial board at the time, or maybe Trevor Aston, who was the editor, had given him the task; anyway, I remember vividly the day in the summer of 1973, while my wife Judith and I were looking after Jean Meyer’s summer place in Bécherel. Douglas and his wife Madeleine came down for lunch from Saint-Servan and Don came up to join us from Rennes where he was doing some research. Douglas had brought our manuscript with him and a set of notes. Lunch was very pleasant, but after, Douglas, Don and I sat in the garden in the warm sun, while Douglas grimly dissected our piece and told us exactly what was wrong with it, for a very uncomfortable and seemingly endless stretch of time. It was mortifying, but worthwhile; the revised article was a success. Douglas over the years became more a friend than a former supervisor. One of my fondest memories of him dates from 1991, when Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie invited me to give a lecture series at the Collège de France. Le Roy knew the Johnsons, and of my association with Douglas, so he asked them to come for the concluding session. Despite what must have still at that time been a busy schedule, Douglas and Madeleine made the trip over from London. After the lecture, Le Roy took us all out to dinner at the Grand Colbert, together with my wife and eight-year-old daughter. At one point, the restaurant lights went out, and Le Roy, who was then Director of the old Bibliothèque nationale, went over to fetch candles from his appartement de fonction across the street, so the staff could light up the restaurant and continue serving. The dinner went on and Le Roy, assisted by a friendly waiter, plied our daughter with large amounts of foie gras followed by chocolate mousse. It was a very happy event. It was also the last time I saw Douglas, and I miss him still. ALFRED COBBAN AS A TRANSNATIONAL VOYAGER TO AMERICA Alfred Cobban was among the most influential English-language historians of France by the time The Social Interpretation was published in 1964.87 Beyond the monograph’s influence, the impressive record of his students bears further witness to his professional legacy in Britain.88 But what of his mark across the Atlantic? The story is one of transition. After the Second World War, Cobban was among the most prominent British historians to establish working ties directly with the American academy. But by the 1960s, he became a symbol to critique by a growing number of historians in the United States who identified positively with the French Revolution. On one level, his legacy speaks to the significance of fruitful transatlantic exchange between comparable national disciplines in the later part of the twentieth century. On another, his academic internationalism can shed light on a generational change, from the historians who developed French history in anglophone countries after 1945 to the scholars who emerged from restive American campuses during the 1960s and 1970s. In considering a case of transnational learning across generations, Cobban’s story as an intercontinental voyager may suggest how nuanced tensions emerged between mid-century traditions of British liberalism that shaped higher education and American progressivism that has influenced modern European historical study. Cobban focused his interwar career firmly on British national horizons. These were shaped by years of deteriorating conditions in foreign affairs, Depression-era unrest at home among classes and combative political associations, and the continued challenge to London’s imperial status beyond Europe. Trained in the general practice of British intellectual history, Cobban sought out historical sources for those decisions or cultural traditions that had been undertaken by state leaders. His book on Rousseau’s political thought and articles devoted to the history of ideas assumed that twentieth-century disasters in Europe resulted from the formal actions of states. To employ historical study for a common good, Cobban hoped that his work would influence the possible decisions of the well-educated, especially officials who wielded formal government authority. Although not unique, Cobban was somewhat distinct among British historians trained between the wars in terms of his interest primarily in wider historical questions that seemed urgent to address according to their impact on contemporary affairs.89 He continued to publish article-length studies of rather narrow empirical focus.90 But his chief works were present-minded statements, which borrowed from political science and philosophy. Across his career, as we shall see, they followed certain basic beliefs, which sought to steer academic debate as much as to inform counterparts in government service. 91 This interwar body of work would influence two later aspects of Cobban’s historiography. It established certain basic analytical positions regarding history and society that he would expand later into the more recognized writings about the Revolution, especially after he became Professor of French History at UCL in 1953. It also raised his reputation among American scholars, whose university tradition had emphasized the social importance of academics in the direction of research towards present-minded issues of wider interest to either formal public officials or for teaching the broad American public about key aspects of civic life and democracy. To illustrate the latter between the world wars, one can compare the American reception of his study of Rousseau to his sadly neglected book in 1939 on the nature of modern dictatorship.92 His work on Rousseau was meant to rescue the philosopher’s reputation from those who attributed his theories on politics, the state and democracy to the conceptual inspiration of popular dictatorships, or even modern ‘totalitarian’ movements. Cobban held that such views were anachronistic reflexes that ignored the historical context by which Rousseau, and his Enlightenment compatriots, conceived of public welfare in terms of small states, embedded in largely rural expectations of civic democracy and public duty.93 Rather than acting as an intellectual forerunner of the French Revolution’s steps toward radicalization, Cobban concluded that Rousseau sought a more balanced relationship between public authority and individual liberty.94 In the 1930s, the American reception—although subjective of course to those who were chosen to review his books—was uneven. His first book on Burke received rather moderate, but superficial attention in America; the same academia rather ignored the more significant Rousseau study, as the American Historical Review was the sole journal to review it.95 There, Crane Brinton (whose own doctorate was in English intellectual history from Oxford) chided Cobban for imagining Rousseau as a moderate, whereas he considered Rousseau to be an equally strong critic of the Enlightenment on a par with Burke.96 Brinton, however, also held a more critical view of reason and the Enlightenment as a movement, in that he tended to see it from a more conservative perspective, which considered the movement riven with utopias and guided by the innate irrationality of society.97 Brinton also wanted to examine social questions that borrowed from neighbouring disciplines akin to the American ‘new history’. He averred that Cobban needed to widen a history of ideas to embrace Rousseau’s readership and influence, to greater contextualize readings typical of traditional anglophone ‘history of ideas’.98 This critique had a wider context than personal difference. In the 1930s, American historians of Europe embraced approaches of the ‘new history’ that broadened the vantage point of examining the past, beyond elites and abstract ideas, to include ‘social forces’ that required applications of social science theory to traditional historical problems. During the decade, historians from the Right and Left questioned the viability of ‘reason’ in human affairs, and thus emerged American ‘relativist’ disillusionment with the Enlightenment as a unitary legacy devoted to rational progress.99 Although American views on Rousseau in the 1930s were never unitary, their relative willingness to question the existence or nature of Enlightenment reason, which Brinton shared, was inconsistent with Cobban’s hope that a rational, elite-oriented Enlightenment could lead Europe away from the forces of its modern self-destruction. After the Second World War, Cobban’s reputation in the United States notably grew. What had changed? American civic engagement in the war, and President Roosevelt’s successful New Deal climate, motivated historians to seek out moral, reasoned alternatives to defeatism in ‘the West’ and to face threats from radical states across the world. Holding to interdisciplinary goals of ‘new history’, but now in the spirit of the United Nations, American historians wanted to erect stronger ties with transatlantic partners whose intellectual collaboration could rebuild a more united and peaceful Europe along generally ‘pragmatic’ policies and new principles of social-civic governance. These interests coincided with Alfred Cobban’s turn in the late 1930s to analyse the conceptual ‘failures’ (as he saw them) of political thought in the West, which had led to the inability of European states and society to co-exist in prosperous peace by the twentieth century. Appearing in the last peaceful months of 1939, Dictatorship: Its History and Theory reflected a new, long-term interest in the historical link between forms of popular sovereignty that had emerged, in different versions, after 1789, and the nature of modern dictatorial regimes. Focusing after the Renaissance era, he traced the nature of continental dictatorship, defined as the seizure of sovereignty by a single ruler, by force or partial public consensus, which abrogated any representative political institutions. It was a conceptual and comparative historical examination of contemporary problems of ‘dictatorship’ and the then-current claim of ‘totalitarian’ governments; in that light it complemented quite well similar works such as Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution, Barzun’s Of Human Freedom, and Hayes’ The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism.100 The outbreak of the war likely mitigated attention to Cobban by his peers, as Dictatorship was reviewed only in British journals beyond the discipline.101 In emphasizing a focus on ‘totalitarianism’ as a modern form of dictatorship, Cobban’s positions are notably distinct from American conservative-oriented