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Overview
Like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, Richard Cobb had a gift for understanding great historic events in terms of ordinary human relations. Here for the first time Cobb's widely admired chronicles of daily life in Revolutionary France are gathered into one volume with an illuminating introduction by his former pupil, historian David Gilmour.Synopsis
Like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, Richard Cobb had a gift for understanding great historic events in terms of ordinary human relations. Here for the first time Cobb's widely admired chronicles of daily life in Revolutionary France are gathered into one volume with an illuminating introduction by his former pupil, historian David Gilmour.
David A. Bell
...Cobb...insisted on seeking out the men and women of the 18th century at street level....He had a peerless talent for finding...the gritty details that evoked the experience of living through the Revolution and stories demonstrating just how fully the course of events had depended on accidentresentmentboredom and bullheaded folly....[S]ome critics aserted he wrote history without organization...but as in a pontillist paintingthe details added up to a coherent whole. —The New York Times Book Review
Editorials
David A. Bell
...Cobb...insisted on seeking out the men and women of the 18th century at street level....He had a peerless talent for finding...the gritty details that evoked the experience of living through the Revolution and stories demonstrating just how fully the course of events had depended on accidentresentmentboredom and bullheaded folly....[S]ome critics aserted he wrote history without organization...but as in a pontillist paintingthe details added up to a coherent whole. —The New York Times Book ReviewLibrary Journal
Cobb, who died in 1996, was the chair of modern history at Oxford and became well known in the 1970s for his works on the social history of the French Revolution. Collected here are excerpts from his major works. Editor Gilmour, one of Cobb's Oxford students and himself a prize-winning biographer, laments the decline of Cobb's reputation after his retirement in 1984. He attributes this decline to Cobb's having never produced a great work of synthesis but focusing instead on a variety of themes, foremost among them the influence of the revolution on ordinary folk (les petites gens) and vice versa. The works collected here are broadly representative of Cobb's craft: his interest in counterrevolution, the individual and authority, popular protest, government repression, human motivation, and social class. Two useful appendixes, one identifying revolutionary figures, factions, and historians and the other showing the correspondence between the Republican and Gregorian calendars, heighten the book's value as a tool for graduate students.--Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJDavid A. Bell
...Cobb...insisted on seeking out the men and women of the 18th century at street level....He had a peerless talent for finding...the gritty details that evoked the experience of living through the Revolution and stories demonstrating just how fully the course of events had depended on accident, resentment, boredom and bullheaded folly....[S]ome critics aserted he wrote history without organization...but as in a pontillist painting, the details added up to a coherent whole.— The New York Times Book Review