Alfred Cobban

Alfred Cobban (1901–1968) was a Professor of French History at University College, London, who along with prominent French historian Francois Furet held a 'Revisionist' view of the French Revolution.

Biography

Born on May 24, 1901, in London, England, Cobban was educated at Latymer Upper School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Before his professorship at University College, London, he was a lecturer in history at King's College in Newcastle-on-Tyne. He held a Rockefeller Fellowship for research in France and was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.

An editor of History magazine, Cobban also published articles in the English Historical Review, the Political Science Quarterly, International Affairs and other historical and political journals.

Revisionist view

Cobban and Furet believed that the Revolution did little to change French society, in direct contrast to the orthodox Marxist school, which saw the Revolution as the rise of the bourgeoisie against the nobility and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. As such, the Revolution was a symbol of progress.

However, Cobban claimed that the quality of daily life after the Revolution remained basically unchanged, identifying that:

1. France was still a rural society with small farms. "Probably some 95 per cent of France's 26 millions lived in isolated farms, hamlets, villages, and small country towns. Mountain and forest still covered, as they do today, large tracts of country, though under pressure of rural over-population farming had pushed into marginal land on moor and hill-top that has since been abandoned. Agriculture, little influenced by the new methods developed in eighteenth-century England, followed its routine of the Middle Ages. Industry was still largely domestic. In all these fundamental respects it matters little whether we are writing of 1789 or 1799. The Revolution did not materially add to or subtract from the basic resources of France, though it altered the use that was, or could be, made of them."
2. The French Industrial Revolution came later in the nineteenth century as most cities retained a majority of small workshops and artisans' small enterprises (often employing around four people) rather than large-scale production facilities (factories), although the latter were found in Anzin, for example. This was a town of iron foundries and coal mining and employed 4000 in these trades.

Cobban claimed that the urban poor fared worse than before as they lost the charity supplied by the Roman Catholic Church. This occurred in 1791 when the National Constituent Assembly abolished the tithe and sold Church properties. Cobban also notes that French society still had a significant amount of social inequality, as many nobles still retained political and economic leadership and dominance under the collective title with the bourgeois as 'Notables'. Gender equality did not advance far, with women still considered the 'lesser' sex as they lost the rights gained during the Revolution under the reign of Napoleon I.

Cobban's views and works in the macrocosm were to be the inspiration and birthplace of the historical school now known as Revisionism. Along with George V. Taylor, Cobban vehemently attacked the traditional Marxist conception of the past within Marx's dialectic, particularly in his work The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. His resultant argument was that the Revolution could not be seen as a social revolution exacerbated by economic changes (specifically the development of capitalism and by corollary, class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the nobility). Rather, argued Cobban, the French Revolution should be seen as a political revolution with social consequences.

Cobban died April 1, 1968, in London.

Publications

• A History of Modern France, Volume 1: 1715-1799
• A History of Modern France, Volume 2: 1799-1945
• Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century
• Rousseau and the Modern State
• Dictatorship, its History and Theory
• National Self-Determination
• The Debate on the French Revolution
• Ambassadors and Secret Agents: The Diplomacy of the First Earl of Malmesbury at the Hague
• In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History
• The history of Vichy France in Arnold Toynbee's Hitler's Europe