Albert Mathiez

Albert Mathiez
Albert Mathiez in 1918
Born	(1874-01-10)10 January 1874 France
Died	25 February 1932(1932-02-25) (aged 58) France
Occupation	Historian

Albert Mathiez (10 January 1874, La Bruyère, Haute-Saône – 25 February 1932) was a French historian, known for his Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. Mathiez emphasized class conflict. He 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. Mathiez greatly influenced Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul in forming what came to be known as the "orthodox" Marxist interpretation of the Revolution. Mathiez admired Robespierre, praised the Terror, and did not extend complete sympathy to the struggle of the proletariat.

Mathiez came from a peasant family in Eastern France. He showed high intelligence as a young student, with a strong interest in history. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1894, by which time he had already displayed a strong anti-clerical bias. After graduation, he passed the aggregation in history, and after doing his military service, entered the teaching profession. He taught at a variety of local lycèes until he completed his doctorate, which he wrote under the direction of Alphonse Aulard, then the leading historian of the Revolution. Aulard admired Danton. Mathiez was greatly influenced by Jean Jaurès who propounded a more radical economic and social interpretation. At first a good friend of Aulard, he broke with his mentor in 1907, founding his own society, the Société des études robespierristes, with its journal, the Annales révolutionnaires. He also moved up from the lycée to the university level, teaching at Besançon and Dijon.

Earlier a pacifist, Mathiez developed into a nationalistic Jacobin after the World War erupted in 1914. He 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. The World War, with its serious economic and social stresses, such as shortages of food and rationing, prompted him to study similar conditions during the Revolution. The eventual result was one of his most original works, La Vie chère et le movement social sous la Terreur (1927).

Mathiez in his masterwork La Révolution française (3 vol. 1922-1924) boldly made Robespierre the hero.Emile Durkheim's work in the sociology of religion influenced his interpretation of the 1790s.