"Richard Cobb's new book is a valuable and highly original addition to the growing volume of studies now being devoted to the French Revolution as seen 'from below'. No other writer in the field has so extensive a knowledge of the sources, Parisian and provincial, none has the same degree of wide-ranging erudition; moreover, the book is presented in the highly personal style with which Cobb's readers have become familiar: pugnacious, witty, irascible, irreverent, tendentious, impressionistic, and shot through with occasional passages of arresting brilliance. The familiar bêtes noires are here again: sociology, economic historians, 'scientific' history, Robespierre ('the Pope of the Supreme Being'); and a new and greater villian is added to round off the list: Napoleon, whose Empire is described 'France's most appalling régime'. In short, the reader, even though his hackles occasionally rise, will never be bored and is most likely to be both entertained and instructed."
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Historians from EnglandEssayists from EnglandUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumni
Original Language: English
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Sources
George Rudé, review of The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 in History, Vol. 56, No. 186 (February 1971), p. 114
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Cobb
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Richard Cobb
Richard Charles Cobb CBE (20 May 1917 – 15 January 1996) was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the University of Oxford. He was the author of numerous influential works about the history of France, particularly the French Revolution. Cobb meticulously researched the Revolutionary era from a ground-level view sometimes described as "history from below".
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