15 Facts About Georges Lefebvre

Georges Lefebvre was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life.

Georges Lefebvre is considered one of the pioneers of "history from below".

Georges Lefebvre coined the phrase the "death certificate of the old order" to describe the Great Fear of 1789.

Georges Lefebvre was born in Lille to a family of modest means.

Georges Lefebvre attended public school, obtaining his secondary and university training with the help of scholarships.

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Georges Lefebvre attended the University of Lille, and it was here that he followed the "special curriculum", which emphasized modern languages, mathematics, and economics instead of the classical languages.

Georges Lefebvre became more and more influenced by Marxism about the time of the Second World War, especially by the Marxist idea that history should be concerned with economic structures and class relations.

Georges Lefebvre began writing in 1904, but it was not until 1924, at the age of fifty, that he was finally at the point in his career - no longer preoccupied with supporting his family - that he was able to finish his doctoral thesis: Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Revolution francaise.

Georges Lefebvre often wrote from a viewpoint which he felt the peasant of the time would have held.

Georges Lefebvre's "the Coming of the French Revolution" identified four key champions: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the urban revolution, and the peasant revolution.

Peter Jones elaborates that Georges Lefebvre's take on the Revolution has three major emphases: the idea that the countryside peasantry actively participated in the Revolution, the idea that this participation was not significantly influenced by the bourgeoisie, and the idea that the peasants largely agreed on an anticapitalist way of thinking in the 1790s.

Davis expands on the concept of mentalite that Georges Lefebvre developed, arguing that this is "a term that represented their collective goal of documenting the material and mental worlds of people of the past, where the social and cultural existed comfortably side by side".

In 1935 Georges Lefebvre became the president of the Societe des Etudes Robespierristes and the director of the Annales historiques de la Revolution francaise.

In 1937 Georges Lefebvre was named the Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne.

Georges Lefebvre continued to engrave all that he could on the French Revolution and all that dealt with it, well into his old age and beyond his retirement from the position of chair at the Sorbonne in 1945.