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Georges Lefebvre (6 August 1874, Lille - 28 August 1959, Paris) was a French historian best known for his work on the French Revolution. Events 1538 - Bogotá, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. Year 1874 ( MDCCCLXXIV) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common Lille (lil Rijsel is a city in northern France. It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest Metropolitan area in the country Events 475 - The Roman General Orestes forces western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos to flee his Capital The year 1959 ( MCMLIX) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Paris (ˈpærɨs in English; in French) is the Capital of France and the country's largest city Legal residents and citizens To be French according to the first article of the Constitution is to be a citizen of France regardless of one's origin race or religion ( See also History An historian is an individual who studies and writes about History, and is regarded as an Authority on it The French Revolution (1789–1799 was a period of political and social upheaval in the History of France, during which the French governmental structure previously an Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française ("The Peasants of the North During the French Revolution”), which culminated 20 years of Lefebvre's research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period. Year 1924 ( MCMXXIV) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar.

Contents

Personal Background

Born on August 6th, 1874 in Lille, France, Lefebvre became one of the most preeminent historians of the French Revolution. Lefebvre came from humble origins, and his family could not afford to put him through college. He was the son of a small commercial employee[1], and Lefebvre attended public school, obtaining his secondary and university training with the help of scholarships. Lefebvre attended the University of Lille, and it was here that he followed the “special curriculum”, which emphasized modern languages, mathematics, and economics instead of the classical languages. [2] It was as a result of his schooling that Georges Lefebvre was able to teach in a series of secondary schools for more than twenty years after his graduation in 1874. [3] After his career in teaching secondary school students, Lefebvre began teaching at the university level. [4]

He became more and more influenced by Marxism about the time of the Second World War. Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including He often wrote from a viewpoint which he felt the peasant of the time would have held, as shown in his groundbreaking work, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution Française (1924). A peasant is an agricultural worker who subsists by working a small plot of ground Lefebvre was influenced by the Marxist idea that history should be concerned with economic structures and class relations.

Lefebvre's French Revolution

Lefebvre began writing in 1904, but it was not until 1924, at the age of fifty, that he was finally at the point in his career - no longer preoccupied with supporting his family - that he was able to finish his doctoral thesis: Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française. [5] This work was a detailed and thorough examination of the effects of the French Revolution on the countryside. Lefebvre’s work on this thesis was “based on a thorough analysis of thousands of tax rolls, notarial records, and the registers of rural municipalities, whose materials he used to trace the effects of the abolition of feudalism and ecclesiastical tithes, the consequences of property transfers, the movement of the bourgeoisie onto the countryside, and the destruction of collective rights in the peasants villages”. [6] It is this document that accounts for Lefebvre’s ever growing interest to engrave and contemplate his own viewpoints on the revolutionary issues that continued to influence modern events.

One aspect of Georges Lefebvre’s life that other historians are particularly keen on examining is the period of 1924-1959. This period in Lefebvre’s writings is repeatedly chosen because he wrote his most influential and “much more complex interpretation of the Revolution than had hitherto prevailed amongst historians”. [7] Jones elaborates that Lefebvre’s take on the Revolution has three major roles, which he describes as the active pursuit of the French country to partake in the Revolution, that such participation was not influenced by the bourgeoisie, and that the peasants agreed on their anticapitalist way of think, that resulted in their way of thinking in the 1790s. [8] This exact observations and concepts from Lefebvre on the French Revolution; that throughout the passing of time and the many revisionists that have questioned it, has fallen out of favor as a consequence of this evaluations by the revisionists, and the public no longer sees it as influential as it once was.

Georges Lefebvre’s accomplishments

Lefebvre's account of the origins of the French Revolution was written in Quatre-Vingt-Neuf, and published in 1939 to mark the sesquicentennial of the events of 1789, but the Vichy government that took over the following year wanted no left-wing history or sympathetic understanding of the Revolution, as they drew their support from the anti-republican right. An anniversary (from the Latin anniversarius, from the words for year and to turn meaning (returning yearly known in English since c. Vichy France, or the Vichy regime are the common terms used to describe the government of France from July 1940 to August 1944 The Vichy régime suppressed the book, ordering 8,000 copies to be burned; as a result the work was virtually unknown in its native land until it was reprinted in 1970. Its reputation was already secure in the Anglophone world, however, since the English translation, The Coming of the French Revolution (1939) had established it as a clear, yet subtle, classic. It remains the definitive explanation of the Marxist interpretation of the causes of the Revolution. His seminal work, La Révolution Française (revised edition, 1951) was translated into English as two volumes: The French Revolution From Its Origins To 1793 (1962-4) and The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (1964). He also wrote a study of the most famous general and ruler in the history of France in Napoléon (4th edition 1953; translated in 2 volumes, 1969). This article is about the country For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic France topics.