interwar historians and later leaders of French history, on both sides of the Atlantic, who located the emergence of twentieth-century totalitarian practice first in the National Convention in Year II of the French Revolution. Cobban was critical of concepts by the abbé de Mably or abbé Sieyès that fused popular sovereignty to the unitary and nationalist state, which he believed had driven France into revolutionary ‘tyranny’ after the Flight to Varennes. However, he was equally critical of Carl Schmitt’s concept of totalitarian sovereignty. He refused to couple the record of the Convention or Napoleon’s ‘first modern dictatorship’ to contemporary claims of totalitarian rule.102 In the darkest year of the Second World War, Cobban followed up Dictatorship with his second analysis of the present world’s connection to past history. As Britain’s strategic situation deteriorated, Cobban wanted to explore the ‘intellectual nihilism’ of the present, with a statement he entitled The Crisis of Civilization.103 Consistent with the priority that he gave to ideas and governing leadership in history, Cobban believed that the ‘bankrupt’ status of ‘Western Civilization’ had resulted from a neglect of ideas, which had not advanced (in Western Europe) since the 1790s. As with Dictatorship, he did not blame the revolt of the Estates General in 1789 by itself for later failures of community intellect. But continuing lines of thought from 1939, Cobban found that the Revolution’s turn towards a centralized nation-state, which displaced local freedoms, helped to establish a precedent for regimes that now placed Britain at its greatest time of peril.104 Popular sovereignty was the key, summarized in what is otherwise a complicated book: Western ideas, which … took their modern form in the eighteenth century, were the product of two millennia of intellectual and moral development. Their failure to maintain their predominance in face of attack delivered in the name of the sovereignty of the people was proof of both practical and theoretical inadequacy, and today the very survival of … Western civilization is in doubt. The triumph of the rival idea of popular sovereignty, crystallized in the nationalist, democratic and socialist movements…has led to the setting-up of totalitarian dictatorships and the destruction of the ideals of liberal Europe; and if we do not like the fate which totalitarianism foreshadows for our civilization, we shall have to abandon the principle out of which it has grown.105 To recover, Britain and the ‘West’ would have to engage again with his heroes of the Enlightenment-era, such as Burke, Kant and Rousseau. Cobban idealized this collection of humanists, by considering them to be united around the use of reason to maintain a prosperous peace, which was sabotaged during the Revolution by ambitious opportunists of violence, force or war: Marat, Hébert, Babeuf and Bonaparte or other self-proclaimed ‘benevolent despots’. When the ‘political alchemy’ of sovereignty ‘came into its own’ after 1788, by fusing government power with a unitary claim of popular will, the Revolution’s ‘Goddess of Reason’ removed ‘checks and balances’, by which Cobban meant classic English liberal traditions of natural law, constitutional rights, and contract law. Dictatorship and the legacy of aggressive nationalism was practically inevitable. His key chapter ‘The Theory of Popular Sovereignty’ concluded that continental traditions of popular sovereignty lay at the core of modern evils, because it had led to the displacement of Natural Law, which he considered to derive either from holy authority or by a commitment to Jeffersonian ‘inalienable rights’.106 While disagreeing strongly with the theory of failed liberalism held by Carl Schmitt, in this pessimistic book Cobban concluded that experiments in Europe with rule by consent of the governed had not succeeded, and too often was merely embraced as a ‘panacea for all social ills’.107 Indeed, the English historical tradition of parliamentary government has avoided such shoals because for so long the franchise was in the hands of few, elite, leaders until social reforms required its steady expansion in the nineteenth century. He believed however that once it embraced more citizens, fewer new voters partook in democratic duties, so that much of the citizenry was ‘apt to lose heart’ and relapse into passivity, or ‘turn to revolutionary doctrines’, especially if contemporary national parties could not reflect the will of the average voter.108 Clearly expressed at the height of the threat to his country‘s future, all his wartime books would reveal scepticism for modern democratic politics outside of Britain’s own modern experience. At its base, these works reflected the author’s convictions that ‘the motive power of human action is emotion and not the intellect’.109 It was impossible for administration ‘in the hands of the people’ to function, and thus a parliamentary alternative needed to limit popular sovereignty with an independent judiciary free from elected government influence and a quality bureaucracy that operated beyond the reach of public opinion. Reflecting James Bryce’s Liberal idea of ‘elective aristocracies’, Cobban supported an elite set of politicians to lead over elements of popular sovereignty, limited by geographic and institutional checks to power.110 By 1945 an Allied victory was complete. Present-minded as always, Cobban took interest in the efforts of Western leaders to rethink a postwar world based on new instruments of international cooperation, chiefly the United Nations and its outline for new financial principles laid out in the Bretton Woods conference. In this changed light, his third wartime book, National Self Determination, adopted a more optimistic outlook for leaders to construct an equilibrium between principles of popular sovereignty, expressions of national identity and stable postwar state government. Now, if new states were to be created, and ethnic groups demanded political autonomy, how could the leaders avoid the mistakes that Cobban claimed to have planted in Wilsonian ideal of ‘national self-determination’ and the priority of populist majority views over the necessary ‘rights’ of individuals or minority populations? In continuing his interest to use history as a means of relating together political philosophy, ethics and recommendations of government policy, Cobban believed that the practice of diplomacy and long-term state strategy required a new attention to the theory behind decision-making. Investigating how national identities developed historically would shed effective light on the most secure means of arranging a new political map of the globe, which in turn would avoid states being crippled by internal weakness, lessen opportunistic expansion by larger powers and thus ‘integrate [new nations] into the fabric of a stable, prosperous and peaceful world’.111 The danger, again, was that ‘the idea of sovereignty [had not been] altogether favourable to the continued growth of nation states’. Particularly once the French Revolution had established the precedent for a national sovereignty to be ‘one, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible’, Cobban feared a postwar world that once again would be led by ‘the culturally and politically unified nation states’. The book proposed how international bodies might check singular international power of individual nations, while traditions of decentralized governance and individual or local rights might protect domestic minorities from the tyranny of assertive unified popular sovereignty. 112 All three books were complicated essays, sprinkled with phrasing about equality, rights, law and politics that seem internally inconsistent in meaning when juxtaposed. Readers may identify different emphases, given their philosophical flavour. But perhaps a unifying thread was the profound application of comparative history to argue for the principal theoretic protection of individual freedoms, as the bedrock of his liberalism. Coupled to freedom, however, was Cobban’s firm opposition to social endeavours that claimed public power, either to create change or to control the identity and activity of a community. One can see it threaded throughout policy-styled articles addressing postwar German policy or in pointing out the tradition of French local independence from Parisian authority during periods of national regeneration.113 Whether this political philosophy is ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’ depends on the outlook of the reader, and one’s expectation regarding the public use of history as a discipline. National Self-Determination appeared at a perfect time to draw greater attention from Americans than his previous wartime or prewar works. Overall, his conclusions about new internationalism were compatible to American educators who sought a ‘usable past’ for teaching and expanded civil service advisory positions in which professors had a visible role after 1944.114 The opportunity came for direct sustained contact in America with an invitation from the University of Chicago to visit for a semester in 1947. Purportedly it was to offer lectures and to enjoy the school’s magnificent research facilities; in fact President Robert Hutchins and the influential dean of the social sciences, Robert Redfield, had designs to ‘steal’ him from the University of London by offering him a full professorship in history or political science attached the Committee of Social Thought.115 The position in an ‘elite’ interdisciplinary, graduate-oriented unit would certainly have tempted a promotion of status and increase in income.116 Cobban was to hold classes in the autumn of 1947 ‘in the field of political theory’ (on problems of sovereignty, texts of political theory), a topics course on the history of France, and a seminar on the ‘origins of the French Revolution’.117 A further arrangement was made to grant the University of Chicago Press permission for an American reprint National Self-Determination, which could suggest how self-determination had failed ‘as a principle of organizing for peace’, yet still invited officials to think through widespread support for popular sovereignty and nationhood.118 The key advocate for Cobban was the Committee’s co-founder and chair, the economic historian John U. Nef. A relatively conservative historian, Nef was however a very wide-ranging scholar who maintained an outstanding range of contacts with counterparts across the political spectrum throughout Western Europe, and