Political rebel, fine scholar: George Rudé
When he taught history at Sir George Williams and then Concordia University, George Rudé was probably the university’s most distinguished scholar. Now his scholarly papers are housed in the Concordia Archives, on the tenth floor of the Hall Building, where they are available to scholars.
His story is poignant one. He was a political radical, and Concordia was his refuge from England, where he was effectively shut out of a teaching career because of his politics. However, it was his resolutely proletarian approach to history that made his scholarship so groundbreaking.
He was born in 1910 to a Norwegian engineer and an English woman educated in Germany. His early years were spent in Norway, but the family soon moved to England, where he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Cambridge.
A specialist in modern languages, in 1932 he visited the Soviet Union and joined the British Communist Party three years later. This was a period when many intellectuals in the West were enamored of the Soviet experiment and keen to break out of old social hierarchies and political conventions.
During the 1939-45 war, Rudé served in the London Fire Service. After the peace, he found teaching closed to him. He turned to history and received a doctorate from London University in 1950.
Rudé’s first book, The Crowd in the French Revolution, which grew out of his doctoral thesis, became an instant classic. He went on to expand it into another book called The Crowd in History, and would write 17 books in all. After several years teaching in Australia (where his former students still hold a seminar every two years in his name), he came to Canada, and started teaching at Sir George in 1970.
History professor Carolyn Fick was one of his students. She also wanted to do a thesis on the 1789 French revolution, but Rudé steered her towards less trodden ground, the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution.
“He wrote what came to be called ‘history from below,’” Fick said. “His model was Georges Lefebvre, one of the great historians of the French Revolution. But he shared common ground in this with other scholars and friends. In his work, Rudé put names and faces on the ‘crowd’, up until then commonly called the mob or the rabble by more traditional historians.
“He distinguished between its various layers — the working class, the artisans, journeymen and tradesmen, and he did it by examining the police records of the day. He was able to weave it all into a political analysis.”
Rudé was a Marxist, Fick said, but not a doctrinaire one who held to a strictly determinist view of history. He was interested in the dynamic forces at work, how the foot soldiers of the revolution viewed the world and interacted with those above them. It was the activity of the crowd that gave the bourgeois leaders of the revolution their legitimacy.
Archivist Nancy Marrelli said Rudé deposited some of his documents at the university when he left in 1985 and returned to England, where he died in 1993. Last year, she discovered that more Rudé papers were in the hands of a British bookseller. A price was negotiated, and the materials were bought jointly by the Archives, the History Department, and the offices of the Provost and the Faculty of Arts and Science.
These newly arrived materials have not yet been processed to make them accessible to scholars, but Marrelli expects that the processing will be done soon.
She remembers Rudé well. “He was much beloved, and a great teacher,” she said.
Fred Krantz also remembers him well. They were colleagues in the History Department, and Krantz wrote a Festschrift, or celebratory volume, of essays by various authors in Rudé’s honour when Rudé retired.
In the introduction to History From Below, Krantz says Rudé “broke on the one hand with uncritically sentimental tradition and [on the other, with] unwarrantedly hostile viewpoints. . . . Rudé’s work, emblematic of the field it has so greatly influenced, exhibited a characteristic personal concern with ordinary people.”