Albert Soboul - Career

Career

Called up for military service that same year, he served in the horse-drawn artillery before being demobilized in 1940. He had already become a member of the French Communist Party and remained committed to them even under the German occupation. He received a teaching position at the lycée of Montpellier, but was dismissed by the Vichy regime in 1942 for supporting resistance activities. Soboul spent the rest of the war years doing historical research under the direction of Georges Henri Rivière for the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris.

After the war's end, Soboul returned again to Montpellier to teach, then moved to the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot, and finally the Lycée Henri-IV. He became a close friend of the eminent historian Georges Lefebvre and under his direction Soboul wrote his 1,100-page doctoral dissertation on the revolutionary sans-culottes, The Parisian Sans-culottes in the Year II. Soboul was later promoted to the University of Clermont-Ferrand. After a decade as a combative academic presence and prolific author, he was made Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne in 1967. He served also as editor of the Annales historiques de la Rèvolution française and lectured frequently throughout the world, acquiring a reputation as "the leading French authority on the Revolution."

In his writings, Soboul promulgated the concept of overarching class struggle as the basis of the Revolution. He carried forward many of the central viewpoints of earlier historians like Aulard and Mathiez, and his extensive body of work is characterized by a clear, unfettered writing style and deeply detailed research. He always rejected labels of his work as Marxist or Communist, describing himself as "part of the 'classical' and 'scientific' school of historiography represented by Tocqueville, Jaurès and Lefebvre." Nonetheless, Soboul remains considered a principal architect of the Marxist school of historical analysis.