Georges Lefebvre - The French Revolution

The French Revolution

Lefebvre began writing in 1904, but it was not until 1924, at the age of fifty, that he was finally at the point in his career - no longer preoccupied with supporting his family - that he was able to finish his doctoral thesis: Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française. This work was a detailed and thorough examination of the effects of the French Revolution on the countryside. Lefebvre’s work on this thesis was "based on a thorough analysis of thousands of tax rolls, notarial records, and the registers of rural municipalities, whose materials he used to trace the effects of the abolition of feudalism and ecclesiastical tithes, the consequences of property transfers, the movement of the bourgeoisie onto the countryside, and the destruction of collective rights in the peasants villages". It is this document that accounts for Lefebvre’s ever growing interest to engrave and contemplate his own viewpoints on the revolutionary issues that continued to influence modern events.

He often wrote from a viewpoint which he felt the peasant of the time would have held.

One aspect of Lefebvre’s life that other historians are particularly keen on examining is the period of 1924-1959. This period in Lefebvre’s writings is repeatedly chosen because he wrote his most influential and "much more complex interpretation of the Revolution than had hitherto prevailed amongst historians". Jones elaborates that Lefebvre’s take on the Revolution has three major roles, which he describes as the active pursuit of the French country to partake in the Revolution, that such participation was not influenced by the bourgeoisie, and that the peasants agreed on their anticapitalist way of thinking, that resulted in their way of thinking in the 1790s.