especially France, from Ernest Labrousse to André Siegfried.119 Sceptical of socialist doctrines, he was also dedicated to present-minded research that engaged both students and public officials in ideas found through historical study. Later in his career, he authored A Search for Civilization for a conservative publisher, a book which had Burkean overtones and overlapping interests with Cobban’s text of 1941, though with greater antipathy to modern secularism.120 He believed that historical study had become too parochial in scale, too rigidly empirical in approach, and overly enamoured with discovering endless causalities. Key goals were a broad outlook that informed the present about matters of ‘enduring meaning’ or a focus on inter-relationships to offer interpretative form for an era, as long as one avoided simple materialism.121 This fitted wonderfully with Cobban, who sympathized with a desire to attack the departmentalization of knowledge, the tendency of scholars to isolate themselves in small specialisations, the neglect and even fear of what used to be called moral and political philosophy, are as marked, I think, in this country as [you] suggest there are in the United States … I am particularly thinking of history and of political theory, though I do not think it is peculiar to them. As a result of the separation from more speculative thought historical research in this country seems to me to have become extraordinarily sterile. When historians like Tout and Namier directed their attention to questions of administration and political technique they seemed to be opening a new road with the most brilliant prospects. Now, though the road is still being followed, it does not seem to have led anywhere in particular.122 Cobban supported American beliefs in an interdisciplinary conception and interpretation of problems, but understood in terms of political-oriented thought and a broader commitment to the professionalization of history. His legacy was institutional as well textual, as both the chair of modern French history and department chair at UCL for some fifteen years, even as he served as editor of the journal History. He was a crucial node for the recommendations of teaching posts, such as for Richard Cobb at the start of his career, and until his illness he was a respected leader in Britain’s Historical Association.123 Thus Cobban appears to have enjoyed a productive stay in Chicago. In the longer run, perhaps more importantly, it facilitated later working relationships with Americans that would offer Cobban a forum over the next decade to offer revealing conceptual critiques of the categorical constructs used in social history, as well as extending his idea for political theory to be used for the needs of present-day governing elites.124 But, in the end, Cobban refused the offer from Chicago. Perhaps he was too invested at UCL in London; and he may also have been fundamentally an Englishman at heart, out of place in the Windy City. Cobban would return again to America the following decade for a spring semester with the history department of Harvard University. He was asked to replace the aged Peter Geyl to complete the remainder of the academic year, while he also delivered a lecture series on the heritage of the Enlightenment. The initiative may have come from the future dean, the European specialist Franklin Ford, who met Cobban in London in 1957.125 Apart from offering courses on political theory and the Enlightenment movement, he also substituted for Crane Brinton (a semester guest at Stanford), to serve as a second reader for the thesis of a future leading historian of France, David D. Bien.126 Cobban also participated anew in professional gatherings of note, in particular the annual conference of the newly established Society for French Historical Studies, held at Duke University, where Cobban presented a paper. In contrast to the sharp dismissiveness of Richard Cobb’s exchanges with Americans, Cobban sought constructive critique to build bridges, at a period when he also had his own thesis students to place in careers. He was drawn to the debate over the famous ‘Pinkney thesis’, articulated at the conference, whereby Professor David Pinkney laid out daunting limitations for Americans to conduct original research in France. In reply, Cobban suggested that American concerns about ‘doing French history’ from a distance should not devolve into mere textbook compilations and popular works. Despite his own designs for grand interpretative works that we have seen, he expressed concern that Pinkney had seemed to recommend for senior American colleagues only the composition of secondary-source syntheses. Cobban avowed that there was no substitute for new research and critique, in view of his concern that the guild was already seeing too many ‘textbook compilations or works of popularization. Some can be good of their kind … but I think we already have an excessive supply of them’.127 From his lectures at Harvard, Cobban published In Search of Humanity in 1960.128 He would offer article-length summations in later years, but the book is a definitive bookend to his engagement with Burke and Rousseau from the 1930s. It received more attention from American scholars than any of his earlier works, and it is still probably his most cited piece after The Social Interpretation. Returning again to his discussion of European thought as a way to understand the traumas of the world wars, and the national conflicts that succeeded them, the book was a defence of the Western Enlightenment against the charge, most notably made by Jacob Talmon, that the Enlightenment had enabled the emergence of destructive political forces since the French Revolution. As summarized, his essay sought to pose a clear divide between the ideas of classic Enlightenment thinkers and tendencies that evolved after 1789 which Cobban had suggested in his earlier works to have been at the root of European warfare or debilitating social strife. The dangers were still seen as popular sovereignty as a form of representation that empowered states to gain control over the individual or locality within in national communities, which led eventually to modern totalitarian governments.129 He saw the heritage of English, French and Dutch-language figures of the eighteenth century as that of moderate political liberalism.130 These values revolved around moralistic rationality to support individual well-being, which included secular toleration for other faiths, utilitarian attitudes of pragmatic compromise and an honouring of humanitarian sentiments. They were not elitist sponsors of enlightened despotism, nor blind devotees who followed a siren-song of utopian abstractions. Today, Cobban’s Enlightenment would read as far too limited in its geographic and demographic scope, and appear restricted to ideas rather than broader social practices.131 Some critics considered the philosophical essay form to be too ‘selective and fragmented’ to support the weight of his grand observations. Certainly his conceptual expulsion of Central and Eastern Europe from the Enlightenment tradition struck Americans as unconvincing, particularly for those sensed that Cobban was judging Kantian ethics according to anachronistic values of the twentieth century.132 Between trusted transatlantic colleagues, Cobban followed other postwar ‘Western’ liberals who believed that, due to its alleged Prussian roots, modern Germany had deviated from the ‘proper’, successful model of modern representative government, which was implicitly of the anglophone political model. German exile scholars in America such as Ernst Cassirer sought to include a central European intellectual tradition of rational and tolerant ethics into a Western transatlantic consensus that could help to guide a reconstruction of ‘civilization’ after the world war. Cobban saw German philosophic traditions through a lens of modernist worship of the State, so he could only respond to authors who valued its legacy with ‘reservations’: [Cassirer’s] belief that the Enlightenment culminated in aesthetics and that Kant was the crowning glory, seems to be entirely wrong. I still regard Kant as marking the beginning of the break-down of, or reaction against, the Enlightenment; and from that point of view (as well as many others) a disaster. For this reason I doubt if I could regard Buffon, Diderot … as foreshadowing the Hegelian dialectic.133 On the other hand, Cobban’s defence of a ‘Western’ Enlightenment had great appeal among centrist-minded liberal historians in America, such as Peter Gay at Columbia.134 Gay in particular admired Cobban as a consensual, moderate, ‘middle way’ of critical, presentist engagement.135 Gay’s liberalism also valued the educated elite of a society, who aspired to rational leadership over everyday people. He considered the Enlightenment as the product of Western European educated elite, rather than more sociological or philosophical approaches, especially if they were a critique of reason itself, as voiced by the Frankfurt School. Interpretation that stood above contemporary ideological struggle could celebrate an Enlightenment, unsoiled by nationalist-populist forces that first arose during the French Revolution. What happened in the 1960s to upset that comfortable appreciation? Throughout the 1950s, in America there developed an increasingly positive interpretation of the Revolution as a crucial ‘modernizing’ step towards the creation of workable republican democracy. This belief, led by historians such as Louis Gottschalk, Beatrice Hyslop and a young R. R. Palmer co-existed with more conservative outlooks between the world wars. The triumph over fascism, and the postwar ambition to revitalize an international coalition of representative governments, both incentivized an American Left to locate a common Western heritage of popular democracy after 1945. In the 1960s, American domestic politics witnessed a dramatic embrace of populist, even confrontational, democratic movements that pursued revolutionary change: the civil rights movement, women’s equality, Vietnam and anti-draft protests, environmentalist awareness and a general desire at university campuses to challenge authority. Both strands joined by 1960 to form an atmosphere that linked imperfect, violent revolutions of popular sovereignty together as a long-term progressive necessity. Cobban‘s suspicion of national revolution clashed with America’s most visible international defender of popular sovereignty, Robert R. Palmer. A prized doctoral student of