François Victor Alphonse Aulard (19 July 1849 – 23 October 1928) was the first professional French
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...
of the
French Revolution and of
Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone di Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French general and statesman who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led Military career ...
. His major achievement was to institutionalise and professionalise the practice of history in France.
Career
Aulard was born at
Montbron in
Charente
Charente (; Saintongese: ''Chérente''; ) is a department in the administrative region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, southwestern France. It is named after the river Charente, the most important and longest river in the department, and also the r ...
. He entered the
École Normale Supérieure
École or Ecole may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...
in 1867 and obtained the degree of doctor of letters in 1877 with a thesis in Latin on
Gaius Asinius Pollio
Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 BC – AD 4) was a Roman soldier, politician, orator, poet, playwright, literary critic, and historian, whose lost contemporaneous history provided much of the material used by the historians Appian and Plutarch. Po ...
and a French one on
Giacomo Leopardi
Count Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (29 June 1798 – 14 June 1837) was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist, and philologist. Considered the greatest Italian poet of the 19th century and one of the greatest a ...
(whose works he subsequently translated into French). Moving from literature to history, he made a study of parliamentary oratory during the French Revolution and published two volumes on ''Les orateurs de la Constituante'' (1882) and on ''Les orateurs de la Legislative et de la Convention'' (1885). With these works, he established a reputation as a careful scholar well versed in the primary sources of the French Revolution.
Appointed professor of the history of the French Revolution at the
Sorbonne in 1885, he formed the minds of students who in their turn did valuable work. Nonetheless his views were seen as controversial and "advanced" in a society still under the long influence of the French Revolution. During his course on the Revolution at the Sorbonne in May 1893 violent fist fights broke out. At the exit rival gangs yelled at each other "Down with Aulard" and, in opposition to a Roman Catholic clergy identified with the Ancien Régime, "Down with the skullcap".
Peter Kropotkin
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism.
Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended the Page Corps and later s ...
, the Russian Anarchist, wrote in 1909 that Aulard and the Société de la Revolution française "have shed a flood of light upon the acts of the Revolution, on its political aspects, and on the struggles for supremacy that took place between the various parties. But the study of the economic side of the Revolution is still before us..."
Work
Applying to the study of the French Revolution the rules of historical criticism which had produced such rich results in the study of ancient and medieval history, Aulard devoted himself to profound research in the archives and to the publication of numerous important contributions to the political, administrative and moral history of that period. His masterwork was a ''Histoire politique de la Revolution française'' (4 vol, 3rd ed. 1901). He championed
Georges Danton
Georges Jacques Danton (; ; 26 October 1759 – 5 April 1794) was a leading figure of the French Revolution. A modest and unknown lawyer on the eve of the Revolution, Danton became a famous orator of the Cordeliers Club and was raised to gove ...
as opposed to
Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (; ; 6 May 1758 – 28 July 1794) was a French lawyer and statesman, widely recognised as one of the most influential and controversial figures of the French Revolution. Robespierre ferv ...
, seeing in Danton the true spirit of the embattled Revolution and the inspiration of the national defense against foreign enemies.
He was known to have argued:
"From the social point of view, the Revolution consisted in the suppression of what was called the feudal system, in the emancipation of the individual, in greater division of landed property, the abolition of the privileges of noble birth, the establishment of equality, the simplification of life. ..The French Revolution differed from other revolutions in being not merely national, for it aimed at benefiting all humanity."
Aulard divided the French Revolution into "four epochs: 1789- 1792, during which democratic and republican parties were formed under a constitutional monarchy; 1792-1795, during which a democratic republic existed; 1795-1799, the period of the bourgeois republic; and 1799-1804, that of the plebiscitary republic."
Editor
To him, we owe the ''Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public'' (27 vols. 1889–1923); ''La Société des
Jacobins
The Society of the Friends of the Constitution (), renamed the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality () after 1792 and commonly known as the Jacobin Club () or simply the Jacobins (; ), was the most influential List of polit ...
: Recueil de documents sur l'histoire des club des Jacobins de Paris'' (6 vols., 1889–1897); and ''Paris pendant la reaction thermidorienne et sous le directoire: Recueil de documents pour l'histoire de l'esprit public a Paris'' (5 vols., 1898–1902) which was followed by a collection on ''Paris sous le consulat'' (2 vols., 1903–1904).
For the ''Société de l'Histoire de la Revolution Française'' which brought under his editorship the important periodical entitled ''La Revolution française'', he produced the ''Registre des libérations du consulat provisoire'' (1894) and ''L'Etat de la France en l'an VIII et en l'an IX'', with the reports of the effects (1897), besides editing various works or memoirs written by men of the Revolution such as Jacques-Charles Bailleul,
Pierre Gaspard Chaumette,
Claude Fournier (called the American),
Hérault de Séchelles and
Louvet de Couvrai.
These large collections of documents were a fraction of his output. He wrote a number of articles which were collected in volumes under the title ''Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française'' (9 vols., 1893–1924). In a volume entitled ''Taine, historien de la Révolution française'' (1908), Aulard attacked the method of the eminent philosopher in criticism that was severe, perhaps unjust, but certainly well-informed. This was, as it were, the manifesto of the new school of criticism applied to the political and social history of the Revolution (see ''Les Annales révolutionnaires'', June 1908).
Positivism
Aulard's historiography was based on
positivism
Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positivemeaning '' a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, ''Soci ...
. The assumption was that methodology was all-important and the historian's duty was to present in chronological order the duly verified facts to analyze relations between facts and provide the most likely interpretation. Full documentation based on research in the primary sources was essential. He took the lead in the publication very important documents and in training advanced students in the proper use and analysis of primary sources. Aulard's famous four volume history of the Revolution focused on parliamentary debates, not action in the street; and in institutions, not insurrections. He emphasized public opinion, elections, parties, parliamentary majorities and legislation. He recognized the complications that prevented the Revolution from fulfilling all its ideal promises as when the legislators of 1793 made a suffrage universal for all men, but also established the dictatorship of the
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror (French: ''La Terreur'', literally "The Terror") was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the French First Republic, First Republic, a series of massacres and Capital punishment in France, nu ...
.
Criticism
Aulard remains controversial because of his political positions. His place in historiography remains contested. His history was a series of narrow studies of constitutional, institutional and political developments in stark contrast with the wide-ranging imagination of his leading student
Albert Mathiez. Conservatives argue that Aulard's anti-clerical and radical-republican position skewed his research findings. On the other hand, his professionalism and fidelity to sources inspired a generation of scholars. He built a neo-Jacobin legacy with attention more to raison d'état than to party division. He championed international, liberal democracy and human rights.
[Joseph Tendler, "Alphonse Aulard Revisited" ''European Review of History'' (2013) 20#4 pp. 649–669.]
Bibliography
* Aulard, François-Alphonse. ''The French Revolution, a Political History, 1789–1804'' (4 vol. 1910);
volume 1 1789–1792 online Volume 2 1792–95 online
References
Attribution:
*
Further reading
*
** Godfrey, James. "Alphonse Aulard." in S. William Halperin, ed. ''Essays in modern European historiography'' (University of Chicago Press, 1970) pp 22–42
* Tendler, Joseph. "Alphonse Aulard Revisited," ''European Review of History'' (2013) 20#4 pp. 649–669.
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Aulard, Francois Victor Alphonse
1849 births
1928 deaths
People from Charente
Historians of the French Revolution
École Normale Supérieure alumni
Academic staff of the University of Paris
20th-century French historians
French male non-fiction writers
19th-century French historians