Soboul, Marius Albert

Soboul, Marius Albert 

Born Apr. 27, 1914, in Ammi Moussa, Algeria. French historian.

The son of a peasant, Soboul graduated from the Sorbonne in 1936. From 1932 to 1939 he was a member and leader of a Parisian student communist organization. In 1939 he became a member of the French Communist Party. During World War II (1939-45) he was active in the Resistance. From 1945 to 1960 he taught in lycees in Paris, and from 1960 to 1967, at the University of Clermont-Ferrand.

A follower of G. Lefebvre, Soboul is one of the leading authorities on the history of the French Revolution. Since 1967 he has held the chair of the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne and has been director of the Sorbonne’s Institute of the History of the French Revolution. He has been general secretary of the Robespierre Society since 1959 and is a member of the editorial board of the society’s journal, Annales historiques de la Revolution franqaise.

Soboul has focused on the study of revolution “from below”; his The Sans-culottes of Paris (1958; abridged Russian translation, 1966), based on archival materials, is the most complete study of the movement of the Parisian lower classes during the Jacobin dictatorship. He has published a number of subsequent works summarizing French history on the eve of and during the French Revolution.

WORKS

Histoire de la Revolution franqaise, vols. 1-2. Paris, 1964.
La France a la veille de la Revolution, 2nd ed. Paris, 1974.
Paysans, sans-culottes et jacobins. Paris, 1966.
Le Premier empire (1804-1815). Paris, 1973.
In Russian translation:
Iz istorii Velikoi burzhuaznoi revoliutsii 1789-1794 gg. i revoliutsii 1848 g. vo Frantsii. Moscow, 1960.
Pervaia respublika, 1792-1804. Moscow, 1974.