Rather than write yet another biography of Robespierre or another examination of Girondists or Jacobins, Francophile Richard Cobb chose to spend most of his career writing social histories of Revolutionary France.

These essays are broadly representative of his work, focusing on les petites gens, their influence on the revolution, and the revolution's influence on them. Several pieces provide wonderfully detailed portraits of the individuals inside the masses--within the army, the Sans-Culottes, or simply the common people. In the final essay, Cobb recounts the melancholy testimony of unwed mothers making a déclaration de grossesse to identify their seducer, request a place in the foundling hospital for their unborn children, or both, and points out that, for them, the revolution is not nearly as important as their unwanted pregnancies.

Though the lengthy quotations in French, usually without translations, may dismay the non-Francophone, detailed footnotes and a thorough index make this collection valuable to anyone interested in the French Revolution. --C.B. Delaney


From Library 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.AMarie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Theodore Zeldin
Cobb likes the past for its own sake, he feels at home in it, he knows practically everybody who lived in the 1790s. He is such a great historian because of his unique and very personal relationship with his subject.


Gwynn Williams
Cobb is the Goya of our craft.


Book Description
Illuminating essays on daily life during the French Revolution from a master historian. 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. In these pages we meet not makers of history like Robespierre or Danton but les petites gens living in the shadow of events. As Gilmour writes, for Cobb "history was not simply a matter of spending long days in the archives; it had to be walked, observed, smelt, drunk and above all listened to, in cafs, buses, parks and railway stations." These essays combine prodigious scholarship with the best of the storyteller's craft to bring human perspective to the world-shaking events of the French Revolution. Richard Cobb was the author of many books, including Something to Hold On To and The End of The Line.


Card catalog description
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.


About the Author
David Gilmour was one of Richard Cobb's students at Oxford in the early 1970s. His books include the prize-winning biographies Curzon and The Last Leopard: A Life of Guiseppe di Lampedusa.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

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

Library 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., NJ

David A. Bell - The New York Times Book Review