George Rudé

George Rudé (8 February 1910 – 8 January 1993) was a British Marxist historian, specializing in the French Revolution and "history from below", especially the importance of crowds in history.

Born in Oslo, Norway, the son of Jens Essendrop Rude, a Norwegian engineer, and Amy Geraldine Elliot, an English woman educated in Germany, Rudé spent his early years in Norway. After World War I, his family moved to England where he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. A specialist in modern languages, he taught at Stowe and St. Paul's schools. After completing university, Rudé took a trip to the Soviet Union with friends. When he returned he was a "committed Communist and anti-Fascist", despite his family’s fairly conservative political views.

In 1935 Rudė joined the British Communist Party. Communism awoke in Rudé an interest in history in which he pursued during the 1930s and 1940s attending London University part-time. During this time he taught at the preparatory schools of Stowe and St Paul’s. When the war broke out he joined the London Fire Service where he extinguished fires caused by German bombs.

He received his doctorate at the University of London in 1950 for a thesis on crowd action during the French Revolution. He taught modern languages in English secondary schools while publishing. His first book, The Crowd in the French Revolution, soon became a classic.

Rudé was actively involved with the Communist party, an affiliation which caused him many hardships during his life. In 1949, he was relieved of his duties at St Paul’s for the activities of the political party which he was affiliated with. He accepted teaching positions at Sir Walter St John’s School and later at Holloway Comprehensive School. Rudé, making his new academic focus history, and with very little to back his research in Paris of revolutionary France, became a leading British historian of the French Revolution. Rudé contributed to the "history from below" view of history, which is history from the view of the oppressed. He focused especially on those who participated in the riots and rebellions. He is credited by Eric Hobsbawm as having been the only member of the Historians' Group of the English Communist Party to write eighteenth-century history, exploring the chronological "no-man's land between the Group's two most flourishing sections". After writing an article about rioters during the French Revolution, he was awarded the esteemed Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 1956. Rudé wrote and was featured in a number of journals and created a scholarly name for himself under the wing of his mentor, Georges Lefebvre.

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