Carl Becker’s from Cornell, Palmer represented a mid-century exemplar of American non-socialist liberalism in French history, akin to a spiritual successor of James H. Robinson at Columbia.136 Although Cobban admired much of Becker’s work in intellectual history, he had already voiced disagreement with the American progressives historians (Becker and Charles Beard) over their ‘simplistic’ interpretations of complicated historical problems, devoid of any ‘grasp of theory’ or new historical research, beyond a hazy relativism.137 Palmer’s famous work, his first volume of The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959), remains the most recognized anglophone effort in the past century to synthesize revolutionary democracy into a wide transnational setting. Apart from occasional positive responses, few specialists who taught in Western Europe could agree with Palmer’s thesis.138 Most British historians concluded that Palmer imposed a unitary revolutionary wave that did not comport with the actual nature of each revolt in Europe after 1760, and distorted how eighteenth-century subjects actually saw American ‘democratic’ ideas in the period.139 Palmer believed the French Revolution foretold the dawn of modern individualism that would ‘disengage the individual from the état in every sense’.140 Palmer and Cobban had skirmished earlier in the Annales historiques of 1959 over a somewhat technical question regarding the social composition of the Constituent Assembly. Their open letters seem to suggest a brewing antagonism over the Revolution’s legacy as a means of advancement toward a liberal-democratic welfare state.141 When Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution appeared, Cobban was impressed by its boldness, but he concluded that it simply carried parallels too far. He deemed Palmer too dismissive of the popular support in Europe for conservatism, and too reliant on the class-based views of French historians such as Lefebvre or Soboul. As a present-minded defender of revolutionary democracy, Palmer ‘unconsciously omits what doesn’t fit, such as the American defense of slavery or the “age of aristocratic revival”’.142 In the same vein, Cobban extended that critique to Harvard’s Franklin Ford, who joined Palmer in portraying the revolutionary era as a ‘watershed’ step towards a more positive modernity. For Cobban, it was further evidence of ‘confusion’ for crediting ‘1789’ with any element of European culture, institutions or society that was held to be of salutatory value. It was traditionalist British liberalism in tension with American progressivism.143 These differences were soon supplanted by a conflict over Cobban’s critique of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ and especially its great authority, the historian George Lefebvre. Americans held Lefebvre in unmatched esteem, having dedicated the first issue of French Historical Studies to him while printing in the first issue a patriotic speech that praised Robespierre as the great historical defender of democracy.144 In explaining the Revolution, these Americans tended to shy away from their own differences with French socialism, nationalism and violence. On this fulcrum also rested the ‘Western Civ’. survey, ever-thickening professional ties to French academia, and America’s (complacent?) claim to monopoly over anglophone research or writing on French history, particularly evident in the monographs that appeared before 1960. This is what Cobban challenged, whether he intended to or not. Some younger Americans did gain real inspiration from his social history, especially Brinton’s students such as Elizabeth Eisenstein, David Bien and Vivian Gruder.145 But more Americans seemed quite cool, at best, to The Social Interpretation. The themes of their critique were twofold. First Cobban wrote ‘idées de feu’ that implied a one-sided attack that (implicitly) distorted the wider greatness of Lefebve’s record and utility.146 Of greater concern, his was work was only destructive, having torn asunder the ‘paradigm’ with nothing left to replace it. Conditioned by the spirit of American progressive modernity, scholars in the United States wanted a consensual approach that explained, in clear terms, the Revolution’s positive legacy for the present.147 As the late Betty Eisenstein summed it up later to the author, Cobban seemed to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’—the baby being a wider consensus of political Franco-American civics.148 The severest criticism came from Palmer, in a long review for The New York Review of Books, mysteriously pulled from publication after its final proof editing. Among its many detailed criticisms, Palmer focused especially on the social meaning of etymological constructions. If historians led by Lefebvre employed the term ‘feudalism’ as an object that revolutionaries overthrew, it was not in a mere Marxist ideal or seigneurial dues, but an entire mental construction among those seeking change of ‘the entire ancien régime as a system: fragmentation of public authority, overlapping jurisdictions, blurred public and private spheres, obstacles to the way of rational government, and above all the protected, privileged special status of favored elements in society, notably the nobles, ecclesiastics or others, many of whom rightly or wrongly, justified their power by harkening back to the Middle Ages’. The Revolution as a Hegelian stride toward modernity meant that Cobban has denied that the French Revolution is a true revolution. I see it as a great revolution in which the classes and the relations between the classes were of utmost importance. But not in the sense of the old Marxist model, it seems to me [it] is a typical case of the violent and rapid transition of a society of orders and estates to a society of classes.149 The ‘negativism of the book’ stemmed from Cobban’s over-concern with what the Revolution was not. So engaged in refutation, Palmer concluded that his antagonist had ‘reduced a movement concerned in many ways with liberty and equality, to a mere power struggle among its own leaders, and a technical problem for historians’. For the remainder of his life, Cobban continued to critique English-language studies that employed terminology that he considered reductionist, or that supported traditional aspects of the French ‘bourgeois’ revolution which he had found unsupportable in 1964. For Robert Forster at Johns Hopkins, the critique was that Cobban had ignored how ‘the Revolution was a triumph for the conservative, propertied, landowning classes, large and small’, and thus the era was still a triumph of social classes and the power of wealth.150 One of Cobban’s last interventions in America was a final critique of the anglophone use of ‘class’ as sociological terminology used to project unified long-term historical processes towards a modern ‘bourgeois ascendancy’.151 He somehow saw the draft of Palmer’s review, and replied at length in 1967 to his American and French critics in one of his last survey articles in the journal History, which he had edited.152 The main site for the direct discussion was Paris in 1966, on the invitation of Roland Mousnier, where Cobban presented a French summation of his critique of the ‘social interpretation’, and minutes were published of the resulting debate that included Palmer and senior French historians. In his talk, directed chiefly at Jacques Godechot, he critiqued a vaguely constructed ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the Revolution through two points that summarized the core arguments of his final years. The first was that contemporary typologies of social groups used by French historians were too imprecise and incorrect to explain the actual nature of eighteenth-century communities. The second, more controversial, point was that this interpretative gulf was due to French historians viewing the Revolution through an overarching political conflict, with terms applied uncritically to social groups that had little real connection to such ‘omnibus terms’.153 If Cobban’s views were being rejected as ‘parti pris’ beyond Britain, it was because he had underestimated how much presentist political commitment compelled historians to project their ideologies through all of the past, and how since 1945 the ‘terms of the power struggle’ had become core Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory.154 Perhaps because of this line, scholars in America either ignored his presence entirely or followed the new department chair at Princeton, Lawrence Stone, who dismissed Cobban for a ‘largely irrelevant onslaught on M. Godechot’s review of his book’.155 As a final dialogue with Americans, at the audience commentary Palmer proposed that Cobban had essentially overlooked how the Revolution inevitably worked to politicize pre-existing tensions of social inequities. Thus rather than accepting a duality of either a ‘social’ or ‘political’ vantages, scholars had to weigh how French leaders or groups after 1787 tried to resolve these social challenges through new forms of politics in European society. ‘Social problems became political problems.’156 On that, Cobban and Palmer could agree. The debate continued after Cobban’s death in early 1968. What does his transatlantic legacy suggest about wider aspects of research or teaching about the French past? One key point is that Cobban valued American exchange to a degree that was not unique, but still notable in terms of the embryonic nature of French history in Britain during the 1940s. In his lifetime, he was the principal British historian of France to write in American publications, for a transatlantic audience, with the genuine desire to interact on even terms with foreign counterparts. Until the 1970s, British historians of France, such as Richard Cobb, either ignored America or tended to cast aspersions on its culture and historical practices. For better or worse, Cobban loved debate, both national and international. In his articles, his letters to journal editors or in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, he was perpetually on the intellectual rampart, ready to engage with sometime biting remarks. This is what made him interesting, particularly since his focus of history was bound so tightly to matters of contemporary concern. Did it bring a cost? For his American counterparts at least, the philosophical nature of his short books could make their content appear conjectural, confusing or inconsistent in specific argumentation.157 As with philosophy, his assertions were open