Марксистский импульс творчества Джорджа Рюде

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The article is devoted to the work of George Rude, a prominent British and Australian historian of the French Revolution. George Rudé, born in Oslo in 1910, moved to London with his Norwegian engineer father and English mother in 1919. He graduated in languages from Cambridge in 1931 and, becoming politically committed, joined the British Communist Party in 1935. He taught languages in private schools until in 1949 when he was dismissed, because of his communist views. He set off for Paris to further his postgraduate studies. His doctoral thesis, defended in 1950 in London, finally resulted in his first book “The Crowd in the French Revolution” (1959). In 1959 Rudé was offered a position at the University of Adelaide and at last got an academic post. His decade in Adelaide from 1960 was to be the most productive of his life. He published or completed a major series of books on French, British and European history. As a Marxist historian, Rudé’s fundamental concern was to explore the ways in which the twin upheavals of the late-eighteenth century – the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution – radically transformed socio-economic structures, the nature of ruling élites and the social composition and collective protest of urban crowds. Rudé’s great books have been remarkably influential, not only because of their combination of deep erudition and conceptual sweep, but also because of his capacity for lucid, coherent argument about the great transitions in western Europe in the century after 1750. He had profound political convictions but wore his affiliations lightly, even though they at times had harsh consequences. His personal influence on historiography in Australia and elsewhere was profound.