A doctoral dissertation by Lawrence Davis, entitled Georges Lefebvre: Historian and Public Intellectual, 1928-1959, as the title suggests, concentrates on the latter part of Lefebvre’s life and on the scholarly publications that made Lefebvre among a noteworthy historian. Davis expands on the concept of mentalité that Lefebvre developed, arguing that this is “a term that represented their collective goal of documenting the material and mental worlds of people of the past, where the social and cultural existed comfortably side by side”. [9] Throughout the work, Davis concentrated on the notion that Lefebvre used this concept of mentalité of the peasantry in relation to the Revolution.

Lefebvre Recognized

Georges Lefebvre was a man of much recognition; by 1935 he became the president of the Societe des Etudes robespierristes and the director of the Annales historiques de la Revolution francaise. [10] In 1937 Lefebvre was announced the Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne. [11] Lefebvre was very blessed in his talents as a scholar, and by 1914 he had already published a collection of documents, titled Documents relatifs a l’histoire des subsistances dans le district de Bergues pendant la Revolution (1788-An V). By the time of his death Georges Lefebvre had written more scholarly publications, that what his mind could capture, his works ranged from the humble peasant sentiment, to the volumes and volumes he conjured about Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821 was a French military and political leader who had a significant impact on the History of Europe. Lefebvre continued to engrave all that he could on the French Revolution and all that dealt with it, well into his old age and beyond his retirement from the position of Chair at the Sorbonne in 1945. [12] Georges Lefebvre died in Boulogne-Billancourt on August 28, 1959.

Important Books written by Lefebvre

Bibliography

Bienvenu, Richard T. “Lefebvre, Georges. ” Encyclopedia Americana. 2008. Grolier Online. 16 Feb. 2008 <http://ea.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0242060-00>

Davis, Lawrence H. Georges Lefebvre: Historian and Public Intellectual, 1928-1959. Diss. University of Connecticut, 2001. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2001. 3008115.

Evanson, Elizabeth M. Foreword. The French Revolution Volume I from its origins to 1793. By Georges Lefebvre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. ix-xiv.

Jones, Peter M. “Georges Lefebvre and the Peasant Revolution: Fifty Years on. ” French Historical Studies, Vol. 16 No. 3. (Spring 1990), pp. 645-663. JSTOR. George Mason U. Lib. , Fairfax. 16 Feb. 2008 <http://www.jstor.org. >

Notes

  1. ^ Lefebvre, Georges (1962). The French Revolution Volume I: from its Origins to 1793. New York: Columbia University Press, ix-xiv.  
  2. ^ Bienvenu, Richard T. (2008). “Lefebvre, Georges”. Encyclopedia Americana. Retrieved on 2008-03-06. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 1079 - Omar Khayyám completes the Iranian calendar. 1454 - Thirteen Years' War: Delegates of
  3. ^ Bienvenu, Richard T. (2008). “Lefebvre, Georges”. Encyclopedia Americana. Retrieved on 2008-03-06. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 1079 - Omar Khayyám completes the Iranian calendar. 1454 - Thirteen Years' War: Delegates of
  4. ^ Evanson, Elizabeth M. (1962). The French Revolution Volume I from its Origins to 1793 (preface). New York: Columbia University Press, p. ix-xiv.  
  5. ^ Bienvenu, Richard T. (2008). “Lefebvre, Georges". Encyclopedia Americana. Retrieved on 2008-03-06. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 1079 - Omar Khayyám completes the Iranian calendar. 1454 - Thirteen Years' War: Delegates of
  6. ^ Bienvenu, Richard T. (2008). “Lefebvre, Georges”. Encyclopedia Americana. Retrieved on 2008-03-06. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 1079 - Omar Khayyám completes the Iranian calendar. 1454 - Thirteen Years' War: Delegates of
  7. ^ Jones, Peter M. “Georges Lefebvre and the Peasant Revolution: Fifty Years on. ” French Historical Studies, Vol. 16 No. 3. (Spring 1990), pp. 645-663. JSTOR. George Mason U. Lib. , Fairfax. 16 Feb. 2008 <http://www.jstor.org. >
  8. ^ Jones, Peter M. “Georges Lefebvre and the Peasant Revolution: Fifty Years on. ” French Historical Studies, Vol. 16 No. 3. (Spring 1990), pp. 645-663. JSTOR. George Mason U. Lib. , Fairfax. 16 Feb. 2008 <http://www.jstor.org. >
  9. ^ Davis, Lawrence H. (2001). Georges Lefebvre: Historian and Public Intellectual, 1928-1959 (PhD dissertation). University of Connecticut.  
  10. ^ Evanson, Elizabeth M. Foreword. The French Revolution Volume I from its origins to 1793. By Georges Lefebvre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. ix-xiv.
  11. ^ Evanson, Elizabeth M. Foreword. The French Revolution Volume I from its origins to 1793. By Georges Lefebvre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. ix-xiv.
  12. ^ Evanson, Elizabeth M. Foreword. The French Revolution Volume I from its origins to 1793. By Georges Lefebvre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. ix-xiv.


See also

External links

The "Great Fear" (la Grande Peur occurred from July 20 to August 5 1789 in France at the start of the French Revolution. The French Revolution (1789–1799 was a period of political and social upheaval in the History of France, during which the French governmental structure previously an
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