Georges Lefebvre

Georges Lefebvre (French: [ləfɛvʁ]; 6 August 1874 – 28 August 1959) was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He coined the term "history from below", which was later popularised by the British Marxist Historians, and the phrase the "death certificate of the old order" to describe the Great Fear of 1789. Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française ("The Peasants of the North During the French Revolution"), which was the result of 20 years of research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period.

Lefebvre was born in Lille to a family of modest means. He attended public school, obtaining his secondary and university training with the help of scholarships. 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. It was as a result of his schooling that Georges Lefebvre was able to teach in a series of secondary schools for more than twenty years after his graduation in 1898. After his career in teaching secondary school students, Lefebvre began teaching at the university level.

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

He died in Paris in 1959.

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 Révolution française. This work was a detailed and thorough examination of the effects of the French Revolution on the countryside. Lefebvre’s work on this thesis was "based on a thorough analysis of thousands of tax rolls, notarial records, and the registers of rural municipalities, whose materials he used to trace the effects of the abolition of feudalism and ecclesiastical tithes, the consequences of property transfers, the movement of the bourgeoisie onto the countryside, and the destruction of collective rights in the peasants villages".

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