George Frederick Elliot Rudé (8 February 1910 – 8 January 1993) was a British Marxist historian, specializing in the French Revolution and "history from below", especially the importance of crowds in history.

Early life

Born in Oslo, the son of Jens Essendrop Rude, a Norwegian engineer, and Amy Geraldine Elliot, an English woman educated in Germany, Rudé spent his early years in Norway. After World War I, his family moved to England, where he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. A specialist in modern languages, he taught at Stowe and St. Paul's schools. After completing university, Rudé took a trip to the Soviet Union with friends. When he returned he was a "committed Communist and anti-Fascist", despite his family's fairly conservative political views.

Career

In 1935 Rudé joined the British Communist Party. Communism awoke in Rudé an interest in history in which he pursued during the 1930s and 1940s attending London University part-time. During this time he taught at the preparatory schools of Stowe and St Paul's. When the war broke out he joined the London Fire Service where he extinguished fires caused by German bombs.

He received his doctorate at the University of London in 1950 for a thesis on crowd action during the French Revolution. He taught modern languages in English secondary schools while publishing. His first book, The Crowd in the French Revolution, soon became a classic.

Rudé was actively involved with the Communist party, an affiliation which caused him many hardships during his life. In 1949, he was relieved of his duties at St Paul's for his communist leanings. He accepted teaching positions at Sir Walter St John's Grammar School for Boys and later at Holloway Comprehensive School. Rudé, making his new academic focus history, and with very little to back his research in Paris of revolutionary France, became a leading British historian of the French Revolution. Rudé contributed to the "history from below" view of history, which is history from the view of the oppressed. He focused especially on those who participated in the riots and rebellions.

He is credited by Eric Hobsbawm as having been the only member of the Communist Party Historians Group to write 18th century history, exploring the chronological "no-man's land between the Group's two most flourishing sections". After writing an article about rioters during the French Revolution, Rudé was awarded the Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 1956. Rudé wrote and was featured in a number of journals and created a scholarly name for himself under the wing of his mentor, Georges Lefebvre.

Hobsbawm alleged that Rudé's thesis advisor, (Alfred Cobban, a political conservative), blocked any chances Rudé may have had at getting an appointment at a university, but Friguglietti says there is no evidence for that. Shunned in Britain, Rudé looked for opportunities abroad.

In 1959, he was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, in the home town of his wife Doreen. He took the opportunity of his time in Australia to research 19th century British and Irish political prisoners transported to Australia as convicts. This later resulted in his book Protest and Punishment: The Story of Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788–1868. He was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1969.

Rudé, like most prominent communists in Australia, was put under surveillance by the government's domestic security agency, ASIO.

Rudé suffered deteriorating health after the early 1970s and had a brain tumour removed in 1983. After retiring, he returned to England, eventually dying in hospital at Battle on 8 January 1993. His widow Doreen placed his ashes in the garden behind their home in Rye. A tall, handsome and athletic man, he always retained the manners of an English gentleman as well as his left-wing sympathies.

Influence

George Rudé's influence was his emphasis and development of "history from below". Following the new Annales school of thought, Rudé strove to cast off the idea that history was only about nation-states and the men who ruled them. Accompanying Rudé in this shift was the 'new left', liberal historians who, according to Mark Gilderhus, "showed the feasibility of doing history while incorporating attitudes and viewpoints other than those associated with white male elites". Though Rudé was not part of this movement directly, he was firmly allied with their ideas and helped to promote them. He believed, along with the 'new left' that it was the neglected people who could be used to reshape the face of history. The historian James Friguglietti comments that Rudé's work, "displayed sympathy for the lower classes, whether laborers or convicted criminals". By focusing on lower classes Rudé hoped to create a new understanding of history's major events.

Rudé's communist ties shaped his way of perceiving history and opened him up to the idea of looking at the history of protesters. Revolutions were transforming events, and Rudé sought to bring light to why someone would join in such an endeavor. Marxist theory believes that everyone's primary motives for acting are always linked with their material need. Using this frame of reference Rudé places it on the people of the French Revolution and created specific faces in the crowds. He sought to dismantle the myth that the crowd in the revolution is seen as a great evil mass of people bent on destruction of order. As Rudé paints it, "those who took to the streets were ordinary, sober citizens, not half-crazed animals, not criminals". Some of Rudé's work became less highly regarded after the collapse of the USSR, but, overall, his contributions to social history and the understanding of protests greatly enhanced how historians look at the past and its actors.

Works

  • Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, John Wiley & Sons, 2000,
  • The French Revolution, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994,
  • The Crowd in History. A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848, New York: Wiley & Sons, 1964. New edition London: Serif, 2005,
  • Protest and Punishment: Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868,
  • Crime and Victim: Crime and Society in Early Nineteenth-century England, Oxford University Press, 1985,
  • Ideology and Popular Protest, Lawrence & Wishart, 1980,
  • Hanoverian London, 1714-1808, Sutton Publishing, new edition2003,
  • Europe in the 18th Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge, Orion, 2002,
  • Captain Swing: A Social History of the great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (with E. J. Hobsbawm), Penguin Books, 1985,
  • Wilkes and Liberty, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983,
  • Foreword to Does Education Matter? by Brian Simon, Lawrence & Wishart, 1985,
  • Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat, London: Collins, 1975,
  • Debate on Europe, 1815-1850, Harper & Row, 1972,
  • Interpretations of the French Revolution, published for the Historical Association by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961
  • The French Revolution: Its Causes, Its History and Its Legacy After 200 Years, Grove Press, 1994, / 0-8021-3272-3

George Rudé's historical work focused primarily on the French Revolution and crowd behaviour in France and Great Britain, during the 18th and 19th centuries. Rudé utilizes the method of reporting and analyzing history from the "bottom up," focusing on the people, not the leaders and elites. Rudé's most notable works include The Crowd in the French Revolution; The Crowd in History; Revolutionary Europe: 1783–1815; Ideology and Popular Protest; Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century; Debate on Europe: 1815–1850; and Captain Swing: A Social History of the great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (co-authored with Eric Hobsbawm).

One of Rudé's most influential works is The Crowd in History, focusing on 18th and 19th century dissidents and revolutionaries in France and Great Britain. Rudé analyzes the impact and importance of various uprisings between 1730 and 1848. He identifies grain shortages in France and industrialisation in Britain as two recurring catalysts for disturbance. In this work Rudé employs a clear and precise prose style, beginning with specific examples of disturbances in Part 1, and moving on in Part 2 to "a critical analysis of the crowd in its various manifestations".