Cobbanism

On 6 May 1954, Professor Alfred Cobban gave his inaugural lecture at University College London before an invited audience that included M. Massigli, the French Ambassador to Britain. The lecture, entitled provocatively, ‘The Myth of the French Revolution’ cast doubt, if not on the actual occurrence of ’1789’ as a major political event, then certainly on the social and class interpretation placed upon it by those legendary French socialist historians of the Third Republic, Jean Jaures, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre. Cobban had delivered his first broadside against Marxisant (interpretations of history inspired by Marxist theories), or ‘orthodox’, interpretations of the Revolution. For supporters of this tradition, ‘1789’ was an event of world-historical significance, representing, more or less in line with Marxist theory, the collapse of feudalism and the ‘triumph of the bourgeoisie’. Cobban's refusal to fall in line would eventually earn him the title of ‘the father of revisionism’. The immediate reaction was a stern lecture from Georges Lefebvre himself, who reminded Cobban that, ‘for the first time in Europe, [the Revolution] proclaimed the virtues of free enterprise without any restriction other than that relating to public order. In so doing, the road to capitalism had been well and truly opened; this was no myth.’ The battle-lines had been well and truly drawn.

A decade later, Cobban published The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, a work which was to become the handbook of revisionism for a new generation of Anglo-Saxon scholars.