What kinds of people were in the crowds that stormed the Bastille, marched to Versailles to bring the king and queen back to Paris, overthrew the monarchy in August 1792, or impassively witnessed the downfall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor? Who led these crowds or mobilized them to action? What did they hope to achieve, and how far were their aims realized? Earlier historians have tended to view the revolutionary crowd as an abstraction--"people" or "mob" according to the writer's prejudice--often even as the personification of good or evil. Professor Rude's book, published originally in 1959,...

In The French Revolution, the distinguished historian George Rude turns his penetrating eye to one of the most cataclysmic events of modern history, presenting a cogent survey of the revolution, of the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship that ensued, and of the revolution's ultimate, enduring impact on Western history. The French Revolution is an indispensable study of his pivotal era and of its lasting impact on the world.

In this pathbreaking work originally published in 1980, the late George Rude examines the role played by ideology in a wide range of popular rebellions in Europe and the Americas from the middle ages to the early twentieth century. Rude was a champion of the role of working people in the making of history, and Ideology and Popular Protest was the first book devoted to the comparative study of popular political ideas and consciousness in both preindustrial cultures and the age of the Industrial Revolution. According to Rude, the development of modern revolutionary struggles depended on...

Historians generally--and Marxists in particular--have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based. In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of...

The classic social history of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1839 by two of the greatest historians of our age.
In our increasingly mechanized age, the Swing revolts are a timely record of the relationship between technological advance, labour and poverty.With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism swept from the cities into the countryside, and tensions mounted between agricultural workers and employers.
From 1830 on, a series of revolts, known as the 'Swing' shook England to its core. Landowners wanting to make their land more profitable started to use...