to divergent views regarding their meaning or even significance. Bill Doyle sagely noted how Cobban ‘was the essential demolition man’, and this might have aggravated a defensive posture against critics.158 His focus on political theory, so central to his identity as a historian, was also one delimited to Western Europe. Setting aside inattention to key transatlantic figures such as de Tocqueville, Cobban’s lens for understanding ideas never truly engaged in detail with central European thought. And apart from a brief look at ‘Wilsonian’ idealism about nations, he never took up American political thought even for his beloved Enlightenment age. If Americans were supportive or critical of his work, perhaps the point that stands out the most in a transatlantic light is the implicit tension between a British tradition of liberalism, which he embodied, and overlapping American beliefs of progressivism and popular democracy. Cobban was simply more supportive of an elite basis of government and social leadership, at least in a European setting, than his counterparts from the American Left, who entered the field of French history precisely because they were inspired by populist traditions of activist change or ‘revolution’ as a positive step towards a modernity defined by civic equality. If Cobban’s formative world was interwar Cambridge, then this was an environment quite distinct from the tradition of student activism at Madison, Berkeley or Morningside Heights. When Cobban began to challenge French Marxism or social science-driven modes of interpretation more directly by 1960, his brand of Commonwealth liberalism would inherently grate against a civic inspiration for the French Left that formed the American progressive consensus from James Robinson to Lynn Hunt in the present. It is perhaps why so much of the anglophone momentum of ‘revisionism’ against a pseudo-consensual ‘social’ interpretation of the Revolution came from historians affiliated from England in the later twentieth century. This should not diminish the accomplishment of Cobban’s career. But it is a window in which to see how the English-language world of European historiography is more variegated than current scholarship seems to assume. In that sense, Alfred Cobban still has more to teach us today, on both sides of the Atlantic. ALFRED COBBAN’S DOCTORAL STUDENTS, WITH DATES OF COMPLETION, THESIS TITLES AND SUBSEQUENT CAREERS George Rudé: 1950, ‘The Parisian Wage-Earning Population and the Insurrectionary Movements of 1789–91’ (career in secondary schools in London, the University of Adelaide, Australia, and Concordia University, Canada) John P. McLaughlin: 1951, ‘The Annexation policy of the French Revolution 1789–1793’ (career at University of Western Ontario, Canada) Michael J. Sydenham: 1953, The Composition and Characteristics of the Girondin Party in the Convention (career at Carleton University, Canada) Harvey Mitchell: 1954, Great Britain and the French Royalists 1794–1797 (career at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada) Geoffrey J. de C. Mead: 1955, The Financial Relations between the Crown and the City of London in the Reigns of Edward I to Henry VII (did not enter academia) Joan E. MacDonald: 1956, The Influence and Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Rousseau in France up to 1791 (did not enter academia) John F. Bosher: 1957, ‘French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy’ (career at UBC, Cornell University, USA and York University, Canada) Winifred Edington: 1958, ‘An Administrative Study of the Implementation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the Diocese of Lisieux’ (did not enter academia) Nicola M. Sutherland: 1959, The Secretaries of State in the Age of Catherine de Medici (career at Bedford College, then Royal Holloway College, University of London) Nora C. Temple: 1959, Town Administration in France in the Eighteenth Century with Special Reference to a Group of Towns in the Department of l’Yonne (career at University of Wales/Cardiff) Harry G. Judge: 1959, The Oratory in France under Abel Louis de Sainte Marthe (headmaster at Banbury School) Olwen H. Hufton: 1961, A Social Study of the Town of Bayeux on the Eve of the French Revolution (career at Leicester University, University of Reading, Harvard 1987–1991, the European Institute at Florence, and Leverhulme Professor at Oxford) Peter B. Harris: 1962, The Concept of Fraternity and its Place in the French Revolution, 1789–94 (career at the University of Hong Kong) John Q. C. Mackrell: 1963, The Attack on ‘Feudalism’ in Eighteenth-Century French Thought (career at Westfield College, University of London) Clive H. Church: 1963, The Organisation and Personnel of French Central Government under the Directory 1795–1799 (career at University of Lancaster, then the University of Kent) Keith M. Baker: 1964, Condorcet and the Concept of Social Science in Eighteenth-Century France (career at the University of Chicago, then Stanford University, USA) David Higgs: 1964, The Ultra-Royalist Movement at Toulouse under the Second Restoration, 1815–1830 (career at the University of Toronto, Canada) Julian Dent: 1965, The Financial Administration of the French Monarchy 1653–1661 (career at the University of Toronto, Canada) Pamela M. Pilbeam: 1966, The Revolution of 1830 and the Establishment of the Orleanist Monarchy in the Departments of the Haute-Marne, Côte-D’Or, Doubs and Vosges (career at Bedford College, then Royal Holloway College, University of London) Cynthia A. Dent: 1967, The French Church and the Monarchy in the Reign of Louis XIV: An Administrative Study (career at York University, Canada) Guy R. I. Neave: 1967, Agricultural Syndicats and Interest Groups in French Politics, 1880–1910 (career in Education Studies) Students Who Began Work with Cobban and Completed under Douglas Johnson Roger Mettam: 1967 (University of Cambridge), The Role of the Higher Aristocracy in France under Louis XIV, with Special Reference to the ‘Faction of the Duke of Burgundy’ and the Provincial Governors (career at Queen Mary, University of London) Timothy J. A. Le Goff: 1970, ‘A Social and Economic Study of the Town of Vannes and its Region during the Eighteenth Century’ (career at York University, Canada) Edward A. L. Whitcomb: 1970, The French Diplomatic Service 1799–1814 (career at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada) Fred N. Affleck: 1972, The Beginnings of Modern Transport in France: The Seine Valley, 1820- 1860 (career in the Australian Civil Service, then later writer on transport history) William A. I. Fortescue: 1974, Alphonse de Lamartine as a Politician and Intellectual, 1831–1869 (career at the University of Kent) Donald M. G. Sutherland: 1974, The Social Origins of Chouannerie in Upper Brittany (career at Brock University, Canada, then the University of Maryland, USA) Malcolm Crook is Emeritus Professor of French History at Keele University. Having written widely on the French Revolution and Napoleon, he turned his attention to the history of voting in France. A book, entitled How the French Learned to Vote, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. He is extremely grateful for the assistance of John Harvey in locating material for this article during the period of lockdown and engaging in fruitful discussion about various aspects of the subject, while John Dunne helpfully commented on an earlier draft of the text. Like the other three contributors, he would also like to thank Bill Doyle for kindly agreeing to read all four papers in this symposium. He can be reached at m.h.crook@keele.ac.uk Pamela Pilbeam is Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has been visiting professor at the Universities of Toronto, York, Ontario and British Columbia (all thanks to Cobban connections). Among her many publications are nine books on the social history of nineteenth-century Europe and France, including The Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France (2014), Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (2003) and a volume on the 1830 Revolution in France. She is very grateful to Professors Pierre Serna and Alan Forrest for the opportunity to speak about Cobban at the Colloque entitled ‘Cosmopolitismes et patriotismes au temps des Révolutions’, which constituted the annual meeting of the Institut historique de la Révolution Française at the Château de Vizille, Musée de la Révolution française, 25–27 September 2019. She is equally very grateful for the comments of colleagues, especially Peter McPhee and Tim Le Goff. Her text will be published in French and Russian, the latter translated by Alexey Tereshchenko. She also contributed a paper on Cobban to the 22nd George Rudé seminar, hosted at Auckland, New Zealand, in July 2020. She can be reached at p.pilbeam@rhul.ac.uk T. J. A. Le Goff has written extensively on rural and urban history, on the history of the labour force in French shipping, and on state finance and the French stock market, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is currently Professor Emeritus of History at York University (Toronto) and Associate Member of the Institut Roland Mousnier and the Institut de Recherches sur les Civilisations de l’Occident Moderne at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. He wishes to thank Don Sutherland, John and Cecil Bosher, Fred Affleck and Pamela Pilbeam for their generous help in preparing this memoir; any errors of fact or judgement are his own. He can be reached at tjal@yorku.ca John L. Harvey is an associate professor in the History Department at St Cloud State University, in central Minnesota. A summary of this study was presented at the annual conference of the SSFH at Leeds in 2019. It reflects a broader project to examine the development of French historical study as a global anglophone enterprise during the twentieth century, embedded in the history of transatlantic intellectual exchanges since the First World War. He can be reached at jlharvey@stcloudstate.edu Footnotes 1 A. Cobban, The Myth of the French Revolution (London, 1955), reprinted in idem, Aspects of the French Revolution (London, 1968), 90–111. 2 Idem, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964). 3 W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 1st edn (Oxford, 1980). 4 See a list in the Appendix below. François Crouzet described Cobban as ‘the founder of a distinguished “school” of British historians’, in The Times, 9 Apr. 1968 though, as the list suggests, many of them were Canadians. 