Richard Cobb

Cobb's published work mostly consists of collections of historical essays, of which the most celebrated is The Police and the People: French popular protest, 1789–1820, first published in 1970.

Almost all his early historical works were written in French.

Like Soboul and Rudé (and another friend, the older historian Georges Lefebvre), Cobb is counted among the progenitors of the "history from below" school of historical analysis.

He wrote with a general sense of agreement toward their Marxist historiography, but Cobb's personal approach always avoided the doctrinaire presumptions common to his French colleagues.

Cobb himself fully rejected any identification with Marxist ideology.

While the Marxist writers were more focused on historical movements and trends, Cobb's own vision was more tightly framed on individuals and their unique contributions.

Even more importantly, those individuals who captured his attention were not the usual famous names – his favoured subjects were either Everyman figures or obscure persons of unique depth.

Cobb had "an intense identification with the people who experience rather than make history."

In his books and essays, Cobb wove compelling stories from raw data: "His approach is that of the novelist or Impressionist painter, communicating, always with compassion and a total absence of solemnity, what history did to ordinary people and how they managed to survive it."

Richard Charles Cobb (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".

Returning to England, he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford in 1935, and was awarded a second class degree in History in 1938.

During the Second World War he was an instructor to the Polish Air Force, made BBC broadcasts in French, and served in the British Army.

After his military discharge, Cobb returned to France and stayed for another nine years.

During this time, Cobb honed his style of historical analysis.

He worked closely with the French Marxist-school historians Albert Soboul and George Rudé, frequently sharing research at the National Archives.

Unable to obtain French citizenship, Cobb went back to England in 1955 for a succession of academic jobs.

Cobb is best known for his multi-volume work The People's Armies (1961), a massive study of the composition and mentality of the Revolution's civilian armed forces.

He was a prolific writer of essays from which he fashioned numerous book-length collections about France and its people.

Cobb also found much inspiration from his own life, and he composed a multitude of autobiographical writings and personal reflections.

Much of his writing went unpublished in his lifetime, and several anthologies were assembled from it by other scholars after his death.

Richard Cobb was born in London, England, during World War One (NB the biographical information to the right gives his birthplace as Frinton, Essex) the son of Francis Hills Cobb, who worked in the Sudan Civil Service, and his wife, Dora, daughter of Dr J. P. Swindale.

After being educated at Shrewsbury School, he visited France for the first time.

He stayed for a year and developed a passion for the country, its people and their history.

Though his published works are mostly essay collections, Cobb's most renowned work is a unified multi-volume analysis – the massive and intricate Les Armées Révolutionnaires, first published in France in 1961.

He taught at Aberystwyth University and the University of Leeds, before ultimately returning to Oxford, where he was elected as a tutorial fellow of Balliol College in 1962.

Eleven years later, he was made Professor of Modern History of Oxford University, a post with a fellowship at Worcester College.

A 1969 collection of Cobb's essays on France and French life, A Second Identity, brought his writing to a popular audience for the first time.

In its wide-angle view, the book poignantly intertwines many of Cobb's own personal experiences with those of forgotten participants in historic events.

This was followed by more academic works in the 1970s, including Death in Paris (1978), which examines the Revolutionary experience through data mined from hundreds of official death records.

He gave the 1974 Raleigh Lecture on History.

Cobb returned to France repeatedly, sometimes to give courses of lectures at the Collège de France.

Throughout his life, Cobb displayed an understanding of the country and its people that seemed almost uncanny for a non-native: in the words of fellow historian Guy Chapman, "Few can enjoy the felicity of Mr. Richard Cobb, of becoming so soaked in a society not his by birth that he moves without needing to look where he is placing his feet among its nuances, its customs, its silences."

This scholarly work earned the Wolfson History Prize for Cobb in 1979.

Released in English as The People's Armies in 1987, the book offers a social and political examination of the armed civilian révolutionnaires, including the sans-culottes, the fédérés and numerous other paramilitaries and irregulars.

In particular, it chronicles their experiences under the Reign of Terror in what is widely regarded as a "masterly account".

Part of what separates Cobb from Soboul, Rudé, and other traditional Marxists is his view that the popular movement behind the Revolution was lukewarm and thinly spread.

In The People's Armies he explains most thoroughly his view that the actions and ultimate course of the Revolution were not necessarily representative of "the people's will", but rather were inserted in history by a relatively small pageant of militant factions and outsized personalities.

Cobb's approach has been described as a combination of "mistrust of facile generalization and an enthusiastic appreciation for the colorful tapestry of individual actions that make up past events."