14 Facts About Albert Mathiez

Albert Mathiez argued that 1789 pitted the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy and then the Revolution pitted the bourgeoisie against the sans-culottes, who were a proletariat-in-the-making.

Albert Mathiez came from a peasant family in Eastern France, being born in La Bruyere, Haute-Saone.

Albert Mathiez showed high intelligence as a young student, with a strong interest in history.

Albert Mathiez entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1894, by which time he had already displayed a strong anti-clerical bias.

Albert Mathiez taught at a variety of local lycees until he completed his doctorate which he wrote under the direction of Francois Victor Alphonse Aulard, then the leading historian of the Revolution, who admired Georges Danton.

Albert Mathiez was greatly influenced by Jean Jaures, who propounded a more radical economic and social interpretation.

Albert Mathiez moved up from the lycee to the university level, teaching at Besancon and Dijon.

Albert Mathiez used his scholarship on the Revolution to demonstrate that just as Revolutionary France had defeated the allied coalition in the 1790s, so too the Third Republic would triumph over Imperial Germany.

Albert Mathiez saw the French Revolution as the critical first stage in a proletarian advance that would gather strength in the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian revolts of 1905 and reached its highest point during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia which created a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat.

Albert Mathiez rejected the common view of Robespierre as demagogic, dictatorial and fanatical.

Albert Mathiez argued he was an eloquent spokesman for the poor and oppressed, an enemy of royalist intrigues, a vigilant adversary of dishonest and corrupt politicians, a guardian of the French Republic, an intrepid leader of the French Revolutionary government and a prophet of a socially responsible state.

Albert Mathiez held the highly prestigious Sorbonne chair in French Revolutionary Studies and was the founder of the Societe des Etudes Robespierristes which led to the creation in 1908 of the highly regarded journal Annales revolutionnaries that became Annales historiques de la Revolution francaise in 1924.

Albert Mathiez was active in the French Communist Party from 1920 but resigned in 1922.

Albert Mathiez joined the Socialist Communist Union but left it shortly after, becoming closer to the SFIO and supporting the Cartel des Gauches.