5 A. Cobban, A History of Modern France, 2 vols (Harmondsworth, 1957–61), then 3 vols (Harmondsworth, 1962–5). 6 G. Lefebvre, ‘Le mythe de la Révolution française’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 145 (1956), 337–45, reprinted in AhRf, 259 (1985), 1–7, after the appearance of the French translation of Cobban’s Social Interpretation, see below. 7 A. Cobban, Le Sens de la Révolution française (Paris, 1984). 8 An immediate, hostile review appeared (anonymously) in the Times Literary Supplement, to which Cobban responded, and this was discussed by C. B. A. Behrens, ‘Alfred Cobban and his critic’, Hist Jl, 9 (1966), 236–40. 9 This is not the place to develop the fascinating parallel between the two debates over these revolutions, but there is no doubt in my mind that Cobban was influenced by that earlier debate, though he only alludes to it briefly in The Social Interpretation, 9. 10 There is an interesting observation in a notice for the French translation of Cobban’s Social Interpretation, that ‘for those who read English it will not bring any revelations’, unlike those, ’so numerous’, who do not. Bulletin de la Société d’histoire moderne, 27 (1985), 40. 11 R. C. Cobb, Les Armées révolutionnaires: instrument de la Terreur dans les départements, avril 1793-floréal an II (The Hague, 1961–3), in particular. 12 A. Soboul, Précis d’histoire de la Révolution française (Paris, 1962) and idem, ‘L’historiographie classique de la Révolution française. Controverses récentes’, La Pensée, 177 (1974), 45. Yet he did concede that Cobban’s critique was ‘brilliant, if ill-founded’, in ‘Survivances féodales dans la société rurale française du XIXe siècle’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 23 (1968), 980. 13 Idem, ‘Préface’ to C. Mazauric, Sur la Révolution française. Contributions à l’histoire de la révolution bourgeoise (Paris, 1970), 5. 14 Ibid., 76–8. 15 Ibid. and G. V. Taylor, ‘Noncapitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution’, Am Hist R, 72 (1967), 469–96, which begins with reference to Cobban. Ironically, while there was much research into nobles, peasants and sans-culottes, there was little on the bourgeoisie. 16 Cobban, Social Interpretation, 9. 17 R. Mousnier (ed.), Problèmes de stratification sociale. Actes du colloque international (1966) (Paris, 1968), 215–24, then discussion 225–39. 18 J. Godechot, Revue historique, 235 (1966), 205–9. 19 C. Langlois, ‘The French Revolution and “revisionism”’, The History Teacher, 23 (1990), 398–9. 20 L. Bergeron, ‘Une “relecture attentive et passionnée” de la Révolution française’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 23 (1968), 614, though this was not a review of Cobban’s book. 21 J.-C. Martin, ‘Re-reading the French Revolution’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. L. D. Kritzman (New York, 2006), 320. 22 The Times, 9 Apr. 1968. 23 F. Furet and D. Richet, La Révolution française, 2 vols (Paris, 1965–6). 24 Soboul, ‘Preface’ to Mazauric, Sur la Révolution française, 5. 25 For a fuller study of Furet’s relationship with left-wing political thinking in France: C. Prochasson, ‘François Furet, the Revolution and the past future of the French left’, Fr Hist, 26 (2012), 96–117. 26 F. Furet and D. Richet, The French Revolution, trans. (London, 1970). 27 Notably in L. Bergeron’s review of Furet and Richet’s book, ‘Une “relecture attentive et passionnée” de la Révolution française’, Annales ESC, 23 (1968), 597–8 and 614, and François Furet, ‘Le catéchisme révolutionnaire’, idem, 26 (1971), 265. 28 French historians were reluctant to employ the term, which had connotations of a late nineteenth-century debate within Marxism, but it began to be employed after G. J. Cavanaugh introduced it in ‘The present state of revolutionary historiography: Alfred Cobban and beyond’, Fr Hist S, 7 (1972), 587, though it was only used more widely after Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 12 and 19. 29 O. Hufton, ‘Cobban, Alfred Bert Carter (1901–1968)’, Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. For another brief biography of Cobban: J. Dunne, ‘Cobban, Alfred 1901–1968’, in Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, ed. K. Boyd (London, 1999), 236–7. 30 A. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, intro. Gwynne Lewis (Cambridge, 1999). 31 M. Cox, ‘Furet, Cobban and Marx: the revision of the “orthodoxy” revisited’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 27 (2001), 52. W. Doyle, ‘The price of offices in pre-revolutionary France’, Hist Jl, 27 (1984), 831–60, refuted Cobban’s suggestion that many of the Revolution’s leaders were recruited among hard-pressed officiers, whose incomes were declining. 32 F. Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978), rapidly translated into English as Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981). 33 Cobban, The Social Interpretation, 162. 34 Cited in Cox, ‘Furet, Cobban and Marx’, 62. 35 Martin, ‘Re-reading the French Revolution’, 322. 36 O. Hufton, ‘Alfred Bert Carter Cobban’, Dictionary of National Biography. 37 Alfred Cobban, professional files, UCL Archives. 38 Cobban to Provost, 27 Jan 1964. UCL Archives. 39 I was an undergraduate and postgraduate student of Professor Cobban. I took his two specialized BA courses. In 1965 after three years research I completed a PhD under his supervision. 40 A. Cobban, in The New Cambridge Modern History, 14 vols (Cambridge, 1957–79), vii, 102. 41 Idem, ‘Introduction, 1948’, to Édouard Dolléans, Le Chartisme, (1831–1848) (Paris, 1949), vii-xii. 42 A. Soboul, La Révolution française (Paris, 1965), 5. 43 A. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964), dust jacket. 44 Ibid., 24. 45 G. Lefebvre, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Lille, 1924) and idem, Études sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1954); C. E. Labrousse, La Crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris, 1944). 46 G. V. Taylor, ‘Types of capitalism in eighteenth-century France’, Eng Hist R, lxxix (1964), 478–97; idem, ‘Noncapitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution’, Am Hist R, 72 (1967), 469–96; G. Lefebvre, Quatre-vingt-neuf (Paris, 1939). 47 A. Cobban, Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution (Historical Association Pamphlet, 1946), 36. 48 I am very grateful to Pierre Serna for this information. 49 Lefebvre, Études, 249. 50 Idem, La Grande peur de 1789 (Paris, 1932). 51 Cobban, The Social Interpretation, 103.119, 52 Ibid., 75. 53 Ibid., 119, 161 and idem, ‘The vocabulary of social history’, Political Science Quarterly, 71 (1956), 1–17. 54 Idem, Le Sens de la Révolution française (Paris, 1984). 55 Idem, (ed.), The Eighteenth Century: Europe in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1969). 56 P. Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIesiècle (1958). M. Agulhon, La République au Village. Les populations du Var de la Révolution à la Seconde République (Paris,1970). A. Corbin, Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXesiècle (1845- 1880), 2 vols (Paris, 1975). E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1966). 57 Furet and Richet, La Révolution française and F. Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978). For a brief summary of arguments around the ‘bourgeois revolution’, ‘The Bourgeois Revolution, 1789–1815’, in P. M. Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914: France, Germany, Italy and Russia (Basingstoke, 1990), 210–34. 58 A.-J. Tudesq, Les Grands notables en France: étude historique d’une psychologie sociale, 2 vols (Paris, 1964); G. Chaussinand-Nogaret, La Noblesse au XVIIIesiècle: de la féodalité aux Lumières (Paris, 1976); trans. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985). 59 W. Doyle, ‘Was there an aristocratic reaction in pre-revolutionary France?’, Past & Present, 57 (1972), 97–122; J. Q. C. Mackrell, The Attack on ‘Feudalism’ in Eighteenth-Century France (London, 1973); D. Higgs, Nobles in Nineteenth-Century France: The Practice of Inegalitarianism (Baltimore, 1987). 60 K. M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975); idem, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990). 61 O. Hufton, Bayeux in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Social Study (Oxford, 1967); The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1974); Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992). 62 C. Church, Revolution and Red Tape. The French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770–1850 (Oxford, 1981). 63 P. M. Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France (London, 1991). 64 I am grateful to Professor Clive Church (University of Kent) for this information. 65 Attendance book, IHR 03/03/1922 - 03/03/1923. 66 D. Munro, ‘George Rudé – Communist activist and inactivist’, J of Labor & Society, 19 (2016), 147–62. 67 J. F. Foster, Secretary, Association of Universities of the British Commonwealth, 2 July 1959. University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200, files 1959/207 & 1963/392. 68 Olwen Hufton to Eric Hobsbawm [January 2003], and Hobsbawm to Hufton, 15 January 2003, Hobsbawm Papers, University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre, 937/1/3/11 (courtesy of Emile Chabal, University of Edinburgh). 69 The pamphlet is also accessible online at www.marxists.org/subject/france/rude/french-revolution.htm. In 1963 John McManners, then a professor at the University of Sydney, and a notable French historian himself, drew attention to the pamphlet in a reference for Rudé for promotion to professor at the University of Adelaide. University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200, files 1959/207 & 1963/392. I am extremely grateful to Doug Munro for generously sending me copies of these files and for reading what I have written with great care. 70 J. F. Bosher (ed.), French Government and Society 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban (London, 1973). 71 J. MacDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762–1791 (London, 1965). 72 Published, in an English translation, as ‘Political versus social interpretations of the French Revolution’, in A. Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution (London, 1968), 264–74. Thanks to Tim Le Goff for these details. Some of us, current and former students, invited Cobban for a meal in Paris on this occasion. 73 What follows in the next few paragraphs is based on conversations with John Bosher over the years since 1969, a long discussion with him in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia on 14 July 2019, and a series of communications with documentation in January and February 2020. 74 J. F. Bosher, The Single Duty Project (London, 1964). 75 R. C. Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study (Madison, WS, 1966); Louise Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal au XVIIesiècle (Paris, 1974). 76 C. Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, MA, 1964); Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest. Des structures économiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l’époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Paris-La Haye, 1960); O. H. Hufton, Bayeux in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Social Study (Oxford, 1967). 77 Published as Vannes and its Region: A Study of Town and Country in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981) (French trans., Rennes, 1989). 78 E. A. L. Whitcomb, Napoleon’s Diplomatic Service (Durham, NC, 1979). 79 Personal note to the author, 30 July 2020. 80 D. M. G. Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany 1770–1796 (Oxford, 1982). 81 Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964) pp. 35, 53. 82 For example, in speaking of the solution found for common rights Cobban asserts that: ‘It was the better-off peasant farmers whose stubborn defence maintained the common rights and whose inherent conservatism and power, consolidated by the Revolution, set the pattern of French agriculture and village life for the next century and a half’, Cobban, The Social Interpretation, 119. Sutherland and I have expressed a less pessimistic view of French producers’ productive capacity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in e.g. our joint article ‘What can we learn from leases? A preliminary view’, Histoire & Mesure, 15 (2000), 289–320, and my ‘Agricultural production and productivity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France: new evidence from the hospices of Dijon’, in Measuring Agricultural Growth. Land and Labour Productivity in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (England, France and Spain), ed. J.-M. Chevet and G. Béaur (Tournhout, 2014), 125–48. 83 I wish to thank Fred Affleck for his comments on an earlier draft, and for sharing with me the notes he made after Cobban’s death, which were a great help in replenishing my own very strong memory of this event. 84 A. Cobban and R. S Elmes, ‘A disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “the comte d’Antraigues”’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 43 (1936), 181–210, 340–63. 85 A. Cobban, ‘Vichy France’, in Hitler’s Europe, ed. A. Toynbee (London, 1954), 338–434. 86 In L. T. Milic (ed.), The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century (Cleveland, OH, 1971), 37–59. 87 Cobban, The Social Interpretation (Cambridge, 1964). 88 J. F. Bosher, ‘Alfred Cobban’s view of the Enlightenment’, in The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century, ed. L. T. Milic (Cleveland, 1971), 37–53 and O. Hufton’s biographical sketch in the Oxford DNB (2004–2005), 267–8. 89 For comparison, consider Sir J. A. R. Marriot, Dictatorship and Democracy (Oxford, 1935), E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 1939); or works by D. W. Brogan such as Proudhon (London, 1934) and Politics and Law in the United States (Cambridge, 1941). British historians have had a long tradition of writing contemporary-minded historical syntheses for a wider public. 90 E.g. ‘Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1838’, Eng Hist R, 83 (1968), 537–41, or ‘The influence of the clergy and the “instituteurs primaires” in the election of the French Constituent Assembly April 1848’, Eng Hist R, 57 (1942), 335–44. 91 Contemporaneous views are C. B. A. Behrens, ‘Professor Cobban and his critics’, Hist J, 9 (1966), 236–41 and Dame V. Wedgwood, ‘Alfred Cobban (1901–1968)’, French Government and Society 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban, ed. J. F. Bosher (London, 1975), xi–xiv. More critical surveys rest in the American ‘center’, M. Cox, ‘Furet, Cobban and Marx: the revision of the “orthodoxy” revisited’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 27 (2001), 49–77, and the English ‘Left’, R. B. Rose, ‘Reinterpreting the French Revolution: Cobban’s “Myth”: thirty years on’, Australian J of Pol and Hist, 32 (1986), 238–44 and G. Lewis’ ‘Introduction’, to a new edition of The Social Interpretation (Cambridge, 1999), xiii-xlix. 92 Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London, 1934) and Dictatorship: Its History and Theory (London, 1939). Cobban published a second edition of Rousseau in 1964. 93 Rousseau and the Modern State, esp. 98–125. Cobban did not deny that one could find certain phrases among Rousseau’s writings that could presage a moralist foundation to state-centred authoritarian control over society. However, understood in mid-eighteenth-century context, Cobban felt that Rousseau assumed a required civic duty and individual freedom were perfectly compatible, which was a logical extension of ancient Greek and Roman models of (male) citizenship that centrally informed these French-speaking thinkers at the time. 94 Noted in C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), 139–40. Cobban also insulated Rousseau’s thought from the Terror in ‘The fundamental ideas of Robespierre’, Eng Hist R, 63 (1948), 29–51. 95 On Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: W. Laprade in the J of Mod Hist, 2 (1930), 488–489; R. Trotter in Am Hist R, 35 (1930), 664–5; H. Clark in Saturday Review of Literature (18 Oct. 1930), 246–7. 96 C. Brinton in Am Hist R, 41 (1936), 538–9. 97 Brinton, review of In Search of Humanity in Am Hist R, 66 (1961), 694–5. 98 For Cobban’s standpoint, see his summary chapter ‘The Enlightenment’ in J. O. Lindsey (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii, The Old Regime (Cambridge, 1963), 85–112, or ‘The Enlightenment and the French Revolution’, in, Aspects of the French Revolution, ed. E. R. Wasserman (Baltimore, 1963), 305–15. 99 Compare C. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932); C. Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (New York, 1930); C. J. H. Hayes, France: A Nation of Patriots (New York, 1929); and the keynote talk of J. H. Robinson, ‘The newer ways of historians’, Am Hist R, 35 (1930), 245–55. 100 C. Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938); J. Barzun, Of Human Freedom (Boston, 1939); C. J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931). Other examples exist. 101 Although they admired Cobban’s goal and appreciated the book, reviewers warned that he risked a ‘tele-scoping of the truth’ in key sections of comparative discussion that was too ‘scrappy and superficial’ in historical detail or context: D. Thomson, A. McFadyean, and H. M. Stannard in Philosophy, 14 (1939), 493; International Affairs, 20 (1944), 112; ‘Dictators as leaders’, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 17 June 1939, 351. 102 Dictatorship, 54–77. His key point was that separation of powers was essential to preserve civic liberty. 103 A. Cobban, The Crisis of Civilization (London, 1941). 104 Ibid., 18, 25–8, 39. 105 Ibid., 133. 106 Ibid., see for these comments 64–5, and the chapter on 73–84, esp. 76. 107 Ibid., 150–4. Government ‘of the people’ was ‘a system that unfortunately in many countries has refused to work, and at best has not worked in the way that it was expected of it ... even fortified with the addition – which would have shocked most of the early democrats – of the female vote’. Thus, representative government, once achieved, has ‘lost many of their theoretical attractions, and in consequence of their apparent failure the whole idea of government by consent has been discredited’. 108 Ibid., 156–7. His scepticism included America in the era of Roosevelt’s New Deal, in a national setting which ‘shows that politics may become an unreal struggle between two armies of job-hunters’. 109 He avowed the theme in varied contexts, such as ‘The triumph of pessimism’, The Hibbert Journal, 40 (1941), 132–9, and ‘Cruelty as a political problem’, Encounter, 4 (1955), 32–9. 110 Ibid., 159, 168. Cobban praised ‘aristocracy’ as ‘the government of the best … fitted to govern’, but without being purely hereditary, because there was ‘no scientific means of telling who makes a better politician’. On Viscount Bryce and Modern Democracies (1921): T. Kleinknecht, Imperiale und Internationale Ordnung: Eine Untersuchung zum anglo-amerikenischen Gelehrtenliberalismus am Beispiel von James Bryce (1838–1922) (Göttingen, 1985), esp. 164–9. For the liberalism of Bryce (and Cobban) see P. Pombeni, ‘Starting in reason, ending in passion. Bryce, Ostrogorski and the problem of democracy’, Hist J, 37 (1994), 319–41. 111 A. Cobban, National Self- Determination (Oxford, 1945), 3. 112 A. Cobban, ‘The nation state’, History, 29 (1944), 50, 52–4, 57. 113 Cobban, ‘Local government during the French Revolution’, Eng Hist R, 58 (1943), 13–31 and ‘Administrative centralization in Germany and the new states, 1918–39’, International Affairs, 20 (1944), 249–64. 114 See positive reviews by H. Kohn in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AHAAPSS), 242 (1945), 165–6; A. Byrnes in The Saturday Review, 31 (5 June 1948), 24–5; S. Fay in J of Mod Hist, 20 (1948), 347; E. Kayser in World Affairs, 112 (1949), 32; N. Timasheff in Social Research, 15 (1948), 511–12. 115 Letters of Robert Redfield, 17 Aug. 1945 and 26 Nov. 1946 in Box 31, John U. Nef Papers, University Archives, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. 116 When Cobban was promoted to a full professorship in French history at UCL in 1953, it paid a relatively low sum of £1,800 per year. See the appointment meeting and offer in the Minutes of the Faculty of the University of London, ST 2/1/36 pp. 44–45 for meetings of 11 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1953. Senate House Archives, University of London. In 1946, Cobban was compensated with $6,000 for his half-year of time, the equivalent of £4,000 alone! 117 On his visit: Am Pol Sci R, 41 (1947), 991. For the semester details: Dept. of History Newsletter, Apr. 1947, Collection of History Dept. Newsletters, University Archives, Regenstein Library. 118 As expressed by the University Press in the original American dustjacket, a copy of which resides in the University of Chicago Press Papers 1892–1965, Box 112, Folder 7, in the University Archives, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Hans Morgenthau wrote the manuscript report to support its publication, dated 20 May 1947. It sold 1,400 copies of 1,764 printed by 1956. 119 Nef founded the Committee in 1941, as part of the intellectual response to the war, along with President Hutchins, Dean Redfield, and the economist Frank Knight. He was its executive secretary and chair from 1945–1964. 120 J. U. Nef, A Search for Civilization (Chicago, 1962), esp. 111–13. It appeared through the well-known conservative publisher Henry Regnery. 121 Best expressed in ‘The responsibilities of economic historians’, J of Eco Hist (Dec. Supplement, 1941), 1–8. Lucien Febvre, Charles Moraze, and Jacques Maritain were among his many other associates. 122 Alfred Cobban to John Nef, 23 June 1946, Box 31, Nef Papers. 123 Cobban assisted Richard Cobb in transitioning from private life in France to his first university post at Aberystwyth in 1955; and he was an instrumental voice for Cobb’s ‘promotion’ to a lectureship at Leeds, Cobban to the dept. chair, John Le Patourel, 13 and 20 Mar. 1961 in LUA/Dept./017, ‘R. Cobb’, Special Collections and University Archive, Broughton Library, Leeds University. 124 A. Cobban, ‘New light on the political thought of Rousseau’, Pol Sci Quarterly, 56 (1951), 272–84; idem, ‘The decline of political theory’, Pol Sci Quarterly, 68 (1953), 321–37; and idem, ‘The vocabulary of social history’, Pol Sci Quarterly, 71 (1956), 1–17. 125 Franklin Ford to Crane Brinton, Feb. 5, 1958, Box 22, HUG 4237.5, Brinton Papers, Harvard University Archives. 126 Official Register of Harvard University vol. 54, No. 19, 4 Sept. 1957: ‘Courses of instruction offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 1957–1958’. Cobban offered ‘The end of the eighteenth century’ and a seminar ‘Political theory from Hobbes to Bentham’. The previous fall Geyl led a seminar on historiography of the French Revolution. David Bien’s thesis was ‘Calas and Catholics. The End of Religious Persecution in the Old Regime, 1750–1789’, Harvard dissertation, March 1958. Its exam committee comprised Ford, Cobban, and H. Stuart Hughes. 127 See the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, 31 Jan.-1 Feb. 1958, where he presented one of the seven papers. D. H. Pinkney, ‘The dilemma of the American historian of Modern France’, Fr Hist S, 1 (1958), 11–25; Cobban’s reaction during audience comments are printed in Fr Hist S, 1 (1959), 252–3. 128 A. Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (New York, 1960). 129 A. Cobban, ‘An age of Revolutionary Wars: an historical parallel’, Review of Politics, 13 (1951), esp. 134–6. 130 Cobban’s last writing, ‘The end of the Old Regime’, 329, 341–2. 131 See for example his summary in ‘The Enlightenment’, The New Cambridge Modern History. vol. vii: The Old Regime, 111–12. 132 L. Coser in Am J of Sociology, 66 (1961), 411 and Brinton again in the Am Hist R, 66 (1961), 694–5. 133 Alfred Cobban to Arthur Wilson, 1 Feb. 1957, Wilson Papers, Box 1, F. 32, Rauner Library Special Collections, Dartmouth College. 134 O. Fellows, ‘Yesterday’s answer to tomorrow’, The Saturday Review (SR), 43 (20 Aug. 1960), 20–1 and B. Blanshard, ‘Is the nation the villain?’, in The New York Times (NYT), 18 Sept. 1960, Book Review section, 59. 135 P. Gay, ‘Man in the middle’, The New York Review of Books (NYRoB), 17 Mar. 1966, 22–4. 136 L. Hunt, ‘Forgetting and remembering: The French Revolution then and now’, Am Hist R, 100 (1995), 1119–35 or Hunt’s introduction to a special issue devoted to Palmer’s legacy, ‘Preface’, Hist Reflections, 37 (2011), v-viii. For background: L. Hunt, ‘Fantasy meets reality’, in Why France?, ed. L. L. Downs and S. Gerson (Ithaca, NY, 2007), 61–72. Hunt talks to Robinson, whose influence was more in teaching, thesis direction, textbook development and his promotion of a ‘new history’ for European studies. But see J. H. Robinson, ‘Recent tendencies in the study of the French Revolution’, Am Hist R, 11 (1906), 543–4. 137 Cobban’s review of Carl Becker’s legacy, reprinted in France since the Revolution and Other Aspects of Modern History (New York, 1970), 211–14. 138 Only Jack Plumb, Max Beloff and David Thomson signed positive reviews, and these were for American journals. 139 As examples, C. B. A. Behrens, HJ, 4 (1961), 107–10, followed up by her ‘Revolution à la mode’, NYRoB, 3 June 3 1971; also J. Roberts in History, 51 (1966), 102–4; B. Lenman, Scot Hist R, 51 (1972), 216–20; C. L. Mowat, The William and Mary Quarterly, 17 (1960), 257–9; or R. Cobb, ‘The era of the French Revolution: Some comments on opportunities for research and writing’, J of Mod Hist, 30 (1958), 128–9. 140 Palmer, ‘Man and citizen: Applications of individualism in the French Revolution’, Essays in Political Theory Presented to George H. Sabine, ed. M. Konvitz and A. Murphy (Ithaca, NY, 1948), 130–52. 141 Palmer, ‘Sur la composition sociale de la Gauche à la Constituante’, AhRf, 156 (1959), 154–6, and the open letters, 387–91, which were all translated into French. He also hinted how Cobban represented French historians in Palmer, ‘Georges Lefebvre: The peasants and the French Revolution’, J of Mod Hist, 31 (1959), 329–30. 142 See the review in History, reprinted in Cobban, France since the Revolution, 155–63. It was not entirely negative. 143 Cobban, ‘The Enlightenment and the French Revolution’, esp. 313. This responded to F. L. Ford, ‘The Revolutionary-Napoleonic era: How much of a watershed?’, Am Hist R, 69 (1963), esp. 22, which rejected Cobban’s thesis of the Revolution as a national ‘myth’. 144 G. Lefebvre, ‘Remarks on Robespierre’, Fr Hist S, 1 (1958), 7–10. For context: J. Friguglietti, ‘R. R. Palmer and Georges Lefebvre: their collaboration and friendship’, Hist Reflections, 37 (2011), 56–69. 145 D. Pinkney, ‘The Myth of the French Revolution of 1830’, A Festschrift for Frederick B. Artz, ed. D. Pinkney and T. Ropp (Durham, NC, 1964), 52–71, esp. 53. Apart from Eisenstein, Patrice Higonnet, and Taylor, see Vivian Gruder’s Harvard thesis directed by Brinton in 1966, ‘The Royal Provincial Intendants: A Governing Elite in Eighteenth-Century France’, esp. 277–8, 287–8. 146 P. H. Beik, ‘Bilan et perspectives: L’histoire du XVIIIe siècle et de la Révolution française,” AhRf, 191 (1969), 663. More often one reads an identification of Cobban with ‘polemic’, as in I. Woloch, J of Soc Hist, 8 (1974), 131–4; F. Manuel, ‘No longer the exemplary war?’, SR (14 Dec. 1968), 37. R. R. Palmer used phrases like ‘attack’ more widely in ‘Polémique américaine sur le rôle de la bourgeoisie dans la Révolution française’, AhRf, 189 (1967), 373. 147 Most influentially, G. Cavanaugh, ‘The present state of French Revolutionary historiography: Alfred Cobban and beyond’, Fr Hist S, 7 (I972), 597, or in England, G. Ellis, ‘The “Marxist interpretation” of the French Revolution’, Eng Hist R, 93 (1978), 354. For other examples, C. Fairchilds J of Soc Hist, 16 (1983), 181–2; R. Darnton, ‘French history: the case of the wandering eye’, NYRofB, 5 Apr. 1973, 25; L. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), 178. 148 Betty Eisenstein informed the author that Crane Brinton felt Cobban, herself and others were ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. Eisenstein to author, 12 Jan. 12 2014. Also Brinton in History & Theory, 5 (1966), 315–20. 149 The undated copy is in Box 35 of The New York Review of Books records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University. It has final editorial marks for spelling and grammar, but no record for why it went unpublished. 150 R. Forster, ‘The survival of the nobility during the French Revolution’, Past & Present, 37 (1967), 71–86, and Cobban’s exchange of letters with him in Past & Present, 39 (1968), 169–72. 151 A. Cobban, ‘The “middle class” in France, 1815–1848’, Fr Hist S, 5 (1967), 41–52, in response to L. O’Boyle, ‘The middle class in Western Europe, 1815–1848’, Am Hist R, 71 (1966), 826–45. 152 A. Cobban, ‘The French Revolution, orthodox and unorthodox: a review of reviews’, History, 52 (1967), 149–59. 153 See Cobban’s talk, ‘Les interprétations politiques contre les interprétations sociales de la Révolution française’, in Problèmes de stratification sociale, ed. R. Mousnier (Paris, 1968), 215–24, and the discussion to 239. He held that the historians such as Godechot, Lefebvre, Soboul or their American allies were ‘adopting the political division [of people during the events] as a basis for social history’. Or, ‘a translation of political categories into social ones’, 221. 154 Ibid., 222. 155 Lawrence Stone, review of Mousnier (ed.) Problèmes de stratification sociale in Am Hist R, 74 (1969), 2146. Cobban had passed away the previous year. Coolly critical, see B. Hyslop, ‘Western European history in the past five years’, AHAAPSS, 387 (1970), 159, 163, 167. The American historian most supportive of Soboul-Lefebvre, Jeffry Kaplow, was chosen to review Cobban’s Social Interpretation for the Am Hist R. Yves Durand did not acknowledge Cobban’s presence or the debate, in Revue historique, 244 (1970), 531–53, nor did the revisionist George Taylor in J of Soc Hist, 3 (1969), 82–5. 156 Palmer’s comment in Mousnier (ed.), Problè mes de stratification sociale, 225. 157 A fine example of this was from historian, Lester Crocker, then dean of the graduate school of Western Reserve University. His letter to his teacher at the University of Chicago expressed excitement over Cobban’s ‘revisionist’ book. But he then listed great confusion over its content, as all the social tensions (‘wars’) laid out in the chapters were never fitted into an overall picture. Its arguments were contradictory; if the Vendée was a revolt of country against town, then how could Cobban argue that in general the ‘peasants had it in for the landowners’? And his economic interpretation, as Crocker read it, ignored the ‘political and ideological fermentation of the revolutionary years’ that the American considered anti-feudal. See Crocker to Louis Gottschalk, 12 July 1965, Box 6, Folder 16, Louis Gottschalk Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. These points echoed among other Americans. 158 W. Doyle, ‘Cobban from the outside: A view from Oxford’, paper at the SSFH Conference, Leeds University, July 2019. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Forum: The Legacy of Alfred Cobban
JF - French History
DO - 10.1093/fh/craa068
DA - 2020-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/forum-the-legacy-of-alfred-cobban-uVCEwXQIcr
SP - 512
EP - 560
VL - 34
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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